American Wife (27 page)

I will guarantee one thing: they slept pretty well the nights after practice.

The first Easter Chris was gone, I stayed up late Saturday night to hide the Easter eggs. We got up early, and I watched as Bubba and Angel went to work finding them. You can't help but smile at kids who are just alive with the fun of it all. For a few moments I was so absolutely into their happiness that I forgot how tired I was, and didn't think of Chris or the fact that we were missing him so badly.

Finally, after all the eggs and candy were gathered, I told the kids I was going to take a shower and get ready for the rest of the day. I was feeling great—until I closed the door behind me.

The sense of loss that I'd been screening out hit me. It drove me to my knees, and I began crying uncontrollably.

There was a knock on the door. Angel opened it and looked in.I did my best to smile. “Hey, what's up?” I asked.

“Are you okay, Momma?”

“Yes.”

“You miss Daddy?” she asked.

I nodded.

Angel came in and gave me a hug. “You know he's still here with us, right?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

SMOKING

There were plenty of times when grief washed up like a tsunami and threatened to drown me. Tears would suddenly come, and I had no control over them. I wanted control—I wanted to present a hard face to the world. Earlier in our marriage, when Chris was deployed, I would do anything to keep him from thinking that I was worried about him. Now I was trying to do the same thing to the world: I wasn't going to show them my vulnerability, my real emotions. I was going to bury myself in work. I was going to help the kids. I was determined to carry on like the brave, heroic mother I felt I had to be.

Even though inside, I was falling apart. My core was despair, all despair.

I needed to do something to keep myself from losing control. I found it in smoking.

Cigarettes gave me something to focus on. I'd excuse myself, go outside, light up. Everything about the cigarette was comforting.

Momentarily.

Smoking kept me from falling down a hole, but it quickly became a crutch, and then an addiction. I craved nicotine, even though I knew it wasn't good for me.

I tried quitting.

I hadn't been a big smoker before, but I had smoked during different periods of my life. I'd quit several times. I was good at it. It was almost a science: I'd go cold turkey. Day One I'd be miserable. Day Two, I would be irritable.

Day Three: Sleep.

Day Four: Sleep.

And that would be it. I'd quit.

For a while.

Months, sometimes; even years. Then, for whatever reason—usually nothing in particular, just the chance that a cigarette was nearby—I would start again.

This was the first time that I couldn't quit. I tried several times, but couldn't get there. Weeks went by and I'd realize I was no longer trying to stop. Feeling guilty, I'd give it a shot again. One day, two . . . then a cigarette would somehow come back into my hand and I'd be smoking again.

The rational part of me tried to reason cigarettes out of my life. I analyzed when I smoked, and saw I was using them to remain calm. There are other ways of staying calm, I reasoned. Rather than smoke, I decided I could substitute a few minutes of prayer.

An excellent idea. Until I tried it. My calm kept getting interrupted.

You can always find reasons to smoke. And no matter how rational you are, you can excuse away the obvious health risks.

Chris chewed tobacco and it had nothing to do with his death: when it's your time, it's your time. So why not?

I had a great-aunt who lived to be a hundred and smoked all the time. But she paid for it—the last decade of her life was filled with health problems. The rational part of me argued: the lesson
isn't
that we all die when it's our time to die, but rather, the quality of your life is up to you. God will determine when you die; you will determine how you spend that time, in misery or health.

It was a great insight, but it didn't stop me from smoking.

A lot of healthy impulses and habits took a beating in those months. My resolve to make healthy dinners slid out of sight. We'd always tried to avoid fast food when Chris was alive. Now, if there wasn't time to make dinner—fast food was there.

We're hungry. What does it matter?

It took months to get past that and start eating healthy again.

Even then, smoking remained. I have to confess, cigarettes were a good excuse for a lot of things. If I was at a business meeting in New York or doing something where I just needed to take a break, a smoke got me out without questions or comments. No one looks at you funny if you excuse yourself to grab a smoke. Imagine the reactions if you say, “Hey, I'm going to go grab a five-minute prayer. I'll be back.”

Or worse, “Hold that thought. I just want to go cry a minute.”

Excuses are easy. Quitting is much harder.

MEDICATION AND COUNSELING

But cigarettes are a distraction, not a cure. As I struggled with grief and tried to put our lives back into some sort of order, I began to feel the unmistakable signs of depression.

Clinical depression is a disease, and a devastating one. If you haven't lived through the awful sense of worthlessness it can be hard to understand. It's like being at the bottom of a very, very deep shaft with no way out. You try clawing up the sides, but eventually your fingernails break and your hands bleed, and you fall back even deeper into the pit. It's beyond sadness, and deeper than grief.

You can be as positive as you want, you can change your mentality, but if your chemicals are depleted and your body stops working the way it's supposed to, all the positive thinking in the world isn't going to change your body chemistry.

I recognized the symptoms, since I had had the ailment once before. Still, I didn't want to admit that I needed help. I told myself a lot of things, none of them very convincing:

I don't need it. Toughen up. Grow up.

I'm a failure. I'm worthless. How pathetic.

I'm tough! I don't need it.

These are exactly the things that depressed patients often tell themselves. It's a strange kind of feedback loop, where your illness ends up encouraging itself.

“If you had diabetes and needed insulin, you'd take the medicine, no questions asked,” a physician told me finally. “So stop fooling yourself, and get help.”

And so I did. I went to a doctor, who prescribed antidepressants, and I started talking to a variety of counselors, each of whom helped me in their own—or maybe my own—way.

One of the most helpful things I did was talking regularly with a counselor who had seen me back when I was in school. He still lives out on the West Coast, but Skype made regular sessions with him as easy as clicking a mouse.

One of the advantages of talking with him was his long knowledge of who I was. Basically, I couldn't BS him.

“This has always been an issue for you,” he could say, with great authority, if I tried to put something off to grieving. At the same time, his ability to work with families gave him a perspective not only on grief but on how the kids would deal with it, which has been of great value to me.

One of the most difficult issues to deal with was the kids' desire to know what was going on. Not just about my grief, but about the different court cases and other trials and tribulations I had to deal with. Some of those things were not only beyond their understanding, but also the kind of problems that kids should never really have to think about.

No one should.

“I know you want to know everything I'm going through, honey,” I told Bubba one day. “But I don't want to rob you of your childhood.”

“But Mom, don't you think if you tell me all this stuff now, that when I'm an adult and I have really bad stuff, I'll think it's no big deal?”

I looked at him and thought, Why should you have to know?

“The thing is, Taya, they're smart,” my counselor told me when we discussed it. “It's really uncomfortable for them to not know what's bothering you. I'm not saying tell them everything that's bothering you. But tell them enough to let them know.”

And so I started, a little at a time. I found it's hard to open up to your kids without scaring them or making them feel bad—which would only make me feel worse. There were many poignant moments. I know the kids have been changed by Chris's death. They've learned about evil at an age when no child should have to.

COLOR THERAPY

We also started working with another form of therapy that, though unorthodox, helped us with more than just grief. Called color therapy, it uses color as a starting point for interpreting different psychological conditions. It was the sort of thing I might have thought was nonsense until I witnessed its effect myself.

To summarize very roughly, the underlying theory holds that before we know words, we know emotions, and we tend to associate these with colors before we have a vocabulary to explore them. That association stays with us, and offers a way for us—and the therapists who help us—to examine the emotions we feel but can't talk about, or talk about inefficiently.

I originally contacted the counselor, Lana Allen, because a friend's daughter had raved about the work she was doing with her. Lana has a special way with children, managing to connect on their level. Interestingly, she's not a grief counselor or a children's counselor per se; her therapy is more wide ranging.

In a basic session, Lana would show me a screen with different colors. As I stared at the screen, one color would come to dominate. I could try not to see that color, or to see less of it, but gradually that color would take over.

When I first started, the color would suddenly diminish, pulling back to the size and strength of the others. All of this happened without any conscious intervention from me; it was like watching a movie, if movies consisted of blocks of color that got bigger and smaller.

Lana theorized that the changing size of the colors corresponded to a fight in my psyche between my emotional side and my logical side. When the emotion—grief, sadness, anger—started to get strong, the logical side of my brain would take over so I wasn't overwhelmed by it. The two sides of my brain—left and right, one primarily emotional and one primarily logical—worked together to keep things in balance. I needed that balance to continue to function.

The color therapy gave me insight into how I function, and why I acted so rationally and calmly when I got the news that Chris was dead. It was a survival instinct. The emotion was too much to take in, so the other side of my brain simply took over:
You shut up, so we can deal with this.

Of course, the emotional side couldn't be denied or submerged forever. The longer problems were suppressed, the more they would exert themselves in unhealthy ways.

Working with the colors, we explored my emotions and what I was feeling in my body—the knots and tensions. It's amazing the connections that come out once you begin.

With the kids, Lana translated complicated concepts about the body and stress into terms they could understand. The brain is like an alarm center, she'd say, and there are highways that send different emotions to different parts of our body. The pain you feel in your chest or the tightness in your neck is there because the alarms have overloaded your body.

The therapy gave the kids ways to talk about different emotions without fully understanding them. Directly and indirectly, the colors were windows into what they were feeling. They could deal with different emotions without having to relive them.

I've come to understand that there is really a very strong link between the mind and the body. And the therapy provided many insights, a good number of them seemingly random.

Can I make a pun about these coming “out of the blue,” or would that be too much?

One day Lana was talking about different emotional states and shocks, and she mentioned the word
“terror
. I realized that word described almost perfectly what I'd felt since Chris died—sheer terror. It was like being scared that the worst thing would happen all the time.

Which it had.

Terror. It was more than grief or feeling scared. It was as if the fight-or-flight mechanism we hear so much about was stuck in overdrive.

Logically, I knew that the
worst possible thing
had already happened; I didn't have to be scared about it anymore. Emotionally, though, I was stuck in that phase.

Understanding the sensation didn't put it to rest. I still felt incredibly pressured, as if a twenty-ton weight were about to fall on me. But it was an important insight, and it did have an effect—maybe the weight slipped to fifteen tons.

Other things helped me relieve stress: massages, chiropractic treatments, even acupuncture.

The parent of one of Bubba's friends is a practicing acupuncturist and chiropractor. He offered to give me a treatment one day. The first few needles got my attention, though I can't really say they hurt.

Then he pushed one in that released something mentally: I began crying and couldn't stop for maybe five minutes.

They say there are many different stages of grief and mourning. Denial, bargaining, acceptance. Everyone goes through these, according to the experts.

I don't know that my grief could be easily divided. It was impossible to separate it from the turmoil left in Chris's wake—the lawsuits, the overdue work, the need to find a way to make a living, the demands of raising children as a single mom. But there certainly was disbelief and denial.

There was also, at times, a reserve so steely that I felt like a different person.

After the initial shock and tumult, I entered a stage where I felt as if I were walking through mud up to my chin. My life in those first months went from complete chaos to semi-controlled but overwhelming disaster. It was progress, though not much.