14

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

—MAYA ANGELOU

In 1959, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin was flying his supersonic jet at forty-eight thousand feet when it suffered a catastrophic engine failure. He was forced to eject from his aircraft over a cumulonimbus—a gigantic storm cloud that gives even seasoned pilots the willies.

You’ve seen one. When fully mature, the cumulonimbus is a cauliflower-shaped cloud with billowy towers and turrets that can reach altitudes of seventy-five thousand feet. On its peak sits its distinctive anvil-shaped top. When a group of cumulonimbus clouds get together, they form menacing supercells. You don’t want to attend this party unless you’re one of those supernaturally stupid people on the TV show Storm Chasers.

Colonel Rankin is the only man to fall through the “king of clouds” and live to tell the tale. In the center of the cloud, Rankin was met by rising air blasts that shot him heavenward, then hurled toward earth by brutal downdrafts. Large hailstones at the mercy of the same forces pummeled the helpless pilot. Bolts of lightning passed frighteningly close, followed by thunder so fierce that Rankin claims he felt it more in his body than in his ears.

“This was nature’s bedlam,” he said, “an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics . . . beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.”

This is what 1986 felt like to me.

It began the night my father died.

He’d been in Greenwich Hospital for a month, rallying one day, declining the next. Some combination of us played Scrabble and gin rummy with my mother in the family room to pass the hours. One afternoon, after his vital signs had improved for the hundredth time, the nurse on duty suggested I go home and get some sleep. “You look exhausted. I’ll call if anything changes,” she said.

I looked at my mother. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Phillip is here. I’ll be fine.”

The nurse called at 3 a.m. “His vitals are dropping quickly,” she said. “It won’t be long.”

I topped ninety miles per hour on the Merritt Parkway, but it wasn’t fast enough. My father was dead when I arrived. I stood in the hallway outside his room until my mother came out.

I hugged her. “I’m sorry,” I said.

She hugged me and rubbed her hand in a circle on my back. “Me too.” She looked back toward the room. “They’re going to take him soon,” she said. “Would you like to say good-bye?”

I don’t know what I was expecting to see when I walked into his room, but it wasn’t this. I glanced at his body, then leaned back against the wall to prop myself up. On TV, dead people look like living people, only sleepier. This isn’t true in real life until they’ve been worked on by a mortician. At the moment of death, a person’s jaw muscles relax completely. My father’s mouth was misshapen, a gaping, black yawn. To amplify the already grotesque, a harried nurse had put his dentures back in, but only halfway. He looked like one of those ancient statues you see in the Met of a Roman warhorse screaming in terror.

I took deep breaths until my head cleared, then went to the foot of his bed. I felt the need to say something meaningful. I considered kneeling and praying, but what would I say? Hadn’t I seen a movie where a kid lays his head on the breast of his dead father and pours his heart out to him? Maybe I could riff on my memories of that scene for a while until it jump-started an emotion that would inspire me to say something from the heart. Nothing came to mind. I couldn’t recruit even one feeling, much less an outpouring of feelings to mark the solemnity of the moment.

My father’s medical chart wasn’t hanging on the foot rail of the bed anymore. Thick with a month’s worth of notes, the clipboard was now lying on the white dresser by the window. At the bottom of it, the attending nurse described my father’s death as a “Negative Patient Care Outcome.” Hemingway, the master of minimalist prose, would’ve surrendered his Nobel to whoever authored that pithy phrase.

I had expected to feel grief, at least for what our relationship wasn’t.

I hadn’t expected to feel nothing at all.

I left Bowdoin clueless about what I wanted to do with my life. I returned home and applied to the Yale Drama School but didn’t get in. I hand-delivered a vocal demo reel to every jingle house in Manhattan, hoping to get work singing radio and television commercials. While my friends were in training programs at Wall Street investment banks or going to law school, I was auditioning to sing a “Learning by Numbers” segment on Sesame Street. I was all kite and no string.

On a Sunday in early September, I went to my old church for the first time since arriving home from college. I ran into my former Young Life leader Mike at coffee hour. He asked if I was busy on Tuesday nights, and did I want to play guitar and help lead singing at Club? I just about kissed him. Anne still had two more years at Bowdoin, and I needed a community. If I became a volunteer leader with Young Life, it would give me something to do while I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. It might also keep me out of trouble.

It’s often a chance encounter that maps your future. Mike became my champion. He tended the long neglected garden of my talents with great love. He blew on the glowing embers of my passion for writing and performing music, my gift for communicating the gospel with humor, and my increasing love for God. What I thought would be a brief stint helping out a youth group turned into a vocation.

In the months following Dad’s death, I got married. Anne and I moved to a new community, and I took the helm of a youth ministry that needed a fresh start. It was a lot to absorb in one year, but exhilarating. Marrying my college sweetheart; settling into an idyllic yellow house in New Canaan, Connecticut; and watching my ministry take off was thrilling. I stood on the porch with my coffee some mornings and compared where I was at that moment with the end of the movie Rocky. I’d survived fifteen rounds with a nutcase. It was time to have the life I’d dreamed of living.

Six months later, my heart started a prison riot in my chest. I woke to it shaking and pounding my rib cage like a prisoner demanding to see the warden now. I sat up and put my hand on my chest. Was I having a heart attack? Had I drunk too much coffee before bed? Once my fear of dying passed, I realized that the only other time my body felt like this was when I was furious about something. I replayed the events of the previous day but couldn’t think of anything that would make me feel this angry. I turned on the light and read for a while until I fell asleep again. It was probably nothing.

A few nights later, a sharp pain in my chest awakened me, and again I sat up. A primitive tribesman was hollowing out my chest with a chisel to make a canoe. Every sliver of wood sliced away brought a deeper feeling of sadness. I sat up against the headboard of our bed and tried to trace the feeling back to a recent incident. But nothing had happened to elicit this kind of profound melancholy.

I woke Anne and described what I was feeling.

“I think it’s stress,” she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. The bedside light I’d turned on was making her squint.

“It’s scary, Anne. I feel like I’m losing my grip.”

She squeezed my hand. “If it’s not better tomorrow, we’ll call the doctor,” she said.

The next morning I felt better, so I put off making an appointment to see someone, but I was starting to dread the night.

A few days later, I became the second man to fall through a cumulonimbus cloud.

I was wracked by bouts of panic that lasted only a few hours, but the rest of my day was spent anticipating the next attack. I began to know when one of them was ramping up. A wave of anxiety would jerk my heart rate upward, which meant the free fall of sadness would soon follow. When this happened, I’d throw on my sweats and rush out to take a run, hoping that exercise would diminish the dizzying effects of my descent. As I ran I composed a list in my mind of all the reasons I should be happy, hoping to extinguish the spreading fire of anxiety and sorrow. But I could no more talk myself out of one of these episodes than I could contain a four-alarm fire with a squirt gun.

One would think that as the time between these bouts shortened and their intensity amplified, I would see a doctor, but I was too proud. I knew how to plow through hard times. I’d always figured things out on my own. I excelled at my job despite my fear that my inner scaffolding was collapsing. I’d grown up rising to the challenge. As the child of an alcoholic, I knew how to smile and work a room like someone running for reelection, even when there was a spear sticking through my head.

I was also too scared to ask for help. On one hand, I wanted a name for whatever it was that had taken over my life, a name more accurate than my self-diagnosis of “rapid-onset madness.” On the other hand, I sensed that I might be better off if I didn’t know what it was. What if they told me I was in the early stages of becoming the person my father had been, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it?

I just wanted it to go away.

I had a dream. I dreamed that Anne and I had just gotten engaged and we’d invited friends over to celebrate. We were sitting around the kitchen of my old house, laughing and talking. I was putting the linguini into the boiling water when a noise louder than AC/DC doing a sound check threatened to take out the foundation. My friends leaped to their feet. They put down their sloshing glasses of wine and gawked at the shaking linoleum floor.

“Dude, what’s in your basement?” Jim asked. We’d been good friends in college.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “Basement? I don’t have a basement. I don’t even have a crawl space.” I was happy and unconcerned. I had just dipped my wooden stirring spoon into the marinara sauce and tasted it. It was going to be a great dinner.

Moments later, AC/DC’s run-through of “Highway to Hell” was augmented by the din of smashing glass and hundreds of aluminum garbage cans being thrown against walls. The house shook until cracks appeared in the plaster walls.

“Ian, can’t you hear that? It’s got to be something in your basement.”

I whipped around. It was my boss, Mark, wincing and plugging his ears. “I’m telling you I don’t have a basement,” I said, thrusting my spoon in his direction.

“If you don’t have a basement, then where does that go?” It was my first-grade teacher, Sister Margaret. Where had she come from? Who invites a nun to their engagement party?

I checked the bread and slammed the oven door shut. “All right, I have a basement!” I said. “Is that a crime? Now, everyone sit down and eat.” One of my eyelids was quivering.

Anne went to the basement door and laid her hand on it as if she were about to pray for God’s healing. “Ian, let’s go downstairs,” she said.

I clenched my fists. “I’m not going down there!”

In the dream’s final scene, I was positioned like someone in a leg press machine at the gym. My back was pressed flat and straight against the basement door, and my feet were pushing against the wall opposite. Something was smashing against the basement door, and it wouldn’t be long before its hinges blew off. Whatever was down there wanted to kill me. And I was on my own—my guests had left.

Anne found me crying on the couch in the living room. I’d woken from the nightmare overwhelmed by another feeling I’d never experienced. Grief. My soul was a ghost town on a bleak and wintry plain. The buildings were still standing, but close to falling down. I was out of my depth.

The next morning I called my internist, Dr. Ashwood, and told his secretary it was an emergency and I needed to see him that day. She said to come during his lunch hour. When I think of what doctors might have been like in the 1950s, I imagine Dr. Ashwood. His hair was silver and always looked like it had just been trimmed. He did things with an unhurried deliberateness, and that included taking time to listen to his patients. I sat on the examining table and described my symptoms. I looked down at the black-and-white octagonal tiles on the floor. Eye contact was out of the question. Falling apart and failure were synonymous in my book, and I was riddled with shame. Dr. Ashwood asked me what life had been like over the last year. He gave me a thorough physical, drew some blood to test my thyroid for something, then told me to get dressed and meet him in his office.

When I came in, he was sitting at his desk, writing something. I was tucking in my shirt.

“Ian, I want you to see my friend, Daniel Barnigan,” he said, stretching across his desk to hand me a piece of paper.

I read it and slumped. “A psychologist?”

Dr. Ashwood leaned back into one of those ridiculously expensive chairs for people with bad backs. “He goes to my church. I think he’s one of the best.”

“I’m mentally ill?” I asked.

He chuckled. “No, but you have been through a lot of transitions in the last eighteen months. I want you to talk with someone before we approach this medically.”

I shook Dr. Ashwood’s hand. “I’ll give it a shot,” I said, avoiding having to look at him.

As I turned to walk out, Dr. Ashwood said, “If it’s okay, I’d like to call Dan before you see him.”

I stopped, surprised. “How come?” I asked.

“It’s not unusual for an MD to call a psychologist about a patient’s medical history. If you have no objections, stop and sign a release on your way out.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

When I pulled into my driveway, I leaned my forehead on the steering wheel. Hopelessness had spread from my mind to my body. The journey from the car to the front door was like slogging a mile through a swamp of molasses. I felt old.

I called Barnigan, and he agreed to see me the next day. It was 3 p.m. I drank a few beers and went to bed.

Dan was seventy, his body forty, and his eyes eighteen. He radiated a child’s optimism that something exciting was about to happen but maintained the centered calm of a cloistered monk. The framed photos of him crossing the finish lines of several triathlons explained why he was so trim.

He invited me to sit on a red leather tufted couch. He sat across from me in a matching chair, one leg corkscrewed around the other, his foot hooked behind his calf. He wore a blue-and-yellow striped bow tie, a white shirt, and a black V-neck cashmere sweater. I soon learned that cashmere V-neck sweaters and bow ties were his trademark apparel.

“So what brings you here?” he said.

I stared out the window. “I’m falling to pieces,” I said, not wasting time. I described my fitful nights, the anger I couldn’t connect to anything, my vivid and petrifying dreams, and the suffocating sadness and anxiety that had become my constant companions.

“I thought these would be the happiest days of my life,” I said. “Instead, I’m afraid I’m losing it.”

He bit his lip and nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What you’re describing sounds awful.” He picked up a legal pad and pen from the floor next to his chair. “Tell me about your family.”

Tell him about my family?

I stumbled around trying to find the trailhead where the climb up this huge mountain was supposed to begin, and then a voice in my head whispered, I’ll take it from here. The narrative had waited so long to be told that it had taken on its own life.

Once it left the station, there was no slowing it down. Several times when I told specific stories from my childhood, tears welled in his eyes and I’d stop.

“Go on, go on,” he’d say.

I spoke for two hours. He stopped me two or three times to ask for a clarification; otherwise I don’t remember him even moving.

“Sorry for rambling,” I said.

Dan uncrossed his legs. “I want to sit quietly for a moment to honor the story you’ve just told. It was sacred,” he said, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes.

Honor the story. It was a phrase that brought to consciousness something deep within me. It was like peering through the vision-test machine the optometrist uses, only I wasn’t looking at an eye chart, but at my life. As he said those three words, a new lens clicked into place and things looked different, not better, just different somehow.

When Dan opened his eyes, he sat up straight.

“Do you have any questions for me before you go, Ian?” he said.

“What’s happening to me?” I said. I couldn’t leave without knowing.

He looked into the distance for a moment. I sensed that he had gone hunting for just the right word. Finally, his eyes gleamed.

“You’re waking up.”