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Stepping Out of the Trauma Tango
A year and a half after my husband’s very expected death, I lost the capacity to hold onto a decision.
In the morning, I’d be sure I should keep “our” house by any means — rent out half to a traveling nurse or offer short-term rentals where I changed other people’s sheets, whatever it took. I agreed to store three motorcycles over the winter for a modest fee, making use of the second garage bay.
Come evening, I’d confront the mounting interest on the two mortgages, the devastating credit card balances from those last years, and the way scrambling for extra freelance assignments meant setting the alarm for 2 a.m., to catch the offerings from Mumbai, India, before other Americans saw them. Then it was obvious: I needed to sell the house.
But by morning I knew that wasn’t the way to go. The spinning back and forth kept me off balance. “I make smart decisions quickly,” I protested to my brother on the phone. “I always have, it’s what makes me a quick editor. But now I’m too frightened of both options!”
Terror rode my nights along with the Mumbai-check-website alarms. Desperate, and eight months into the solitude of the pandemic (no vaccines yet, lots of deaths), I picked out a counselor who’d see me via Zoom.
You’re a writer, she mused. Very good, we’re going to use narrative therapy. What is the overarching theme of your life?
DANGER, I told her. It was the first big truth.
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Readers: This is, I think, the beginning of pulling together the many memoir segments I’ve placed online. What do you think? Would you read the next page of this book?
