Crash Convergence

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Your odds of crashing in a commercial airplane are about the same as your odds of getting struck by lightning. The risk goes up considerably in a private plane. Still, how many people do you know who’ve been in an airplane crash? I’ve never personally met anyone else who survived one. Until recently, I’d only met two people who even had plane crash stories in their families.

Imagine, then, how eerie it was to find myself in a laundry room at a housewarming party with two strangers whose parents had died in airplane crashes. Wait, it gets even freakier. We quickly discovered that each of our family’s crashes occurred in the 1970s. Both of theirs happened outside the same city in Peru, of all places. One was a commercial flight. The other, like mine, was a private plane.

Hold on, you’re saying. What were you doing in the laundry room? That’s where our friends had set up the bar, on top of the washer and drier. The space could only hold half a dozen people, and 50% of us standing in it at that moment had either been in a plane crash, lost family members in a plane crash, or both.

What are the odds?

Turns out one of my new crash compadres, Ray, lives just a few blocks down the street from me. (Cue Twilight Zone music.) The other, Mark, is an Oakland-based journalist whose three books and scads of print stories focus on human-created environmental disasters. When he told me about his involvement with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in Emeryville, that was the last straw. My mind was fully and officially blown.

Here’s why. The Executive Director of CIR is Robert Rosenthal—a journalist with a long and storied career that’s included executive editor positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chauncey Bailey Project. Before he became an award-winning fancy-pants, though, Rosenthal was a reporter for the Boston Globe. After our plane crashed in October 1979, it was his byline on that newspaper’s coverage.

What this means, in case you’re having trouble tracking all the woo-woo connections, is that my new friend Mark, whose parents died in a plane crash around the same time as my little sister, happens to work with the guy who wrote the newspaper stories about the crash that killed her. The crash I survived 37 years ago.

I shit you not.

Mark gave me Robert’s email address and urged me to get in touch with him. He knew “Rosey” would be interested to hear from me. And guess what? He was right! I took my time contacting him, worried that a big-wig newsman wouldn’t have time for my small-potatoes story. An hour after I finally sent the email, though, I got a reply. Robert asked if we could get together and talk. He had a vague memory of the incident, he said, and wondered if I had clips of the stories he’d written.

We met three days later in the CIR offices. He told me that once he’d read the clips I sent, memories of reporting the story came back to him. He’d spent a day in our small town outside Boston interviewing people, including a neighbor girl who’d been playing tetherball with Nancy the day before she died. He remembered how devastated everyone he spoke to had been by the news.

More than once in the course of our conversation he marveled at how infrequently this sort of thing happens. Journalists rarely get to follow up with the people they write about, he said, even though certain stories remain front of mind. To hear my version of the crash events, and to learn about my protracted struggle and how I finally got the help I needed to re-engage with life—this was clearly a moving experience for him.

As it was for me. I kept having to remind myself that I was face-to-face with someone who’d been there. Someone who canvassed the neighborhood while Mom, Dad and I lay in our hospital beds. He glimpsed a side of the events I would have missed, if not for his newspaper articles. It felt incredibly lucky and so very sweet to get the chance to connect with him after more than 35 years.

Perhaps the coolest coincidence of all is that I met these folks just a few months before the release of my memoir about the plane crash. It’s as if, once I’d got the story down on paper, the universe started putting people in my path to say: this matters.

I sent Robert my book manuscript. Once again, his reply was immediate. “Thank you Carol,” he wrote. “I just read the first few pages. The narrative is powerful, gripping and wonderfully written.” I flushed with pride. He continued, “I think anyone who reads the first few pages will read the book. It pulls you along. . . . Congrats.”

I am here to say, alive to say: Life is brutal, enervating, raucous, stupefying, jubilant. Extremely weird. And so dear.

Married to Therapy

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You wouldn’t know it from this blog, but for years I was dead-set against psychotherapy. A brief stint in college with the wrong therapist had a lot to do with that. So did my own decades-long denial that anything was wrong. But I also got the hint early on that I wasn’t deserving of the care a good therapist provides, and that made me spiteful.

Soon after my mother married Dad #2, they put my little sister Nancy into therapy. She’d been shunted from one babysitter to another during Dad’s protracted divorce and she was pissed. Dad bragged that Nancy was seeing the best child psychologist at McLean’s Hospital. I wasn’t offered the option after our plane crash, so I pretended not to care. I didn’t need that kind of help. Therapy was for losers.

It wasn’t until I was pushing forty and desperate to save my relationship with my partner of fifteen years that I finally reconsidered. He’d started seeing a therapist and insinuated that, if I did the same, he might not leave me. Even though I was coerced, somehow I recognized that Connie Rubiano, a licensed clinical social worker, was the life raft for me. “Ahoy,” she said. “Climb aboard.” And I did. Thank god! Now I know just how incredible it is to come out the other side of your misery.

Psychotherapy is not the only way to accomplish this, but it sure did the trick for me. My work with Connie, and with Jan Cehn, the EMDR therapist she referred me to, transformed my life. I can’t sing their praises loudly enough.

I guess it’s no surprise that I wound up married to a therapist, then. (Not my own therapist. Ew!) After the relationship I’d tried so hard to save went south, and after I found my nerve, I did the online dating thing. There he was in pixels–a writer and therapist who specialized in EMDR. It seemed too good to be true, but he kept turning out to be the real deal.

Nuns marry Jesus. I married therapy, and it couldn’t be a more perfect match.

My emotional life just gets better and better. Since meeting my husband, I’ve learned what it means to be adored, muffin top and all. I’ve gotten better at forgiving myself, at tuning out the critic in my head. I’ve also learned how to fight in a way that clears the air instead of making it fouler, how to accept an apology instead of clinging to an offense, how to abide the fact that not everyone thinks I’m awesome 100% of the time. And that’s just for starters. I’m still working on getting to the point without chickening out when something is difficult to say. Allowing that someone else’s bad mood is probably not my fault. Not leaping to problem-solve everything for everyone.

As if all that weren’t already an embarrassment of riches, I got a bonus, too. My husband is as talented a writer as he is a therapist. And he’s an incredible editor.

I’ve read over and over that married or partnered writers should NOT edit one another’s work. Some say it puts too much strain on the relationship. Others say it doesn’t give the work enough of an objective appraisal. I’ve also read many accounts of married and partnered writers who ignore these warnings and do just fine.

I can’t say how things will go in the future, but when I was drafting and revising my memoir Every Moment of a Fall, being married to therapy was the best thing EVER. Who else would you want sitting next to you while cranking on the umpteenth draft of a book about your own therapy experience but a therapist who also happens to be a kick-ass editor (and who loves you best of anyone in the world)? We pored over every single word together. Literally. We plugged my laptop into the TV monitor and scrutinized each page on the large screen.

Sometimes it drove us nuts. He had to be in control of the wireless keyboard, for instance, since he said I type too slowly. It’s true, I do. I can’t type without looking at my hands. But still. Sometimes we got hung up because the word or phrase he insisted I change was absolutely, non-negotiably the one I wanted. But inch by inch, we made the story clearer, the experience more vivid, the healing more apparent. More days than not, we’d high-five at the end of an editing session, thrilled at the good work we’d done together.

If you’re a writer, you know what a demanding and mostly solitary job it is. Having a mate who gets that, who understands how bloody hard you worked to lay six words next to each other in gorgeous order, who can help you amp those words up from gorgeous to chill-inducing—well, that feels slightly miraculous. It feels like being carried over the threshold. Home.

UnPause

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Pardon the lengthy hiatus, dear reader. Your blogger has been AWOL lo these many months, toiling away in the land of revision.

But I’m baaaaaack.

Which can only mean one thing: my book manuscript is finished! After several additional rounds of reimagining, rehashing, reorganizing, rejiggering, recombining, realigning and resweating bullets, I’d like to say Halle-frickin-lujah. Can I get a witness?

This thing is really happening.