On Feeling Powerless

My last post was for those of us with lives that have taken a swift detour.

Of course, we all know this is the better of two situations.

Many people might even feel they prefer life this way, under pandemic rules.

The misanthropes out there don’t have to deal with people, nor do the socially phobic; those who lacked free time before now have it up the wazoo; we’re connecting with our families more and each other—phone companies have found an increase in voice calls unlike anything they’ve seen in years.

A lot of us are also experiencing a slow-down of life that makes us happier. We’re getting a break from the busyness and maybe seeing it never had to be that way at all. Maybe we were doing things the hard way before and not the smart way, because we never took a moment to think about it.

Most of our delays are beginning to feel like opportunities. Chances to think through our next moves.

***

But what about the small percentage of us experiencing the worst of this?

As of today, 95,000 people have died worldwide. In the United States, 16,000 have died, nearly half of them in New York.

Most of of us in the New York area know someone who has or has had coronavirus. Some of us know someone who’s died from it. Some of us know someone who’s dying right now.

***

I’ve hesitated to comment on this because what happened to my father was not this. He wasn’t sick. It wasn’t drawn out. It was likely painless. And he had a funeral.

But it was violent and sudden and tragic and felt arbitrary. It was a cause of death that affects thousands of people every year.

Losing someone like that that tends to inspire activism—when you know the death could have been prevented. When you know you are one of thousands, it does something to you. It means you’ve joined a club.

There’s a club most of us aren’t mentioning by name right now because the requirements for membership are horrific. I know in the 17 years since my father’s death, most people I’ve told about it tend to have that reaction—the notion that someone they love could be killed by a driver on a phone seems horrific. They don’t know how they could ever recover from it, so they choose not to think about it.

But we need to think about it.

We can’t treat the families of coronavirus victims like they are alien either.

They could just as easily be you or me.

***

When someone dies in an instant doing something we do every day, driving, it has a way of making you cling to anything you can find that might bring you safety. I held on tight to the idea of finding a secure, predictable life. In a way, I became frozen in time. I spent a decade pursuing the career I was pursuing when my father was killed and little else.

So imagine how fearful you must be when someone you love dies from simply breathing. From simply leaving their house.

***

When I chose to pursue this list, and finish it in only four years’ time, it was a decision made in desperation—I just couldn’t be afraid anymore.

My spirit was willing to risk anything to be set free. I wasn’t really living, you see. I was surviving.

The other day, a podcast interviewer asked me, “Name a moment in your life when you felt the most empowered.” I gave an atypical response: “When I had to surrender my life.”

Love makes brave choices. Love doesn’t cower in fear. Love is the best part of us.

When we lose someone we love, it becomes that much harder to let love in or out.

***

In an effort to promote faith for those of you losing yours, I’ve excerpted my manuscript below.

This is the part that describes my dad’s death.

It’s also an ode to New York.

***

The amount I could stretch out a dollar that summer began to impress even me. People often call New York expensive, but if you’re young and broke, there’s no better place.

Steven’s second visit was the Fourth of July. When we got back to the apartment after exploring the city, it started raining. Thunderstorms, like most of June had been, which made Steven giddy. We stood in the dark looking out at the Empire State Building, lit up red, white and blue like a Bomb Pop.

“Why do you love storms so much?” I asked.

“When I was little, my mom told me it was the angels bowling,” he said. “I got excited whenever one came. I used to calm down all my scared classmates in kindergarten.”

It was harder to say goodbye the second time. I knew I’d fallen in love, but I’d also never felt like this. The idea of him packing up his whole life and moving to New York felt like a lot of responsibility. How could someone think I’m that worth it? I thought.

By late July, I still hadn’t found a job. One day at my internship I got a terrible feeling of dread. I suddenly knew something terrible was going to happen. The night before 9/11, I’d woken up and felt the same thing.
I emailed Steven. “I don’t know who it’s going to affect—just me and the people I love or the world at large, but it’s going to be big and it’s going to be terrible, and I think it will be soon.”

That week I finally got a job, as a hostess at Outback Steakhouse, which mostly entailed seating people who walked in the door confused. “I didn’t know there were chain restaurants in New York!”

———

In August, Steven visited a third time. We went to Astor Place, our favorite spot in the city, and ate at a restaurant called Yaffa. I didn’t realize until I got home that I’d lost my phone. We went back the next day and the busboy still had it. “I called Dad!” he said.

He’d scrolled through my contacts and found my father. I hadn’t spoken to him since Father’s Day.

The next day Steven walked me to my first journalism interview in New York: at Black Book. I’d found a spelling error at my internship and the research editor said I was destined to be a copy editor. On the way we saw a puddle shaped like a heart. Steven pointed to it, and said it was a good sign.

The Friday of his visit, we boarded a Chinatown bus to meet my family in Delaware. We met my dad for lunch, and I brought my copy of the latest issue of Art & Auction. I was just as proud to show him my name on a masthead as I was to introduce him to the love of my life.

We told him about my spelling error catch, and he told Steven he wasn’t surprised, as I was a spelling bee champ as a kid. I reminded him I’d only gotten fourth place, and he said the same thing he said then.

“You were robbed!”

He said he’d been getting heart palpitations. Since his enlarged heart diagnosis, he’d been putting off surgery. He said he’d just broken up with his girlfriend after catching her making out with his friend. “I never want you or David to speak to her again,” he said.

He’d moved into a studio apartment across the street from the church on our town’s main drag, but wanted this kept a secret.

I stopped in the bathroom as he paid the bill, leaving my dad alone with Steven by the doors. As I walked back, I overheard them.

“Well, you seem like a nice young man…,” my dad said.

It was the first time he’d said that about anyone.

On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, he grinned, held out both arms and gave me a big hug goodbye.
Steven and I drove to a bookstore, and I broke down crying.

“When will it ever end?” I said. I meant my worrying about him.

———

The next week, after Steven left, I was coming home from work one day when a strange man got on the train and sat down next to me.

“Excuse me,” he said, and, “boy, it’s hot.”

New York was in a heat wave, and people were getting weird.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking you this,” he said, “but are you OK? You look sad.”

I told him I was fine, just tired.

“Are you on your way home from work?” he asked.

I told him I was.

He had on a denim work shirt and carpenter jeans. Why is he talking to me? I thought. I’d only lived in New York three months, but I knew this just wasn’t done.

“Where do you work?” he asked.

I told him, warily. He told me he was a security guard at a veterans’ hospital, then showed me his ID to prove it. The veins in his dark arms distracted me—they were pulsating like blood was flowing through them for the first time. His dark pupils vibrated.

He asked if I had family in the city. I told him one cousin.

“Well, call him up!” he said. “Call your mother! Mothers worry. Mine still does, and I’m 39!”

My father’s joke.

The man told me about the veterans in the hospital. Some people dismissed them as crazy, he said.

“I know,” I said. “But they just have PTSD.”

“Yes,” he said. “Hey…you seem to know a little something about this…”

Then, just as gently as he’d glided on, he was gone.

I got off the train in Jackson Heights, and as I climbed the stairs, I realized I felt more at peace than I ever had. I’d heard stories about things like this, but couldn’t believe it until it happened to me.

It felt like I’d just met an angel.

I reached for my cell phone so I could call Steven, but saw I’d missed a call from Dave.

“Call me back as soon as you can,” my brother said tearfully in his voicemail.

My heart pounding, I pressed his number.

———

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” my brother said. “But Dad died yesterday. He was in a car accident.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I know.”

I’ve never been able to understand why I said that. Maybe it was because on the train he’d just said goodbye.

“What happened?” I asked. “Was the driver drunk?”

“No,” he said. “It was in broad daylight, in the afternoon. A teenager crashed into him at an intersection.”

I stood frozen on the sidewalk, in front of all the fruit stands, the street’s busyness fading into the background.

The police officer who’d tried to resuscitate my dad had searched through his wallet to find someone to call. He’d prayed the business card didn’t belong to a son.

Dave said he’d been trying to reach my mom but couldn’t. She was in the Poconos on vacation with Jim.

“Let’s get you on a train to Delaware,” he said. “How soon can you come?”

I walked down the sidewalk in a daze. All those times I’d kissed him goodbye on the cheek from the backseat of his car—I was never sure whether it was more for him or for me. But I was glad I’d done it suddenly. And sad I’d never do it again.

When I reached my apartment, I walked straight to my bookshelf.

My dad wrote his book, The Why? Generation (in a Why-Not World.), in 1976, the year he married my mom. He finished it two years later, when I was born. My mom had it spiral-bound in her teachers’ lounge and gave it to family as Christmas gifts. The book compiled 13 essays about how things had changed in the 13 years since John F. Kennedy’s death.

I’d brought it to New York along with the legal pads and pencils he’d given me to become “a real writer.”
I flipped through the back of the book and found what I was searching for:

“When a person dies, his physical remains are buried or burned and returned to the mother earth. This ash-to-ash concept of existence is not depressing when you look at the full scope of humanity. I can share in the greatest thoughts and inventions of the greatest people who walked the earth. Their spirit and influence will never die.”

I called Steven. He booked a flight to Delaware right away.

———

My brother picked me up at the train station that night. We spent the next two days in the house alone, trying to reach my mom, having no idea what to do. Finally, Dave got through. When they pulled into the driveway, I ran to her.

Though we all went to the funeral home together, my mom and uncle Jim, my dad’s brother, took care of my dad’s estate. He had no will and owed money still for something, but I wasn’t told what. He had a safe deposit box, but my uncle couldn’t find the key.

For days I barely ate anything. Sleep was my only escape from the nightmare, but when I woke up, I had to remember all over again.

I told my mom and brother where my dad’s new apartment was, because we had to clean it. But at the last minute, I couldn’t help them. I told them I wasn’t strong enough.

The coroner said my dad had died instantly, that his heart had stopped on impact, so there was no need for a closed casket.

Still, by the time we got to the wake Friday night, he didn’t look like himself.

His body looked peaceful and still. His face looked older, flatter. But the strangest part was his hands—clasped gently together on his stomach, a gesture I’d never seen him make.

My dad lived through his hands. They were always in motion.

My brother and I stood in front of the casket as everyone formed a line to greet us, mostly strangers. When everyone had gone, we turned to pay our respects.

I stood in the middle of my mom and brother with an arm around each. It was the same way we’d stood when I was six, the day he drove away. But as they looked down, I looked up.

Where are you? I thought.

———

My friend Kelly came to the wake—she still lived in Delaware then, hadn’t moved to Los Angeles yet. She offered to drive me to get Steven at the airport in Baltimore.

On our way back to Delaware, we drove towards a large orange disk on the highway, a harvest moon. It was the biggest moon I’d ever seen.

We stopped at a diner, and Steven said we were about to get a storm.

“Good,” I said. “I hope it pours.”

I stayed up editing my eulogy, which I’d luckily already written. I was adapting an essay I’d written on Father’s Day when I couldn’t afford to send my dad a card.

The next morning I rode with my brother to the church. It was the one where my dad had gone to school as a kid. The one where he’d thrown all his baseball cards up in the air one day at recess and yelled “Finders, keepers!” He’d told us that story so many times. How rich he’d be now if he’d never done that.

It was the church where he’d married my mom. It was the church where I’d been baptized.

We opened the heavy doors and walked down the aisle. My brother had instructed the organist to play “Too-Ral-Loo-Ral-Loo-Ral” without my knowledge. We would lay my dad to rest with the song he’d sung to tuck us in.

Dave reached for my hand.

—–—

When it was time, I read my eulogy, then turned to find my brother in tears.

“That was beautiful,” he said. Then he read his.

After the service, we greeted people at the front of the church. One of my brother’s friends came up to me and said, “Maybe this is inappropriate, but wow, you are a writer.”

It was the first time I’d read anything in public.

———

On the way to the cemetery, the sky opened up.

“I just want to say…,” I said to my brother, who was driving.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said.

My stepbrother Scott drove Steven and me to the reception at my uncle’s house. He’d just met Steven that morning, as had most of my relatives.

The rain was really coming down. It was Scott’s one-year wedding anniversary, and his wife didn’t seem happy that this was how they were spending it.

“Ahh! My eyes!” she yelled as a bright bolt flashed across the sky.

At the reception, nobody talked to me. I mostly sat in a corner with my plate, not eating anything, explaining to Steven who everyone was. My uncle Dan was the tall guy with the toupee and wide tie. Jim Weill, my dad’s former housemate, was the guy with the mustache holding court about Elvis.

My cousin Jimmy was the only cousin on my mom’s side who came, mostly because my dad was his godfather. He said he was lucky he’d gotten out of New York.

Two days before, there’d been a citywide blackout—even the Empire State Building went dark. I’d watched on TV the streets I’d normally walk, heard news anchors report that nobody knew the cause. On the front page of Time magazine was a photo of hot, sweaty New Yorkers sitting on the steps of the public library, stranded without their lights. One girl sat up from the masses, in a white tank top and denim skirt. She surveyed her surroundings with a concerned and frustrated gaze. The caption read, “Powerless.”

I knew exactly how she felt.

***

I met the agent at a French café near Washington Square on my wedding anniversary. As we talked, I couldn’t help feeling like he’d made some kind of mistake. I confided in him not only about my father’s death, but about my parents’ divorce, my depression and my hospital stay. He said he was even more excited to represent me than he had expressed in his email. I’d never shared most of those things with anyone.

Four days later, I was preparing yet again to jump out of a plane.

———

Some people said it didn’t make sense that an advocate for saving lives would risk her own. “You have to finish my book for me if anything happens,” I told Steven. But I’d said this many times—even before minor surgeries.

Mostly I had to decide if I was OK with the life I’d led if it was about to be over.

I decided I was.

The night before, I couldn’t sleep, so I took an Epsom salt bath. Then I found another skydiving interview, this time with Will Smith. He said he spent 16 hours being scared before his first jump, then realized the fear wasn’t productive. “Why be afraid of something that is going to be blissful?” he said. “The fear only ruins your day. God puts the most blissful things on the other side of fear.”

I woke up the next morning to a sunny, clear sky. The drive was an hour and a half. I almost never drove anywhere.

I stopped for gas and worried the stop might make me late, so I picked up my phone to email the reporter who’d be jumping with me, Rohan Mohanty. A man in a truck behind me at the tanks immediately yelled at me to get off my phone. I was startled.

If only he knew what I’m about to go do and why.

When I arrived at the airfield, I learned from the cameraman that Rohan was late. The airfield was small and broad and populated only by men. I told the Australian who looked like Sting behind the desk that I needed to use the restroom. He directed me to the bathroom bike. The restroom was so far that you had to pedal to reach it.

The restroom’s mirror was cloudy. I’d wanted to check one more time how I’d look on TV. Instead all I saw was fear in my eyes.

When Rohan arrived, he joined me at a picnic table to watch the training video. “What is this? Duck Dynasty?” he asked. The narrator, sitting in a suit behind a large desk, had a black beard down to his belly.

Rohan wasn’t someone I’d befriend. He wore Ed Hardy shirts and lifted weights every day, though he was also slight and barely taller than me. He was the kind of handsome that most TV anchors are, impeccably so, with chiseled features and a broad, white smile, which stood out against his brown Indian skin. It appeared he’d just jumped out of bed for this—his hair was disheveled and he seemed out of sorts. He also smoked.

But as soon as he got his camera working, he went into another mode.

He regularly used a mobile camera, one on a tripod system he’d designed himself. He could wear it if needed, and most of his interviews included close-ups of his face. Somehow he made mugging for the camera endearing.

He told me it was his shared birthday week with his toddler son and his dad, who’d recently died. His father’s death had been his motivation to take the segment. I told him about my shared birthday week with my dad and my niece. When we met our tandem jumpers, the men we’d be strapped to, we learned that mine, a Brazilian named Jones, was celebrating a birthday week with his father and daughter. In fact, Jones’s birthday was that day!

“OK,” I said. “We’ll definitely be safe!”

Nuclear George, Rohan’s tandem, showed us what to do when we stepped off the wing. “You want to keep both hands on your shoulder straps,” he said. “Never on the tandem jumper’s hand.” He demonstrated by holding his left fist out and slapping it with his right and yelling, “Don’t do THIS!” The tandem jumper would be holding a video camera in that hand, and he’d also use it to pull the parachute open. Next we were to hold both arms out and smile like we were having the time of our lives.

When the parachute opened, we’d have another five minutes before we reached the ground, at which point we’d pull our legs up, bent at the knees. Nuclear George said he didn’t want anyone breaking bones. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

As we walked towards the plane, Rohan joked that he was on the green mile. “We’re doing this for all the dads out there,” he said to his camera. “Happy Father’s Day!”

I asked Jones if his parachute was supposed to hang out of his bag like that, as though my astuteness alone could save me.

“It’s fine!” he said.

I was chosen for the seat beneath the dashboard, which wasn’t really a seat at all. I felt like my cat whenever we take her to the vet. The pilot looked like he was 12. He was flying a plane with three whooping men and me. The door didn’t close all the way—as we neared 10,000 feet, I could still see the ground grow farther through the gap. I was seated too low, thank God, to look out the windows.

If you’d told me at that moment that the first famous skydiver was a woman, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Tiny Broadwick, born Georgia Ann Thomson in 1893, was called “Tiny” at birth because she was only three pounds. The youngest of seven in rural North Carolina, she was married by 12 and a mother by 13. Her husband died in an accident, so she had to work in a cotton mill to support her child. One day in 1907, she saw an act called “The Broadwicks and their Famous French Aeronauts” at the state fair. The troupe jumped out of a hot air balloon and fell to earth with the help of parachutes. Tiny asked their leader if she could be part of it. He recognized the hype-building potential of her size and said yes. Tiny’s mother promised to look after her granddaughter as long as Tiny sent back a portion of her pay each month, and Broadwick was given permission to adopt Tiny, so she became a Broadwick, too. At only four feet tall, she was soon a carnival sweetheart. Newspapers called her the most daring female aeronaut ever seen.

After the Wright Brothers’ work in airplanes, pilot Glenn Martin asked Tiny to jump from his. A string was fastened to the plane’s fuselage and woven through her parachute’s covering so that when she jumped, the cover tore away. In 1914, the Army asked her to demonstrate a jump from a military plane. On her fourth try, her parachute’s line tangled up in the plane’s tail, so Tiny improvised. She cut the string, plummeted and then pulled the cord of the parachute by hand, inventing the ripcord.

Her survival proved that a pilot could safely bail from a damaged craft. The parachute became known as the life preserver of the sky. During World War II, Tiny visited military bases and showed the men her early chutes. She convinced them that if a little woman like her could survive a jump, they could, too. She made more than 1,000 jumps from planes in her life.

She probably would have fit beneath that plane’s dashboard better than I did.

As they laughed and hollered, I looked around and realized every man jumping was a dad. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer. When I opened them, suddenly there were no longer three dads in the plane, but four.

Isn’t it amazing, I sensed my dad saying, that I didn’t get to do this in my life, but you do?

I had no evidence, nothing to explain why he wanted to do this, except for a few lines he’d written about parasailing on his honeymoon. He’d “floated in the air with the greatest of ease, looking over the islands and waterways.” In the 1970s, both parasailing and skydiving as sports were brand-new. Before then, the only people jumping out of planes for fun were former soldiers.

My dad had ascended 150 feet when he floated above the Bahamas. My plane had now reached 20,000.

———

When a tandem jumper straps you to his stomach, there’s no going back. As I kneeled forward, Jones aimed the camera at my face and asked how I felt. “I feel great!” I lied. Looking into the camera, I said more quietly, “I love you, honey,” in case it was the last time Steven saw me alive.

Every noise around me muted, and a voice in my head I didn’t recognize as my own said something.

Let go.

Jones opened the door and jumped.

I screamed louder than I ever had. Then suddenly I was OK. Because I was flying.

I felt like Christopher Reeve on a green screen, except this scenery was all real. The bays and beaches and trees and highways and tiny little trucks moving along them were all real.

I focused on the instructions I’d been given: hold onto your straps, then extend your arms and smile. The rest of it was up to God now.

Next thing I knew, Rohan and Nuclear George were twirling to the right of me, screaming all the way. Jones pulled the ripcord and our bodies jolted.

“Welcome to my office!” he yelled.

Earlier that week, a girl who ran a website had interviewed me. She’d asked what my favorite piece of advice was in life, and I’d said I once heard Drew Barrymore say that if something scared her so much she wanted to puke, she knew she had to do it. “Do the thing that makes you want to puke,” I said.

I suddenly regretted this.

“I think I might puke,” I told Jones. “I’m so sorry!”

“It’s very common!” he yelled.

For a second the vomit seemed to float in mid-air, then some of it landed on me. I don’t know where the rest of it went.

A week earlier, the first time I was supposed to skydive, I was fixing my makeup in the car and said, “It’s so hard having to be camera-ready all the time.” Steven grimaced. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.”

My dad was somewhere laughing his head off. When I landed, that puke would be on TV.

Our landing was soft and serene. I pulled my legs up toward my chest, which was harder than it looked when Nuclear George did it. At the very last minute, a breeze swept us up and then gently placed us on the ground.

Rohan wasn’t so lucky. George had steered them ahead of us to make sure we wouldn’t collide. Their landing was the most difficult he’d ever done.

“It’s OK,” Rohan said later. “I’m better at jumping than most.”

He told me about the time in college his friends had pressured him to jump from a cliff into the Schuylkill River. He’d nearly drowned like Jeff Buckley. Rohan’s mom, like my mom, was afraid of water, but she was so afraid that she’d never taught him how to swim.

“What did it feel like?” I asked him. “Was there a struggle?”

“No, not at all,” he said. “It felt like letting go.”

I’d planned in the sky what I’d say on-camera. Rohan joked about the puke on my shirt, and I begged him not to show it on TV. Jones pulled the parachute away and we reconvened on the airstrip, giddy that we’d survived.

“I just want to say that as scary as this was, it wasn’t nearly as scary as losing your dad because of a distracted driver,” I said, looking at the camera. “I jumped out of an airplane today so that all you have to do is not use your phone while driving. That’s how much I care about this.”

This likely wasn’t what my dad had in mind when he wrote “speak to a TV audience.” But it was the most powerful way I could think of to do it.

“When you jump out of a plane with someone, you get to know them really fast,” Rohan said in the TV segment, which aired a few days later. As we sat at the picnic table again in the hangar, we talked for two hours straight. It started when I asked how his father died.

Sujeet Mohanty was in his late 60s, with a heart condition he didn’t want to trouble anyone with. One day he went upstairs to take a nap. When Rohan went to wake him, he wouldn’t wake up. He’d had a pulmonary embolism. This happened three months before our jump.

I texted my mom to tell her I was OK and called Steven. He told me he’d been checking news reports all morning. I was speaking quickly—the adrenaline spike had amped my energy, but I couldn’t detect this until the phone call because Rohan’s energy matched mine.

After deciding our dads probably arranged this, we walked back to our cars. Rohan explained how he became a TV reporter. He was working in the HR department at Fox when the head of programming asked if he was interested in Chasing News. Rohan had no journalism training, but the man said he didn’t care.

“He said he knew a good storyteller when he saw one.”

The next item on the list was “ride a horse fast.” Rohan said he knew someone who could help with that. I realized he probably knew someone who could help with most list items. He was a guinea pig at Chasing News. He mentioned that he played golf in the 70s his very first time.

I said, “Did you really just say that? Item 26 is ‘play golf in the 70s a few times!’”

“Yeah….” he said. “That one’s gonna be tough…”

We talked about distracted driving, something he said he stopped doing after he interviewed Pam O’Donnell, whose husband and five-year-old were killed. Rohan was certain, he said, that one day I’d be the first guest on his talk show. Some of this was the adrenaline talking, but some of it was Rohan’s natural grandiosity.

My dad always had a new idea, a new business, a new scheme that was going to make him rich or change the world. Each would last a few months to a year and then he was on to the next thing. When he was right, he was really right, but he could also be terribly wrong. His restlessness made me assume the latter was more often true.

But when I agreed to appear on Rohan’s future talk show, I meant it. I believed he would have one. He was too determined not to.

———

I left the airfield and drove across an isthmus to Beach Haven, which was meant to be my reward. The town was mostly empty, but the few people I encountered were gracious and kind. I found a boardwalk area filled with boutiques and a snack shop that sold nearly all of my favorite foods.

And then a strange thought hit me.

What if I’m actually dead?

Just then my brother texted, so I decided to ask him.

“How did it go!” Dave asked.

“Awesome!!!” I typed. “I keep wondering if I’m really alive or actually in heaven. How can I tell if I’m alive?”

I sent him a photo of the food I’d bought—an iced mocha with whipped cream, a cheese dog and beach fries.

“Also, is this greasy enough? I puked during, all over myself.”

“What do you mean are you alive?” he said.

“The store I bought this in sells pretzel cones, Philly blue raspberry water ice, cotton candy, Belgian waffles, corn dogs, those candy sticks we got as kids—add some nachos and Rice Krispie treats and I might be Albert Brooks reviewing my life.”

“Sorry you puked,” he wrote.

“I’m on a bit of a high, if you can’t tell,” I said.

“It’s so cool, isn’t it. The first 30 seconds are the best.”

“Yeah, I think I made a friend for life, too,” I said. “Talked to the reporter for hours.”

“Did they enjoy their jump?” he asked.

“Yes!!!” I said. “Tell me something to prove I’m still alive. Everyone in this town is eerily friendly, like maybe I’m in heaven. I promised myself an afternoon on the beach. I’m on Long Beach Island, never been here. Might be heaven. You haven’t made fun of me. If I were alive you’d be mocking something.”

“Maybe you are in heaven,” Dave said. “Ask God about Trump.”

———

I placed my towel and bag on the beach, which was inexplicably free, pulled out my newest Joseph Campbell book and started reading:

“There was an article in the New York papers a few months ago about a kid who dove into the Hudson River to save a drowning dog and then had to be saved himself. When asked why he’d dove in, he said, ‘Because it was my dog.’ Then there was the girl who went into a burning building—twice—to save her little brother and sister, and when she was asked why she’d done that, she said, ‘Because I loved them.’

“Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from the others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being.

“That’s the power. These people didn’t know if they had the strength or not. It’s not duty, not reckoning. It is a flash: a breakthrough of the reality of this life that lives in us. At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization.”

I broke down in tears, resting my face on my beach towel. I knew exactly why I’d done what I’d done.

What I was doing was a response to a gift I’d been given. Something else was always guiding the way.

I cleaned myself up and walked towards the ocean. The waves were big. I remembered the surfing item I’d told Rohan about—he had a guy who could help with that.

I stared into the murky water and said out loud what I was thinking.

“You’re next.”

———

A year earlier, when Steven and I got married, our first stop on our honeymoon was Mesa Verde, a five-hour drive from Santa Fe. As day turned into night, I could still see the pine trees lining the dark sky. We replayed our wedding playlist.

“You fill up my senses…like a night in the forest, / Like the mountains in springtime, / Like a walk in the rain, / Like a storm in the desert, / Like a sleepy blue ocean. / You fill up my senses. / Come fill me again.”

“This is our ‘night in the forest!’” I yelled excitedly. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we were living out the lyrics?”

“Annie’s Song” was another one my dad often sang.

The next morning we were late meeting my family at the Grand Canyon. I started crying in the 109-year-old El Tovar hotel.

“Why are you crying?” Steven asked. “Your family doesn’t mind.”

“Because even as a wife, I’m still a screw-up,” I said.

After my family went back to their hotel, Steven and I walked along the South Rim. As we stared into the canyon’s vast ravines, my mood lightened. Steven was becoming a photographer, so he crawled out onto the narrowest ledges to get a good shot. He said his photography was curing his fear of heights—as long as he had a camera in his hand, he’d be OK.

I inched to the edge of each cliff behind him, and he yelled for me to get back.

“How come you can go out that far but I can’t?” I said.

“Because I worry I wouldn’t be able to save you.”

As he spotted thunderclouds in the distance, I kept walking, annoyed. Certain he’d chosen photography over me. And then the rain came. Devil’s rain. And something told me to turn around.

Just behind Steven spread a vast rainbow, the largest I’d ever seen.

“Look!” I yelled.

As I walked closer, I realized there wasn’t one rainbow but two.

One for each of us.

Steven took a picture of me smiling like a giddy fool and pointing two fingers at them, which mostly looked like I was saying, “Peace.”

As we walked out, we saw a sign we hadn’t remembered on the way in.

“Congratulations!” it said.

We knew exactly who it was from.

***

I hope you find your rainbow at the end of this. No matter how terrible the storm.

The most torrential rains bring the biggest ones.

Some say it’s the angels bowling.