Checking in: Who am I?

I'm currently seeking representation for a novel in which a professional dancer with body image issues must re-imagine her life after a devastating blow to her career is followed by a mysterious accident that leaves her unable to move. At one point, in the hospital, my protagonist concludes,

The harsh truth: without movement, I didn’t know who I was.

I thought about this, holed up as I was with a fractured ankle in a camp that still echoed with vibrant memory. The running footsteps of my youth (my mother: "You better have washed the pine needles off your feet!") and slamming screen doors (my grandmother, now: "Quick girls, the bats!") had been replaced with an eerie stillness. Although this place had made me feel more "me" than any other setting I'd known in my life, my new immobility allowed the dissociation my character spoke of to set in. Floating free from my writing and editing in a sea of pain medication, as out on the lake other Labor Day kayakers and swimmers reveled in summer's last rays, I felt like driftwood of an unspecified nature.

I have always been sensitive to the way change, especially when unanticipated, can challenge your very sense of who you are. A move to a new state in sixth grade, the loss of a beloved cousin while I was in college, my fertility struggle, my first husband's suicide—in the parlance of story structure these are inciting incidents: unexpected forces that tip a character out of her everyday world and that forge within her a desire to create a new reality.

Why a new reality? If you had a good life, why not just wait things out until I could get it back again? After Ron's suicide, at a meeting of Parents Without Partners, a man asked me just that. "Why are you working so hard at this?" he said, after I'd mentioned the therapy I'd sought. "He did this to you. It's not your fault!" He literally shook with anger, as if my choice to heal implied he might be culpable in his own divorce.

My rationale then was the same as it was fourteen years later, after my ankle fracture: why voluntarily return to a world in which such frightening circumstance was possible? While change is capricious and inevitable, I'd rather hedge my bets and reach for a life with different challenges rather than take another spin through the hell I'd already been through. Otherwise I'd feel as doomed as Sisyphus, rolling that rock back up the hill, over and over.

As a result I'm a rather voracious healer. I do not sit well with a disrupted sense of self; I can't muster the hope that time will knit my soul back together as tidily as it will the bones in my ankle. I'm more proactive than that. But a seeker needs motion. How could I rebuild my sense of self as a lively mid-lifer while stumping through the camp with a walker, each step taking such a toll? I'd hoped that "Kathryn Craft + walker" was a good three or four decades down the road.

The universe offered a grace of timing: by Friday night my sons, ages 22 and 24, already scheduled to spend Labor Day weekend at the lake, were on their way.

Their bed-head appearance late Saturday morning made it seem like the stork himself had dropped them off during the wee hours. At once I knew how much I needed their beautiful familiarity; I was more off-balance than even I had realized.

This was the first summer I'd been at the lake without my dad, whose spirit was evident everywhere but whose physical presence was sorely missed. I'd spent all summer with my mother, with whom I'd always had a trying relationship, but who needed me now that her short-term memory was fluttering to a halt. I'd fractured myself: at the same time struggling to catch up with my own interrupted work, I'd wrapped my life once again around her needs. Her dementia's constant assault on my sense of what was real and true knocked me as far off-balance as Hurricane Irene had, and now I had only one leg with which to right myself.

But in watching Marty glide over the water beside Dave in a vessel my Uncle Bob had bequeathed him, or listening to Jackson and his girlfriend enact the tireless debate on which is the best way to build a fire, the camp sprang to a most familiar life.

When my dad's sister left the lake this year—at 92 the only remaining Graham of that generation—she gave me a check for $50 with the instruction to purchase something for the camp in memory of my father. To that end my mother and I had purchased the Jack Graham Memorial Barbecue Grill to replace its dangerously rusted predecessor, at which my Dad had distractedly lorded over many an overcooked hamburger. On Labor Day I couldn't see, from my perch in the camp, my sons out at the grill. But knowing they were out there with chocolate bars, the old marshmallow forks ("Mom—here's a perfect marshmallow for you, golden brown!"), and my favorite—the graham crackers—I reclaimed a core aspect of self.

I am Kathryn, of the Grahams, and through me, tradition lives on.

Reverb

Last night when I walked into the kitchen and flipped on the light something flew past my face. Using my diligently honed command of nuanced vocabulary to express myself, I screamed.

We had a bat in the house.

It had startled me, but even as the bat skimmed the ceiling above me I quickly calmed down and went to work assembling bat-catching items: a strainer with a handle and a cookie sheet.

"Looks like you've done this before," Dave noted. I have—bats have played a recurring role in my 26 years living in the country. We also had several in the camp while growing up. My father would catch them with the antique corn popper, a screen contraption with a sliding lid meant for use in the fireplace (I never saw it used that way, though—in my mind we kept it to catch bats). My grandmother would do her part by shouting for my sisters and me to bend down and cover our heads, since the bats would surely get their toes caught in our hair and then deliver so many bites we'd be dead before we could untangle them. 

While I have grown to feel competent in my own bat-catching ways, that lovely image never really left my mind. Thus, the scream. I did my share of ducking last night before nabbing our furry visitor. While he took a breather on our living room curtains I covered him with the strainer and had Dave slip the cookie sheet beneath. Effectively trapped, he was soon back outside where he no doubt longed to be.

I'm not necessarily a screamer, but that was the second time this week that I was shocked to the point of shrieking. On the earlier occasion I'd been working on my computer when my son told me it had suddenly started raining. We heard a rumble so I took an "Accu-look" out the window—a dark cloud hovered above but I could see blue sky on the horizon in each direction. Although this didn't look too threatening I decided to disconnect my computers just in case. 

I was leaning over my computer shutting it down when I heard what sounded like a rifle shot beside my left ear—a direct lightning hit through the DSL line. I screamed. As soon as I realized I was fine I called up to my son to tell him what had happened—he had felt the concussion through the floor. In that one explosive surge we permanently lost two phones, a modem, a router, the USB connection to my printer, the internal modem on my husband's computer upstairs, and the old computer on which I had just completed a large page layout job. Of more importance to me was what I had lost temporarily: the sense of safety that has grown as each of the ten years passed since my first husband Ron shot and killed himself. The sound of the lightning—that I had immediately thought of as a gunshot—brought it all back into the moment. 

I felt fragile for a couple of days. I wanted to talk to everyone I knew, hold Dave's hand, stay close. The next day was Saturday, so when he drove to town on his errands I tagged along. We took a walk in the warm sunshine, visited the new farmer's market to pick up some fresh tomatoes, and listened to the singer/songwriter performing there. We stopped by the new coffeehouse and had lunch at one of the outdoor tables on their covered porch. Later that night we thoroughly enjoyed seeing the new Batman movie (have you ever noticed that the universe can have a perverse sense of humor?).

I didn't bother grieving for the work I'd lost; with the heavy use of help menus I rebuilt the Quark document from the ground up on my husband's PC in Microsoft Publisher. Within a few days I re-established Internet connections, replaced the phones, and circumvented the connectivity issues with Dave's computer and my printer. My work is now caught up and I am ready to leave for a week at the lake tomorrow as planned. 

But as surely as bats are still nesting in the chimney high above the walk-in fireplace I can see just ten feet beyond my computer monitor, I am more aware than ever that the trauma I sustained at the time of Ron's death still has life within me.

I thought Dave was pretty brave to marry me three years after Ron's death—I mean, a first husband committing suicide after fifteen years of marriage isn't the best advertisement for a woman' s enduring charms. When I asked him what he thought about that, he said, "I think Ron's death is something you're going to carry around with you for the rest of your life."

That Dave. A pretty smart guy.