I remember talking with my therapist, back when the realization that divorce was inevitable was still just an awful dread in the pit of my stomach, the kind of terrible truth I recognized as a thing I would have to confront no matter how much I wanted to avoid it. I told her, “I feel as though I’ve been standing on this window ledge for years now, waiting to jump, and it’s been the fear of falling that keeps me from making the leap. But if I’m honest with myself, it’s probably equally as much because I know that if I turned around from this ledge and looked through the window, I’d see a room—maybe not big enough for me, or comfortable enough, but warm and safe, or familiar at least. And just knowing that’s there, that I could just climb back in there anytime I wanted to, makes it harder to jump, and so I feel like I’m forever just standing here on this ledge, not jumping.”
She replied: “Remember, though, that you don’t have to jump.”
And then, while I sat there trying to figure out what other option I could possibly have available to me, she said, “See that room where you can look through the window, that safe, familiar, comfortable room? That room also has a door. You could climb back through the window, walk through the room, open the door, and walk down the stairs, step by step, until you get to the ground.”
Finally, I begin to try to answer Nate’s questions.
“You’re right, I thought about it for a really long time. Because it was a very big decision to make, a really important decision that affected a lot of people, and I didn’t want to be hasty or reckless or do anything in a way that would make this already hard thing harder on you guys. But I would rather you see how it’s possible to move to a healthier place, even though it hurts, than learn to just stay in a bad situation. And of course I thought about it for a long time because I didn’t want to cause either of you any pain or heartache, and knowing that this decision would definitely do that, even if it was the right thing to do in the long run, was really hard to think about.”
We both cry as I talk, because we both tend to cry when we talk about things that are important to us, and he hugs me tight once I’m done.
“Well,” he says, “for what it’s worth, I think you made the right call.”
I laugh. “Oh, you do?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I was twelve, and twelve is kind of the age when you realize you’re not the center of the world, and that bad things happen. Like, you got really sick, and you guys got divorced. It was like a rite of passage, I guess.”
“I’m sorry, Nate,” I say. “I wish everything could have stayed the same, that I hadn’t gotten sick and that our family didn’t have to change, that everything could have just kept going, no rite of passage necessary.”
I’m touched by his encouragement, and his candor, but also acutely aware of how he, too, has a tendency toward being glass, toward being still and utterly translucent when scared, toward mirroring a soothing reflection to mask his own anxiety.
“You know, the other reason I thought about everything for a long time,” I tell him, “was because it took me a very long time to understand my own feelings. And it was very important to me that I sort through my own feelings of sadness and worry and grief, so that I would have enough room to help you deal with your feelings without you ever having to worry about protecting me from them. I’m glad you feel okay about things right now, but I also want you to know that I understand if you don’t feel okay about things. Because you might not, from time to time. And that’s normal. That’s how it works. And I’m okay with that. You don’t need to feel bad or protect me from those feelings.”
He nods, hugging me. “Grief is complicated,” he says.
For Emi, the way out of being frozen in place, as brittle and fragile as glass, is, neatly, through glass. I arrange for her to begin meeting with a therapist, who helps her learn strategies to cope with her panic attacks and stress, and she and I continue to talk about it as well; but what ultimately helps her fully emerge from her frozen panic is finding a way to capture it through a camera lens.
The summer before she applies to college, she spends a month in Manhattan, taking an intensive summer course in photography, an emerging passion of hers. That month is a new space for both of us: for her, being away from her regular life, from my illness and recovery, from the process of our family reconfiguring itself, from traveling between houses and gradually learning to unfreeze; for me, healing from the procedure I have done in North Carolina to fix the leak, recovering from the effects of the leak itself, beginning, however tentatively, to return to a life outside of my bed.
During her time in New York, she finds a set of novelty sunglasses, the lenses fractured into a repeating series
