Before any of this, before the fever, before the ill-advised decision to leave the house and go out for breakfast, before the cough, I was in therapy, trying to come to grips with the realization that my marriage was over, that the thing I least wanted to confront was in fact the thing I must confront. Even though my therapist had known me for almost fifteen years at that point, for almost the entire length of my marriage, she asked me to tell her the origin story of my marriage and how I got to where I was then, at the point of its dissolution.
“But isn’t telling you this story—telling myself this story—just a way to make this all seem inevitable? Make myself feel better?” I asked. “Like a ‘just-so’ story to justify everything, since now that I know how this is supposed to end, I can emphasize the foreshadowing, all the things I should have seen as warnings, reassure myself with a telling that makes this all a thing foretold?”
But she just smiled and said, “Humor me.”
So I did. Eventually I was able to see that in urging me to trace back the story to its beginning, she wasn’t trying to make me justify its end, but instead to create a different kind of narrative for myself than the one in which I found myself stuck. To find an alternative to the bad story I told myself about how I had failed, how I had finally done so badly at a thing it couldn’t be undone, how finally the worst-case scenario of my being unmasked as a fraud and terrible person had come to pass. Retelling the story of my marriage to her, even though I knew it was an exercise, was a way for me to find a new story. And even if that story seemed to me to be false, by asking me to give it as much weight and consideration as other potentially false narratives about that relationship, she invited me to call into question the validity of every story I’d ever told myself about it, and confront the possibility that there could, in fact, be more than one way to frame things. In retelling her the story of my marriage, in creating a new story about how I got to where I was, I was able to be kinder to both myself and my then-husband, more generous to both of us, more forgiving. And by the time I was done with the process of retelling things from the beginning, I felt something besides the yawning free fall of failure: I felt compassion. For him, for our children, for myself.
I’m reminded of this process as I try to trace back the origins of this leak, trying to find some kind of narrative, some series of reasons or theories or explanations to make it easier to accept. And yet even as I know the importance of at least attempting to make sense of things, I can’t shake the sense that in this case it is merely an exercise. Even if I could find my way back to the beginning of everything, find a way to explain it and make it all fit, organized and satisfying to the primal follow-through part of my brain that aches for completion, for order, it wouldn’t change where I am now, or make it better, or undo it, or go back in time to prevent this unraveling. There is no story I could tell myself, I told myself, that could possibly change the facts.
But I continued to try. I tried doing what the man on the podcast did, tried to free myself from the tyranny of the bad story, tried to tell myself a new story with a happy ending. In this new story, I imagined the opposite of everything I’d done: I didn’t send the kids away that weekend. Instead, Nate and I were sick together, spending lazy days in bed with the flu, and everything was fine. Or: Nate didn’t get sick in the first place, and I didn’t get sick either, and I didn’t leave the house, I didn’t cough, I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary; I had a nice, normal, pleasant, uneventful weekend with the kids, and that was it. Or: I’d spent the weekend by myself and had an ordinary day and everything was fine. I imagined countless different unremarkable scenarios, substituting the memories of ordinary days or the fantasies of normal, boring weekends for the facts of what actually happened.
It helped, a little, to imagine a different series of events, a story that didn’t end with me messing everything up somehow, and being trapped in bed for nine months, in pain, unable to think clearly. But changing the story for myself didn’t make the night terrors go away, no matter how many times I tried to revise the story into the story of an ordinary day.
Perhaps that was the problem, though: I kept saying “ordinary,” encouraging myself to imagine that day as being an ordinary day instead of the day it turned out to be.
But the truth is, it was an absolutely ordinary day.
Because this is what happens on ordinary days. People make plans for the weekend with their children, or by themselves, on ordinary days. They leave their houses, or they stay inside, on ordinary days. They get married, or they get divorced, on ordinary days. They have heart attacks or strokes or twist their ankles or get bit by a dog or scratched by a cat or they fall down the stairs or
