Seizures

a memoir in fragments

I wrote a memoir that starts with my mother’s grand mal seizure on my front lawn when I was eight and ends with my father’s grand mal seizure in my living room when I was 43. Parts of it have been published as essays. An excerpt got me on the longlist for the Granum Prize. Another excerpt got me into Millay Colony. Another got me into Vermont Studio Center. The book has done a lot for me and I’m so grateful for that. I’m sad that I can’t seem to get the whole thing published as a complete book, but it feels better and more honest to consider all the amazing opportunities this piece of writing has gifted me.

It’s written like a diary, with entries at various ages of my life. It’s in second person, which lots of people don’t like (I love second person!).

Here’s an excerpt I’ve never published.

Thanks for reading.

Age 9

Dad loads the station wagon with a Styrofoam cooler of bologna sandwiches and takes you to Brant Rock Beach, driving up to the window at Dairy Queen for chocolate-dipped soft-serve you eat on your way down to the sand. You and your sisters collect flat rocks and Dad shows you how to flick your wrist just right to make them skip. He buys three cheap kites, crossing stick over stick and clicking the ends into plastic grooves on the diamond-shaped frames, gets each kite unspooled and airborne before handing you and your sisters the taut, dancing strings. Dad’s sandcastles are kingdoms, their turrets and armaments and salt-water moats magically made with plastic shovels scooped into sand, pails filled, packed, and flipped. “Marco,” you yell in the ocean, blind and reaching. Your family answers “Polo.” No matter how quickly you lurch toward their voices, no matter how hard you flail your arms, you are terrible at finding and tagging your family, until Dad makes the spot where he’s standing so obvious you cannot not reach him.

Age 27

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” Dad says in the hours after planes hit the twin towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The job where you answer important men’s phones is a mile away from Los Angeles International airport. Dad worries that all airports are under attack. He’s been blowing up your phone all morning. You tell him you’re working and cannot talk now. He says work isn’t worth it, that you should go home and get safe. You tell him to please stop calling, stop worrying, stop treating you like you’re still his small kid.

Age 28

Dad blows up your phone because he heard there was an earthquake in Yucaipa.

Age 29

Dad blows up your phone because he heard there were wildfires somewhere in California.

Age 30

Dad blows up your phone because he heard someone was killed in a mudslide in Malibu.

Age 41

Dad blows up your phone because he heard people are trapped due to record-breaking snowfall in Northern Virginia. You delete voicemail after voicemail from Dad with taps of your finger.

Age 49

Sirens blare, skies darken, a tornado rips a path alongside your house in Tennessee. Hunkered in the closet, you look at your blank phone and miss the dozens of messages that are not there. You miss the absence of missed calls from Dad, who died six years ago.

Age 45

It’s been a few years since Dad died, but you’ve saved three of his voicemails for blue days when you want to hear his funny Boston accent, his particular way of saying “I love you,” at every call’s end. As long as you can listen to Dad’s voice, he’s somehow still here. You drop your phone in the sink, soak it, and the genius at the genius bar can’t retrieve its contents. You’ll never hear Dad say “I love you” again. Dad’s voice goes missing for good.

Age 12

Missing Mom has made you and your sisters so miserable that Dad pulls you out of school for a week to go to Disney on credit cards.

You’re on your way to Disney! You’re getting on a plane! When take-off begins, the plane goes so fast down the runway you feel like everyone is having a grand mal seizure. You are flying to the happiest place on earth, but instead of meeting Snow White and getting closer to the solar system you’ve seen on the brochure for Space Mountain, you are certain you are about to die like Mom did.

“Flotation device,” you say to yourself, gripping your seat, closing your eyes, and seeing yourself bobbing on white caps as sharks circle, your sisters somewhere out in the black ocean in their own seats, your family getting ready to meet Mom again, like your Catholic school teachers said would happen someday. “Marco,” your shaking mind says but no “Polo” comes back. The devil you learned about in religion class roars into your ears as the plane picks up a level of speed you did not know existed. Your body is shaking and your mind is shaking and you have to do something to release the pressure building up in your skull.

Age 40

The pressure at the base of your skull is too much. Brain tumor, brain tumor, brain tumor, your shaking mind says, because you are the age that Mom was when she developed a brain tumor. The ER doctor sends you for an MRI and you’re sure they’ll see a dark spot. The tomb-like machine swallows you. Inside, the camera checking your brain for dark spots sounds like a firing squad and you pray to a god you no longer believe in. “Dear God, please don’t gun me down like you did to Mom.” Later, you should be relieved but you’re deeply embarrassed when the diagnosis is bad headache and not a mass in your brain you were certain would kill you.

Age 12

This trip to Disney was supposed to be fun, but the plane ride is definitely going to kill you. You pray. “Dear God, I thought planes were the best, but now I think planes are the worst. Please, let me get off this plane without dying like Mom did.” Beneath your body, an earthquake erupts and you’re certain you’ll be swallowed, but Dad says, “It’s just the wheels folding up, dear, don’t worry.” The devil’s roar becomes so loud you think you’ve been dragged down to hell, Dante’s fourth circle, for greedy people like you, who want to play all day, people who fly away to Disney instead of going to school. “Dear God, Dear God, Dear God, please stop this seizure that everyone is having, and please pull me out of hell, and please let this seat be shark-proof—” Suddenly: silence. You’re flying! You aren’t shaking anymore; you’re gliding. Out the oval window, you see miles of clouds, which your Catholic school teachers call heaven’s landscape. You look for Mom on every cloud and don’t see her, but for the first time since she died you feel her. You know she is with you, you know she loves you, you know your connection with her is eternal, which is what your teachers call faith.

At Disney, the line for Space Mountain is immersive theater: in the dark, screens project smatterings of stars and planets, red footlights, piped-in voices welcoming you and your fellow space travelers, ambient music, lit signs letting you know you’ve completed your training mission and are about to board. Your sisters board a space shuttle together and you board a second space shuttle with Dad. You’ve been dreaming about Space Mountain since you knew you were going to Disney; dreaming about it makes your mind stop shaking. Your sisters’ shuttle takes off, and you can’t wait for your shuttle to do the same. You’re about to fly, but not just on a plane, on a shuttle through outer space! Your shuttle launches and you immediately scream and cry and say, “please make it stop, I can’t see what is happening, am I dying?” Dad keeps saying, “It’s okay, it’s a ride, it’s fun, I’m here, you’re okay, we’re okay.” But Dad kept saying that when Mom got sick. “She’s okay, she’ll get better, it’s okay, we’re okay.” He was lying then and he’s lying now, as you fly through outer space at a million miles per hour toward certain death. Mom had died when Dad said it would be okay and now you will die when Dad says it will be okay. Later in life you will learn you have trust issues, but right now it’s not trust issues, it’s your dramatic death in a replica of outer space conceived by a man who supposedly froze his head so he’d never die.

You storm off your Space Mountain shuttle, crying, shaken. Dad keeps saying “it’s okay, you’re okay.” You say, “Stop saying that, I hate you.” Your sisters say something along the lines of, “Whatever, chickenshit. Dad, can we go on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad while you sit here with this crybaby who always ruins everything?”

Your sisters skip off to certain death on a rollercoaster while you play Whac-A-Mole with Dad. You slam the inflatable hammer on the pop-up heads and start to feel better. Eighteen games later, your sisters appear and ask to go on an upside down rollercoaster. Dad asks if you want to try an upside rollercoaster, says he’ll be right next to you the whole time. You look at the upside down rollercoaster, and almost throw up in one of the mole holes. “Go,” Dad says to your sisters. “I’m having fun playing with Amy.”

That’s how the next few days at Disney play out. You and Dad play while your sisters ride rides. You play shoot the clown in his mouth with a plastic water gun, pick up the duck with a flimsy fishing pole baited with a magnet, and knock down the pins with a germ-infested baseball. Dad pretends the whole time that he’s having a blast. Once in a while, you agree to go on baby rides with Dad, like It’s a Small World, the teacups, and the merry-go-round, but before boarding, Dad says, “If you can’t do it we can throw nickels into the pond over there and win a giant panda, or have a snack with Snow White, or sit on this bench in the blazing Florida sun and just chit chat, or whateva.” Forty years later, when you look back, you are certain Dad absolutely wanted to go on the death-defying rides. Dad’s wife was dead, he was stuck raising three assholes, and he wanted to have fun, but instead of having fun he hung out with you so you wouldn’t be scared.

Age 45

In line for Space Mountain, you and your sisters scream with laughter remembering what a crybaby you were way back when. You board, fly through space, your laughter streaking along behind you like a comet’s tail. You’re still scared, but you know the difference between scared and scared. You know you’ll survive. Dad is gone, dead three years, but this trip to Disney includes an addition to your family. Your great-niece, who has Dad’s blue eyes, who loves to play and play.

Love,

Amy