In his biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson writes that before Emerson climbed the stairs to his bed for the last time at his home in Concord—six days before he died—he insisted on closing up his study himself: fastening the windows, latching the shutters, and separating the coals still glowing in the fireplace. I picture his long body—addled by dementia, weak and feverish with pneumonia—gripping the poke, edging the ashes, nosing at the deep orange embers. Maybe they seemed beautiful—their rich, mysterious warmth.
Throughout his life, he wrote about how he loved the image of smaller flames merging into a larger fire: a metaphor for the creative urge as a conduit for spiritual connection. “A spark of fire is infinitely deep, but a mass of fire reaching from earth upward into heaven, this is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul,” he wrote in his journal (1842).
The spotless orange sunrise on the hills by Walden Pond. Lyla bathed in light on the folding chair as the sun dips below the highway. My father with his hand on my mother’s forehead as she rants for orange through the night.
27. Well of Mercy
I decide I need some time to write and be alone, so I sign up to spend a few days at a retreat center and convent about an hour from home—Well of Mercy. It’s run by Catholic nuns, but they say they’ll take anyone—in fact, my mom went there once several years back.
“It’s such a gift to step away from the world for a bit,” I remember her saying, “although it was really nice to come home.”
The place is calm and cheerful, with huge unpaned windows staring into the woods. There are walking trails and a labyrinth and a hot tub. There are warm simple meals and warm simple rooms. Signs everywhere asking for quiet. And still, from the moment I step inside I am filled with darkness—with complete terror.
I suppose I felt it building before I even left home, as I was packing my bag in my bright, quiet bedroom that morning after the kids left for school—readying myself to leave them. I am practicing, I thought. This is just practice.
And building more as I drove along the bright, quiet highway toward the mountains—then down the country road with its goats and donkeys and lifeless tractors and leafless trees, then up the long dirt drive and down into the hollow where the convent was hidden. And building in the soft, warm bosoms of the sunny nuns who welcomed me at the door. Building in such a way that I could barely look them in the eye. Building as I closed the door to my room and set down my bag on the bed.
I’ve had panic attacks before, but not in more than a decade: before kids, before the diagnosis. It’s suffocating: darkness looking at darkness. Like lying in a wooden box or a metal tube. Nowhere to look that is looking away. Turning our heads ceaselessly this way and that.
I wonder if this was the room where my mom slept, I am thinking, my chest tightening—a deep sense of being torn from something, ripped and pushed. The thought doesn’t help me. I try to calm myself by unpacking my pajamas, my toiletries. My hands are shaking. I wonder if I am going to throw up.
There is a small mirror above the dresser. I peer into it. That is my face: I am still here, although I look very old. I look at my phone. I have no service, but I can feel that John and the kids are out there—their world spinning along. And I am here—separate, cut off, alone. I say aloud, “You can go home. You don’t have to stay here.” And I say: “That sun better not try setting or I am going to be in trouble.”
I try Relaxation Jon breathing. I try counting. I stand at the window, my pulse racing, my body aching, until the sobs come and throw me onto the bed.
“I am not ready for this,” I yell against the silence into my pillow. I am not ready to be away. I will kill myself if I have to be away like this already. I will close my eyes and hold my breath until my heart explodes. Or scream. Maybe I will scream.
I wake up hours later, and there are a few minutes of light left in the sky. I do not feel better, but I force myself to stand up, and pull on my boots. I rustle through my pill bag until I find some Xanax and I walk out the back door toward the trailhead and into the woods.
I don’t walk very far. I can’t. Just enough to hear my feet against the earth, the leaves crunching along the trail that traces beside a shallow creek, which is not frozen—but is very, very cold. Soon, one of the nuns rings the dinner gong, and I am able to take my weak smile and flushed cheeks and carry myself to dinner.
*
Later that evening I climb up to the top of the gravel road to get cell service and call John. The warm lights of the convent fill the hollow below me.
“This doesn’t bode well. Even when you’re not here, the kids still prefer to talk to you,” says John. “Freddy keeps popping up in the doorway and then saying “oh” and going back to his room. Benny keeps hollering out your name from his bed to tell you things. Just now he yelled, ‘Hey, Mom, wanna hear my top three favorite ungulates?’ What am I even supposed to say to that?”
“Just say ‘Absolutely,’?” I say. “He doesn’t care. He mainly likes to hear himself talk.”
I tell him about the panic attack.
“Whoa,” John says. “What are you thinking brought it on?”
It is full-on dark all around me now. I can see the nuns moving around down inside the lodge about fifty yards away.
“Being away from you guys, I guess,” I say. “A sense of how much smaller my world is lately. It’s intense here. Despite the cheery teal carpet, I feel like all of the world’s weightiest questions have passed through these guest rooms.”
I’m picturing my mom: her little black suitcase, her yoga mat, her delicate body curled in the twin bed, imagining what she still had to face.
“I’m sure they have,” says John.
“I took a little walk,” I tell him. “I know that’s what Emerson would recommend.”
The grounds here remind me a bit of Concord—farmland and woods, a forest of old hardwoods, birches and boulders, a ridge of bare branches like a wispy limbo between the earth and the sky. I could be on the paths of Walden or Estabrook if I didn’t know better.