I thought about deleting last night’s post, but the comments are already too valuable. I wanted to do away with the post not because I regret the message, but because I could have and should have done better. I was tired, and I was sad, and I was angry.

I’m no night owl — I do all of my writing during the day, when the coffee’s hottest and the light is least depressing. It’s interesting the way a post comes out differently when you write it long past bedtime, half dressed and freezing on a living room sofa, cloaked in the heaviest of darkness, the screen barely visible through the tears. I’m going to try to do better right now.

On last night’s post, Elizabeth commented, “How many people are aware that October is Domestic Violence Awareness month? Most people associate this time of year with pink ribbons and fundraising initiatives to support breast cancer research. ” She had no way of knowing that simple sentiment is what started this all for me a year ago.

I’ve bragged endlessly about meeting Gloria Steinem last year. The reason I met her was because she came to town for the 30th anniversary of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services in Madison. Our city magazine scored an exclusive interview, and they gave it to me. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, and then she invited me to be her guest at the banquet, and that’s where we snapped that picture. From her, I learned how incredibly pervasive domestic violence is, and how even though we’ve come a long way, an honest community conversation is still very much lacking. I’d also interviewed a close friend who is a TV news anchor for the same article, and she told me how frustrating it was to sit there in the newsroom and listen to the scanners trumpeting all of these arrests and know, because of safety and privacy concerns, that she couldn’t say a word on-air. I learned that in our own highly-educated, affluent, white-collar county in Wisconsin, between one third and one half of all arrests are domestic violence related. But these stories most certainly did not make up one half or one third of the news. They were only reported when someone died. Murder-suicide.

The article with my Gloria Steinem interview ran in the October issue last year, right alongside a stunning portfolio profiling breast cancer survivors (written by someone else.) I thought to myself, why can’t we do an article just like this for domestic violence victims? But I knew why. It wasn’t safe. Where would I find women who were safe enough? Brave enough? Whose situations were uncomplicated enough? It would never work.

I decided to try anyway.

Thanks to the help of a prominent local advocate, seven women — seven women — agreed to be photographed, agreed to use their full names, and agreed to let me tell their personal stories. The article will be on newsstands before the month is out, in time for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

This is the cruel, hard fact: One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime, according to a 2000 report by the National Institute of Justice. Tell me, do you know four women? Believe me, the men and women who are victims of abuse are all around you. They look exactly like you. They are sitting next to you at the PTO meeting and they are pumping gas in the next stall and they are your sons and daughters’ friends and they are your sons and daughters. And it’s not always easy to tell. And it doesn’t start out violent. Men don’t walk up to women and punch them in the face, to have women say, “Gosh, you’re romantic, let’s get married!” It is slow, creeping, insidious, until you wake up one day and find you are not the person you once were, and you have no idea how you got here. It has happened to me, and since starting this article I have learned that it happened to many, many people I thought I knew. Listen to me: Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is beaten. How many seconds did it take you to read this post? If you read fast, maybe you can do it in a two minutes. 120 seconds. That’s 13 women while you read these words.

The several months spent living inside the words of these wounded women have not been easy. I’ve mentioned before the unfortunate tendency I have to sponge up the emotions of the people around me, and the interview and writing process for this piece affected me deeply. It cut, and it itched, and it burned. But it also healed, and it evolved, and it surprised. These women were such a gift to me. Their stories are now forever entwined with mine, deep inside.

That’s what brought me to my knees about Viviana. I did not know her. She was not one of the women profiled in my article — but she was exactly like them. She lived in the same town as my seven women. She volunteered with other victims, just like my seven women. She had managed to leave her abuser, just like my seven women. She knew several of my women, and they knew her. To me, reading that article, it was like I’d lost one of mine. And in addition to the mourning, part of me felt a sick lump of fear forming in my stomach for my new friends, and what the exposure from this upcoming article could mean for them. Bravery is not a strong enough word. It just isn’t. So, please: we owe it to them to listen.

In my article, I speak these women’s names, because the fact that they are using them is the most powerful thing of all. That’s why Viviana’s name squeaked painfully out of me last night, why I whispered it over and over again. Why I’ll continue to whisper it in my heart, along with the seven others I’ve come to know as well as my own. Why I’ll continue to listen for their stories.

May they all be heard.

August 29, 2005

It is evening in Wisconsin, the air sticky and still, not a single breeze whispering through the open windows of my living room. I am glued to my television.

2,000 miles away, Hurricane Katrina is wreaking cataclysmic havoc. Over the next few days I sit frozen before the sickly blue light, images of terror dancing across the screen. I watch helplessly as She decimates 60 miles of coastline, as She drowns grandmothers and children in their attics. As the levies break, as newly homeless people lie wedged like sardines in the stadium, as families stare incredulously at piles of rubble.

More than once, I curl up on my safe, undamaged sofa, and I weep.

December, 2007

Lance Myers speaks so quietly I can hardly hear him. I keep leaning in, keep pushing my recorder closer to him so it will catch his softly spoken story.

He is leaving his job as the sports photographer for the newspaper that employs me. It’s been over a year since the storm, and Mississippi, a state he’s come to think of as a second home, remains severely crippled. There are still 39,000 families living in FEMA trailers. 39,000 families in Mississippi alone.

Lance clears his throat; the newsworthy tale pours out; my pen scribbles furiously. Four weeks after Katrina hit, he and two friends collected 14,000 pounds of supplies from their fellow Wisconsinites, trucked them down to Pass Christian, to Gulfport, to Long Beach, MS, and set up shelter in the gymnasium of the South Mississippi Regional Mental Health Center. Seventy percent of the residents of The Pass lost everything, and Lance was determined to help them get it back. Over the next year he made monthly week-long trips to volunteer where he could — to comb the ditches for family photos, to pull bicycles from treetops, to feed and water and clothe and comfort whomever crossed his path.

It’s December now, and he has decided all the work he’s done is not enough. He has quit his jobs, and in a few weeks he will say goodbye to his wife, move to the gulf coast, and begin a two-year personal mission. Someone from our tiny Wisconsin community has donated a small trailer for him to stay in, and he will take a job at the SMRC, the same place he set up those donated supplies. Every day, he will work at the center, then spend his nights and weekends continuing to help Katrina victims recover. Every month, he will send mortgage money home to his wife of 38 years in Wisconsin. Every minute, he will ache for his family.

“That’s amazing,” I say, breathlessly, once he has finished. Then, “I’d like to do that.”

“What’s stopping you?” he smiles, a twinkle in his eye.

I think about all the sacrifices he’s making, and I know the answer before I speak it aloud.

“Nothing.”

Summer, 2007

Dave drives our van down Highway 90, a stretch of ocean-front road along the gulf coast once lined with magnificent old homes. It’s been two years since Katrina, but very little has been rebuilt — the clean-up alone took well over a year.

Along this beachfront drive now we see only the occasional shell of a formerly grand house; mostly it is cement slab after cement slab after cement slab. The air is thick with the ghosts of people we never knew, people we are somehow mourning anyway. I shudder when I realize the road we’re driving on was 30 feet beneath the water on that fateful day.

This is the second relief trip I’ve made since meeting Lance; the first was several months earlier, with three high school kids and one other chaperone, for nine days. This time, I brought my family — my husband whose skilled labor is far more valuable than any help I can provide, and my children, whom I wish to teach that life is so much more than Barbies and trampolines. I’ve shown them the pictures, told them the stories of the work I did here, the work my friend Lance is doing every day, but the ideas are too abstract, and I’m flailing. I want so badly for them to understand why we are here, at least on some level.

So we’re driving that stretch of road and it’s getting dark and I’m getting sad and suddenly Gretta speaks.

“I just think about if it were the opposite situation,” she says. “If people in Wisconsin needed help, and the Mississippi people came to help us.”

And yes, she really does say ‘opposite situation.’ And yes, she is only seven years old. And yes, my heart swells. And I know she finally gets it, what we’re all doing here.

And then a 2-year-old Emma screams and points, and I follow her sight line to a towering McDonald’s sign, its yellow lights blown clean, an empty slab where the restaurant once stood.

“Mickadonowds is bwoken!” she wails, and I think it’s the closest she’ll come to getting it, too.

And I think it is close enough.

August 29, 2008

Lance’s two year mission is almost up, and he’s accomplished so much, impacted so many lives. He started a blog several months back to document his project, and I’ve been following my friend’s efforts closely — but today’s message is ominous.

Lance is battening down the hatches. Tropical Storm Gustov is slowly gathering momentum off the coast of Cuba, and plans to strike the gulf coast Sunday, maybe Monday. Lance is tying down his trailer, and he is headed back to the shelter he built for others almost two years ago, to take shelter himself.

I’m on my couch again, staring at the blackened television. Though its power is off, I can see the ghosts of the technicolor images from three years ago.

I think about how ironic it is that today marks the three year anniversary of Katrina, that Lance’s two years are almost up, that this Labor Day weekend may bring the storm that starts his labor all over again. At best, it will bring horrific memories for Katrina’s survivors. At worst, new memories will be forged.

And I can’t help but think about what it means, that I’m praying for the hurricane to miss my friend, to go elsewhere — because that means it will hit someone else’s friend.

And I know I’ll be thinking all weekend about walls of water that flatten buildings and dreams, about ocean breaks and broken hearts, about how easily the lives we build can be erased in a single, salty instant.

And I’m thinking if there’s anything I’ve learned since I met Lance, it’s that no matter what happens this weekend, they will rebuild.

At least, as best they can.

And I hope they know that no matter what happens this weekend, strangers will come from thousands of miles away to help.

At least, as best they can.

*******

Ironically, one of my favorite bloggers — one I’ve only known a short time — lives in Pass Christian. Please read her story today and pass it along.

I didn’t know my friend Brandi yet when she found out her husband had cancer. I’m thankful for that, for purely selfish reasons; Considering the power she holds today to turn me into a weepy mess in an instant, I don’t know that I would have survived it if I’d known her then, back in 2001. Back when they’d only been married a year, and she was six months pregnant with their first child. Back when they found a malignant tumor the size of a small grapefruit squatting in her 28-year-old husband’s brain.

(Chris’s actual scan.)

Let me skip to the end right away because this is not a sad story, and Brandi would not want it to be: Her husband Chris is still very much alive. They have two daughters now. This is not a story about dying, it’s a story about living.

This is the thing about Chris and Brandi: They move mountains on a regular basis. They never know what tomorrow will bring, literally, and yet I have never, ever heard them complain. Not once. They radiate goodness. When I am in their presence I am better for it. They make me want to be my best.

(Photo by C & N Photography.)

Chris and Brandi were living in San Francisco when he was first diagnosed; that’s where he had his craniotomy, the tumor extracted like chewing gum from hair, some pieces still there today, stubbornly clinging to important things like the Optic Nerve. San Francisco is where he had his eighteen months of chemotherapy. I didn’t meet them until they moved here, home to Wisconsin, from where they both originally come.

I knew them for an entire year before I learned about the cancer. An entire year. They just don’t talk about it. They refuse to be ruled by that beast. They spend every day living like it could be their last, but they don’t waste time talking about why. I have never known anyone quite like them in all my life.

The only reason Brandi finally told me about the brain tumor that day was because she was bored with just fighting cancer. She and Chris wanted to eradicate brain tumors completely. They wanted to raise some money.

That was four years ago. Brandi hates when I use the term “single-handedly” when I say what I’m about to say, but I’m just gonna say it, because it’s my blog, dammit: The two of them have single-handedly raised just under $700,000 for brain tumor research at the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center in the past four years. They have created the first ever Brain Tumor Professorship in the state of Wisconsin. They have brought two gorgeous baby girls into the world and they did another seven weeks of radiation when that godforsaken tumor started growing again, a couple years back. And even now, even this week, some bad news, a little more growth. And even now, they don’t call it bad news. They call it “not-so-great” news. This is the kind of people they are. It’s no big deal. It’s just a tumor, right? It’s no match for spirit like this.

(Photo by C & N Photography.)

Their key fundraising event is an outdoor celebration held each year at a state park – and that’s exactly what it is, a celebration. They hang out with their loved ones all day long and they eat, they listen to live music, they paint murals on the cheeks of children and make magic with balloons. They hike and bike and do yoga outside and there are acupuncturists, massage artists, other healers. My favorite part are the stickers for to write the names of the people you know, the people we all know, who are affected by brain tumors. To speak their names aloud, to slap them all over our shirts and wear them proudly. I name my grandfather, who died from his brain tumor in 1991. I name my cousin, who survived his a few years back. And I always, always place Chris’s name just above my heart. Right where it belongs.

Every donation goes straight to the research fund. This is a non-profit with next-to-zero overhead. Brandi’s office is her kitchen table. All the food, the t-shirts, the supplies, they’re all donated. All the people who help, like me, do it freely. Under threat of life and limb, I would not take a penny from those people. There’s no way you could ever make me, and I know that’s how all of the volunteers feel, every last one of them — and there are dozens. Like them, I will tell Chris and Brandi’s story to as many people who will listen, for as long as I draw breath to speak. I’m honored to tell it here, though I know she’d shy away from the fuss. But believe me people, there has never been a woman more worthy of fuss.

The first time I met Chris, we were sitting in his kitchen, a group of us. Brandi left the room and he simply stared after her. Finally, he said, “How amazing is that woman?”

How amazing, indeed.

The fifth annual HEADRUSH celebration will take place this Saturday, September 27th, rain or shine, just like life. For more information, or to donate, please go here.

I wanted it so badly, so ferociously, so deeply, and still I had no idea it would hurt like this when it didn’t come. A year of work, a year of intense pining, a year of secret hope so sharp I didn’t dare wield it publicly for fear it would slice me clean through, or at least reflect my pathetic desire on its blade for all to see, this face, this wanting, this crushing need to be taken seriously, me.

I wanted it the way other people want a baby, or to lose 50 pounds, or to win the lottery. This is not cancer, I say it over and over in my head to the rhythm of my stomping up the road, the fierce wind licking my face clean of tears, unable to unclench my fists, can’t unclench my gut, stopping, doubling over, breathing, straightening, moving on, rinsing, repeating. This is not divorce. Shocked by the tenacity of my unexpected grief, real grief, over something no one else will understand, something so silly. This is not rape. This is not fire. This is not a stroke. This is not domestic violence. This is not a car accident. Repeat it repeat it repeat it. Believe it believe it believe it. Get through it get through it get through it.

One shoe slips and sinks in a puddle of muck and I flash to Dave last night, framed by the windshield from the waist up, brushing a half foot of snow from the hood with the quilted flannel of his forearm, his breath in steady puffs alive and suspended in the headlights and now, today, it’s already gone, melted, evaporated, like it had never come at all, now there’s just mud and brutalized brown grass and I know this will go away too if I can just keep moving, keep sucking in air, if I can just get to the top of the hill, to the other side, where this hurt can’t reach me, I can disappear too, like the snow, I can hide, I can quit, This is not a heart attack, even if it feels like it, this is not a real loss, then why does it feel like it, this too shall pass, nobody else cares about this, count your blessings, don’t be an idiot, walk on, walk on, walk on.

***

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” — Louis L’amour

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: In my dream life I’m a hermit.

In real life I can’t be a recluse. It’s not healthy, right? It’s also not practical. I have a job that depends on my ability to speak comfortably to anyone, anywhere, at any given time. I have a husband and two children who (to my suspicious eyes) appear entirely addicted to socializing with other people. I have a cadre of close friends who are always suggesting fun and interesting activities to do, like, outside of the house. I have a studio I commute to and shopping duties I perform and vacations I take and plenty of small talk I make at the farmer’s market, the wine shop, the gas station, you name it! I am a veritable social butterfly! I am! I just sort of hate it most of the time.

I thrive when I’m alone, and I rarely get lonely. I love that my writing studio is in a dungeon. I love the nights my family skips happily off to tae kwon do class. I love going entire days without opening my mouth, I consider that a true victory. Quiet time, however, is rare in life, right? So I try to carve it out inside my head. Most of the time I’m okay if I can just get an hour to myself, even if it means throwing on a pair of headphones while my family laughs a bit too loudly at the nine-billionth rerun of any given Spongebob episode.

Lately, though, the problem is my head is just as busy as my body. All the places I’m physically going, I’m matching that pace mentally. After a very long and poverty-inducing dry spell, I suddenly find myself juggling six deadlines at once, each with a dozen or so interviews to manage (let’s hope this is a sign the economy is coming around, eh?) Emma has decided it’s time to learn to read RIGHT NOW, and Gretta has somehow morphed into a 9-year-old teenager and so I find myself playing teacher and warden simultaneously. I can’t even dive into my online lagoon, suddenly a mirage shimmering brilliantly before disappearing. I want to be here, I want to be there, but mostly I just want to be quiet.

But I can’t. My head won’t stop hitchhiking all over the place and she’s one mouthy passenger. Even if I could somehow give myself permission to pull over at a seedy rest stop, I just can’t do it right now. I truly don’t have time, and most of all I can’t afford it. I have fantasies of completely unplugging but quite honestly, my entire professional world is dependent on this computer, especially right now. Right this minute.

Last weekend, though, it happened for a little while. Several times a year my three oldest friends and I get together in Chicago, and it always brings me back to myself. See, they are not of this high speed geek gadget zoomified world. My best friend still has an AOL email address that she pays eight dollars a month for the privilege of using. She is a high-falootin’ gardener in Chicago, often recognized when we’re out in public for her TV appearances (imagine a world where gardeners, not bloggers, are the celebrities?) My other friend is a straight-up gardening genius, she practically speaks in Latin identification terms, and between the two of them you can’t help but focus on the dirt and the green, on sunrise and sweet cold water and the here and the now. The third friend is a former English teacher and currently a school librarian. We talk books when we’re not shoosh-ing ourselves. One of them found her cell phone in her pants pocket in the dryer on Sunday, and another just got her first cell phone last month — I am not making that up. These people don’t have laptops. They actually set their phones down, like, on tables and stuff. I struggle when I’m with them to focus, to forget the chaos and the noise and the guilt and just be. That’s always a hard thing for me to do, but I find it easiest in their presence.

Still, they were the ones who thought to take this picture. We were out on a boat, seeing the city from the most enviable vantage point imaginable, and as we passed the Sheraton where BlogHer will be held next week my friends asked me where my phone was. They remembered that it could take pictures. They said, “You should send this to your blog friends!” I swear I almost teared up.

I haven’t unpacked my suitcase. My head is a Johnny Cash song on loop. I’m leaving again tomorrow, this time for work, and then next week I’ll be back in Chicago. I’m struggling with the immense guilt of leaving my family so much, and I’m wondering how I’ll make some of these deadlines from the road. I’m missing the quiet moments, watching the summer slip through my fingers like white hot sand. I was not made for this.

Still, I don’t want any other life. None of this is a complaint. I don’t actually want to be a hermit, I want to have it both ways, I think, maybe all ways. I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want my kids to lack anything — I love these moments on the beach, at the park, playing board games. I don’t want to regret memories not made, opportunities not taken, for them and for myself. I want to go on dates with my husband. I want to pay my mortgage.

I want to find a way to soak this all in without losing my mind, to photosynthesize this chaos and grow.