Finding Love in a Lost Generation…
Heather and Jamie reuniting for a NYC 40th birthday celebration.
When I met Heather a few weeks into my freshman year of high school, I was instantly in love. It was the sort of love you might feel for a hyper pug who one minute wants nothing more than to lick your face, and the next will lay down in a heap, exhausted, like this whole life thing is too much.
She was in the hallway between periods. Her signature, piercing laugh reverberated from around the corner. Heather was a tall, lanky, blue-eyed, self-possessed teenager with electric blonde hair.
Her southern, slightly nasal words poured onto me like a warm blanket as I passed by. Her arm was around my shoulder within seconds. She introduced me to brilliant Ben Friedman, the hot but quirky Alex something, and gorgeous, gay Andy. I was quiet but funny, tall and strangely beautiful but didn’t know it, and so reserved and painfully shy that I was often considered a snob. So, if you wanted to be my friend, you kind of had to pounce on me. Thank God Heather did.
I was raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where we went to high school, and where cow-tipping and trespassing bareback on untrained horses through neighboring fields helped define teenage rebellion. Heather, who had spent much of her childhood near Asheville, North Carolina and her middle school years in Nashville, Tennessee was a diamond in the rough in our borderline hillbilly town. She was a vegetarian environmental activist who rode her bike to school; the loud feminist who told sexist jocks to go to hell, publicly; a dancer; a theatre and art history lover; and a singer.
As sophomores, we would escape parties we were too young for and lay on lawns under the stars together. Unlike most Gen-Xers and humans in general, Heather had demons she didn’t hide from. She’d tell me stories I could relate to but wouldn’t for 25 years, at least not out loud. Then, she’d trace Orion, looming like a king among the other constellations, with her finger.
“Where have all the goddesses gone?” Her cackle would come and we’d be discovered.
“Stay with me.” She’d say. And, I always would. Or, at least I hope I always did.
At 15, Heather and I taped whiskey-filled ziplock bags to our stomachs to sneak it into movie theaters. We’d choose the sappiest films and cry until we laughed. We fell for the same boy, then dumped him for the same reason - he was entirely too whole. At the beginning of our Junior year we started an environmental club as the proportedly gay president and vice president couple (Heather unaffected, me mortified). And, we swore we’d never leave each other no matter how far we traveled.
At one particular party, drunk and stumbling, I ended up in a room with some guy whom I had no intention of being in a room alone with. I sobered up quickly when Heather barged in.
She grabbed my hand to get me away from him. He told her I wanted to stay, pulled me closer.
“You fucking touch her again and I’ll cut your penis off in your sleep,” she said. It was her signature threat. Unlike everyone else, when she used it, I knew she meant it. Her fierceness came at a young age.
At ten years old, Heather hid a steak knife under her pillow before she went to bed. When her 20 year-old half-brother, who had molested her for years, snuck into her room after the house was quiet and climbed on top of her, she pulled the knife out from under the pillow, jabbed it into the side of his neck and said, “If you come in here again, I’ll kill you.”
He never returned.
As the child of a devout Catholic family, my attempt to exorcize my own demons looked quite different. Wrapped in a heavy coat of guilt, I walked a mile to the empty University church at age 12, knelt at the altar, and begged God’s forgiveness. I was too young to know that I was the god that had to forgive me, and them; that I was the only one who could. So, by 13, I stopped believing in anything.
Heather and I stood out in high school like those handmade coffee mugs on the shelf that catch everyone’s eye - the ones that make you feel more interesting when you drink from them, but are either chipped enough around the rim to cut you, or have a misshapen handle that’s too hard to hold.
Heather could be excessively loud, cussed like a sailor, was beyond outspoken, and was whispered about for all of the above. They were all my favorite traits.
I managed to get A’s and B’s, struggled into 5am swim practices, drank too much too early, and wrote poetry in the dark or on scratch paper tucked in the back of textbooks. There wasn’t much to say, but I was hiding something, so they said plenty.
Heather was my escape and laughter was hers. And, in her house, she needed it often.
When I met Heather’s mother for the first time, her glassy eyes and white sculpted smile made me feel like she’d just as soon stab me as hug me.
“Heather, are we going for the slutty look today?” Her mom said when we walked into the kitchen. It smelled of Clorox and Glade Plug-ins.
In the background, Heather’s Dad appeared to be glued to the lazy boy where he sat quiet and motionless.
I may have witnessed her Dad out of that chair twice in four years. His sad, drawn face, paralyzed from the stroke, looked both vacant and throbbing like a symptom.
“At least he still has a heart,” Heather would often say, with a transparent chuckle.
On this particular day, Heather laughed in her mother’s face.
“Good to see you too, Sarah.”
Heather pulled me by the hand toward the front door of their brick ranch to leave. Her mom followed us onto the porch spewing snarly threats as we walked toward the car.
“Goodbye, Sarah,” Heather said, letting go of my hand as she climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“What kind of mother does that?” I said, putting my seat belt on.
“An insane one.” Her high-pitched laugh came to save us.
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Skip ahead nearly 30 years through a novel-long story peppered with joy and plenty of pain, like most good love stories.
Not long ago, Heather texted me from her home in Fort Collins, Colorado to say that she’d called her mother at the nursing home she’d dropped her off in days before. But, she’d refused to speak to her.
“You have to let her go,” I called her to say.
Through Heather’s divorce, remarriage, bouts with cancer, and a life-altering immune disorder, Heather’s mother never showed up. Even following one of the most tragic incidents one could imagine - Heather’s son, Connor, being hit by a car walking to school at age 16 and left paralyzed - her mother never physically showed up.
Heather called me the morning after the accident. It was the first time I’d heard her cry in ten years. She could barely get the words out.
I could come, I said. I could be there the next day.
She would be in the hospital everyday for weeks, maybe months. What she really needed was for someone to handle something, anything. Waking up, curling up next to him in his hospital bed, wading through the emotional turmoil that threatened to drown them...it was all so overwhelming. She could barely breathe, much less get through a list.
“What’s at the top?” I said. “I’ll do anything.”
She wanted the best wheelchair for him, and the equipment to make the truck he’d recently bought handicapped accessible.
I rounded up my three kids and we set out to raise $5,000.
When I asked my 8-year-old daughter what she thought we could do to raise the money quickly, she said, “We need to show them what it’s like.”
So, we painted poster board signs and flags, super-glued them all to a donated hospital wheelchair, and I started training. After dark, and before sunrise for two weeks, I pushed the wheelchair through the streets of our quiet beach town until the six mile roll down Fort Fisher Blvd, the distance from Connor’s home to the high school he attended, seemed possible.
On the day of the fundraiser, I pulled the chair out of the truck with my kids and friends around me. We would raise $1000 per mile.
Halfway in, my arms ached. My head was throbbing. People were honking and a local television station anchor was there interviewing me. It felt like fanfare. I just wanted Heather there with me. I pictured Connor, whom I’d only met as a toddler, and again at 13, but whom I loved like I loved her, the way you can’t explain. He laughed like her. Sweet Max, her stoic, brown-eyed baseball player who would push Connor up multiple 12,000 ft. Rocky Mountain summits in the years to come. And, Matty, her rock of a husband.
My neighbor, who was fast-walking next to me said, “Thank God,” for the perfect weather.
I imagined Heather next to me, cracking jokes and hollering at people as they passed, then turning to him to say, “What if God has nothing to do with this?”
I wasn’t sure she still felt this way. I wasn’t sure I still felt this way. I just knew that we were the gods who would carry us through.
In a few years, Heather’s Dad would deliver the next mountain for her to climb. He’d spout one of a dozen suicide threats, hobble into his bedroom while Heather made tacos, and shoot himself in the head as she walked toward his room to check on him. She would call me from the garage where she’d taken Sarah for safety, in shock, but characteristically clear, calm. She’d say goodbye to him, sprawled on his bed, gun still in hand. Her younger brother, Eric, would peel into the driveway in his Chevy Impala after she’d called him, blame her. She would have arrived home four days earlier in response to Eric’s texts…”they aren’t well...possible dementia...couldn’t afford Dad’s medication”, minus the expletives. Although she’d have been estranged from them for years, they would need her, so she would fly home.
I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d sob for her because she couldn’t yet. How much could one person take in this life?
I’d call her three times a day. She would get through it. We would get through this too.
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Friends and supporters were waiting at the lake park finish line. I could see my girls running in circles through the small crowd ahead, jumping and screaming when they saw me coming; I looked over at my son, scootering next to me. The tears came fast and hard. What if this was the thing that would break her?
In that moment, I couldn’t see how she would use pain this debilitating as she always had - for fuel. The Arch Foundation would be born, fortifying caregivers across the country. Heather would become an award-winning humanitarian aid worker with the Red Cross, and an advocate and speaker for No Barriers, a nonprofit organization designed to build bridges for people of diverse abilities to fully unleash the potential of the human spirit.
Because that’s what you do with all that love.
And, me, I would keep rolling across finish lines with her, making my way through my own storms, and holding her hand through it all the only way I knew how.
Because...that’s what you do for love.
