For verily I say unto you that I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the light and life of the world — a light that shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not.
Doctrine and Covenants 45:7
The Things of My Soul
Like the prodigal I wandered off Into a far country Seeking the things of the world Leaving the things of my soul Far behind Ever shrinking Growing small At the edge of sight They stayed with me Keeping a safe distance Whispering to my heart Hoping I would look back Through the mist And see them Shining there
While I was away from the Church I didn’t believe in doctrines or prophets. As far as I was concerned the Bible was a compilation of legends, myths, and wishful thinking peppered with snippets of ancient history, and the Book of Mormon was a hoax. I respected the historic Jesus as a great humanitarian and compassionate teacher but I scoffed at the notion that He was the literal son of God who went about performing miracles. I believed the idea of a personal God who heard and answered prayers was a fairy tale made up by people who couldn’t face the world without the comfort of religion.
As for me, I needed no such comfort. I could get along fine without doctrines and the other trappings of organized religion. I had myself, and I had David, and that was all I needed to make my way through the world.
David and I were very happy together. We were well-suited, treating each other as equals. When we argued it was only over small things and harmony was soon restored. He never picked at me or denigrated me and over the years we grew to love each other deeply.
David was a successful graphic designer with his own business and I worked at a series of office jobs in New York City. I never stayed at one job for more than a year or so, moving on when I grew bored or frustrated with the work or my boss. At some point I began trying to write novels and screenplays in my spare time, writing even on the subway, starting and abandoning story after story. They were badly written at first, but I was learning the storyteller’s craft as I piled up unfinished manuscripts.
When the owners sold the Manhattan brownstone where David and I lived, we moved to a larger apartment in a high-rise and bought a tiny cabin in the countryside of eastern Pennsylvania, where we enjoyed many weekends. We loved being in the country so much that we started looking for a house on Long Island’s rural East End, where David had boated and fished years before. Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1978, we found a farmhouse with almost an acre of land on the North Fork. In that farmhouse on Labor Day weekend in 1979 I experienced my first glimpse beyond the veil between life and death.
The house was full of company. We had invited friends out from the city to share the fresh air and green space of our country acre, and we were having a good time together, as always. David cooked a lobster feast in our spacious kitchen, the wine flowed, and the house filled with laughter and conversation.
Back in San Diego, my paternal grandfather had been hospitalized for a heart problem, but he had improved and was about to be discharged. I had a get-well card ready to send him but, with the preparations for the weekend, I’d put off sending it.
The phone rang and I answered it in the kitchen. It was my sister Lynne, telling me that Grandad wasn’t going home after all. He had suffered a massive heart attack and died in the hospital. I was devastated, and my grief was compounded by guilt that I hadn’t sent that card. I hadn’t told him I loved him, and now it was too late.
Memories of my grandfather flooded my mind. He had always been there for his grandchildren, delighting in making up stories about talking forest creatures to entertain us. He was the one who taught me that nothing ever disappears, it just changes into something else, like a sunken ship slowly disintegrating at the bottom of the ocean, the atoms that formed it becoming part of the sea and the seafloor. The ship wasn’t gone, only transformed.
Grandad had been a vital part of my life and a living link to my father, and now he was gone. I’d never see him again. This new loss swept me into an ocean of sorrow. Crying, I went upstairs and threw myself on the bed. I could still hear the laughter of our guests but they seemed far away. My grief for my father rushed back full force and I wept as if my broken heart would never mend.
I was lying on my back, still weeping, when a vision appeared in my mind’s eye. I saw two faces, my father’s and my grandfather’s, floating near the ceiling, smiling at me. I didn’t hear their voices but I knew they were telling me not to be sad, because they were together again, and they were happy.
My tears of grief turned to tears of astonished joy. This was no illusion born of wishful thinking; it was real. My father and grandfather weren’t dead. Some part of them lived on in a place where there was reunion and happiness. I didn’t call that place heaven and I didn’t connect this new knowledge with religion or doctrines. I just knew from that moment on that in the natural order of things bodily death wasn’t the end. Life was eternal. As Grandad had taught me years before, nothing is ever really gone, it only changes form. I stored that precious knowledge in my heart.
I know now that remarkable vision was one of Heavenly Father’s many tender mercies to a prodigal daughter He still loved in spite of her stubborn refusal to acknowledge Him. He saw into my wounded, armored heart and sent me a portion of His grace, allowing me a glimpse through the veil. It was the first step on my long and winding road home.
As wonderful as that experience was, it didn’t miraculously erase the decades of unresolved grief and turmoil that followed my father’s death. The loss of my father and the emotional withdrawal of my mother had caused an avalanche of emotional pain that had haunted my whole life. It would take more than one brief vision to heal those deep wounds, but the door had been opened.
Our experiment in country living was cut short by the lack of jobs on Eastern Long Island. It was still mostly farmland back then, with few opportunities for graphic design or office work that paid decent wages. We both tried our best, but after a year we admitted defeat, rented out the house, and moved back to the city. Manhattan rents had skyrocketed while we were gone, so we found an apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a short commute by subway to where the jobs were.
Around that time I signed on with a temp agency. An assignment at Harper & Row Publishers turned into a full-time editorial-assistant position in the high-school textbook division. I was thirty-four, and the long-buried emotional trauma of my childhood was finally bubbling to the surface. I felt sad all the time and I didn’t know why. There were days when I sat at my desk in tears, unable to work. One day I had such a terrible headache that I had to leave work. Walking to the subway, I felt as if the top of my head were about to explode.
The editor I worked for was sympathetic and recommended a psychologist she knew. Soon after I started seeing him, we got to the root of the problem and started working on my repressed grief, first in individual sessions and later in group therapy.
While preparing to write this book, I went through all my old papers and found bits and pieces of journal entries and personal essays from my early years in New York. The following essay, dated August 1982, describes a seminal event in my spiritual awakening.
Lessons in a Stream
I was sitting on a slab of granite that overlooks a shallow stream in eastern Pennsylvania. The morning sun warmed my rocky perch and illuminated the moss-covered stream bed so that I could see it just as clearly as if I were looking through a window. Small fish, their tails tinged with green, drifted just beneath the surface. A sharp-nosed turtle the size of my fist crawled under a rock. I watched for a while, but it didn’t emerge from its hiding place.
As I sat there in the sunshine, a new and welcome peace began to grow in my heart. It seemed that for the past few months, I had been existing in a haze of pain and sorrow. Deep depression, alternating with almost unbearable anxiety, had driven me at last to seek the only help I knew, and I had begun seeing a psychologist only three weeks before.
I knew where the roots of my trouble lay; there was never any mystery about that. My father had died in a plane crash when I was eight years old, and here was I, twenty-six years later, still fighting through the early stages of a terrible, consuming grief. How could it be that at the age of thirty-four, I still cried for my father? Cried not the bittersweet tears of memory, but the heartbroken tears of a child whose world has ended. I still wanted him back. That little girl was there inside me, denying, always denying, that her father would never come home again.
There had been inklings over the past several years that all was not well with me. I came to realize, very gradually, that I had blocked all memory of my father from my conscious mind. I could recall a few things he’d done and places he’d taken me, but as I gained the courage to examine those memories, I found that they were only concerned with events and locations. My father was not in them. My only mental pictures of him were from family snapshots.
In my first three sessions with the psychologist, I’d begun to uncover a deep and well-defended core of fear: the fear of abandonment. In my heart, I was desperately lonely.
I had wept many tears over the years since my father died but I had never come to terms with the finality of his loss. I had no concrete religious faith to sustain me but I had gradually grown into the belief that a higher power does exist, that there is a plan for the universe, and that this plan includes eternal life. I found some comfort in this slowly growing faith, but it was not enough. Something, perhaps just the passing of time and the approach of my thirty-fifth birthday, triggered the latest crisis, which sent me running to a psychologist. Maybe some part of my psyche was strong enough to protest that I couldn’t spend the second half of this precious life in the same half-alive state in which I had spent the first.
But psychology, although it is very helpful to the mind, does little for the soul. When I saw how deeply grief and loneliness were affecting me, I began to search for ways to help myself overcome these barriers to a full and happy life.
As has always been my habit, I went to a bookstore. But this time, instead of going to the psychology and self-help section, something guided me to the inspirational books. I bought a slim paperback about coping with grief and read it all that same day. When I came to the part that said Jesus Christ would take my burden from me if I would just lay it at His feet, I began to cry with relief and I felt my heavy burden of fear start to lighten. The tension began to melt from my shoulders and I felt as if an actual physical burden were being lifted off of my body.
That was the beginning of my journey back to God. Now, only a few days later, I sat on my rock beside the stream and thought about the wonderful things I had learned since then from my reading about God and Jesus and the power of faith and prayer. Changes had already begun to take place within me. I felt lighter and happier but I knew I still had a long way to go and many lessons to learn.
As I watched the small fish barely moving in the flowing water, it came to me that I had been doing the same thing since my father died. I had stopped my life in midstream and I’d been treading water ever since. I had grown up, married, divorced, and found a new life partner. I had held responsible jobs, driven cross-country alone, and behaved as if I were a full-fledged member of the adult world. But all the while, underneath, I had really been that little girl waiting for her daddy to come home. Just treading water, drifting with the current, not really going anywhere. Waiting.
When the turtle caught my eye and I watched it crawl under a mossy rock on the stream bottom, I saw myself in it as well. I had spent countless lonely hours in my room, reading stories of faraway places and imaginary people in preference to living in the real world. I had hidden under a rock, growing moss on my soul.
The sun was getting high now and it was time for me to go back to the cabin. I thanked God for the lessons He had shown me in the little fish and the turtle, assured Him that I would take them to heart, and rose to leave the stream. But then I began to wonder what had become of the catfish that I had seen in this spot before. I enjoyed watching it cruise along the bottom with its shark-like movements.
When I stood, I felt as though I were being guided across the granite boulder to a point a few feet downstream. Because of the slant of the sun, this part of the water had been dark to me before. But now, as I squatted down to see beneath the surface of the water, I gasped in surprise and pleasure. There was the fish I had missed! It was lying very still, and after my first surprise, I thought it odd that it should be so motionless. I watched for a moment, trying to tell if the gills were moving. By some trick of the light they seemed to flutter for a second or two, but I began to be afraid I was imagining it.
But how could the fish be dead? Why, I had seen it just yesterday, as healthy-looking as could be! I wouldn’t believe it yet, and I looked around for something to toss into the stream next to it, to stir the water and make the fish move, to show me that it was alive. There were no sticks or pebbles near me, so I broke off a twig from a bush and tossed it into the water, but it just floated on the surface. The catfish remained still. I searched across the granite rock until I found a piece of gravel and threw that into the clear water. It landed within a few inches of the fish but still, it did not budge.
Yet unconvinced, I looked around until I found, half buried in the mud at the stream’s edge, a rock encrusted with moss and duckweed. If it was alive, this could not fail to disturb the fish from its sleep. I threw it in, aiming carefully so it would not hit it. The stone stirred up the silt and spread ripples across the stream. When the water cleared, my heart fell. Finally, I had to admit to myself that the fish really was dead.
Suddenly, in that moment of realization and acceptance, I knew that I had been led to this spot and that I had just been taught the lesson that I needed to learn more than any other. That fish was dead, and nothing I could do would bring it back to life. I could stay there all day and pitch stones at it, but it would still be dead. Nothing would ever change that, just as nothing would change the fact that my father had died in a plane crash all those years ago. I had been wasting my life trying to change the laws of the universe.
I knew then that it was time to go forward. I had to shut the door on the past. There, by that clear stream, I finally said goodbye to my father, and I knew in that sweet instant that I would see him again someday. But for now, for my life here, I let him go at last, knowing I would be all right without him. He has his work to do and I have mine, and this is as it should be.
As I said, “So long,” I distinctly sensed the passage of a presence, not with my eyes or ears, but with my heart. It was like a warm, swift breeze winging downstream toward the rising sun. With a light, sure step and a full heart, I walked up the hill toward home. Even through my tears, the sky looked brighter, the leaves greener. Yes, I was crying again, but my tears were tears of joy.
The next time I met with my psychologist, I told him what had happened. It was obvious he believed my mind had expanded on the experience to comfort my grieving heart. I didn’t care if he thought I was delusional; I knew it was real. As I told him, it wasn’t just that I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t in the tunnel anymore.
It’s clear to me now that my experience that morning was another of my Heavenly Father’s tender mercies to a prodigal daughter who was “yet a great way off.” He knows me perfectly and He knew I had to make my own convoluted way home to Him. Because He knew that, He put experiences in my path that would shape me for His purposes when I finally returned.
That blessing at the stream helped to heal my heart but, in spite of the optimistic tone of the essay I wrote shortly afterward, it didn’t miraculously give me a direction for my life.
It wasn’t long before another event turned the world dark again. Late one January night while we still lived in Park Slope, David was walking the few blocks home from the F train when two teenagers came up behind him, demanding money. One of them brandished a knife.
David had grown up on the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, and had lived in New York City all his life. He was streetwise and knew better than to risk his life over money. He immediately took out his wallet and handed over all the cash he was carrying, a five-dollar bill.
Apparently, that wasn’t enough to satisfy his attackers, or, more likely, they just wanted to hurt somebody. The one with the knife slashed out at him, cutting his forehead. Blood spilled down his face into his eyes. That’s when David realized the knife wasn’t just for show; his life was in danger. He started yelling as loud as he could while he tried to fight off the vicious attack, hoping someone would hear him and call the police.
Someone did. A young man in the apartment building across the street who was training to be an Emergency Medical Technician heard David yelling and called 911, then raced down the stairs and across the street to help. The mugger with the knife stabbed David in the chest before they both ran.
I knew nothing of this until the insistent ringing of the phone woke me around three in the morning. I don’t recall how I got to the hospital, but it was only a few blocks away. When I got there, David was conscious and agitated, lying on a gurney, his face streaked with dried blood. He kept saying it was his fault for staying out so late. I assured him it wasn’t and then they took him to the intensive care unit. His lung had collapsed.
I’d never been more terrified in my life than when I saw the blood-stained coat David had been wearing. I could see where the blade had glanced off the metal zipper and penetrated the thick layers of cloth right next to it. An inch to the left and it would have punctured his heart instead of his lung. That was the first time I almost lost him.
After nine days in the hospital, David came home. Eventually, he fully recovered from his injuries except for scars on his forehead, chest, and hip.
The first day I went back to work was strange. The whole world looked dark, as if the air had taken on a black haze. Fear walked with me for weeks.
The teenagers who attacked David had been arrested the same night. His rescuer gave a description to the police, who found the bloody knife and stained five-dollar bill in a snowbank on the way to the boys’ street several blocks away. They spent a few months in custody and then plea-bargained down to short sentences. I was bitter about that outcome for a while, and then I had to let it go. Over time the world righted itself and life went on. David shaved off his short salt-and-pepper beard and never grew another one. He stayed more alert on the subway and street and came home earlier.
We had lived in Park Slope for four years. It was a lovely neighborhood of leafy London Plane trees, stately brownstone houses, and trendy shops and restaurants near Prospect Park, but I hated it after that. Aside from the attack that nearly killed David, our apartment had been burglarized twice. The stolen items included a little gold ring with a fire opal my mother had given me for my tenth birthday. I couldn’t wait to leave.
Not long after that, we moved to the Midwood section of Brooklyn. It was farther from Manhattan but we found a much larger, nicer apartment. We had the whole ground floor of a Queen Anne-style house, with a square of grass in front and parking space behind. I continued working at office jobs, taking the subway every weekday. I also continued to write and enrolled in New York University’s Adult Education program to study literature and creative writing.
While we still lived in Brooklyn, a film student in my dramatic literature class produced my trilogy of one-act plays as a reading and went on to make a short film from one of the plays. I got to write the script and be involved in the filming. The experience was rewarding in an unexpected way, but that came later, after David and I had moved back to Long Island.
With the advent of fax machines and email, by 1991 we were able to return to our farmhouse on the North Fork. David could now run his graphic- and exhibit-design business from a distance with the help of a FedEx office half an hour away. I tried to keep my job in the city but the commute was more than two hours each way by car and the Long Island Rail Road, so I wasn’t unhappy when I got laid off. The local economic situation had improved and I was eventually able to find office work while I kept writing fiction on the side.
It was during the interval between jobs that my one-act play “Frog Baby” was filmed at a country house in Westchester County, about an hour north of New York City. I traveled there by train and stayed at the house during the week of filming, helping out by preparing meals for the cast and crew.
“Frog Baby” features Karen, a young newlywed whose husband, a newly minted army officer, is about to leave for Vietnam. Over the course of a weekend at the family home of another young officer’s wife, Karen tries to face her fears. One night she has a nightmare about a crying infant floating alone in the blackness of space. When she wakes, Karen realizes to her horror that the infant in her nightmare is her. I was dismayed when the director told me he planned to film Karen’s nightmare. They shot that scene in a studio in the city and screened it for the cast and crew on the set.
It’s impossible to describe how I felt when I saw my deepest fear brought to life on film. The closest I can come is this: My soul screamed in pain. I retreated to my basement bedroom and cried for a long time, sobbing as I relived the grief and loneliness that had conjured that stark image in my mind so long before. When I finally ran out of tears, I felt empty but stronger. Seeing that secret image outside my head had been cathartic. I no longer felt like a helpless, lonely infant deep inside. It was one more step in my path forward.
David and I were visiting my family in California in late 1995 when he started having chest pains. They were intermittent and mild, so we didn’t worry too much. We thought maybe he’d strained some muscles in his chest. The doctor he consulted in California couldn’t find anything wrong.
David was born with a serious heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. He was a “blue baby” and wasn’t expected to survive for long, but his doctors hadn’t counted on David’s irrepressible spirit. He kept going through his childhood, trying to keep up with the other kids on the streets of Flatbush. When he ran short of breath due to the lack of oxygen in his blood he sat down and rested until he could go again. Nothing stopped him for long until his early teens when his faulty heart could no longer keep up with his growing body.
Open-heart surgery was still in the future, but David’s sister-in-law had seen a magazine article about the Blalock Procedure, now called the Blalock-Hanlon Procedure to give credit to the African-American doctor who was instrumental in developing the life-saving surgery. David’s life was saved by the new procedure. That partial repair kept his heart going until his early thirties when he was one of the first to have open-heart surgery to correct the defect.
David was forty when I met him and had been in good health since his second surgery. Still wiry and slender at sixty, he wasn’t an obvious candidate for cardiovascular disease. He had quit smoking after suffering that punctured lung but he did enjoy rich food. He was an excellent cook and prepared delicious meals for us.
In February 1996, we were planning to visit friends in Florida over Valentine’s Day and decided it was a good opportunity to get married. We’d been together for nearly twenty years and it hadn’t seemed important to make it official, but when I discovered how easy it was to marry in Florida we decided to go ahead and take the plunge on Valentine’s Day. We had a simple ceremony on a dock in the Indian River and were delighted to be taking that step. It turned out that David’s sister-in-law, now widowed, and her cousins were staying nearby, so we invited them to meet us on the dock, not telling them we were getting married. Their surprise and delight helped to make it an even more memorable day.
While we were in Florida David’s chest pains grew more frequent and intense. When we returned to Long Island the cardiologist he consulted was certain he was suffering from an arrhythmia that could be easily corrected by shocking a node in his heart back into normal rhythm.
But it wasn’t an arrhythmia. It was angina pain caused by a reduced flow of blood through occluded arteries. David was scheduled for an angiogram. I waited anxiously while the invasive procedure was underway. The doctor who came to give me the results told me David had nearly died on the table when his heart rate plunged to twenty beats per minute. That was the second time I almost lost him.
David urgently needed a quintuple bypass but the surgeon explained to me why he couldn’t have one: His early open-heart surgery had fused the thin covering around his heart, called the pericardium, to the back of his breastbone. They couldn’t open his chest to get access to his heart. If they tried they would rip his heart wall open.
The same surgeon showed me the film of David’s beating heart, pointing out an almost complete blockage in his left descending aorta, known as the “widow-maker.” He said the only thing they could do was try to insert a stent, a tiny metal tube that would open the severely narrowed artery. It would be a very tricky procedure because the blockage was just below a bend in the artery and there was a flap of plaque protruding from the artery wall right above where the stent needed to go. If that broke off it could trigger a fatal heart attack.
David and I had enjoyed twenty wonderful years together, but it wasn’t nearly enough. I had endured a difficult marriage and traveled three-thousand miles to find him and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to let him go. I sat in the waiting room with my heart in my throat for more than two hours until the surgeon came in smiling and my heart returned to its proper place. David had made it through the procedure and the stent was in position. It would turn out to be the first of many. Once again a medical miracle had saved his life.
I was so relieved and grateful, but our lives would never be the same. From that day forward I lived with the fear that my beloved husband could die at any moment. I didn’t know how I would live without him.
Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter 