What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [31]
Sprawled on the couch or lying in bed during these days, I began to get upset at the mysterious thing in my head that was now rendering me the disabled guy on an NBC form. I went over and over the past couple of weeks. Dad had warned that after getting home, I might get depressed. This wasn’t that. This was anger. I tried to calm myself by saying it could have been a lot worse. After all, I had only wound up with headaches, not handicaps.
That cheery tack did no good. It had the opposite effect.
Wait. This could have been a lot worse. This fucking thing could have taken me out.
I got madder still at my head’s defection from its normal state. For me, anger is not something to be endured passively, but to act upon. Its cause must be confronted. Blame must be apportioned. There must be an outcome.
Who or what was responsible for my near-death experience?
Where can I unload this anger, so I can feel better?
I had been told aneurysms more or less happen. If you smoke or use drugs, your risk is greater, or if you have high blood pressure, or if several people in your family have had one. But none of that applied to me.
Did I become sick, then, because of my lifestyle choices, like living in New York or enjoying a glass of wine with dinner? Was my home next to a landfill or beneath utility lines and my body had been poisoned or zapped, leading to a bulging artery? Did I consume massively caloric meals? Drive fast cars? Indulge in cocaine?
No, none of that. I was innocent.
Were Mom and Dad to blame for passing down aneurysm DNA?
No, they hadn’t.
Was it the job, the television industry, that did this?
Lots of people assume stress was involved. But Dr. Deshmukh had told me stress does not cause arteries to inflate into aneurysms.
Nothing I had done caused this flaw in my brain. Nobody had done anything to me. Mine was the worst kind of anger. It came without a release valve.
My thinking spiraled.
It was a Jimmy Stewart sort of spiral, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, which is a corny analogy, but I did begin to imagine what the world would have been like without me.
I had always envisioned a certain woman with certain characteristics coming into my life and then she had, and her name was Jenny. We were going to have a Norman Rockwell sampler of kids, sports, and family gatherings. Andrew and I would play catch. Andrew and I would do his homework. He would get married. Jenny and I would flow gently into old age.
My brain bleed nearly snuffed that.
I imagined Jenny as a single mom. She enjoys her job, but she prefers being at home. If I had died, she would have had no choice but to continue working to support herself and Andrew. She would have given birth to Baby Licht Two, a child I would never have seen, and she would have become a single mom with twice the parental responsibility.
I imagined how it would have been for Andrew if I had died in the hospital. He would have been at his aunt’s house in Boston and they would have driven him back to New York, where he would have found only Jenny in our apartment from that day on, and he wouldn’t understand why Daddy was gone for good. I wouldn’t have been there to witness the make-your-heart-melt trick he has perfected of late. In veteran Manhattanite style, he throws his two-year-old arm skyward and yells, “Taxi!”
At Vanity Fair’s party following the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2009, I had a long conversation with a fellow Syracuse graduate, Taye Diggs, the Broadway and screen actor who is married to actress Idina Menzel. Taye and Idina were a few months away from being parents for the first time and Taye asked that night what fatherhood was like, because Andrew had been born a few months earlier. My answer was unoriginal. That made it no less felt.
I would kill for my son, I told Taye. I would never have killed anybody before, but if someone threatened my son now, I would do it. In the first minutes after his birth, they had handed Andrew to me, and as they tended to Jenny, it had been him and me alone in another room. I had made a promise.