> I DO NOT
I did not lose my faith so much as shrug it off, like a coat I’d come to realize wasn’t up to the weather. I needed something sturdier, more reliable, something crafted more honestly and simply.
I had my suspicions about God as early as adolescence, only to see them confirmed for good during the darkest hours of my life. Fortunately, I discovered other resources to rely upon.
Some background: I was a blue baby . . . This was was back in the days when a mismatch of Rh factors between mother and newborn often proved fatal.
My mother had almost died in childbirth with Jim, the second of the four boys, and her doctors had warned her against having more children. But she was Catholic, and so both contraception and abortion were off the table.
Beautiful, curly-haired John ensued, with no complications, creating a bit of false optimism perhaps. Then came me: Rh positive to my mother’s Rh negative, the beginning of a compatibility standoff that would never truly abate.
While I hovered near death, the doctors ordered a full-body transfusion and complete quarantine, and my mother wasn’t permitted to nurse or even hold me.
I remember none of this, of course, nor do I remember the pediatric nurse who, according to family lore, developed such a devotion to me that she ventured into a blizzard on a municipal bus to deliver a Christmas present six months later: a scratchy wool bear.
My first recollection is of clutching that bear as I rose from my bed at night, unable to sleep. I might even say my self-awareness, my consciousness, was born in insomnia, which afflicted me nightly.
Emerging from the bedroom I shared with my brother John, I would first look right toward my mother’s room. The door, as always, would be locked, with a washcloth wedged in the doorjamb to perfect its silence.
And so I turned left, toward the next room down, where my father slept. Each night, despite the long day behind him and the next one ahead, he rousted himself from sleep, slipped on his glasses, lifted me up, and, with his pillow-mussed hair, took me into the living room and sat with me in the family rocker, where I perched in his lap and curled into his chest, clutching my poor, monocular bear, and gratefully rocked to sleep.
Looking back, this dynamic, established so early, became the framework of my life, my mind, and my character. On the one hand, a deep sense of unease abided within me, mitigated only by the stoic, patient, largely silent, but reliably loving, concern of my father. On the other hand, my mother’s extravagant moods — she suffered from borderline personality disorder and self-medicated with alcohol — would continue to nurture my anxiety and emotional uncertainty. In a family of scared men, she reigned all but absolutely. The role of lone apostate deferred to me.
Though I secretly longed to be closer to her, I never trusted her, often feared her, and I’m ashamed to admit, at times even despised her.
My changing relationship with my brother John reinforced the curious dynamic with my mother. In the beginning, John and I were quite close. He was three years older but he looked after me. Then, about the time he entered Catholic school, he changed. He recognized he was different, and long before he knew the words homosexual or gay, he felt a special type of scrutiny. With no way to express the increasing sense of dread and shame and guilt he felt, he projected those feelings onto me.
Just as my mother routinely shamed, degraded, and criticized my father, so John began a reign of terror with me, finding fault with absolutely everything I did . . .
The message I learned was this: only perfection guarantees love. And I knew I was hideously, sloppily, perfectly imperfect.
This message was echoed at Catholic school. We were made in the image of God, we were told, and since God was perfect, anything less than perfection was unacceptable.
Not surprisingly, my role as family heretic followed me to school. I never quite fell for the company line in either domain.
(In my 20s and early 30s,) my relationship with my brother John improved markedly. We reconciled after he “came out,” forging a warm though not entirely untroubled, bond once he decided that a God who loved him couldn’t possibly want him to be as miserable as he’d been as a boy, and so he accepted both his homosexuality and his faith.
Unfortunately, he was mistaken. Apparently his God did want him — and an entire generation of smart, generous, creative men like him — to be miserable, to waste away before our eyes, to die slow, agonizing deaths at the mercy of AIDS, a plague of biblical proportion, while the sanctimonious bullies all but cheered.
As it turned out, John’s death forced me to look more deeply for some kind of understanding of my life. From a therapist I’d grown to trust, I gained two of the most important insights of my life. First,
the perfect is the enemy of the good. I came to forgive myself for the sin of being me. I learned to strive to be better without lashing myself with self-doubt and contempt.
Second, I came to understand that, despite all the emotional gamesmanship I’d endured growing up, I’d known unconditional love as well, and it, too, had saved me. Its source was my father . . .
It was through taking this advice to heart, and with John’s recent death deepening my understanding of the fragility of this existence, that I met the first great love of my life: Cesidia Therese Tessicini. We met by accident and very shortly decided we were meant for each other, to the extent that human beings can claim such things.
Our marriage provided me the happiest, most rewarding years of my life. Like my father, Terri (as she was called) was gentle, caring, and utterly decent. She was also playfully silly and, true to her Italian heritage, stubborn to the core.
Simply put, the devotion Terri and I shared made God and perfection irrelevant. Everything I had wanted of my existence, our marriage provided. For the first time in my life, I felt safe.
I wasn’t, of course. Or rather, Terri wasn’t. Around the time of her forty-sixth birthday, she began treatments for what was first believed to be a reaction to cortisone shots she’d received for a problematic shoulder. But abdominal pain contradicted that diagnosis, so she had a complete physical, during which a savvy nurse practitioner performed a sonogram. It revealed a complex mass in Terri’s ovary.
Within a matter of weeks, she was diagnosed with Stage IV clear cell epithelial ovarian cancer. Four months later, she was dead.
The devastation I’d felt after John’s death was nothing compared to what followed Terri’s passing.
I wasn’t so much bitter as lost. As days ground into months, I realized that the depression I was battling served no real purpose. I wasn’t honoring Terri, and I was crippling myself.
As it turned out, two things Terri said before dying ended up pointing me in the right direction. The first was her insistence that I promise to take care of our three dogs . . . Having someone to care for other than myself provided the crucial element in climbing out of the despair in which I’d become mired.
The other gift from Terri was a letter she wrote that I was not allowed to read until after she passed. In it she told me that she had no words to express our love: “It just was.”
She wanted me to cry her a river, then grab life by the tail and never let go. “I want you to marry again, and she’ll be the luckiest woman in the world.”
Because of that letter, I realized that our love would only die if I let it. If I remained strong enough and wise enough to keep allowing the example of our marriage to change me for the better — if I carried that love forward into my seemingly empty life — the emptiness would dissipate.
And so I devised a practice of trying each day to reflect on how I might become just a bit braver, more truthful, more caring.
Not that all problems are solved, of course. I still suffer from insomnia, sometimes waking in the early morning hours with a gnawing dread.
I’m still the extravagantly flawed and frightened person. Regardless, I’ve found that simply getting up and beginning my day dispels a great many shadows.
I’ve also found love again, and with someone as extravagantly named as Ms. Tessicini: Mette Hansen-Karademir. Once again — like my father — she’s decent and caring, practical and honest. Once again — like Terri — she’s stubborn and smart and playful. Why buck a favorable trend?
I know I will lose Mette, and she will lose me. I know chances are good that it won’t be easy or pretty for either of us; I think about this every single day. And when the fear rises up, as it always does, I think of how I might be just a little bit braver, more honest, more caring. This is the practice I’ve devised, to replace the faith I found lacking. I live my imperfect, impermanent life. Or rather, I share it. David Corbett is a novelist and poet. “Love and Insomnia” Copyright © 2015 by David Corbett. This essay has been edited for length.