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The Caspian

Bizarrely, we are on our way to the Caspian Sea with Habib’s brother and his new bride. It seems the family felt so badly after my initiation into Iranian life with my husband doing time in Evin Prison, that they show me some beauty after the ugly visit’s beginnings.

TRANSITIONS

Habib and I are in the backseat, perpetually clutching one another, with Nasser and his bride up front, driving and navigating. As we begin to climb through the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, for the first time in the last six weeks, I begin to really see and appreciate the beauty of the terrain. It slowly becomes wooded, picturesque and quiet, without the cacophony of the smog shrouded capital of Tehran.

We make a brief stop at a park along the way and I begin to feel more of my guts unwinding. A few hours later we’re at a posh resort at the outskirts of Ramsar, nestled a short distance overlooking the Caspian Sea. Once settled in the suite of rooms, Habib and I room around the hotel a bit, giving the bride and groom their privacy. I begin to hear more English speakers, see paler complexions and soon realize this is a haven for American and European expats. It would almost feel incongruous if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve been starved for my own tribe! 

Habib and I walk down to the sea, the beach being calming in its way though surprisingly dirty, the soil a bit dank smelling. It startles me to contemplate that on the opposite shore is Russia. The whole scene feels more foreign than anything I’ve experienced so far, which says a lot about my altering perception of the world at large. How can it be that things become stranger in this place after all that has happened.

THE SUBTLETY OF MALE DOMINANCE

We’ve been at the resort for a few days now and Nasser has decided we’ll try a local cafe away from the hotel. It’s a small place but feels so authentically off-the-beaten-path Persian. There’s a bit of grime in spots along the walls, incongruous against the incredible fragrance of spices and heat. Once we’re settled at the table, I straighten my plate and mismatched utensils. I notice a smudge of what appears to be partially dried egg yolk on the plate. I hand it to Habib and ask him to tell the waiter I need a new one, that this one is dirty. He takes it, telling me it’s not that bad, wipes it with a napkin and gives me his instead. A small shaming but shaming nonetheless. I’m beginning to see my husband through different eyes these days.

After about a week of what feels to be a strange experience, a combination of relaxation and quiet mixed with an odd separateness in the presence of my own husband, we get ready for the trip back to Karaj. The drive back through the mountains is initially uneventful as I watch the beauty of the terrain wiz past us. We’re coming down the other side of the mountain and stop at the same park we briefly visited on our way to Ramsar. After a time, we get back into the car and pull up to the park’s exit. Waiting for traffic to clear, Nasser sits at the highway’s edge, and looks both ways. I assume he sees the car on the left attempting to pass another car that I also see. But, Nasser doesn’t see it. He pulls out and we are broadsided, spinning us to a sideways stop.

THE COST OF KEEPING QUIET

It all happens fast. I realize in a split second had I said something to Nasser about that passing car it likely could have been avoided. Besides the relief of none of us getting seriously hurt other than bumped around a bit, it dawns on me yet again the price of female passivity in a culture that “waits and does not challenge” males. And besides this dawning, holding back my own much more assertive nature, the increasing chasm between myself and Habib continues to grow yet again. How will we ever survive the place? (And what has happened to my husband?)

And not just “we” but “I” — how will I ever survive here? The slow seepage of ever growing suppression of myself is becoming scary for me. It’s an insidious thing, contemplating the diminishment of the self. It creates an actual emotional distance between Habib and I, one he’s clearly unaware of. And how could he be? He’s swallowed up by his own upbringing culturally. As I think this thought I wonder what our future holds, here or anywhere else for that matter. Yes, I am “on my own” and my heart is broken in a new and unfathomable way. And while I am bereft at the thought, I also sense an internal steerage slowly coming into view. A part of me must rely on an unnamed emotional and psychological survival mechanism.

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IRAN

WHAT PLACE IS THIS?

We arrive at Mehrabad Airport after hours and hours in the air. It’s sweltering hot, I don’t know, maybe 100 degrees or more? We walk from the plane, down stairs and into the terminal and get into a queue for passport and visa checks. Even inside it’s hot!

All the smells are different in the atmosphere, all except for the identifiable odor of human sweat. I’m excited, nervous, exhausted as we inch forward. Soon, we’re at the table where officials sit and a few stand behind, surveying the line.

MOOD SHIFT

Habib is ahead of me and hands the seated man his passport. A discussion occurs between himself and someone standing behind him. It’s Farci, and even though I had a tutor in the language for six weeks prior, I cannot tell what’s being said. What I do know is that there is a palpable shift in mood, ominous and destabilizing.

The man standing behind the table steps to the side, and beckons Habib. Again, In Farci, again I know not what they say. The rancid odor of sweat is replaced by the rancidness fear and I suppose, a bitter adrenaline taste. I ask Habib what is happening and the man answers, telling me in English they just want to talk to him, and they walk away from me.

WHAT COMES BEFORE

I’m frozen. But not for long. The man at the table asks me for my passport so I hand it to him. He checks it, stamps it and hands it back. I walk away from the table in an anxious fog and search the crowd across the wide expanse of Mehrabad Airport looking for Habib’s older brother, Nasser.

I’m sure if you were to ask his brother now he would admit to concern, maybe even fear, but at the time, he just looked a bit worried without a lot of expression. You learn to not give too much away in the Middle East. It could be dangerous if you do.

In what seems like only seconds, a suited man exits a door caddy-corner from the chasm between Nasser and I. The official is brusque, purposeful. Once over at the luggage area he grabs Habib and my luggage and returns to the unmarked door on the other side of the expansive room.

In an immeasurable flash, I feel terror. I know Habib has anti-Shaw literature in our luggage. We had a fight about it in DC, me saying he can’t take it, and him scoffing—that he has a friend at the airport to avoid any problems with officials, thus totally blowing my concerns off! Typical! After all, what did I know, it was his country!

 BAD MOON RISING

Nasser and I lock eyes as he remains behind the roped area on the other side of the terminal. Oddly, I have no clear recollection of how long it took the same official to come retrieve me and ask me to go with him, probably only a fraction of a second but seemed eternal. What I do know now is that I was to have an unforeseen event that was to change my life, my marriage and my view of the world and everything in it.

There are points in a lifetime that challenge absolutely everything you thought you knew about yourself and the world you inhabit. In the fastest flash I knew I was alone, a single organism in an unknown place. So alone, the feeling was thunderous, instantly isolating at least for a time. It was destabilizing and disorienting yet somehow a perverse survival mechanism kicked in. I knew not whence it came.

When I think about this event now I realize how the animal reacts, thought seems suspended. You know to put one foot in front of the other, thoughts flash in a microsecond, responding as if programmed. But the heart pounds, the respiration quickens and you are on autopilot. 

In your head, it is as marooning as being on Mars. You don’t dare deal with the emotional earthquake of fear that is going on inside of you. Instead, both physical and psychological survival takes over like the rabbit chased by a wolf. It’s only later when there’s time to reflect on the event that you can absorb more of it. Even then it’s limited in processing the residuals of the event as if you’ve still skipped too many frames of the film being replayed in your mind.

HYPERTENSION

The official takes me through the door that I saw Habib go through. We enter the room he sits in with other officials nearby, three or four maybe? I recall them asking me my name, a few other details about myself but I have no recollection of what those details were. 

Habib is nervous, completely still, with a look on his face I’ve never seen before. One of the men hands me some papers—in Farsi—and asks me in English if these are mine, asks what they say, did I bring them? I answer no, not mine, I don’t know what they say, I can’t read Farsi. It is clear to me this is incredibly dangerous territory. If not for me, certainly for my husband.

The sense of powerlessness and impotency that swamps you in certain situations is unexpected, sudden, as a westerner and particularly as a woman. That feeling (and knowledge) is to only grow over the next couple of months. It is also to alternate between impotence and a naive brashness, thinking I can go to the US Embassy and they will help resolve this. After all, US policy has changed. As President, Jimmy Carter has been pushing a policy promoting human rights issues on ally countries of which, Iran under the Shaw, is one of them.

INNOCENCE LOST

Yes, I will tell Nasser to take me to the Embassy, that’s what I will do. The men subsequently let me go but, as night follows day, keep Habib. I leave the room and walk quickly across the remaining wide expanse of the lobby area to my waiting brother-in-law. I start to tell him what has just transpired and he tells me to wait until we get out of the airport.

We are in the car, Nasser and I, and I tell him what I want to do, to go to the Embassy. “No, you can’t,” he tells me. “It’ll only make it worse.” I realize I am trapped, just as much as my husband, but in a different way. The enormity of what is unfolding swamps me, as we whisk away from Mehrabad airport. My entire life, and my husband’s, has pivoted,  spiraling into the abyss. Terror sets in. I am the rabbit, heart pounding, and it occurs to me I am in uncharted territory, a stranger in a strange land, trapped between heaven and hell, lost and alone. Powerless!

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Musings From A Bag Lady

Never in a million years did I think it would be this difficult just to get a colostomy after struggling with 14 year tumor excision history. For some crazy reason I was under the delusion that I’d be up and around moving relatively easily a couple of months after the initial surgery. Ha! I couldn’t have been more wrong. No one knows if they will have surgical complications. I was in that category of 100% believing it would be a trajectory of healing that had nowhere to go but up, forward, continually gaining strength, and improving. I suppose I was naïveté on steroids, confessing to being an optimist besides.

Years ago a former therapist told me only optimists get hurt. At the time I thought that sounded sort of odd. Asking her to explain, she laid out the following: pessimists expect the worst and are therefore rarely disappointed when something goes awry; Realists accommodate to whatever outcomes occur, using the intellect to manage any disappointments that come their way. But optimists, rarely fearing negatives, possess an expectation all will be well. The ship leaves port to arrive at the desired destination assuming all will be well. The hitch? The slide into disappointment when things do go wrong can be disorienting, sometimes debilitating, throwing the ship way off course, adding insult to the original injury, becoming unmoored.

Success Not Success

I could tell you the first surgery to remove the tumor and subsequent body parts that hosted it was highly successful. It is the truth. My insult occurred when three weeks later I had to have a second surgery to remove an unanticipated kink in my colon. Shocked, pissed, depressed and, well, pissed some more by the entire set back—which was substantial—my recovery has been slowed, sometimes feeling glacial. This event was peppered with other lesser setbacks such as UTI’s, lumbar compression fractures exasperated by required bed rest, wound healing that has been slow, etc, etc, etc!

In hindsight some of these setbacks feel more like nuisances at this point though not always. Rather, it is the aggregate of complications and slowdowns, the cumulative totality that has been the most difficult to adjust to, adding fuel to the disappointment fire. My intellect informs me, and rightfully so, this could be worse. It also reminds me of people who truly DO have medical situations far more dire and problematic than mine. After all, I am tumor free for they have removed the body parts that were its host. There is no “there” there! To say I remain incredibly grateful is the understatement of the century.

Unmoored

Yet still I grieve. Still I am pissed, at least at times although it does seem to be waning a bit. Feelings of loss are not just for missing body parts. Rather, they reflect an energy system that shrinks away from a physical life I once took for granted. They are for a psychological and emotional operating system of navigating the world and my place in it, as if a supernova is in the process of burning itself out in my small personal firmament.Turning that two ton ship around from optimism to realism necessarily has to be done by degrees much like a ship’s navigation.

This way of looking at my world involves patience, honest and authentic acceptance, and faith! The faith in not only things will be well, but that they already ARE! That the process of degree by degree learning to think and feel differently is beneficial and may even lead to a kind of salvation regardless of the slow-motion, occasionally agonizing discomfort that I feel going through it. The trilogy of qualities listed above have always been challenging for me, especially patience. I’d like it all healed NOW, body, mind and spirit!

Turning in Slow Motion

Having no other real choice, I trudge on in fits and starts with a new emotional, psychological, intellectual and spiritual mechanism that requires patience, forgiveness, compassion and understanding. Ain’t no other way. I guess that demonstrates at least a modicum of acceptance. I definitely feel the benefits of these qualities as they slowly come into focus, albeit it ever so slowly—degree by degree. Oh how I wish I could be on the other side of it. Of course that is not how evolution of any kind operates, at least not until a momentum has built to a critical mass creating a new order.

I know I am blessed. I even imagine, truly, in the end I will view this entire surgery, setbacks and all, as an unexpected gift, besides the obvious life saving measure that it is. In an odd way I’m beginning to see it has merely been a delivery system for a change that has been required of me all along: a blessing in disguise as a medical event. To know thyself one often needs to be tested, a catalyst of sorts, to hit bottom as it were. I may have unknowingly generated such a catalyst.

A New Radar

Some years ago after Michael J Fox had his Parkinson’s diagnosis, I was struck by what for me was a profound statement he had made. It went something like this: I could never sit still until I could not sit still. The habit deeply ingrained in an interior way of how we think and feel, how we approach our world, often requires something cataclysmic to get our attention. I see the value in having such an event, even as I have resisted and cursed it at times. “Lucky is the man who has lost his leg to find out what he is truly made of—not grizzle and bone. Rather, of a sturdy faith in the unseen ineffable Self.”

I am such a (wo)man!

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The Bag Lady

It’s come down to this. There is a body part that needs removing due to a large, hideously unattractive tumor that has just, well, gotta go! Years ago (more than a decade, less than a century) it made its presence known similar to now. With a couple surgeries and double-digit colonoscopies to remove said growth and/or tiny polyps over the years, it has come back, the little bugger!! Excuse me: the big bugger!! Read more

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Death by Suicide

Suicide! With Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain’s recent suicides, a national conversation has occurred. It happened after Robin Williams’ death as well only to fade away like so many other shocking events in contemporary life these days. People are genuinely sympathetic and empathetic for a time only to fall back into daily living. It’s natural enough, of course. Read more

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Fire and Brimstone

No, wait. Not exactly that but sometimes it sure feels like it. The fires in northern California have been devastating, surreal and overwhelming to say the least. It is hard to count my blessings right now given that I surely have many. After all, my life was minimally impacted in relative terms. I lost no loved ones, my housing remained intact, although I did evacuate when the advisory was issued by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office. The smoke-saturated air hyper-laced with toxins, felt like it carried minimal oxygen. Imagine suffocation with foulness. It was hard to breathe and especially hard once it became so dense it hurt to take it in. Read more

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Trauma Writing

“How to Write About Trauma”. That is the title of the NYT Op-Ed piece dated 08/15/16, penned by Said Sayrafiezadeh, an American-born, Iranian-cultural-inheriting memoirist and fiction writer. I read it with serious curiosity for several reasons. First, I’ve recently begun conducting an Expressive Writing course and specialized coaching practice on the same topic. Read more

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