Each time I visit the Mystery House I try to envision what this space must have looked like to the “rifle widow” Sarah Winchester, when she first encountered it in 1886—acre after acre of undulating orchards and fields, broken only by an unassuming eight-room cottage.

Legend holds that before the 1906 earthquake—when her estate was as huge and fantastically bizarre as it would ever be with 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, and 2,000 doors, trap doors, and spy holes—not even Sarah could have confidently located those original eight rooms.

Sarah had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. Her father-in-law Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous repeater rifle, died in 1880, and her husband Will, also in the family gun business, died a year later. After she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, Sarah dedicated a large part of her fortune to ceaseless, enigmatic building. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.

An American Penelope, working in wood rather than yarn, Sarah wove and unwove eternally. She built, demolished, and rebuilt. Sarah hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas, or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day. In 1975, workers discovered a new room. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. Sarah had apparently forgotten about it and built over it.

In 1911, the San Jose Mercury News called Sarah’s colossus a “great question mark in a sea of apricot and olive orchards.” Over a century later, the San Francisco Chronicle was still baffled: “the Mansion is an ornately complex answer to a very simple question: Why?”

Mrs. Winchester’s main bedroom.

The answer: Sarah’s building is a ghost story of the American gun. Or so the legend went. A spiritualist in the mid-1800s, when plenty of sane Americans believed they could communicate with the dead, Sarah became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month-old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. A relative said many decades later Sarah fell “under the thrall” of a medium, who told her that she would be haunted by the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims unless she built, non-stop—perhaps at ghosts’ direction, for their pleasure, or perhaps as a way to elude them. Haunted by conscience over her gun blood fortune and seeking either protection or absolution, Sarah lived in almost complete solitude, in a mansion designed to be haunted.

When I heard Sarah’s ghost story from a friend in graduate school, I was enthralled. Eventually, Sarah became the muse for my book on the history of the American gun industry, and culture.

I keenly anticipated my first visit to the Mystery House. I must have been hoping that the house would yield up its secret to me. At first glance I was deflated, for the unusual reason that from the outside, the house wasn’t entirely weird.

But the drama of this house, like the drama of Sarah’s life, was unfolding on the inside. A staircase, one of 40, goes nowhere and ends at a ceiling. Cabinets and doors open onto walls, rooms are boxes within boxes, small rooms are built within big rooms, balconies and windows are inside rather than out, chimneys stop floors short of the ceiling, floors have skylights. A linen closet as big as an apartment sits next to a cupboard less than an inch deep. Doors open onto walls. One room has a normal-sized door next to a small, child-sized one. Another has a secret door identical to one on a corner closet—it could be opened from within the room, but not from without, and the closet drawer didn’t open at all.

Details are designed to confuse. In one room, Sarah laid the parquetry in an unusual pattern: When the light hit the floor a particular way, the dark boards appeared light, and the light boards, dark. Bull’s-eye windows give an upside-down view of the world. Even these basic truths, of up and down, and light and dark, could be subverted.

The house teems with allusions, symbols, and mysterious encryptions. Its ballroom features two meticulously crafted Tiffany art-glass windows. Here, Sarah inscribed her most elegant clues for us. The windows have stained glass panels with lines from Shakespeare. One reads, “These same thoughts people this little world.” It’s from the prison soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Deposed from power and alone in his cell, Richard has an idea to create a world within his prison cell, populated only by his imaginings and ideas.

The Winchester Mystery House, circa 1900-1905.

Is the legend accurate? I found spine-tingling clues on the archival trail that incline me to believe that Sarah really was a spiritualist, but I never found that smoking gun, to borrow a metaphor from Oliver’s empire. I do know that her mansion conveys a restless, brilliant, sane—if obsessive—mind and the convolutions of an uneasy conscience. Perhaps Sarah only dimly perceived the sources of her unease, whether ghostly or profane. But she wove anguish into her creation, just as any artist pours unarticulated impulses into her work. Over repeated visits, I came to think that if a mind were a house, it would probably look like this.

The House is an architectural exteriorization of an anguished but playful inner life. Ideas, memories, fears, and guilt occur to us all day long. They come to consciousness. If they displease or terrify, we brood or fuss over them for a while, then revise them to make them manageable, or we plaster over them and suppress them, or refashion them into another idea. One of the house’s builders recalled, “Sarah simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over or around, or … totally ignored.” The mental and architectural processes of revision, destruction, suppression, and creation were ongoing, and similar.

Perhaps the same mental process happens with a country’s historical narratives about its most contentious and difficult topics—war, conquest, violence, guns. Sarah’s family name was synonymous by the 1900s with a multi-firing rifle, and the Winchester family had made its fortune sending more than 8 million of them into the world. It wasn’t crazy to think that Sarah might have been haunted by that idea, that she might have perpetually remembered it, and just as perpetually tried to forget.

I’ve come to see the house as a clever riddle. Sarah made charitable donations, certainly, and if she had wanted to, she could have become a philanthropist of greater renown. But the fact remains that she chose to convert a vast portion of her rifle fortune into a monstrous, distorted home; so we can now wander through her rooms imagining how one life affects others.

Instead of building a university or a library, Sarah built a counter-legend to the thousands of American gunslinger stories. And in this counter-legend, the ghosts of the gun casualties materialize, and we remember them.

The post Why the Winchester Rifle Heiress Built Herself a Haunted Mansion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I hadn’t expected to run anywhere near that. My best 1,500 time going into the race was 3:42—still a very respectable time by collegiate standards, but far from record- breaking. As one of the athletes who had to beg his way for a spot on the starting line—it was a late-season race, held specifically for some of the country’s top runners to lock down good times—I was just there to play follow the leader, and hopefully get carried along to a personal best, maybe even a qualifying time for that year’s Olympic trials. Instead, I won.

I can recall key parts of the race, but much of it is a blur. The last of the evening’s raindrops splashed against the track as the athletes peeled off their warm-ups. A surprising number of fans lined the track’s perimeter. After the starter fired his pistol, I fell into position toward the back of the 15-person field and focused only on the damp jerseys in front of me. I knew fatigue was due to set in soon, but once we passed the halfway point, instead of losing ground, I began to move through the field. Soon the leaders were in sight. There was life still in my legs around the final turn (how did we get here so soon)? With my eyes forward and my head up, I made my bid for the front.

Engulfed by the moment, I crossed the finish line oblivious to what I had just achieved. My legs were numb. I turned around to see who came in behind me. Then one runner a few strides back yelled to me in disbelief. He must’ve seen the clock. My coaches sprinted toward me with their hands in the air shouting just how fast I had gone.

Euphoria always follows a great race—a validation of all the work and sacrifices leading up to that moment. But this performance was different. It was difficult to understand what had happened. On paper, I was seven seconds faster than I had been when I woke up that morning, a difference that takes most competitive runners years of chipping away to achieve. Suddenly, I was part of an entirely different tier of athlete. Now I had to convince myself I belonged.

Three weeks after setting the record, I had the most devastating race of my career. At the NCAA National Championships, I bombed out of the preliminary rounds of the 1,500 meters, not even making the final. With the echo of the stadium’s crowd still audible through a tunnel and my breath still heavy, I had to compose myself before facing the media. What had happened? I was supposed to be among the best now—people wanted great things. How does the American collegiate record holder run so slow?

I’d had one goal going into those championships: to win. But entering a race with a win-or-lose attitude is a dangerous approach. With new personal records come new expectations, and after I failed to live up to mine, I quickly became haunted by doubts and disillusionment. Would that lightning ever strike twice?

The ecstasy of just a few weeks earlier began to feel like a dream.

It took me three years to run as fast as 3:35 again. After graduating from college, injuries, missed chances, and bad luck plagued each season. Eventually, I had to go back to the basics. Keep it simple. Stop the overthinking. Staying healthy became my first priority; putting one foot in front of the other the second. There was no curse to be lifted, I told myself. That quiet track in the backwoods of Pennsylvania was the same distance around as every other. I just needed the right opportunity.

It finally came last May, when I found myself just off the leader’s shoulder in the final stretch of a 1,500 in South Carolina. The race’s pacers had been hasty, and the field was competitive. Now was my time. The impulse to win overrode the pain of each step, and once again, I felt those chills shooting through my spine, masking the temptation to let up. The numbers on the big clock by the finish were lower than I had ever seen. I leaned my head forward to cut a few hundredths of a second as I crossed the line. Occasions like this are rare, and I wanted it all.

In track, as in all other sports, failure is determined by the level of success you achieve—where you set the bar for yourself, based on past accomplishments. If I hadn’t run that one extraordinary time in college, I’d have been thrilled just to be at nationals that year. But once I proved what I was capable of, I had to try to live up to it.

In this way, paradoxically, a runner’s victories are forbidding as well as euphoric. Success means new goals to obsess over and fall short of.

Last May, with the ghost of my college-self behind me, it didn’t take me long to forget my recent years of frustration. Finally, I’m able to look ahead—specifically, to next year’s Olympics. But I’m already starting to sense once again the creeping demons of my own ambitions. How do I suppress them? So far, the only trick I’ve found is to embrace the disappointment—to recall the crushing moments, and to use them as fuel to never feel that way again.

Then: keep it simple. Take the next step.

The post The Creeping Demons of Ambition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The four of us were drinking cocktails amid the bustle of a downtown Santa Barbara restaurant. Yet we still leaned in over our table’s fading candle and lowered our voices, as if to nestle closer to the campfire.

The Lobero is home to two ghosts, Angie explained: Harry Pideola and Dr. Frank Fowler. Harry was the theater’s Prohibition-era night watchman. He lived upstairs in an old converted dressing room, where he also died. Dr. Frank was a founder of a local theater group. Both ghosts were known to cause mischief around the place, Harry with a taste for pranks, Dr. Frank with a habit of popping up in a top hat and tuxedo.

Angie hadn’t seen the ghosts, but she insisted other people had. The theater’s director had a few chilling tales of his own unusual encounters. And had we read the story by the Santa Barbara Sentinel reporter? He’d planned on spending a night in the theater to debunk the myth last Halloween, but fled after a push-broom showed up where one hadn’t been and the specter of a man in tails flashed before his eyes.

This was all fantastic material, I thought, for a person who gets paid to promote the theater. After Angie leaned back to let us ponder the mystery of what she had just revealed, I couldn’t help taking a dig at the story by asking if any of the theater’s visitors ever were gullible enough to believe it.

I looked across the table at my date, expecting some sort of grin. Instead, she looked disapproving.

“You don’t believe in ghosts?” she asked.

“Why, do you?”

“Sure.” She took a sip from her glass and shrugged. “You never know.”

The fourth person in the group chimed in and agreed he’d seen some spooky things. Then they all started talking about what they were cooking for Christmas dinner.

A year later, that conversation still bugs me. Yes, there are countless things about this world I don’t know, but no, I don’t believe in ghosts. And if I did, I wouldn’t be so casual about it. As the group went on, the skeptic in my head climbed on his high horse and rode through a whole thorny meadow of implications that follow from a belief in the phantasmic. Ghosts mean there’s an afterlife. An afterlife suggests we have souls. Souls suggest there’s a god. Shouldn’t believing in even the possibility of ghosts drastically shape our belief about pretty much everything—how we should live our lives, what we’re doing here in the first place?

If I step off that high horse, though, I get it. Ghosts are fun. We love ghost movies, Halloween, that TV show Ghost Hunters. If someone gets a kick out of a ghost story, it’s not that different from getting a kick out of a vampire story, or a zombie story, or an apocalyptic tale. And ghosts do offer hope—that the people we love are never really gone, that there is indeed something waiting for us on the other side. Even a casual belief can provide a creepy sort of comfort.

Still, there’s something deeper about ghosts that nags at me. It’s not what their existence implies, but the fact that I’d have to deal with them if I believed in them. My life, like everyone’s, is already filled with things that keep me up at night. I have deadlines to meet, people to please, student loans to pay. And then there are the big questions: Will the work I do ever live up to my ambitions? Am I a good person? Would life be different if I’d tried harder when I was younger? Would it be better if I’d tried less?

In Tribute to Freud, a 1956 memoir by the poet H.D. about her friendship with the famed psychoanalyst, there’s a line that has stuck with me for years. “We are all haunted houses,” H.D. writes, reflecting on the experience of living through World War I. Her point is that everyone’s haunted by something—traumas, lost friends, lovers, expectations, mistakes, failures.

With so much that bedevils us, what good are ghosts? I don’t believe in them because I don’t want to believe in them. The things that haunt me are enough, and they don’t live in someone else’s theater.

The post I Choose Not to Believe in Ghosts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He was at his wit’s end, and wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help. I’m an arachnologist, and my specialty is the brown recluse spider—a creature that hides in cracks and crevices. Sure, I told him. Forget the spiders, and have the doctors check those afflicted for a bacterial infection instead. It turned out they had methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (commonly known as “MRSA”).

People are terrified of brown recluse spiders when often they shouldn’t be. In the almost 25 years I’ve been studying the creatures, I can’t tell you how many times other spider experts and public health officials have shared stories with me about giving talks around North America and asking their audiences, “Who knows someone locally who claims to have seen or been bitten by a brown recluse spider?” Typically, one-third to half of the crowd—whether it’s a few dozen or a few hundred people—raises their hands. But the majority of these talks take place nowhere close to where brown recluses are known to exist.

The recluse, whose scientific name is Loxosceles reclusa, is a medium-sized spider, about three-eighths of an inch in body length, with tan legs and an abdomen that varies in color from a light cream to dark brown depending on what it has been eating. It’s found throughout the central American Midwest, between Nebraska, Ohio, Georgia, and Texas. Overall, there are about 17 states where the sustained presence of the spider has been verified. It is not impossible, but still very rare, to find them elsewhere.

But people still believe they can be found pretty much anywhere. Harmless brown spiders are frequently misidentified as brown recluses around the country. Often this happens just because the creature is brown and has eight legs. Brown recluses are especially known for the dark brown violin-shaped marking many have on their cephalothorax—the body part to which the legs attach—but many other spider species have similar markings in the same area, which people tend to creatively misinterpret as violins. Sometimes people find creatures that aren’t even spiders, but beetles or other harmless arthropods.

In the regions of America where brown recluse spiders actually do exist, people have every right to be cautious. Brown recluse bites can cause significant damage to skin. If the venom causes a reaction throughout the body, a bite can be fatal, especially in small children. But these are extreme cases. Only about 10 percent of bites have moderate effects on their victims. Fewer than one in 100 becomes systemic. Medical advice for most wounds is “watchful waiting,” because many recluse bites heal very nicely without medical intervention.

I’ve known several Midwest residents who successfully raised kids in recluse-infested homes without incident. One family in Kansas collected more than 2,000 brown recluse spiders in their 19th-century house in six months, yet lived there for 11 years before someone received a bite. The wound only caused a finger to turn red and swell a little.

So why do so many people break into a sweat at the thought of the coin-sized creature when, statistically speaking, they’re far more likely to get killed by a bolt of lightning? There are many aspects of human psychology that cause creepy crawlers like the brown recluse to bury themselves into peoples’ minds. Undoubtedly there’s an element of fear of the unknown—the monster that could be hidden in any hole or crevice. And brown recluses are such attention-grabbing, almost mythic creatures. As I frequently point out to audiences at talks, you don’t tell acquaintances when you get a bacterial infection, but you do tell everyone when you think you have a nasty spider bite.

On a more concrete level, there are two forces that contribute to the brown recluse’s reign of terror: media and medicine. In the news, only extremely nasty bites are ever reported—and typically they aren’t even actual bites. A common scare story describes a person with a significant skin lesion and points a finger at a brown recluse spider as the culprit. Yet it’s also almost always mentioned offhand that the victim actually “never saw the spider.”

Physicians have contributed to the misperception that brown recluses lurk in every dark corner, too. Misdiagnosis of skin lesions as brown recluse bites has been a chronic, widespread problem in North America since 1957, when the first article was published definitively proving that brown recluses cause them. In the rush to provide new information, subsequent medical authors relied on circumstantial evidence of the spider’s involvement in incidents, reporting bites in areas of the country where it didn’t live.

The myth of the brown recluse’s ubiquity isn’t just problematic because it causes unnecessary fear. It also poses a real danger. Unlike most recluse bites, some conditions with similar symptoms actually are fatal—or, at the least, result in permanent damage. Conditions that are confused with recluse bites include Lyme disease, leukemia, bacterial infections like MRSA, diabetic ulcers, and cancer. When a lesion is misdiagnosed as a recluse bite, it allows a person’s actual condition to continue unrestricted.

Thankfully, after decades of crusading for better awareness of just how rare brown recluses are found outside of the central Midwest, I’m finally starting to see my work have an effect. Whereas 10 years ago I received hate email from people telling me that I was wrong because my research conflicted with their physician’s diagnosis, now medical guides caution doctors to consider many possibilities before declaring a skin lesion as a bite. Some doctors have told me that I’ve changed the way they diagnose skin lesions as spider bites. Even the media is beginning to come around. While there are still plenty of questionable local reports of bites around the country, publications including Wired and Slate have cited my research to help dispel fears of recluses.

Knowing that people are starting to get the message that the brown recluse is far more a scapegoat than a monstrous killer is very satisfying to me. And it should allow you to sleep well at night, too. If you don’t live in areas of the country with proven brown recluse spider populations, calm down. You’ve probably been misidentifying a harmless creature. And if you live in indigenous recluse areas, take precautions to minimize spider bite possibilities, but don’t let it consume you. There are many more dangers in life than recluse spiders.

Now, at least you have one less thing to dread about the world.

The post Do Brown Recluse Spiders Reign by Terror? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those days are over. Today, the light is scarier than the dark ever was.

It’s not just because the sunshine is so much hotter and longer now that California feels as if it’s drying up. It’s not merely that our days are so busy with traffic and meetings that, if you want to get anywhere or get anything done, you have to travel or work at night.

What’s scary is that Silicon Valley rules us now, and all the lights it shines never really turn off.

They are the lights of the smartphone and the tablet and the router, keeping us up with their glow. They are the lights of our digital appliances, informing their manufacturers about the details of our consumption. And they are the lights of connection, of social media, luring us to share and read and step into the light of a community, when we’d be better off exercising or resting or talking to friends or making love.

And they are the lights of transparency, that new god. The best companies are transparent. We must be transparent in our dealings. We demand that our governments be transparent. We, they, all pledge to be so—let the light shine everywhere.

But we pledge transparency so often we’ve turned it into a club. Politicians dump bad news in big batches on Friday afternoons and lawyers dump boxes and gigabytes of records on their opponents, hiding their needles in the haystacks. We obscure the important civic details in 271-page California budgets and delta conservation plans that run to 34,000 pages.

And woe to anyone who doesn’t disclose—you must be hiding something! Let’s convene a grand jury or a legislative hearing. Or file a ballot initiative to force disclosure. Of course, we all know it won’t end there. Transparency can pull things into the light, but it can’t make us trust each other.

It’s scary how much we can see now. At the same time, there is so much out in the light that we can’t see it all. So we struggle to prioritize what’s most important. And it’s downright frightening how hard it is to tell, in all that light, what information is correct and what’s perilously wrong. There’s too much dangerous stuff out there in the light where credulous people can see it. And so they might believe that immigrants are criminals or vaccines threaten children or that having a gun in the house makes you safer.

Remember the Night Stalker? Remember when danger came with crime or violence or drugs in night? Well, murders and violence are less common, and drugs are on their way to being legal. Now we most fear exposure, the scary reality that no matter how careful we are, all our personal information is out there for someone to grab. Identity theft is the crime of these sun-splashed times.

It’s not only the bad guys who can get you in the light. It’s the good people, too.
They want to give us fair warning of everything, and so our lives have endless forms to fill out, boxes to check, labels to read, means of confirming that we have acknowledged what they are disclosing. All those warnings are supposed to reassure us, but too much sunlight can be frightening and blinding.

If we miss anything, if we forget anything, if we read too fast—well, it’s our own darn fault, isn’t it? And so we toggle back and forth between all the screens and lists and emails we’re supposed to monitor, anxious that we’ll miss some message we’re not supposed to miss.

Online communities grow like weeds—every organization and hobby has one. In my own life, with a wife and three kids and a 21st-century job that’s really five different jobs, I’m supposed to be signed into and contributing to a couple dozen permanent online huddles—for preschool and elementary school and the after-school program and Little League and two different soccer teams and my main work (with its different email lists) and a global democratic forum I run on the side and the university where I teach.

And so someone is always mad at me, telling me I missed this message, or that I didn’t respond to something or that I communicated to the wrong list. And sometimes I’m the one who is mad at someone for missing my messages. People see all your failures in the light.

Outside my laptop, the light is invading the dark in California. Ten years ago, I’d drive at night up the coast on the 101 or through the Central Valley on the 99, and you could go for miles and miles in the pitch dark. Today, there are lights everywhere.

One recent dark day earlier this month on my way to Fresno, I pulled off the 99 and wandered into Wasco, a small town that was briefly famous last Halloween for “the Wasco clown,” a scary clown who showed up in places and spooked people. But then the whole thing went on social media, and hordes started looking for the clown, and pretty soon there were copy clowns and arrests of said copy clowns all the way down to Bakersfield. When I asked people in Wasco about the clown, they said they wished it had just stayed a small little local thing.

But the light swallows up everything, even Halloween. Remember when costumes were black and covered your whole body? Today—call me a prude, if you like—the nurses and witches expose so much skin there’s nothing left to the imagination.

With the light revealing so much, I take comfort in the dark now. I bet you do, too.

The dark doesn’t cause sunburn or skin cancer. The dark allows you to think and maybe, if the weather is right, search the sky for a few stars.

My favorite moments now are when I leave the mobile phone at home and steal away for a short walk after the kids have gone to bed. At work, I treasure sneaking out to lunch for a few minutes without telling colleagues where I’m going. I love hiding in the shady corners of theaters and coffee shops where I can feel safe from the light, in dark anonymity, for just a moment.

I hope you find some dark place like that during this very bright and big Halloween weekend.

I hope I don’t you see there.

The post The World Needs More Darkness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Thank you for the invitation to catch up, however I must very respectfully decline,” he wrote.

Very respectfully decline? Coming from someone I had once known so well, that felt like the Internet equivalent of getting the door slammed in my face. We hadn’t spoken in ages, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’d imagined that deep down, despite broken hearts, he was still the same person I had laughed with and loved—that we were still, on some level, friends. But he hadn’t answered me like a friend. He’d answered like someone who wanted nothing to do with me.

It’s an unsettling feeling, believing there’s someone out there who might turn and sprint away if he saw you on the street. I wasn’t used to it; I was dorky as a kid, with thick glasses and a love for the performing arts. I didn’t make many enemies. I also didn’t get many boyfriends. OK, any boyfriends.

Until Matt. With him, I found someone who liked me for my nerdy self. He even said he preferred my curly hair to the trendier, straightened style I wear now. But once I left for college in upstate New York and he went to school in Seattle, long-distance proved an immediate disaster. I used to crouch on the carpeted floor of a gutted phone booth in my dorm for hours, trying to make a cell connection with him feel like being together. The more I cried, the more he pulled back and refused to return my calls, sometimes for days at a time.

We went off-and-on once, but thanks to our young, stubborn devotion to each other, it wasn’t over-over until fall of junior year. I broke up with him out of sheer exhaustion. I told him long-distance was just too difficult, and though he insisted he could try harder, he seemed to understand when I stuck to my decision. From there, our communications slowed and eventually stopped.

I emailed him about meeting up after at least a year of silence. I’d moved on, dated other guys, and felt ready to laugh about what naïve kids we’d been.

Full closure in relationships is probably never possible. But taking a moment to reflect on what happened after some time has passed is valuable, even if you end the conversation thinking the other person is a selfish jerk. At least you know. Matt’s “Thanks, but no thanks” response didn’t give me that chance. It only told me that no, we were not on the same page, and no, he did not want to talk about it.

That uncertainty was more than I could handle. What if he’d written it out of pure hatred, to hurt me? Even if it’s only imagined, an ex’s opinion is scary. Matt knows my flaws, and to him, my redeeming qualities no longer seemed to outweigh the bad. Even today, I can picture myself through his disapproving eyes: I’m not a genuine or caring person, or a good friend.

Of course, the truth of our final interaction is probably more complex than that. Maybe he had just started a new relationship when I reached out to him, or our drawn-out breakup might have hurt him more than I realized. Maybe he just wanted to cut ties and move on with life. Who could fault him for that?

If he isn’t the ex who hates me, he’s at least the one with the permanent question mark. I don’t think I’ll ever sort out my feelings about him. Sometimes, I look back and think he’s the worst. I can’t believe he brushed me off like that after such a long relationship. Other times I’m more charitable: We were so young. I hope he’s doing well.

One of my best friends lives in Seattle, so I’m often out there to see her. I’ve finally stopped considering reaching out to Matt before I go. It’s been long enough to know it’s never happening. But if I ever run into him, I don’t know if I should be ready to fight or forgive. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he still stars in my stress dreams and other ex-flames never do.

Anyway, at this point, I’m not even sure what I’d ask him if we did meet. I’m not certain anyone wants to know what his or her exes actually think. What we imagine is bad enough.

The post My First Great Love Hates My Guts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’d been living upstairs
From a funeral home
For a summer
It was too hot to go outside
It was too hot to stay in

I saw her again
The same position
Clutching air
In each arm, cradling space

Another night I woke to find
A man, bald and mustached
Suspended inside the wall
He looked like he was choking

I recalled a boy
His face against the wooden floor
A sound like marbles dropping
When he’d bang his head
Throughout the hours
I lay awake, too mindful
To shut my eyes. We lived on

Water, we lived on spoiled rice
Cooked slow, stirred even
Slower, we lived on
Cabbage, couldn’t hardly
Make kapusta, gołąbki,
Couldn’t hardly
Get milk unless it was post-dated
Unless we waited
That long, we gathered
Change on the street,
See a penny
Pick it up
We huddled close
And bathed fast

We kept on
Seeing strangers
Every evening
We were never lonely

Counting the hours
The before and the after
Touch, trembling along
The walls, I thought I’d never leave
Brooklyn, I thought I’d never
Be anyone but the girl
In slip-ons and gray stockings

On a stoop
On Diamond Street
So many afternoons
I watched the windows
I watched the people inside
Hungry all the time

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The story isn’t mine. It belongs to my late mother. She was a teenager, living with her family in La Puente, when one night she heard a gentle rapping on her bedroom door. The door opened and her aunt, who was living with them, let her know in a whisper that she was getting up to make breakfast and what would she like to eat? Then she left the room. My mother went rigid with fright, because her aunt had only days before left for a trip to Yucatán. She was trying to make sense of what she had seen when she heard sobbing. It was her older sister, who shared the bedroom with her, crying in the twin bed next to hers. One of them asked the other (my mother couldn’t be sure who spoke), Did you see that?, and the answer was a crashing wave of grief, wailing that woke up my grandfather, who ran to their bedroom to find his daughters repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead. Mi tía está muerta!

There’s more to the story. After my grandfather chides his daughters for being ridiculous, for believing in what they think they saw, just a short time later there’s a phone call, well before the sun has come up. Cut to my grandfather, hurriedly getting ready to leave the house, dragooning my mother—who, at 16, had just earned her California driver’s license—to take him from La Puente to LAX, amid early morning traffic, so he could fly to Yucatán where his sister had been killed in a grisly car accident. Not till many years later did it occur to me that for my mother, an inexperienced driver, having to trek all the way to LAX may have been as terrifying as what she’d seen that night. But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn’t have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you.

There’s more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of “feet” in that hallway behind them as they sit in the living room trying to watch My Three Sons. Then it’s the hallway saturated in perfume, the aunt’s perfume, an unbearable reek. Finally, their priest is consulted and he believes what they tell him, and he agrees to perform an exorcism. He sprinkles the holy water, he recites from the Bible, and he tells the ghost, You don’t belong here anymore. You’re dead. You need to leave. There’s no longer any need for you here. And she goes. No more haunting. The end.

After the sighing, after the blinking, an occasional head shake, someone will ask, When did your mother tell you that story? Of course, when I told this story as a boy, and then as a teen, nobody (or at least no one that I can remember) ever asked that, but I would volunteer that I had heard it when I was a kid, as a way of saying, If you think you’re freaked out, imagine how freaked out I was when I first heard it! It was bragging, like saying I’d ridden on this coaster a bunch of times, so no big deal. But then I’d tell this story in my 20s, 30s, and now 40s. And when revealing the age I first heard it, there’s no comment but certainly an unspoken question: Why would your mother tell you this? Why would she bequeath me her haunting?

I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to guess. If my memory isn’t completely betraying me, my mother seemed pensive that night. I dare say she seemed sad. I don’t remember my father being in our apartment, though he may well have been shut away in their bedroom. But he certainly wasn’t in that dark living room, the only light coming from our porch light when, sitting on one end of our sofa, she told us about what had once happened to her. I think she forgot we were there, me and my younger brother and baby sister. Maybe she was telling, aloud to herself, this incredible thing from her life, as if to reassure herself her existence wasn’t what it seemed. She had seen a ghost at 16, was married at 19, and had three children by the time she was 26. Her life was circumscribed by taking care of us, taking care of the house, and working a job. But this amazing thing had happened.

Then sometimes I think she knew we were listening, but didn’t mean to terrify us. She just wanted us to know our mother had seen things. That she had been a girl who once drove her bereft father on a busy freeway because her mother and older sister didn’t drive, drove him all the way out to LAX, where she’d never driven to before, palms sweating on the steering wheel, then drove all the way back to La Puente by herself, with probably not so much as a Thomas Brothers in the car to help her if she got lost, and did this and more—had lived with a ghost. That this is the story she meant to tell but couldn’t articulate. That she was brave. That she confronted mystery. This is what she couldn’t say—didn’t know how to say—but only that she had seen the newly dead at her bedroom door, and what does it mean, children? what does it mean?

 
 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to Villalon’s mother as having three children by the age of 24. She was 26 at that time.

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I remember so well the morning our medical examiner came into my office to tell me about the autopsy. He had just completed his post-mortem examination on a woman I had seen the previous day. She was a long-time patient of mine; I knew her well. She had come to me for “just another migraine”—her usual problem. Less than 24 hours later, she had died from bleeding into her brain.

This was among the most terrible events in my life, causing memories of that event to be very deeply etched. Even after 25 years, I can still describe her in fine detail, down to the dress she was wearing and her hairdo. No other patient remains so clear to me.

Stories like this aren’t rare. As a physician who studies patient safety and medical events gone wrong, I hear from strangers all over the world who share these deeply personal experiences with me. While the emergency department, operating rooms, and intensive care units probably face death the most, if my inbox is any indication, clinicians in all medical specialties have dark and painful encounters. The effects can linger for decades, lurking in the background of even successful and prestigious careers.

I’m an anesthesiologist, so I care for patients during some of the most high-stakes moments of their lives—birth, surgery, critical illness. I’ve seen injuries and diseases so severe that the best efforts of the best experts, even when perfectly executed, cannot fix them. I’ve also seen the most capable and caring healthcare professionals make mistakes—and I’m sure I’ve made my share. Witnessing death is hard on most people, but there is a perception that physicians are supposed to be immune. The psychological aftermath of painful cases is rarely discussed among doctors—at least, not publically. And that is putting both doctors and patients at risk.

More than likely, the death of the woman mentioned above could not have been prevented. Her diagnosis was extremely unlikely, especially considering headaches were “her usual.” Yet the doctor has been tormented for 25 years by feelings of responsibility and failure—that if somehow he’d only known, she’d be alive today.

This doctor is an example of a “second victim”—a term that historically has referred to a patient’s family and friends who experience deep and lasting grief, and now increasingly also refers to physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals who are devastated when someone they have been caring for dies. Studies have found that second victims’ symptoms are strongly similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder, which include unavoidable memories of trauma, nightmares, difficulty concentrating, self-doubt, and even suicidal thoughts. Although we don’t know with certainty how many doctors have these symptoms or for how long, we do know that a high number of them consider career changes after particularly traumatic events—and that doctors kill themselves at an estimated rate of at least twice that of the average American.

In spite of growing awareness, far too little is being done by hospitals and professional groups to support second victims. There’s a longstanding expectation in our culture that doctors should be able to “soldier on.” Clinicians feel intense pressure from their institutions, colleagues, and even themselves to suppress human reactions for fear of appearing weak and jeopardizing their professional reputations. As a result, both physicians and the public tend to endorse the idea that anyone who can’t take the heat isn’t cut out for medicine. “Bad things happen in medicine all the time,” one doctor said in a study I conducted a few years ago, “Just deal with it.”

This doctor has a point; physicians cannot crumble any time they are faced with a tough situation. But research is starting to show that specific types of cases may be indelibly traumatic. Some of the factors in these cases that seem to correlate most highly with severe second-victim symptoms are unsurprising, like death and gruesome injuries. But there are other factors, too, like if the patient was a child, pregnant, or a victim of crime, and the extent to which a bad outcome was expected or could have been prevented. As well, there is a very powerful and personal sense of responsibility, maybe coupled with a feeling of having failed at one’s life work, when something tragic happens to a patient.

Ignoring this problem may be jeopardizing not only doctors’ well-being, but their patients’, too. After the loss of a patient, as one physician wrote me, “it is not uncommon in medicine for doctors and nurses to be asked to immediately move on to new patient care, without time to regroup, without time to grieve with the patient’s family, without time to debrief with other team members, and sometimes with barely enough time to complete the paperwork.” One study found that nearly 70 percent of doctors surveyed felt their ability to provide safe care was compromised by poor concentration and clouded judgment for at least a few hours after a catastrophic event; about 22 percent said this lasted a week or more. Yet only 7 percent received any time off. This is alarming.

So far, studies haven’t been done that can definitively tell us patients actually are harmed by healthcare professionals who don’t get the right support after bad incidents. And we aren’t even entirely sure what the right support entails. But there has been more attention lately on the many factors that could diminish a physician’s ability. Newer regulations are in place to ensure doctors in training aren’t excessively fatigued (limiting work schedules to 80 hours per week) and that they are adequately supervised. Licensure and board certification standards are becoming more stringent, and now require periodic re-certification (compared to the earlier standard in which board certification was good for life). And, we are seeing increased concern about aging physicians who may be too old to be at their best. Given this, shouldn’t we worry about a physicians’ emotional and psychological well-being, too?

True, it is a hard problem to address. It would cost hospitals money to relieve clinicians from duty and provide support services. Not all clinicians would want the same kind of support, and many would not recognize or admit if they needed it. But doctors are humans, just like the rest of us. We should want them to have feelings, empathy, and an invested connection with their patients.

Not everyone shares the “soldier on” mentality. One doctor responded to our survey: “No death is easy, even when it is expected.” Given the choice between a physician who brushes off death and one who feels the pain of patients and their loved ones, I’ll always take the second option. And I hope our society will support that physician in grief, so they don’t work on patients when not at their best. My life—or yours—could depend on it.

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