Not so alone...

I stepped into the bathroom of our little rental cottage to be alone for a quick moment and check-in with myself. I stuck out my tongue at the mirror, saw what I saw, and knew I was indeed NOT overreacting. I stepped back out into the living room and said as calmly as I could, “Erica, I don’t want you to panic, but we need to get me to a hospital.”

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We were in the Red House Area of Allegany State Park in far Western NY, staying in one of the cottages the park rents out. The weekend cross country ski trip was a Christmas gift I had gotten for me and Erica and it had been going pretty well up until that point. We had our two golden doodles with us, there was fresh snow, and we were both enjoying the feeling of being on a little getaway with no schedule and no responsibilities.

Erica and I don’t take enough of these small trips. It can be hard with 12 chickens, three dogs, and demanding jobs—but “hard” is not the same as “impossible.” And even just 36 hours away from home to catch a concert or take a hike or strap on some skis can go a long way toward recharging our batteries.

This trip was definitely doing that until I sampled one of the mixed chocolates we had picked up along with a few other groceries at the store in Salamanca the previous evening. Within seconds of biting into a chocolate cube with a large nut of some sort buried in the middle, I could feel my tongue starting to both ache and itch. It felt exactly like it had two years ago when I had an anaphylactic reaction to some pumpkin seeds a good friend of mine had ground up and used as the base for an-otherwise-delicious soup.

That particular night I had excused myself from the table, gotten in the car, and driven myself to the Emergency Room of the local hospital. That time, they took my vitals and instantly gave me some liquid Benadryl and some epinephrine. The meds worked, my tongue swelling stopped and then slowly reversed itself, and I went home a few hours later with a prescription for an EpiPen.

That very same EpiPen was now in the medicine cabinet of our first floor bathroom back in Ithaca—a three-hour drive away. Utterly useless. I had not packed it for our weekend getaway. In the time since that first anaphylactic reaction, I had gotten really good at spotting pumpkin seeds, aka pepitas, in all sorts of things. In fact, I was so good at recognizing the presence of pumpkin seeds that I got a bit cocky. I would never be dumb enough to eat those tasty little death nuggets again, right? Why would I need to pack the EpiPen?

The universe has a way of making you eat your words sometimes. And sometimes the way it tricks you into eating your words is by tempting you with chocolate. So in those early moments when I felt the reaction hitting at that cabin miles from help, I turned the box over and reread every ingredient on the list, confirming that pumpkin seeds were not part of the mix. But my tongue—and now my throat—were telling me something different.

In a matter of just two or three minutes we gathered car keys, wallets, cell phones, and dogs and got in the car to drive the snowy roads to the Park Police office that was ten minutes away.

As we drove I slipped into an old habit. I started talking to God, asking for things. I became very aware of the feeling of an audience in my head. It is a feeling I have had my entire life—probably going back to my earliest days as a young Catholic. 

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As a kid I took seriously the idea that God could see into my deepest heart of hearts and knew my fears, my desires, my motives, and my truest self even better than I did. I NEVER felt alone as a kid, even if I was alone. I always knew God was watching me. And judging me. You can imagine the guilt that built up over the years as I grew into an adolescent human being and then a teenage human being. Humans by our nature don’t always make the best choices. So whenever I would make some of those typical teenage bad choices about friends and alcohol and bullying and a million other things, I added another layer of guilt to the pile weighing on me.

By the time I was 25 I had decided that there is no all-powerful, all-knowing creator and that whoever it was I felt watching me was not going to come to some final judgment about my soul. Intellectually, I knew that the watcher was really just a being I created out of the internalized judgments of my family, my church, and my society. But still, it was hard to overcome 25 formative years of internalized guilt and self-loathing.

In fact, when I step back and really think about what has been the work of my adult life, it has been coming to peace with the knowledge that I really am alone. There is no being who sees into my heart. There is no cosmic judge I can look to for protection or for fairness. And there is no one who I need to satisfy but myself. 

I am alone. 

Every few years I come back to this epiphany, and each time it hits a little harder, drives a little deeper. There are still so many accumulated layers to get through to get back to the me that was me before I started drowning myself out with what everyone else said I should want and do and be like.

At the age of 58, I am finally starting to understand the repercussions of that awareness. So now, (when I am at my best), rather than running each impulse and thought and action through a sieve of God and family and society to see if it is acceptable, I can judge it for myself. Or—even better!—I can withhold judgment of it and just allow myself to feel it, whatever it is. That does not mean I am going to act on every impulse I have, but it does mean I will be more kind to myself and, in the process, I might even come to a better understanding of what is important to me and what I want out of life.

The most recent version of the epiphany came a few months ago when I was out for a longish Sunday run and I found myself on autopilot. After a few miles of the slow step-step-step on the small gravel of the Black Diamond Trail my mind was quiet and settling into a rhythm of its own. Rather than actively dictating what came into my brain, thoughts and feelings were rising up of their own accord. I like when this happens—it’s a sort of running meditation and it gives me clues as to what is below the surface, just waiting for a quiet space to float up into.

And what I heard that day was my actual internal voice telling me a truth that I needed to re-hear. “Hey—you know you’re alone, right? Remember?”

The tone was conversational, but the meaning was existential.

It was one sentence, but I knew what the voice was getting at. Loosely translated, I was telling myself (in a moment when I could truly hear it), “Remember? There is no God. And you get just the one life. You have wasted some (much?) of these 58 years caring far too much about external standards and ignoring yourself. If that’s okay with you, carry on. If not, you need to remind yourself every day—every hour, even—that you are alone. How you spend your minutes is up to you. Figure out what is bedrock important to you and do that. We only get the one life so, as RuPaul says, DON’T fuck it up.”

Since that day, I spend time every single day reminding myself that I am truly alone. And my life is mine to make of it what I will. Rather than being depressing, the daily reminder is both focusing and liberating. It helps me focus on what I want rather than spending so much energy putting myself through my people-pleasing gymnastics of trying to figure out what other people want me to be like. It frees me up to listen better to my own voice.

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So in that Park Police office in Allegany State Park, unable to swallow even a tiny Benadryl caplet because my tongue and throat were so swollen, I found myself talking to God. I was sitting in a chair, head down, eyes focused on the air a foot in front of my face, making myself breathe very deliberately through my nose as deeply as I could to pull the air in. My saliva couldn’t get down my throat, so it was backing up and out of my mouth and down my shirt until someone grabbed me a cup to spit in.

My blood pressure—usually around 130 over 80—was down to 80 over 40.

I was telling God that I didn’t want to die this way. I was asking God to make the ambulance get there sooner. But the only answer I heard back was my own voice saying “you are alone.”

And right at that moment Erica, who was with me the entire time, looked me in the eye and said, “They’re going to be here in just a couple of minutes. It’s going to be okay.” She must have been as scared as I was, but she was calm and certain and reassuring. I shook my head yes and went back to focusing on breathing one breath at a time. It was a very long fifteen minutes waiting for the EMTs, but once they got there, they got me on the gurney and into the ambulance and started a liquid Benadryl IV. Erica called me from inside the building before we even pulled away. I was able to tell her that the Benadryl was working and my tongue had stopped growing. My blood pressure was slowly climbing back to where it should be.

It was a slow drive to the hospital in Olean on snowy roads, but I could feel the meds working with each mile. By the time we got to the hospital I knew I wasn’t going to die. They kept me for observation for a couple of hours, the doctor on duty walking by every fifteen minutes to ask me to stick out my tongue. Each time I did it was closer to normal.

Erica got to the hospital as I was being discharged and we drove back to our rental cottage in the park. We talked a little, but it was a mostly quiet ride. I don’t know what Erica was thinking, but I was thinking about her and how she was there for me. She stayed calm, she reassured me, she was with me. In a thousand little ways she told me that I was not alone. And It struck me more deeply than it ever has before that she and I have been doing this for each other for almost 30 years now.

When we got back to the cottage, the dogs--Marj and Rosey--told me the very same thing—“you are not alone.” They were ecstatic in the way only dogs can be to see their people. Before going to bed I stepped into the bathroom to be alone for a moment. I stood at the mirror, stuck out my tongue for one more reassuring look, and then turned out the light and got into bed with Erica and Marj and Rosey---most definitely NOT alone.

(Editor’s note: we concluded later that it was a Brazil nut that caused the reaction.)