That’s my Story

One morning last April I walked on the shore and felt a big piece of myself snap back into place. Until then I hadn’t realized that I was beginning to come apart, although I should have.

A week or so before that day I’d lost my husband to a crushing weight of infection upon injury upon illness upon underlying chronic condition. M fought hard, for a long time. For eighteen months of almost constant hospitalizations he tried to beat his disability back one more time, as he had successfully done before. While he was thus engaged my life assumed a routine of work and worry, of hospital visits and attempts to carve out mental space for thought and analysis, of trying to keep as much of my uncertainty and anxiety as I could from infecting the world around me. I learned to see my life in terms of bad and less bad, not good and better. How are you doing? Not too bad (which was high praise). Such is the content of my inheritance, even now.

During the dark winter of 2006-2007 I began to think of myself as a set of constituent parts rather than a single individual. Some of the parts acquired names. One of them began to identify very strongly with the story of Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man, the guy who spent thirteen summers in Alaska living very close to grizzly bears, who claimed to know them and who was finally killed and eaten by one of them. Yeah, him. I constantly watched and re-watched Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man and, so far as I could, began to emulate Treadwell. I found myself starting to wear hiking boots when no hike or long walk in the snow was on the schedule, a habit I’d abandoned years before after observing that this wasn’t the done thing outside of a college environment. I began to dress in baggy post-grunge separates and to wear sunglasses at inappropriate times. I was, I am sure, conspicuous in my strange attire, but it didn’t matter. I was invisible. I wasn’t really there. I wasn’t really me.

Sometimes I try to figure out why it was the strange, even pathetic figure of Treadwell who captured my imagination so intensely. I think that it had something to do with the liminal quality of his life. As he is presented in Herzog’s film, Timothy Treadwell was a man in search of a story. He changed his name; he exchanged the Long Island accent he presumably grew up with for a flattened post-Valley timbre; he made up backstories for himself and experimented with his look. Eventually he found a cause and an identity through his seasons in Alaska camping among grizzlies: their protector, the self-described “kind warrior.” Even in this environment, a place which I imagine would have demanded an intense alertness and attention to surroundings, Treadwell continued to reach for self-definition. As captured by himself on film he was often very raw emotionally, crying over the indignities of the natural world and seeking to appease the creatures with whom he interacted even as he showed tremendous chutzpah in inserting himself into their world. Herzog shows him musing, filming himself as he strides through the brush, verbally honing the persona of Timothy Treadwell, the kind warrior. “That’s my story,” he would say. “That’s my story.”

Whatever truths actually lay behind his thicket of self-invention, Treadwell was desperate to replace them and fend them off with his imagined story. Last winter I needed a story. I had nothing. Weirdness aside, Treadwell got to experience one of my childhood fantasies, spending extended amounts of time living among bears. His story would do. The strange tale of Timothy Treadwell gave me some necessary insulation from my own environment and, eventually, an understanding of something M had unsuccessfully tried many times to explain to me—the need for a story of one’s own creation.

Now that he’s gone I have not yet reached what I am told is my eventual destination, the place where I will start to make sense of my life with him by patching it into a story. When I hear and read the stories his friends and family are creating as they undergo that process, their Ms are so different from the inchoate being of my memories that they could well be different people. What I was left with is the memory of that moment on the beach when Timothy Treadwell effortlessly departed from my sense of self, leaving behind as a gift an amazing sense of freedom and lightness, my own liminal moment. I got myself back with the chance to make a new start—for the moment, that’s my story.