Good Reads: Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
My parents dealt with the devastation in very different ways. My dad buried himself in his work, grieving on the inside. My mom grieved on the outside, entering a depression that would cast a pall over the rest of her life. She was forty years old when Maura died. She had lost her only daughter. She would burst into tears over the smallest things. Some days she wouldn’t even get out of bed. Many times, she talked about escaping from the pain by ending her life. Until now, she had been a devoted Catholic, but after Maura got sick, she stopped going to church. I don’t know if she no longer believed or she was just too disillusioned with God to go through the motions. For my dad it was the reverse: his faith gave him strength, and he continued to go to church every Sunday. He dragged the rest of us along, but for my own part, I found it very hard to understand why God would do that to a ten-year-old girl.
In the coming months, my brothers and I learned to tiptoe around Mom’s sadness, always doing our best not to disturb her. Instinctively, we stopped saying Maura’s name around the house. We simply didn’t talk about her anymore; I think we were scared we’d set Mom off on another crying jag if we did. All of the pictures of our sister were taken down and put away. As much as everyone tried to hide from her absence, it was no good. We all knew what was missing from our home.
My parents started having horrible late-night fights. One by one, my brothers and I would come out of our bedrooms in our pajamas to sit at the top of the stairs and listen to our parents screaming at each other. The underlying theme was always Maura, each of them somehow blaming the other for her death. I knew my brothers were asking themselves the exact same question that I was: “Why didn’t God take one of us? Why did He have to take Maura, the only girl?” Sometimes my mom would throw plates at my dad, or at the wall, and we would hear the awful crash. At the top of the stairs, we would murmur to each other, “They’re going to get divorced.” We all thought that was the next disaster on the agenda.
But the fights always ended with both of them crying and my dad hugging my mom and trying console her. Somehow my parents kept their marriage together—in large part because there was my two-year-old brother Evan to take care of. But Mom and Dad were different people now. They were worn out, exhausted, and depressed.
After Maura’s death, I changed, too. I became very aggressive and started getting into fights at school. My grades went to hell. I had so much anger inside of me and I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling; I just knew that what had happened to Maura wasn’t fair and that I couldn’t make things right again. Everything I thought I knew for certain had been turned on its head. Our parents always told us that if we played by the rules we’d be okay. But it didn’t matter if you went to church and said your prayers and followed the rules—there were no guarantees and no safety. My sister had done everything right, and my parents had tried everything to save her, but it had all come down to a roll of the dice. So I vented my frustration any way I could.. I didn’t care anymore. About anything.
Eventually my parents started to notice and got worried. After being an A student, I was getting Ds and Fs. They yanked me out of my high school and stuck me in a strict, coat-and-tie boys’ prep school, the Belmont Hill School—one of the best on the East Coast—taking out loans to pay the fees. At my new school, I started channeling my anger and frustration into sports. I liked football the best because you were encouraged to hit people as hard as you wanted to and then actually get rewarded for it. My football helmet was covered with skull-and-crossbone stickers I had earned for bone-crushing hits. I was especially proud when another player had to be carried off the field thanks to me.
Outside of school, I started doing really stupid things and taking very big, very dumb risks. At fifteen I began sneaking out in my parents’ car; I didn’t have my license and had never even taken a driving lesson, but I started driving around town with my friends. I wanted to know what it felt like to have that freedom, to get behind the wheel and just go. I went water-skiing at night, feeling the sheer rush of moving through the darkness, like flying through space. I rode back from a Grateful Dead concert on the top of a pickup truck with a few friends, drunk, hanging on to a roof rack. I didn’t care that it was dangerous. What did it matter anymore?
I was always looking for the next adrenaline rush, the next experience that made me feel fully alive—because I knew I was lucky to be here at all. Life was temporary and nothing was guaranteed. If I could die tomorrow, I wanted to experience everything the world could offer me. I didn’t want to sleepwalk through life and wake up one day on my deathbed thinking, “Wait a minute, I missed out!” I wanted to suck every single drop out of life.
When I was sixteen, I sat down and wrote out my bucket list. At the top of the list was “jumping out of an airplane.” So at age sixteen, I and some friends made plans to go parachute jumping.
INSERT PHOTO: ParachuteJump
I can still remember standing at the door of the plane, half a mile up in the clouds, so scared I couldn’t speak. In those days, you jumped on your own (unlike today where you usually make your first jumps with a trainer), and when I finally took the leap into the void, it felt like suicide. I kissed the ground when I landed. I had never felt more alive.
Despite what had happened to with my sister, I was still a very lucky teenager. With the help of excellent teachers and great schoolmates at my prep school, I began to pull myself together. My mom had a lot to do with getting me back on track. Despite her depression, she cared a lot about us boys and helping us maintain focus. Whenever I fell short or got in trouble, my mom never hesitated to read me the riot act. I’ll never forget the lecture she gave me in freshman year of high school. She had just attended a parent night at school where she had learned that none of my teachers had seen me in weeks. One of them asked her how my “illness” was because I had told the school I had pneumonia. This was soon after my sister died and I had pretty much given up on everything. All I wanted to do was to play hooky and basketball every day with my loser friends.
As my dad quietly fumed, my mom lit into me.
She covered a lot of subjects that evening.
Character
She asked me what kind of man I wanted to be, telling me that even at a young age, I needed to start thinking about these things. That I would be judged by the people with whom I surrounded myself. She told me I was running with the wrong crowd—with losers and quitters without any ambition or integrity.
Perseverance or lack thereof
She told me Maura would be ashamed of me, too, for being a quitter, for giving up, for feeling sorry for myself because my sister had died and my family had changed forever. She told me I had better show more grit and toughness because life was not fair, and there would be plenty more disappointments and setbacks headed my way that I would never survive unless I changed.
Ambition
She asked me what I wanted out of life. I had been blessed with so much talent, brains, and opportunity, and I was throwing it all away. My life could be anything I wanted. I could do anything, live a life that was meaningful and worthy. But right now I was headed down a bad path. I needed to aim much higher.
Kindness
She was worried I was so angry and turning into a person without feelings. I didn’t care about other people. I was becoming cold.
My mom gave me a lot to think about that night, and in the coming years, she didn’t let up with the lectures. I loved her and didn’t want to disappoint her. Slowly, over time, my temper cooled down, and my grades went up. I changed my attitude. I started working as hard as I could at school, slowly inching my way back to being an A student again.
When it came time to choose a college, I had no idea where I wanted to go. But my mom really believed in me. She told me she wanted me to apply to Harvard. At first I found the idea totally laughable—I could never get into Harvard! I’d nearly flunked out of high school!
But Mom knew how to wave a red flag in front of a bull, and she lit a fire inside me. I decided to prove to myself I could do it. It helped that my dad had graduated from Harvard Law magna cum laude, and I had my sports record on my side: by now I was an All-League football player. It also helped that I’d started pole vaulting, entering competitions and channeling my focus into a sport that was based on pure determination and drive to get over whatever hurdle lay ahead of you. I loved the sport and became one of the best pole vaulters in New England. I met with the football coach at Harvard, the track coach, the admissions director—I got on their radar, and somehow, I got in.
After all the effort of getting into Harvard, my first semester did not go well. In fact, it was miserable. In high school, I had been a big fish in a very small pond. At Harvard, I wasn’t even in the middle of the pack; I was at the very bottom. Everyone else in my class was a National Merit Scholar or a concert violinist or an Olympic athlete. Academically, I was in way over my head. To make matters worse, three weeks after school started, my football career ended when the Harvard trainers discovered I had two broken vertebrae in my neck, mementoes from my skull-and-crossbones days. The neurosurgeon told me I was one tackle away from ending up in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
This was quite a blow. Football was the one thing I had going for me, and now it was gone.
After that, I stopped making an effort. I didn’t go to class and started acting out. That Thanksgiving, I came home from school and told my parents that I was quitting Harvard. My mom got up and went to the bathroom to throw up. My dad looked like he was going to chuck me out the window. My parents had just finished putting the Harvard stickers on their car, and now I was telling them I wasn’t going back. Quitting Harvard to do what? they asked incredulously.
I didn’t have any idea. I just wanted to get as far from Boston as possible. So I looked at a map, calculated that San Diego seemed pretty far, and chose that as my destination. By now, my parents had given up trying to dissuade me from leaving—but they did point out that I’d stand a better chance of getting a job in Los Angeles. I really didn’t care where I went, so long as it was someplace where nobody knew who I was, and where I wouldn’t ever have to see the disappointment on my parents’ faces. I just wanted to forget everything.
So I decided to move to L.A., a place I had never visited in my life.
I sold my only valuable possession—my stereo—to finance my move. After buying a one-way ticket I had $656 left to find an apartment, buy a motorcycle, and hopefully find a job before my money ran out. The night my dad drove me to the airport I was secretly hoping he might intervene and stop me from going—or at least give me some cash to get me started. As we stood outside the airport saying good-bye, he told me he wanted to give me something. Thank God, I thought, feeling very relieved. Dad took off his London Fog raincoat and handed it to me.
We hugged goodbye. After he left, I searched in every pocket of the raincoat, certain I’d find a check or some cash. But Dad was a proponent of tough love. The pockets were empty.
When I arrived in L.A., I knew I had to find a job, an apartment, and some means of transportation before my money ran out. I interviewed everywhere I could, from Disney to Capitol Records. But everyone said the same thing: without a college degree I’d have to start in the mailroom, and I should expect to be there for at least a year. I didn’t mind starting in the mailroom, but there was no way it was going to take me a year to work my way out. One year, no exceptions, they said. So I took the only job that didn’t start with a mailroom: I began working as a bank teller in Beverly Hills, at Crocker National Bank.
I was making a $159 a week—before taxes—depositing and cashing checks for some of the richest people in the world. Meanwhile, all I could afford on my salary was a sofa bed in a one-room studio in a seedy corner of Hollywood. After I paid my rent and bills—and bought a used Honda motorcycle for $350 so I could get to work—I had about $10 a day left over for food and gas. I was so broke that most days I couldn’t even afford a cheeseburger at McDonald’s.
Along with being broke, I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles. Without a social life, any friends, or any money, I had a lot of time on my hands. One particularly lonely evening, I was looking through the L.A. Times when I saw an advertisement:
VOLUNTEER CRISIS TELEPHONE COUNSELORS NEEDED
FOR LOS ANGELES SUICIDE PREVENTION CENTER
Following my mother’s instruction to “never resist a generous impulse,” I decided to give the center a call. After everything we had been through with Maura, the idea of helping out in a life-or-death situation had a kind of powerful appeal for me.
I started working the graveyard shift on Tuesday nights, from ten at night until four in the morning. I was a crisis telephone counselor, which meant I handled calls to the suicide hotline. The lines were busy twenty-four hours a day as there were always many more callers than there were counselors. As a CTC, our goal was to determine was quickly as possible whether the caller was “chronic” or “crisis.” A chronic caller was someone who was in very bad shape and had probably attempted or at least considered suicide before; for instance, someone with a long history of alcohol or drug abuse or a person with a mental issue or illness.
Chronic callers typically dialed in not because they were at that moment considering suicide but because they wanted a shoulder to cry on. The minute you determined the caller was chronic, you would refer them to another mental health resource and hang up as soon as possible to open up the line for a crisis caller. A crisis caller was someone who was seriously considering suicide for the first time in his or her life. If you could save a crisis caller, the chances were excellent this person would never consider suicide ever again.
When we identified someone who was in imminent danger of taking his or her life, we would do everything in our power to save this person: tracing the call, contacting relatives, sending in police, ambulances, firemen—you name it. This suicide center was the first suicide center in America and it took a very interventionist approach. Unlike some suicide counseling groups, we weren’t just listening on the other end of the line. It was about quickly taking action and saving lives. We didn’t always succeed but we always tried.
My first night at the center, I took a call from a woman who had drunk a lot of wine and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She told me she had a husband who beat her, and that she couldn’t take it anymore. I kept her on the line while my supervisor traced the call, got her address, and notified the police and paramedics. As the pills started to take effect, her speech slurred and she sounded drowsy. I could hear the thud as she fell off the chair and onto the floor of her kitchen. The phone landed right next to her so I could still hear her breathing. The next few minutes felt like hours. Her breathing slowed until I could barely discern it. Her life was in the balance. Then I heard the crashing noise as the police broke down her door, the sound of heavy footfalls, and a man’s voice speaking down the line: “It’s the police, we’ve got her. We’re bringing her to the hospital. She’ll be okay.” I was so relieved I nearly wept.
As I left the center early the next morning, my adrenaline was still pumping. For the first time since Maura died, I felt as if the world had been put to rights. I had helped saved someone’s life.
As strange as it sounds, I started to look forward to Tuesday nights. I took each call extremely seriously. I was proud of what I was doing. I worked at the center for almost a year. I learned a lot about the human experience during that time. I learned about people who were going through times of extreme sadness and desperation. Most of all, I learned to truly listen.
But despite the rewards of my volunteer work, after five months in L.A., I was ready to go home. I wrote to my parents, telling them I was ready to go back to Harvard. I was bored and miserable at my job with the bank. I was alone and broke, with no friends or social life. Working nine to five for $150 a week made a college degree seem more appealing than it ever had in the past.
My mom wrote back, dispensing more of her tough love:
Brian dear,
I just heard that you called Wednesday night. Sorry to miss you. Let’s hope you have settled down about your job miseries. I understand how frustrating it must be, but both dad and I feel strongly that it would be a mistake for you to leave. Harvard will inevitably feel that if you cannot tolerate an unpleasant situation for more than five months then you still have some growing up to do. They will use that against you; make no mistake about it. Lots of people are bored and dissatisfied with their work and look forward to a lifetime of quiet desperation. It will only be a year at most for you and we really hope that you will bite that particular bullet. You have chosen this situation, no one has inflicted it upon you, and you should not run away from it. There is no easy way out of this Brian. Please believe this . . .
It’s been raining all week. Dad’s been away and I keep looking at your Mother’s Day card, “I wish I were home,” so forgive my maudlin ways. I can’t help loving you and missing you.
Mom
As miserable as I was, I did as my parents instructed and waited out the year. And at the end of twelve months, I couldn’t wait to pack up my meager belongings in a trunk and stick it on a train to Boston. I was determined with every fiber of my being to get back into Harvard and get my life back on track.
But first, I was going to check off another item on my bucket list: riding a motorcycle cross-country.
INSERT PHOTO: motorcycle
My plan was to ride from California directly east to Florida and then up the entire east coast to Boston. I was nineteen years old, I had no helmet and no credit card, and there was just $195 in my pocket. I could only afford a motel room every third or fourth night. Other nights, once the sun went down, I rolled out my sleeping bag and slept on the side of the road.
One day, I was on the highway near Houston going seventy miles per hour in the middle of rush hour traffic, when my rear tire blew out and my bike started fishtailing wildly. The cars around me had to swerve to keep from hitting me and several went off the road. Somehow I managed to slow down and get over to the breakdown lane without being run over. Thankfully a Good Samaritan in a pickup truck who watched my near-death experience took pity on me and offered to take my bike and me to the nearest Harley-Davidson dealer.
After paying $25 for a new tire, I hit the road again, finally making it to New Orleans around midnight. I saw signs for Tulane University and figured a college campus would be a great place to find someplace safe to sleep. I was sitting on my bike in a parking lot trying to decide where to crash, when a Tulane campus police car came flying in right behind me with lights flashing. I sat on my bike motionless as two officers circled me. I was longhaired and disheveled from sleeping outside, sitting on a motorcycle with California plates decorated with all kinds of crazy bumper stickers that only a nineteen-year-old would appreciate. I guess they assumed I must be trouble.
“You trying to steal a car, kid?” one of them asked, thrusting a flashlight into my face.
“Why would I try to steal a car when I own this motorcycle?” I asked with probably a little bit too much confidence in my tone. Then I opened my big mouth again: “Why don’t you get some real police down here so we can—”
Before I could finish my brilliant suggestion, the cop with the flashlight punched me in the face as the other officer grabbed me from behind and they wrestled me to the ground and cuffed me. With my motorcycle knocked over and my stuff spilled all over the ground, they stuck me in their squad car and drove me down to the New Orleans central lockup. It was Halloween night and there were a record number of men in the holding cell. Luckily, my bloody lip and black eye helped keep everyone away from me.
At five in the morning, the cops let me post my $50 bail and leave. It took me an hour to find the parking lot, where my motorcycle was still lying on the ground. I picked it up, packed all my things, and rode out of New Orleans just as the sun was coming up. That $50 for bail meant I was down to one meal a day for the rest of the trip home.
Two weeks after leaving L.A., I finally arrived back in Boston. My parents were there waiting and I’d never been happier to see them in my life. Over my first good meal in weeks, I told them about my plan to get back into Harvard. They looked as relieved as I felt.
If you think getting into Harvard is hard, I can tell you getting in twice is much, much harder. I wrote letters. I begged. I pleaded. I met with my freshman dean and told him about what had happened to me over the past year, how hard I’d worked and how much I’d grown. He listened. I could tell he was impressed with my work at the Suicide Prevention Center.
Eventually, he offered me a deal. “Brian, we’d like you to see one of our psychiatrists at Harvard Medical School,” the dean told me. “If he says you’re ready to come back, you can come back.”
Even though I had worked with a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists at the suicide center, I had never been on the couch myself. I was a little nervous. My first time in my therapist’s office, I remember feeling relieved that he let me sit in a chair and that I wouldn’t have to lie down!
Once a week, over the next two months, I told him everything. I told him about Maura, and about my parents, about what had happened to our family. I told him about my anger issues, about jumping out of a plane, about trying to save people from killing themselves every Tuesday night, about riding a motorcycle across the country without a helmet. Once our two months were up, I asked him to please write me a letter saying I was ready to go back to Harvard.
“Brian,” he said, “you are ready to come back to Harvard.”
Thank goodness, I thought.
But he wasn’t done.
“Regardless of the letter, I strongly recommend that we keep seeing each other. You have a lot of issues. We’ve barely scratched the surface and we have a lot more work to do. How can I put this? You’re not normal.”
The therapist meant I needed fixing, rehabilitation, that I needed to fit in. But I didn’t want to be normal. To me, being described as “not normal” was a compliment!
“Thank you!” I told him. “I’m happy being this way. I don’t want to be normal. I know I’ve made some big mistakes and poor choices. But I think I’ve learned from them. And I don’t want to come back for any more sessions.”
Despite my decision not to continue with therapy, the doctor sent his recommendation letter to the admissions office, and that fall I returned to Harvard.
INSERT PHOTO: HarvardIDCard
GoodReads: buy Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
