A GUIDE TO OPEN WATER LIFESAVING: Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir, by Virginia Eubanks
At several points in her candid account of caring for a partner who has PTSD, Virginia Eubanks mentions her frustration with similar memoirs that end in weddings. This is not one of those books.
And, in case you’re wondering, it wasn’t cathartic to write, as Eubanks tells us in her author’s note. The experience was more like free diving. “I took several enormous breaths and went under,” she writes, “following anchor lines as far as I could into the depths of the ocean, atmospheres of pressure squeezing my organs and bones, not always sure I had enough oxygen to make it back to the surface.”
Putting aside the fact that Eubanks manages to pull off a 384-page cold water plunge of a trauma narrative without referencing Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” this is exactly how I felt while reading “A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving.”
In October 2015, Eubanks was at a writing residency in the Adirondacks when she received an email from J., her partner of more than a decade, telling her he had been brutally attacked by strangers outside a deli near their home in Troy, N.Y. He later underwent a six-hour surgery to have his face reconstructed, an outpatient procedure resulting in a raft of caregiving instructions for Eubanks.
“Blood might come out of his eyes,” the nurses warned. If J. became nauseous, they said, “I should cut the wires holding his jaws together so that he wouldn’t aspirate on his own vomit.”
This was just the beginning. In a 2022 story for The New York Times Magazine, Eubanks chronicled much of the aftermath: The pair received an astronomical bill — $38,962.47 — for the surgery, despite having insurance. Unsurprisingly, J. suffered from debilitating, near-paralytic PTSD. He was attacked again two months later, verbally this time, by “a drunk who took issue with his gender-nonconforming clothing.”
He was turned away from an overcrowded psychiatric hospital for not being suicidal or homicidal; later he became both, the latter a fleeting impulse that terrified Eubanks. He lost his teaching job, and Eubanks — an investigative reporter as well as a political science professor at the University of Albany — struggled to complete writing projects while on leave from hers. Their relationship deteriorated.
But Eubanks couldn’t give up on J. even if she’d wanted to, waist-deep as she was in a swamp of paperwork, therapy, loyalty, history, misery and well-meaning but mostly useless advice. Particularly grating was the trope about putting on her own oxygen mask first.
“J. and I weren’t buckled up side by side, clutching hands, our eyes locked in a poignant gaze while we hurtled toward our entwined fate,” Eubanks writes. They were alone in a crumbling house with painkillers between the couch cushions and haunting echoes of music and meals they’d shared in happier times. There were no oxygen masks.
Here we see what Eubanks is made of, her bare-knuckle, bootstrapping determination to endure. She took classes in sea kayak navigation, winter survival, lifeguarding, wilderness first aid, mental health first aid. She interviewed forest rangers, bushwhackers and, during a stint at a Benedictine abbey, monks.
Eubanks took what she learned — untrained rescuers can compound a crisis; don’t let the emergency set the pace of your response; support is out there even when you can’t see it — and used it to navigate her relationship with J., which evolved into something different over time. She shares her lessons in a small-print appendix that merits boldface type, maybe even block letters.
Reading the hardcover version of the book, I was most interested in the human outcome: Would J. get better? Would Eubanks find a way to support him while staying healthy herself? But after listening to the audiobook, which is narrated authoritatively by Eubanks, I found myself thinking more about her outdoor exploration, the vastness of forest and sky. How would it feel to be able to fend for oneself in the wilderness? Why did it suddenly seem so important to her to learn?
It’s hard to know whether this memoir will land in the hands of exhausted caregivers, intrepid explorers or government officials who have the power to help the most vulnerable among us. It belongs with all three, although each might take issue with a different part. J.’s experience isn’t universal, of course, nor does Eubanks claim it is. Her expeditions are fairly modest, hardly the stuff of “Into Thin Air” or “Wild.” Her dreams of societal support might seem quixotic to those holding the purse strings (or choosing to spend the budget elsewhere).
But there’s an admirable rigor to Eubanks’s account. She really does dive into the wreck, applying the same level of scrutiny to her own impatience and peevishness as she does to J.’s suffering. In places where other memoirists might fade to black (sex, bureaucracy, scrubbing a maggot-infested compost container), she turns on her headlamp. The effect is profoundly moving.
When I was a teenager, I took a lifeguarding class in which I learned, alongside my future colleagues at a suburban pool, how to turn a pair of jeans into a flotation device. I remember laughing, puffing into a leg of wet Levi’s, wondering when I would ever need to know this technique.
Having inhaled, then metabolized, Eubanks’s stylish and informative book, I am reminded of the lesson I ignored back then: Sometimes you need to save yourself. Be prepared.
A GUIDE TO OPEN WATER LIFE SAVING: Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir | By Virginia Eubanks | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 365 pp. | $32
The post There Were No Oxygen Masks: On Caring for a Loved One With PTSD appeared first on New York Times.
