Once I was back at Cal for my senior year, I was able to see a therapist at the student hospital as I had during the spring of my sophomore year. Since Dr. Camarer had committed suicide, I was assigned to a new psychiatrist, Dr. F.

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

It was several years after my death despair began that I first told my mother about it. I remember, as a teenager, sleeping downstairs on the sectional in the living room for a time rather than in my bedroom because I was afraid to be alone. When I asked my mother how people came to terms with death, she said when I was an adult, I would know.

Consequently, when I was twenty-two and officially an adult, the conviction took hold of me one day that I had to face my death despair—I couldn’t keep trying to ward it off. Dr. F thought that I was trying to punish myself for something, but I believe I was simply trying to prepare myself for adulthood—as I’d been doing from the time I tried to befriend Britte as a senior in high school. It was the reason I’d sought therapy in the first place, gone to Spain, and started voice lessons. I was trying to extricate myself from my dysfunctional family and prepare to be independent. Because I’d already experienced so much misery since sixth grade, I was determined to turn my life around. If only I were brave enough, I told myself, I could free myself from the depression and anxiety that hampered me. In particular, I imagined that this was the way to free myself as an artist.

So, by degrees, I tried to stay in the anguish longer and longer when it overwhelmed me. I began to go through the stages of a dying person that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross describes but that I didn’t read about until years later—denial, anger, depression, and finally acceptance. (I skipped “bargaining.”) I became so deeply depressed that if I’d been that depressed about anything else, I probably would have killed myself. It seemed to me that my denial of my mortality and my will to live were one and the same thing and that if I gave up the denial, I might actually die. I remember examining my body one evening as I soaked in a warm bath—arms, legs, hands, feet—and crying bitterly, knowing I would have to surrender it. Another day, riding on a bus, I remember saying good-bye to the sky and clouds and April trees, and going to bed that night utterly depleted, not expecting to wake up in the morning. I’d accepted the laws of nature, bowed to the inevitable…and stopped resisting, knowing that if I survived, my life would never be the same.

Then there came an hour when I could rest, finally, in the despair and no longer try to escape it. I didn’t reach any kind of equanimity about dying—only a cold, soul-numbing resignation. I emerged from this passage doubting that I would ever feel carefree or joyful again. Though I went through these stages over the course of many months, it was years before I completely recovered. Throughout my twenties I couldn’t undertake anything long-term because I no longer had the sense that I had any time.

The hour I described above would have happened soon after my twenty-third birthday. So it’s interesting to consider, all these years later, that my grandmother, Marie, also had to face death at age twenty-three, twelve days after giving birth to my father. Do I think there’s a connection? Probably.

From A Patchwork Memoir:

I started with two voice lessons a week, then went to three, then four. While jealous of the more advanced students, I felt a pugnacious competitiveness. “Just you wait,” I thought fiercely, “I’ll show you all.” Which I suppose I got from my mother; that was her attitude about going to college, in the face of her father’s opposition.

Mrs. Unruh didn’t want her beginning students to practice on their own. She felt they were liable to undo her good work. So after my lessons, still full of music, I did the only thing I was allowed to—whistle at the bus stop until my cheeks hurt. Unlike most students, I loved vocalizing and wasn’t at all impatient to get to the songs at the end of the lesson. I would have been content just to stick to my nee-nay-noo-no-nahs because as the months passed my range broadened and my voice became more supple and resonant, until it finally began to soar.

To get to Mrs. Unruh’s studio (only fifteen minutes by car, but I didn’t have one), I had to take three buses, a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip. I’d arrive late in the day after my university classes, tired, depleted—and sag on the piano bench.

Mrs. Unruh had her own way of developing a voice. She’d been a pianist and learned to train voices from her choral director husband; in the years before his death, they’d had a philharmonic chorus that had toured the country. Unlike other teachers, she didn’t stop and start you till—maybe—you got it a little better. Instead she played the piano fast and loud, forcing you to keep up while covering your bumbling attempts enough that you didn’t feel self-conscious. She had such a wonderful ear that, even above the din, she could hear where you were having problems—what needed fixing—and she would bark out instructions like “Relax your jaw!” and “More breath!” As the music swept me up, I would feel my tiredness and despondency fall away. I now believe I was inadvertently moving energy up through chakras, because I would eventually reach a state where I felt both wonderfully energized and deeply relaxed.

Though I was depressed at the time, I came away from each lesson feeling transformed, however briefly. Singing seemed to tap a spiritual wellspring inside of me. I felt when I sang that I became my voice, and because it was beautiful, I was beautiful. As my technique became more assured, I found singing not less but even more fulfilling than I’d ever imagined it could be.

I remember a day, shortly before I had to quit, when Mrs. Unruh ordered me up off the bench where we sat side by side and had me stand in the middle of the room. As I began, I heard an amazing volume of sound swell around me until it made the whole room throb, yet it felt so effortless, I had no sensation that it came from me at all—it seemed, instead, to issue from the walls.

A quote from Gone with the Wind has always stayed with me: Ashley says of Melanie at her death, “She was the only dream I ever had that didn’t die in the face of reality.” Singing was mine.

To say I was “heartbroken” after my friendship with Britte ended would be an understatement. “Annihilated” would be more apt. That’s the risk with a teacher-student relationship that becomes as deep as Britte’s and mine did. As in a therapist-patient or minister-parishioner relationship, there’s a power imbalance that renders the student/patient/parishioner vulnerable in the extreme. I’d felt unlovable until Britte took me under her wing—and it was only believing I was valued by her that had given me a sense of selfworth. She was the authority figure, after all. Not on an intellectual but an emotional level, her rejection reinforced my feeling of worthlessness, confirmation that I truly was unlovable.

Not knowing where to go after my friendship with Britte “destructed,” I went to my mother’s—but didn’t stay long. She and my brother had moved to El Cerrito during my time abroad. In the two years I’d lived away from home, they had reached an accommodation of each other, and I was the interloper whose presence disturbed the equilibrium of the household. As my mother once told me, she’d decided after the divorce that since she had nothing to give Doug and me emotionally, she would provide “services,” like doing our laundry and dropping us off at our friends houses’—a bargain my brother was happy to strike. He regarded our mother as crazy, he told me later, and didn’t want anything to do with her beyond these practical ministrations.

I, on the other hand, wanted to have a relationship with my mother. I’d felt an empathy for her from my childhood on and knew things about her my brother wasn’t interested in knowing. I wasn’t able to just write her off, and, unlike my brother, I felt anxious and guilty about being a burden to her.  

After Christmas of that year, I moved into a group house for several months, started back to school, and began voice lessons with Arlen’s teacher, Mrs. Unruh.