Project Rebirth (27 page)

New York is simply too full of triggers—every little thing in the apartment, the never-ending mail about recovery logistics and therapeutic opportunities from city agencies, Sergio's favorite corner store, the skyline's altered state. Tanya feels as if the city is conspiring to keep her in the dark.

So she escapes. Or more accurately, she returns to the place where she and Sergio first fell in love. Tanya buys an apartment in Miami in October of 2002. It is a place of only happy, buoyant memories, and otherwise, a sort of comforting anonymity. In New York, Tanya is the widow. In Miami, she can be the biker chick, the new age mystic, the beautiful, mysterious woman at the bar.

The bike gives her a healing outlet. Tanya explains: “I go to Miami and get on my motorcycle. It's euphoric. There's something about sunshine, wind in the hair, road, just vastness, nature, trees, that I find soothing. You go into such a zone. You become kind of one with the road. You let everything go. Free.”

Tanya's not just liberated when on her bike; she's a badass: “I feel strong when I'm on the bike, like I'm the shit. I got this 468-pound machine and I'm controlling it.” At a time when the sadness makes her feel weak and vulnerable, getting on the bike brings her back to her own undeniable strength.

As early as 2003, Tanya admits, “I have this fantasy that I'm going to get this whole new life someday.” She says this almost as if she were wishing to fly with her own two arms as wings, as if it is both a delicious and preposterous idea to her. Sergio, after all, was the love of her life. After losing him, there was a time when she felt as if she had lost her own one-and-only possible future, lost the opportunity to ever have a family, lost the capacity to love ever again. But the longer she is in Miami, riding her bike fast on the highways overlooking the ocean, meeting people who have never known her as Sergio's girl, letting time and quiet oxidize some of her acute pain away, she begins to let the possibility of a new life creep in.

One of the silver linings, however inadequate, of losing Sergio was a financial cushion. Though Tanya continued to run her store, Inner Peace, returning to Queens and all its triggers at least every couple of weeks, she was no longer totally dependent on the store revenue because of the money she received from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund following Sergio's death.

While the money helps Tanya make ends meet, she also spots an opportunity to finally give back to her mother, Eileen. Her mom adopted her, raised her and her three children while working two jobs, took care of her sick husband until his death, as well as taking care of friends and neighbors, and never complained. In 2004 and 2005, Tanya spends a lot of time and energy on purchasing and remodeling an apartment for Eileen, just ten blocks away from her own, in Miami. She makes sure that every last detail reflects her mother's tastes, needs, and unspoken desires.

It is an all-consuming project, taking her mind away from her mourning for hours at a time, providing her with the healing sensation of giving back rather than being stuck in her own funk. It's not that Tanya is done mourning, but that she is learning how to take breaks from it. Tanya describes this dynamic: “There's the half of me that's like I have to connect [to my grief], I have to be in it, but at the same time, I don't want to overwhelm myself. I want to be connected, but not to the point where it's choking me. I need to divert. I need to decompress.”

Tanya's instinctual wisdom is mirrored in scientific research. Dr. George Bonanno, who has studied thousands of people in mourning, writes, “It is that respite from the trench of sadness that makes grief bearable. It is the marvelous human capacity to squeeze in brief moments of happiness and joy that allows us to see that we may once again begin moving forward.”

Moving back and forth between Miami and New York isn't easy. Each time that Tanya returns to her and Sergio's apartment in Queens, she is confronted with a mountain of mail pertaining to 9/11, voice mail messages, all of the little logistics of the store. The reality of her loss sometimes stuns her all over again, the minute she walks through that apartment door.

She is essentially living a double life, but she gives herself permission. She knows that she needs it. When things get hard, she tells herself, “That chapter is finished, at least for this lifetime. Stay open. It will come. Get on your bike. Get through the days. Do what you have to do.”

Tanya rolls into a gas station on “Big Daddy” with her friend Debbie clinging to her back. They spot a group of guys on souped-up motorcycles. These guys are the real deal and Debbie jumps at the chance to spark a conversation: “It's hot, right? Two girls on a bike.”

The two groups end up chatting for a bit. Tanya mentions wanting to repaint the tank of her bike to honor her lost fiancé. She feels awkward inserting Sergio into conversations like these, but also obligated. The guilt she feels is ever present, particularly on days like these when she is deliberately leaving her widow identity behind and just trying to have some fun. She is comforted when she notices that one handsome guy's Harley Deuce has a firefighterangel emblem on his license plate.
He probably gets it,
she thinks.

The girls decide to join the guys as they ride toward Fort Lauderdale. It is a carefree day, just the kind that gives Tanya great relief. But eventually it's time to head home. The looker on the Harley Deuce, who Tanya learns is named Ray, offers to ride south with her.

Once they make it home, Tanya accepts Ray's invitation for lunch along Miami Beach's Lincoln Road. She has already started dating, but she struggles with how to talk with new guys about who she is and what she has experienced. Though Tanya's support group ended in 2004, the women all stay in touch and often discuss the difficulty of simply introducing themselves when meeting new people. With Ray, it all just comes pouring out. He responds with palpable empathy: “I can tell that you really loved him.”

The simplicity of it is stunning. “I did,” Tanya replies. “I really did.”

Having been through her own season of suffering, Tanya notices that she is able to connect more deeply to the suffering of others. “Losing Sergio was
the
experience that was my reality call,” she explains. “We all have this assumption: You do good things, good things happen. That's how we're all conditioned to live until the rug gets taken out from under you and you realize, wow, there's pain in life.”

Tanya has come to understand that pain is nondiscriminating, that the nearly unbearable level of loss she's weathered is not unique. Philosopher Judith Butler writes, “To grieve . . . is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.”

“Why me?” Tanya asks, but then follows: “Why not me? What makes me so special that I shouldn't be going through this? If this is for my soul's growth, let me try to be as productive as I can be.”

In 2005, she decides to take a trip to South America, during which she spends a transformative week volunteering at the village of San Pedro de Casta in the Andes. The poor village lies near the ancient Inca ruins of Marcahuasi, four hours from the city of Lima. The secluded farming community that Tanya finds there holds deep ties to the once flourishing empire, and yet now the villagers struggle to get basic necessities like running water and proper housing with ventilation. Tanya is shocked to learn about the high infant mortality rate, due mostly to carbon monoxide poisoning. She doesn't hesitate to get her hands dirty to help.

Marcahuasi, a mysterious site in Peru peppered with hundreds of gigantic stone sculptures, is believed by many to be one of the world's most spiritual places, and Tanya, ever open, feels a deep connection to the people and the land there. She teaches English to the village children.

Faced with the undeniable extent of the village children's hardship, Tanya realized that she had been living life with blinders on, preoccupied with wedding planning, and inventory for the store, and soccer games. She and Sergio had been happy-go-lucky. They were also, Tanya realizes, sometimes disconnected to the misfortune of others: “I don't ever want to get to the point where I am that oblivious to the world as I was before September 11th. This is what pain is, and people encounter this everywhere.”

Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton observed, “There is in all visible things . . . a hidden wholeness.” Tanya stood atop Machu Picchu, looking out at the breathtaking vista before her, and felt that hidden wholeness for the first time in years. It was her thirty-seventh birthday and she'd grown tired of the divided life. She'd come to Peru in search of some kind of wisdom about how to move forward, how to fuse her cleaved worlds together, and here, at eight thousand feet up, she'd actually gotten something like an answer.

It started as she was hiking up. She was sucking wind, really struggling to keep up with the rest of the tour group, and decided to call on her guardian angel.
Big Daddy, I need a sign that I can actually do this!
Just minutes later, a porter passed her wearing a Boca Juniors soccer jersey, the uniform of Sergio's beloved Argentinean soccer team. Tanya knew that he was with her.

As discussed earlier, psychologists historically pathologized when a person has a continued relationship with a dead loved one, but many contemporary experts in grief and healing actually see it as an adaptive, and potentially healthy, behavior. Bonanno himself admits to speaking to his dead father in an elevator. He writes, “Continuing bonds are more adaptive in a context where they are understood and culturally supported.”

In other words, talking to the dead might get one committed to an asylum in the United States but might be perfectly acceptable in Bangalore. It was fitting that Tanya was communicating with her long-lost Sergio in Peru, as the Incan people are believed to have had elaborate rituals of conversing with and honoring the dead. Spanish invaders recorded detailed accounts of opulently dressed mummies being offered the finest food and drink at ceremonies.