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The Attic
(excerpted from the memoir Just Leave)

J. David

    Nov 8, 2022
    I’m sitting on an exam table in the Urgent Care in East Nashville telling a nurse why I’m here: My throat is sore, I have the sniffles, and my ear is throbbing. I disclose my only current medication (Escitalopram), and then for the first time in my life tell someone in the medical field who is not my primary care physician or my psychologist that I have chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
    “Ex-military?” he asks.
    “No.”
    “How’d you end up with it?”
    He looks at me. I’m looking at him the way I look at a student who has overstepped a boundary.
    “Unless you don’t want to tell me,” he adds.
    It’s more like I can’t really tell him in the few minutes we have before the doctor sees me. If we had a few hours together, I probably still couldn’t tell him.
    But ex-military. What a succinct way to tell anybody anything they think they need to know about how I ended up with PTSD. Therein lies the problem, though. PTSD is wedged into that peculiar space of understanding where people assume there’s only one authentic way a person can end up with it. The connections between military experience and PTSD aren’t simple threads so much as they are thick, insulated cables that casual observers like this nurse are unable to splice and attach to other legitimate causes of PTSD. A basic brochure from the National Institute of Mental Health would go a long way toward anybody, this nurse especially, expanding their understanding of who can end up with the affliction—for instance, a person who has a history of experiencing and witnessing domestic abuse.
    If we had the time, I could tell this nurse how my father was prone to flying off with the back of his hand at any accusation someone pinned on me without troubling himself to talk to me about whatever was said because he never believed in the best in me in the first place. Or if we had even more time I could talk about how my father repeatedly ridiculed me in front of friends and family, same as he did my mother, to the point where I was sure he didn’t even like us.
    Put together dozens of those episodes throughout a person’s childhood, add a mother who spent the last half of her life at the bottom of a bottle of Early Times, and you end up with someone who wishes he could say something as simple as, “Yes. I’m ex-military,” when a nurse asks a question he has no business asking.
    Or don’t put together dozens of those episodes. Consider but one that happened a few weeks before Christmas in 1985.
    I was in the attic helping my mother pull out boxes of holiday decorations. The attic was over the garage and separated from it by thick cardboard ceiling panels stapled to the bottom of joists. The attic side was safe so long as you stayed on the sheets of particle board nailed to the top of the joists.
    We stored everything up there from snow tires to window screens to off-season wardrobes; if not on the particle board, then directly on the exposed joists. The boxes we wanted sat on those exposed joists, and it was easy enough to grab them and slide them over to the particle board.
    We had barely started our task when my mother, bent at the knees and reaching, leaned too far, lost her balance, and fell. She somehow managed to twist herself around in the fall and wedge herself between joists. Her impact popped out a ceiling panel, which fell to the garage floor.
    She was stuck there for a few seconds, frozen. A confused look registered on her face. I stood on the particle board a few feet away, equally frozen and detached from what I was seeing, as if it was unfolding on a TV screen rather than in real life.
    I don’t remember either of us saying anything, only that I unfroze after a few seconds, grabbed my mother’s hand, and pulled her to safety.
    I don’t remember anything we said after that, and I don’t remember registering the thought that anybody who fell awkwardly through the ceiling like that, a mother or a father or a brother or a sister or even myself, would die when they collided with the cold cement fifteen feet below.
    I remember pulling the rest of the boxes out of the attic as my mother stood outside the attic door and received them. We took them downstairs, and the decorating began.
    My mother never stepped foot in the attic again.

*

    I didn’t think about that episode for twenty-four years. It was the holiday season, and I was several weeks into Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing treatments. A lot of raw and jagged memories had emerged throughout the process and continued to pour out at times if my mind was stuck wide-open, but I had taken my first cautious steps toward managing my PTSD.
    I was driving to school that morning, and the memory of the attic exploded in my mind. I had no idea, and still have no idea, what triggered it. I froze there in my car. My stomach flipped over and I tasted bile rising from my throat. My fight or flight instinct kicked in, and I began shaking as adrenaline followed.
    My mother almost died. I had saved her life. And without pause we went back to business as usual. My father arrived home an hour later and noticed the gaping hole in the garage ceiling and the cardboard panel leaning against the tool bench. When my mother explained what happened, he rolled his eyes. All he said to her was that it was a good thing her ass was so fat, or else she would have fallen all the way through.

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