Slipping Away

Lara is slipping away.

When I first met her she was confident, successful, and in great shape.

She pointed up a steep road in Crested Butte, CO: “Yes, I ran up there yesterday evening!”

We were at 10,000 feet, the air was so thin at that altitude I had almost blacked out carrying my luggage across the parking lot but she could actually jog there.

She had her own office and two people reporting to her. She had reports that were her sole responsibility to put out, and were widely read throughout the large financial services company she worked at. She had many, many friends she kept in touch with, and traveled often in the Northeast, jumping into her car at a moment’s notice and taking off, often without a map.

She showed up, unannounced, at my cubicle. She hadn’t called ahead; I was just about to leave. It was already dark, it was cold and rainy, a dreary end to a dreary November day. Outside cars whizzed along the narrow country roads.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked me.

“Where’s Jasper?” was all I could say. She had quit working when our son was born, and had never gone back to work even though he was now at school most of the day and we had no other children.

She told me he was at a friend’s house. I started to get my things together but she was gone. She wasn’t in the building, her car was in the parking lot but she wasn’t around.

I was about to drive home when away in the dark, far corner of the parking lot I saw a figure under a lamppost. It was her, huddled in a blanket from the back of her car.

She told me people were making a documentary about her life, without her permission. She knew this because she had seen cable TV trucks that day. We couldn’t talk at home because of the hidden cameras and microphones that were there. She had the desperate air of a hunted animal.

Her bubbly, outgoing personality charmed everyone. “She’s delightful!” proclaimed my aunt on first meeting her. We had over 100 people at our wedding, mostly her friends and family. She kept in close touch with all her old college buddies and roommates. She worked on a committee at church and various other non-profits, using her skill at charming people to be successful.

She has cut off almost all of her friends. She is no longer involved in the church or any other activity. She has stopped doing yoga and pretty much any exercising. She doesn’t answer the phone any more, or return emails. She doesn’t reach out to any of her extensive network of old friends, roommates or relatives.

For at least two years after he was born, Lara’s world revolved around Jasper. Now that he is in school full day he doesn’t need her every minute. Even so, he is normally the one thing that can get her to engage.

Jasper sat on the couch reading Calvin and Hobbes. His infectious little-boy laughter filled the downstairs with warmth; I had to walk in from the kitchen again and again to see what he was laughing at.

Three feet away, Lara sat wrapped in a blanket, staring off in the opposite direction, wrestling with her imaginary demons. She didn’t seem to notice Jasper at all.





“You want to tell me what’s REALLY going on, John?”

For roughly the millionth time in the last few weeks Lara had woken me up in the middle of the night. There she was again, standing a few feet away; angrily demanding I tell her what was going on.

Nothing was going on. No one called us anymore, no one emailed us. No one had come over for weeks, we hadn’t gone anywhere. How could anything possibly be “going on” when literally, nothing was happening?

“I guess everyone is just having one big ‘ha-ha’?”

Ha-ha? No one was laughing.