Life in Rewind. Terry Murphy Weible

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       Chapter 3 Time to Go Home

      Ed knew it was time to go home. He could no longer handle the stress of getting everything together academically to make the bid for Clemson, and he was consumed with worry that something bad would happen to his father if he stayed there any longer.

      When Ed returned home to Cape Cod, though, his father was angry that he had not been successful. It was devastating for Ed to have to admit to his dad, a man who’d spent time as a Marine during wartime, that he didn’t understand what was happening to him that made it impossible to continue.

      Bob doesn’t recall himself expressing or even feeling any such anger, however. In fact, he suggests that Ed was just on overdrive, setting himself up for disappointment by expecting too much. ‘I think he just overburdened himself by trying to do too much,’ remembers Bob. ‘Eddie went off the deep end.’

      Bob tried putting his son to work in the plumbing business with him, but the two fought vociferously during their drive to work together. ‘I would drive and when we’d get to the roundabouts, Eddie would say, “Dad, let me out here.”’ When Bob refused, Ed would start yelling, ‘Let me out. Let me out!’ Recalling that frustrating time, Bob says, ‘I wondered what the hell was wrong with him.’ Over time, as Ed’s condition got progressively worse, Bob says, ‘A short drive anywhere with Eddie could turn into a sixhour trip.’

      It’s not that Ed’s ‘quirks’ hadn’t been noticed on occasion by the rest of the family, but due to lack of understanding they’d been dismissed. By 1991, however, his symptoms, although still lacking an official diagnosis of OCD, were hard to ignore.

      Whenever the Zine family gathered together for holidays, or birthdays, they couldn’t help but notice Ed was becoming more and more withdrawn. But avoiding people, even the family he loved so very much, was the least painful way for him to deal with whatever strange affliction now tormented him. He struggled to hide his embarrassing ritual of having to walk backwards up and down the steps, and doing so multiple times until it felt right. So he would simply remain down in the basement until everyone left. Ed’s older sister Tami remembers watching in disbelief the first time she witnessed Ed walking up the stairs backwards when he didn’t think anyone was watching. She didn’t understand what she was seeing, but knew this signalled a much bigger problem than anyone had previously imagined. At this point, though, she kept it to herself, and simply hoped it would go away.

      The emotional pain of OCD isn’t limited to personal, internal obsessions unique to the sufferer. OCD sufferers often become inordinately concerned with external events. In Ed’s case, it was the Persian Gulf War. He listened to reports on television and became consumed with the fear that his brother, Tom, who was serving in the Army, would be called overseas-and killed. While this is a normal concern for any military family, the anxiety it triggered resulted in an exaggerated cycle of obsessive worrying, and a growing compulsion to keep ‘things’ in place-for Ed this resulted in a combination of ‘just right’ obsessions and hoarding-that began to erupt on a greater scale. If, for example, there was a hat sitting atop the television when he heard something on TV that inspired him to feel good-someone had won something, a life had been saved or a film had had an inspirational ending-the hat couldn’t be moved. It had to stay in that place, never to be moved, and as long as it did, nothing bad would happen to Tom.

      Contamination fears are probably the most well-known symptom of OCD, and can be triggered when an OCD sufferer encounters illness. For Ed, the obsession with germs fully manifested itself in September of 1993, when the TV movie And the Band Played On, a dramatic story about the evolution of the AIDS crisis, first aired.

      Ed acutely remembers this film, as well as an urban legend originating around the same time about a guy in New York City who wakes up after a one-night stand to find, written on his mirror in lipstick, the words, ‘Welcome to the AIDS club.’ This absurd, perverted horror story caused Ed to worry obsessively about contracting HIV. Ed’s OCD mind had equated sex with AIDS, and he began to fear sexual contact. While Ed had never been promiscuous, within a year OCD had turned his decision to practise abstinence until he found the girl he was going to marry into avoidance of all human contact.

      Increasingly, OCD altered Ed’s physical reality. Once, when a stranger accidentally bumped into him, he followed him a short distance and carefully manoeuvred a way to gently bump his arm back, without being noticed, so the event could be erased from his mind.

      As the manifestation of OCD symptoms increased, Ed became profoundly aware of the physical space around him. If anyone walked behind him, or parked a car behind his car, he would feel trapped-as if bound by an invisible rope that he couldn’t break-preventing him from rewinding his steps and actions so that he could properly ‘erase’ them in time. His older sister Tami recalls that when he rode in her car she would have to park in a place where no one could park behind her, so he would not get ‘trapped’.

      And so much as hearing the word ‘death’, or any variation of it, would instantly stunt his thought process and even his ability to move, sending him into a state of sheer panic. His heart would race, he’d get hot flushes, begin to sweat and even struggle to breathe. He’d suffer extreme flashbacks and would instantly be transported back to the night of his mother’s death, which would become as vivid to him as it when he was 11 years old. The only way he could logically and calmly process any variation of the word ‘death’, ‘dead’, or ‘die’ would be to spell them out, or ask others to spell them out, instead of verbalizing them. If someone unaware of this need unwittingly said one of these words, he’d have them repeat it, so it would be ‘erased’. Eventually he came up with a word that he could tolerate for death: ‘freath’.

      In January 1993, in spite of the mysterious and ever-increasing symptoms that plagued him, Ed loaded up his car-and his dog, Zeus-and with his father in the driver’s seat, made the 14-hour trip to South Carolina one last time. Ed was desperately unhappy trying to work in construction with his father and deal with the mix of intrusive thoughts, the counting and checking rituals, and the constant worry that plagued him. He hoped the incident at the path on campus had been a fluke and that a change in scenery would do him good. He hoped that being around Rudy and the guys, who had made him feel so welcome, and simply throwing the football around, could perhaps empower him again. Bob was at a total loss as to how to help his son find his way in life, and hoped that going back to Clemson would help.

      But the moment his father left and headed to the train station to go СКАЧАТЬ