The Return

Somehow, with all that had happened since Kandahar, I hadn’t made time to visit him during the past few years. I know he worried about my condition, but I hadn’t wanted to share with him the demons I was battling. Hell, it was hard enough to talk about my life with Dr. Bowen, and even though I knew my grandfather wouldn’t judge me, it felt easier to keep my distance. It crushed me that he was taken before I had the chance to really reconnect with him. To top it off, a local attorney contacted me right after the funeral to let me know that I’d inherited my grandfather’s property, so I found myself the owner of the very home where I’d spent so many formative summers as a kid. In the weeks following the funeral, I spent a lot of time reflecting on all the words I’d left unspoken to the man who had loved me so unconditionally.

My mind also kept returning to the odd things my grandfather had said to me on his deathbed, and I wondered why he’d been in Easley, South Carolina, in the first place. Did it have something to do with the bees? Was he visiting an old friend? Dating a woman? The questions continued to gnaw at me. I spoke to Dr. Bowen about it, and he suggested that I try to find the answers. The holidays passed without notice, and with the arrival of the new year I listed my condo with a realtor, thinking it might take a few months to sell. Lo and behold, I had an offer within days, and closed in February. Since I’d soon be moving to Baltimore for residency, it didn’t make sense to find a place to rent temporarily. I thought about my grandfather’s place in New Bern and figured, why not?

I could get out of Pensacola, maybe get the old place ready to sell. If I was lucky, I might even be able to figure out why my grandfather had been in Easley, and what on earth he’d been trying to tell me.

Which is how and why I found myself scattering mothballs outside his rattletrap old cabin.

* * *

I didn’t really have lemonade on the back porch. That’s how my grandfather used to refer to beer, and when I was little, one of the great thrills of my young life was getting him a lemonade from the icebox. Strangely, it always came in a bottle labeled Budweiser.

I prefer Yuengling, from America’s oldest brewery. When I attended the Naval Academy, an upperclassman named Ray Kowalski introduced me to it. He was from Pottsville, Pennsylvania—home of the Yuengling Brewery—and he convinced me there was no finer beer. Interestingly, Ray was also the son of a coal miner and last I heard, he was serving on the USS Hawaii, a nuclear submarine. I guess he learned from his dad that when you’re working, sunlight and fresh air are overrated.

I wonder what my mom and dad would have thought about my life these days. After all, I haven’t worked in more than two years. I’m pretty sure my dad would have been appalled; he was the kind of father who would sit me down for a lecture if I received an A− on an exam and was disappointed when I chose the Naval Academy over Georgetown, his alma mater, or Yale, where he’d received his law degree. He woke at five in the morning every day of the week, read both the Washington Post and the New York Times while having his coffee, then would head to DC, where he worked as a lobbyist for whatever company or industry group had hired him. A sharp mind and an aggressive negotiator, he lived to make a deal and could quote large sections of the tax code from memory. He was one of six partners who oversaw more than two hundred attorneys, and his walls were decorated with photographs of him with three different presidents, half a dozen senators, and too many congressmen to count.

My dad didn’t simply work; his hobby was work. He spent seventy hours a week at the office and golfed with clients and politicians on the weekends. Once a month, he hosted a cocktail party at our home, with still more clients and politicians. In the evenings, he often secluded himself in his office, where there was always a pressing phone call to make, a brief to be written, a plan to be made. The idea of him kicking back on the porch and having a beer in the middle of the afternoon on a workday would have struck him as absurd, something a slacker might do, but never a Benson. There was nothing worse than being a slacker, in my father’s eyes.

Though he wasn’t the nurturing type, he wasn’t a bad father. To be fair, my mother wasn’t exactly a cookie-baking, hands-on PTA member, either. A neurosurgeon trained at Johns Hopkins, she was frequently on call and was a good match for my father in her drive and passion for work. My grandfather always said she came out of the wrapper that way, belying her small-town background and the fact that neither of her parents went to college. But I never doubted her or my father’s love for me, even if we ate takeout for dinner every night and I attended more cocktail parties as a teenager than family camping trips.

In any case, my family was hardly unusual for Alexandria. Everyone at my elite private school had high-powered and prosperous parents, and the culture of excellence and career success filtered down to their children. Stellar grades were the norm, but even that wasn’t enough. Kids were also expected to excel at sports or music or both and be popular to boot. I’ll admit I got sucked into all of it; by the time I was in high school, I felt the need to be…just like them. I dated popular girls, finished second in my class, made all-state soccer in my junior and senior years, and was proficient on the piano. At the Naval Academy, I started on the soccer team all four years, double majored in chemistry and mathematics, and did well enough on my MCATs to be accepted to Johns Hopkins for medical school, making my mother proud.

Sadly, my parents weren’t around to watch me receive my diploma. The accident was something I don’t like to think about, nor do I like to tell others what happened. Most people don’t know what to say, conversation falters, and I’m usually left feeling even worse than had I said nothing about them at all.

Then again, I sometimes wondered whether I just hadn’t told the story to the right person, or if that person was even out there. Someone should be able to empathize, right? What I can say, however, is that I’ve come to accept that life never turns out quite like one expects.

Chapter 2

I know what you might be thinking: How can a guy who considered himself a mental and emotional basket case for the last two and a half years even think about becoming a psychiatrist? How can I help anyone if I’ve barely figured out my own life?

Good questions. As for the answers…hell, I didn’t know. Maybe I’d never be able to help anyone. What I did know was that my options were somewhat limited. Anything surgical was out—what with the partial blindness and missing fingers and all—and I wasn’t interested in either family practice or internal medicine.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss surgery, though. I missed the raw way my hands felt after scrubbing, and the sound of the gloves snapping in place; I loved repairing bones and ligaments and tendons and feeling like I always knew exactly what I was doing. There was a kid in Kandahar about twelve years old who’d shattered his kneecap falling off a roof a couple of years earlier, and the local physicians had botched the operation so badly that he could barely walk. I had to rebuild the knee from scratch and six months later, when he returned for a checkup, he jogged toward me. I liked the way it made me feel—that I’d fixed him, allowing him to lead a normal life—and wondered whether psychiatry would ever give me that same satisfaction.