Two unknown women, surviving

Still in Santa Fe:

Settled in (or out), protected from the wind behind S.’ house, I keep watching footage. I’d been taking in tragic stories for days. Women, primarily, who had abandoned their homes, their families, their jobs, in search of air they could reliably breathe. Or, the lucky ones, for whom everything crumbled only temporarily, flat on their backs with brain damage and heart trouble for months, but able, with money and support, to rebuild their lives by building themselves a home. Somehow, as closely as their experiences paralleled mine, literally or emotionally, I was able to keep my critical filmmaking distance. I wasn’t moved or shaken; I didn’t cry.

Then I came to Bonnie & Julie’s story: two young Jewish women with small children and husbands, with dark hair and dark eyes and familiar accents. Bonnie had first gotten ill lying on her brand-new carpet in her super-insulated house in Maine, playing with her newborn daughter. Julie’s son had been terrifyingly ill since babyhood -- his skin burst into bleeding sores, he had raging fevers and uncontrollable tantrums, screaming for six hours nonstop. These two women found each other in Sedona, Arizona, having both left their lives on the East coast for a climate that might give them some relief.

In the footage, the two families hold a seder, outside, with their children, against a vague background of suburban desert vegetation. Bonnie’s husband, a rabbi, leads the simple service. The children fidget, dutifully holding open their prayer books. They sing a song. The scene is badly shot, the camera spedns too much time with the father, then skitters by the children. But you don't have to see it clearly to imagine what's going on. I burst into tears at everyone’s innocence. Their effort to be a normal family was so simple and yet so immense, such a gigantic leap of faith and so unbearably fragile – like a crystal goblet teetering at the edge of a vast, rocky canyon.

For one day, they had stepped outside the circle of their besiegement. Outside the fact that their neighbors, irritated at too many requests to reduce their chemical lawn care, had deliberately begun spraying pesticides every week. Away from the boy’s delicate equilibrium so easy to unbalance that a bagel or a whiff of his grandmother’s perfume would send him into feverish, screaming fits. Leaving behind the tensions plaguing a marriage where one partner is often incapacitated by ordinary things. They had created a sacred circle, literally, and it protected them, for at least this single beautiful afternoon.

Despite it all, they had a family. Bonnie called her toddler daughter, just showing the first sign of chemical sensitivities, a ‘gift from God’. She had set up her infant’s crib on the lawn with her when she was forced to sleep outside. They were doing this all wrapped in the dynamics of a family. I was overwhelmed by that-- and heartsick. I was barely capable of dealing with this sickness alone. When I was sick, I only wanted to be by myself. Although I craved support, I couldn’t ask for it and wasn’t getting it. Relationships were strained and combative. How were they able sustain loving relationships—and keep the overwhelming loneliness at bay?