Once, covering a war on an assignment for the New York Times Magazine, I stood inside a house whose face had been sheared off by a thousand-pound bomb. A structure of delicate red brick that did interesting things with the light, now less a house than a skull. We climbed through it, an interpreter and I, inviting ourselves in. A kitchen, a bathroom, a living area, no family photos. A blanket covered in rubble, where a husband and wife and some number of children had just sat down to dinner when the ceiling was peeled back by a warhead invented in Texas. 

The interpreter saw my eyes catch the blanket, and he gave a little smile. He said something dark and funny, and he and I became bonded in a contract. As if we’d just agreed: so this is the way we’ll cope, being inside a sudden tomb. 

But he tried to chew the smile down, and his expression shifted in a meaningful way. A flicker of self-amusement moved down his face, and then this strange thing happened: For an instant, standing inside the half-house, I saw my mother, then my grandfather, then my interpreter again. Perhaps I was having a flash hallucination, my mind jagged by violence and jetlag, or perhaps some aspect in the eyes they all happened to share, this person I’d only just met and members of my own family. Something mathematical, some coincidence in a ratio of tendon stretched over bone, similar ridgepoles of sinew and skin that make up a face. Maybe a Joni Mitchell “we are stardust” kind of thing, a buried genetic relic, some falling grain a billion years ago sucked up into gene sequences to bang against code and beacon some silent chain reaction in early animals, flashing now as matching choreography on faces continents apart. Or maybe something more troubling was happening in me. 

*

There was a girl I’d been with just before I’d left for that war, a few drunken nights and then she told me she’d lost a sibling to suicide. For a year afterward, she said, she kept seeing this dead sibling everywhere. “How strange,” I’d said, but she said no, it actually wasn’t strange at all. She’d studied this. She said when loved ones vault away from you too fast, they often return. You see them, holograms of them; sometimes you see them in people full of color and blood. A stranger blowing on a cup of coffee across a chattering café, a stranger in a store window you’re hurrying past. The familiar corner of a person turning away. There are shamans who explain it as the departed coming back to the present realm, borrowing a body to check on you. Scientists and psychiatrists and the more ardent explainers call it a trick of the mind, a projection. It’s you, bringing your loved one back, so you can add something to your goodbye, or maybe say one you never got the chance to. The mind is a lonely inventor, they explain, cabined away and building itself a robot companion, and that too was a theory I considered for why on strangers’ faces, in warzones, I’d started to see members of my own family, before I knew they were leaving. 

*

I must have already seen things by then. In my mother, symptoms that mostly camouflaged themselves against a history of messy desks and a capacity for rapid anger. She was fighting it, she could fake it, at least to me, at least for a while. Before we learned that the front two lobes of her brain had decayed so quickly and so severely that when a doctor finally saw it—territory marked in troubling colors—he just shook his head. “Devastating” was all he could say, and that would turn out to be as good a diagnosis as any. An early, aggressive Alzheimer’s, or perhaps FTD, maybe DLB, PD, a grab bag of bad acronyms—all we knew for certain was that her mind was in the process of disconnecting itself, and we wouldn’t know the precise cause, not until the autopsy.

We would begin a process of simplifying my mother. She’d once been the fissioning orb at the center of the party, a relentless weapon of thrillingly over-the-line jokes. Now we paid a neighbor to be her friend. We down-converted her into an assembly line item that could be wheeled through halogen rooms and pistoned in and out of clanking machines, and it was in that same eerie season that her father—my grandfather—a picture of health and a lock to reach ninety, gave in. He fell one night in his Florida apartment and decided to stay there. A diagonal man filling up the home office floor, dying a week later of we’re still not sure what. Of having decided life was alright but he didn’t really need any more of it, though he held on for an extra day or two because he was worried about abandoning his wife. We agreed to keep it from her. My sunlit grandmother, charming the staff at her memory care facility. I went across West Florida as Pop winced through his last hours, eyes clenched but alive for now. My grandmother seemed unbothered when I stood by her bed and told her she couldn’t see her husband of seven decades because he was on a business trip. She smiled, went into congestive heart failure, and then she was gone too. Another grandfather died too, then an uncle. People were simply dying. 

These things were in process, and I suppose I must have known, as I stood in a faraway warzone staring at this smiling figure in traditional head covering, a young man whose face had, for a second, turned into my mother’s, my grandfather’s. Already, they were trying to tell me something, from the other side of the world. 

That, or I was trying to say something to myself.

*

It was soon after I returned from that war that we decided it was no longer safe for my mother to be at home. My older sister, Margot, found a facility that seemed bright and nice enough, and we told mom she was going to a spa, a nice place to eat well and get her weight back up. We didn’t tell her she would probably never leave.

My younger sister, Jenna, joined Margot in the car that day, two spies aligning a cover story, everyone going to get their nails done, or something like that. The three of them singing Simon and Garfunkel on their short commute to Mom’s new life, Margot and Jenna alternating breaks, pretending to forget the lyrics because if my mother heard them crying, the cover would be blown. 

We thought we were prepared. We’d gone through storage units and the basement and garage, we pulled out furniture that my mother would see and realize was hers, as a way to ease her into her new life, but the facility’s Helpful People shook their heads. Don’t use furniture she might recognize, they said. She was going to a foreign place now. It was going to be strange for her, but it’d be stranger if there were flecks of remembered life. A clean break was best, this was a relinquishing. Let her fly across this ocean untethered,  without holding on too tight. 

We collected happy family photos for her bedside table, so that every morning she’d see the people who loved her, for as long as she recognized us. And so that once she no longer could, we’d at least when she woke up in the morning and turned over, the strangers she saw in the picture frames would be smiling.  

And then we kept almost all the photos from her. This was supposed to be a spa. Wouldn’t it be confusing if you went to a spa and saw photos of your family? Only later, once she’d absorbed a sense of routine, comfort—only when she’d resigned herself to the fact that this was home could we bring fragments of her old home to her. 

That first day, my sisters went into the memory care unit with her, the decor at first cooperating with the ruse: A fake French café, a theater with antique movie posters promising simple pin-up sexism, the nostalgia of an era before my mother’s. A bar with fruit juice in wine bottles, a post office. Everything casino-chic, but too clean, streamlined and sanitized. A salon. 

And when it was time to leave the facility, and to leave my mother inside, my two sisters, advised to calibrate their goodbyes more for a long weekend than forever, were mostly stoic. Jenna said, “Mom, isn’t this place kind of like a lodge in Montana?!” Mom hugged her, but muttered something a little off.  Jenna heard “I’m really open to this.” As if Mom might know what was going on, as if maybe, behind whatever fog she was seeing through, she wanted to comfort us. “I’m open to the experience.” 

But when she turned toward Margot, Mom’s tone had changed entirely. “I’m really scared.” Margot was knocked off-center and tried to recover. “It’s going to be OK,” Margot said. “These people are going to help you get better.” But this was a thing you don’t get better from. Margot and Jenna stepped back across the threshold, smiled, cocked their heads, and waved. 

The doors swung closed, an electric lock hummed, a bolt slid into place. 

My mother must have wondered what kind of spa had locking doors. Or maybe she knew.

*

I thought I was managing just fine for a while. I was tending helpfully to a family crisis. I was home from war, maybe for good. I’d spent much of the last two decades sifting through shattered cities, and the cloak of a celebrated profession was beginning to wear thin. I liked to think of myself as a link between worlds, helping the one I came from understand the ones I went to, helping hemispheres connect, two worlds communicate, finding the food or word in one country that corresponded to one in the other. I liked the idea of “correspondent.” There were other things I liked. I liked the rush, the danger, the creativity and reinvention of it all, the rebel-territory chess game to get over borders and behind enemy lines. The middle-managing on steroids, middle-managing with guns and sometimes drugs and always language barriers to add a challenge. I sometimes felt I was doing honorable work, I always felt I was doing hard work.

But more and more, my trips to warzones felt like strip-mining, as if other people’s sudden pain was a mineral wealth I was after. I went to flammable places and pickaxed the soft parts of minds, looking for specks of value. Now, for once, I would mind my own business; it was time to be there for the family I’d frightened and done little before to support; time to help with my own family’s trauma and leave other people’s wars alone for a change. But there was one war that wouldn’t leave me alone.  

*

We’d just locked my mother away, when, out in the world, the American president announced the end of America’s longest war. In a few months, he said, by the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that had first drawn American troops into Afghanistan, the last of them would finally leave, and the country would be on its own. 

I knew what that might mean. I’d written a book about people preparing for the day the troops left, but I still didn’t fully believe they would. Afghanistan was the first warzone I’d set foot in, my deepest cut. The place I had friends so close I couldn’t really call them anything other than family, perhaps my fucked-up vision of a second home. And the people in Afghanistan I was closest to happened to be the ones who were now in the most trouble. A teacher, Aziz, who started a school in a slum. Aziz had come to America with me once, and stayed in my parents’ house. He’d started calling me “My Jeff,” sometimes used the suffix Agha for me—”father”—though he was my senior in every relevant way. Until he saw The Hunger Games, after which I became “my drunk Haymitch” because Aziz himself was “Katniss, in the Arena.” Aziz had become like a father figure to me, or something between that and brother, so I sometimes forgot why he was so visible to so many others: The school he built was almost aggressively coeducational. They had art classes and a radio station, a singing group and a television channel. He’d spent twenty years pushing girls to yell and dance and sing, to do martial arts in public and broadcast their faces. He publicly aligned the school with the American mission, and he ridiculed Taliban ideology on talk shows. All of it despite the fact—maybe because of the fact—that he and nearly all the students belonged to a despised ethnic minority, and that they were Shia, a sect of Islam that conservative Taliban Sunnism considers apostate, worse than Christians, worse than Jews. 

My mother loved him, she was moved by him. She got a hold of a photo of students at his school, blew it up to poster size, and hung it in the living room. And now Aziz was in the crosshairs. If US troops actually pulled out, it’d be up to Afghanistan’s own shaky security forces to keep the Taliban from taking over. 

Those were not great odds. 

And if the Taliban took over, Aziz and his family would be first in line for retribution. 

As my American family crumbled under a different kind of rubble, I threw myself into the project of trying to find Aziz a safe landing place in America or Europe. It was not selfless; I didn’t think it was humanitarian. It was perhaps a useful diversion, but it was also a maybe biological drive, the survival of a man I loved. I threw myself into trying to get him out. 

*

Again and again, we locked my mother in. Taking her out on walks, locking her back in. Taking her to the mall, which she used to despise, but was now ecstatic for, locking her back in. Browsing the aisles of Michaels, to the rhythm of lapping conversations about how often to water plastic plants, locking her back in.

We expected, each visit, that this time would be the detonation. This would be the time she refused to go back without a fight. This would be the scene,  a pulsing alarm, her body thrashing on a gurney, hustling orderlies with syringes and wrist restraints. 

But each time she just hovered on the other side of the threshold, waving, while the doors closed and sealed her in. Each time peaceful; each time resigned. 

We found ourselves wishing she would detonate. Put her shoulder down, charge through, pull a runner so we’d at least recognize her. The facility had a word for that—”eloping”—I guess because “escaping” made it sound too much like prison, but she never once tried. And when our visits with her ended and we left, she let the curtain drop on her life, fade to black, without a fight. 

There would be crises later. She spent hours in front of the TV without knowing that she was watching the same episode of the same show on a loop, so much time sitting that her hips inflamed and ratcheted her body down into a hardened arc. 

She threw things. She beat her chest. She yelled. She spat at people, and we found bruises on her arms. Meds were adjusted. Doubled, tripled, halved. She calmed down. She became her sweetest self, which wasn’t entirely herself, or hadn’t been for a while. Each time we visited, each time we said goodbye, she met our eyes and smiled, as the swinging doors shut, the electric lock hummed, a bolt slid into place. We went outside and wept.

All of us did, each time, except for me. For me grief came in strange ways, waves, and didn’t identify itself on arrival. It came first as weaponized memory. Sharpened nostalgia, weighted slate arrowheads coming from nowhere and striking my diaphragm, a catch in my breath, but mostly I was protected. By my mother’s flaws, which had for a time risen to the level of caricature because of what was going on in her brain. Her anger had become cartoonish, child-like and dismissible. I was protected also by the gravel of her past, deposited in our laps like sediment from a receding flood, as we sifted through her emails and shelves of letters, and her secrets stopped being secrets. I found all the flaws I needed, her wanderings and trespasses. I built a precision-tooled view of her life, proof pulled from private letters for the case I was assembling against her. This was a neat way to see it, that all my pain came from things she did to me, and therefore she was a guilty party, not a victim. She was the beggar easily ignored for surely having sinned to earn her station, easier to deal with than the idea that bad and permanent things happen to good people. The weaker she became the easier it was to dislike her. To hate her even, because she deserved what she was getting. 

And I was protected, perhaps most of all, by the demands of a task at hand. Troops were now leaving Afghanistan, embassies were closing. My mind was occupied. I was having long conversations with asylum attorneys, and with people who managed networks built for threatened scholars. I was writing to universities and think tanks that might like having Aziz in the building. A small team of Aziz’s friends around the world was forming, trying to find ways of spiriting him out of the country before the last of the troops left. Congresspeople assigned us their most nimble aides, I was speaking to retired ambassadors and current ambassadors, to baronesses, lords, and speakers of various houses. A conspiracy of powerful people who all wanted to help this one family exit, but few universities knew how to get visas from countries that no longer had functioning embassies. There was no playbook for this.

Things kept getting worse, and the project of finding Aziz job opportunities in the West “just in case,” became a more urgent push to get him out of his country before it was too late. More foreign workers left. Foreign aid organizations operating there shut down. Doors were beginning to close. 

My weeks spent finding polite ways to ask favors of friends and elders funneled into a sleepless week directing an action-movie extraction. Coordinating a series of hidden trips across Kabul for a family that at some point had shifted from people I loved to chess pieces; I was no longer a brother/son but a middle manager trying to decode incentives, putting employees in positions to maximize outcomes according to strengths and weaknesses. 

And somehow, miraculously, a manic-sounding plan I’d devised in the middle of the night actually worked. An operation that involved retired generals, active-duty generals, intelligence assets, a team of Marines and a sympathetic Talib. I was moving at light speed by then, I couldn’t remember how I knew all these people, or, more to the point, how I’d convinced them to pay attention to me. But they did, they were, and the moment we learned Aziz and his family had made it safely into the Kabul airport compound, where they’d soon board a cargo plane to safety, the impromptu team following along live on Zoom letting out a whoop, a shared flood of pent-up emotion. Too blinkered to cry, but we watched each other on the computer screen saying “Oh My God, oh My God,” the part of the film where the credits begin to roll, and then a coda shows the leads on a beach clinking neon drinks with large garnishes appropriate for their accomplishment.

But this was not the end. The crisis had abated only momentarily, and only for one family. 

I was receiving messages from Afghanistan on every single social media channel I had an account on. Everyone was desperate to get out, or to get someone they knew out. I’d written one book about Afghanistan that barely registered, and now it felt as though everyone in the country knew who I was and knew how to reach me. The mission continued. After three months trying to get Aziz out, we took fifteen minutes to bask. Before the sun came up, we were already talking about what we owed the rest of the school, now that we’d helped deprive it of a leader. 

We surged forward with wild, sleep-deprived plans. We negotiated the purchase of a bank-repo military transport plane. We’d hire a crew to duck in under the radar, land under cover of darkness in a field outside of Kabul, and pick up a group of at-risk girls. 

The plan fell through. We were promised entry for a few dozen girls via bus to the Kabul airport gate one morning, only to call it off at the last minute, and then negotiated complex feelings when a bomb detonated at the crowded airport gate right where the bus would have passed, killing almost two hundred people, but not our girls. 

We chartered a plane from a businessman we half-trusted to fly out of a smaller city. We played God, picking favorites for the limited seats, and made the people we’d chosen promise not to tell anyone they were going, not even their families. We sent them north by road, through dozens of Taliban checkpoints, only to find we couldn’t get them into that airport either, and sent  them back through dozens of checkpoints, back to Kabul to work things out with the families we’d made them abandon.

Nothing worked. My energy faded. Everything aggravated me. I flung dirty looks at people talking too loudly or too quietly. I felt murderous toward people scraping their chairs back from tables. Unclear text messages were crimes against humanity. My reservoir of adrenaline flagged, or it had long since flagged and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. The Impromptu Team simply didn’t stop. I grew more easily disoriented. I was having a hard time keeping up with which list of girls was supposed to go to what potential savior. I made mistakes that filtered upstream and became mistakes made by important people who were doing us favors. I was angry and tired. Why should this be my job? I was resentful of other members of the Impromptu Team for continuing to put so much time into this; I desperately needed other members of the Impromptu Team to continue putting so much time into it. I desperately needed to be free of them, I desperately needed to feel a part of them. I was in love with this effort and being poisoned by it. I messed up more spreadsheets. I confused names, and sent the wrong lists to people. I couldn’t keep it all straight. The need was endless. The girls were stuck. People heard I’d helped Aziz, and more requests came in, but almost nothing from our one successful mission was relevant anymore. Afghanistan was no longer solid land; it was a constantly shifting ocean, changing so quickly that a helpful contact from a moment ago was now irrelevant and miles away from any possible doorway. 

*

And it was around that time, as I was beginning to split apart, that I realized I was missing my mother’s last lucid months. I flew to Philadelphia to be closer to her, but I never saw her. She was disappearing, dormant and confined in her confusing new home. In the last moments when my mother was my mother, I abandoned her. I slipped out from under a family burden and let it crush down on my father, my sisters, while I distracted myself trying to evacuate Afghans. Then I realized what I’d done and tried to return, backing out of evacuation efforts and letting that burden crush down on teammates. 

I let everyone down everywhere. I couldn’t decide where to aim my flagging attention. The pressure to choose right was massive, existential, because a new sense was settling in, a feeling, an obsession, that time was running out. Time to reconcile with my mother, time to be with a family that was crashing through the atmosphere and breaking up. Time to get Afghans to safety, time to hit rapidly approaching book deadlines that now felt both frivolous and like the last bastion of self. 

I fell behind on professional responsibilities while working on the evacuations, I fell behind on the evacuations while trying to make progress on the professional responsibilities. Messages from Taliban-occupied Afghanistan came in on every single messaging platform, the phone in my pocket a fuel rod flinging off all the unhelpful isotopes, a block of poison that went everywhere with me. When I came back to evacuations, to the daily calls and constant messages, I was nearly useless. Everyone was working hard now to help a group of 450 girls stuck in limbo. My teammates were giving up progress on their own professional obligations and on time with their families. Why did I deserve to be an exception? I weakened more. I was beginning to seize up, the propeller slowing. A blackened engine sputtering, coughing up the last of its life and flaming out. 

And then I went into a tailspin.

*

I couldn’t remember names; I couldn’t remember tasks. Three words into a sentence, I couldn’t remember why I’d started talking. My ability to function around people ground to a halt, took extraordinary effort, moving a boulder out of the way just to muster some grunt of a hello. Matching the blasting steam engine in my head with the movement of air through my diaphragm and the flexing of an embouchure—having a conversation—required impossible coordination, it was landing a triple axel during a hurricane. How had I ever done it?

I couldn’t muster the effort to speak; I couldn’t bear silence. I wanted to be left alone; I needed attention. The thought of doing anything—eating, dressing, moving, sleeping, waking—made me physically ill and sent panic through my limbs, wild electricity in my elbows and fingers. The thought of sitting still did too. I was put on new meds, my new meds were adjusted, doubled, tripled, halved. I calmed down, but it was an illusion, a circadian lull, and then the flames came back. 

My father had me make cocktails. He said they were really good, asked me to have one, asked me to have two, asked me to stop drinking. I wandered onto the roof of his house, then the roof of my apartment, which was three floors up. I laughed. I came down. I drove a little faster than I should’ve. I noticed sturdy-looking trees. I called my mom. “Remember to do something fun for yourself every day,” she said. Locked away, but had she ever been so comforting? A lifeline, a connection, some frizzled frequency of hope. God, she really did know me, and stripped of pretense by rotting coils in her brain, there was love. She asked what I was working on. She made a noise. “Remember to do something fun for yourself.”

Loss was everywhere. 

Community exploded. I couldn’t find friends; I couldn’t even picture them. I was lost in self-absorption. Everyone was experiencing loss, but I felt alone with mine. A mother, a plan, youth, friends. I’d lost a country. My first war zone. I’d gone with a bit of a sense to help and mostly to extract, to feel adrenaline, sex, violence. I’d gone with a death wish, and I’d fallen in love. Not with girls—though I did that too; I always did, even if they didn’t always know—but with a school, a community. Can you fall in love with a country? If it’s a place you despise, can’t stand, are compelled to return to, what is that but family? I’d lost that too. I’d lost a war. For my whole long catalog of mental health struggles—my deep, monstrous depressions, obsessions, wild ion storms of panic—I was certain that trauma wasn’t one of them. War is hell, but I’d sailed through all my wars without injury. It was the end of one that did me in. I carried around a backpack of pills. I realized I was grieving at the exact wrong time. I ignored my mother. I stopped visiting. I called her again. Again, she asked what I was working on, and this time the question leveled me. How had it taken this long to realize that “What are you working on?” was cover for “What do you do for work?” A step or two from “Who are you?”

 She made her voice sweet. “Remember to do something fun for yourself every day.”

*

When I first went to Afghanistan, just out college, my mother wrote me a letter. I was shipping off to to be a freelance war reporter. It was reckless, wild, a thing that should’ve never worked. I was drawn to conflict like some young people are, but I think my mother sensed, even then, that I was running from something too. I think she may have sensed, even then, that what I was running from might have been her. We were crouched on a sidewalk, Mom helping repack my suitcase. It was in these moments, often in the leaving, sometimes in the escaping, that she seemed most like I had a mother, but it’s only now that I’ve begun to summon those things, memories breaking the surface like bodies coming up. I think I know why. As best we can tell, as we look back, plumbing old text messages and arguments for signs, my mother’s illness began right around the time my career as a war correspondent did. At least her physical disease, the organic damage to the tissue holding the whole territory of her mind. And even before that, I now know that her own season of grief began right around the time I became old enough to form memories. Her middle age of resignation that sometimes tipped into rejection, of a family in which she was no longer worshipped, or even respected, or perhaps even recognized. That must’ve been the time she realized she was living the rest of her life. Her home, her work, her children and spouse, the whole estate of her existence was only what she could see. So my memories are mostly off the flash and cloud that came from that. I saw a person making noise out of the last of mortality, the radiant spectacle of a dying star. I remember her anger, her mistakes, the bolts of errant energy, the bladed way she sometimes spoke to loved ones. I remember her always angry, or maybe needing to see she could inflict pain to make sure she still existed. 

The things from before all of that, the artifacts of her being her, have mostly escaped me, or maybe I’ve always been able to escape them. Only now am I beginning to remember. I remember mom kneeling on the sidewalk, unconcerned that her pants are getting dirty. I remember getting sick on bathroom floors, Mom on her hands and knees scrubbing, cancelling my plans for me. Mom helping me to pack, for a sleepover or summer camp. Showing me to roll rather than fold, to tuck socks into shoes for space. To always pack something dark because you never know when you’ll have to attend a grim-toned event, always pack quick-dry fabrics and some matching black so you’re ready for a hike or an impromptu funeral. 

On the sidewalk hunched over my duffel, she squeezed her knees into the meat of the bag and wrestled the zipper closed. She stood up, and handed me the envelope without fanfare, without eye-contact even, my name in her offhand scrawl. 

She looked like she wanted to explain something. I could tell she’d been looking for a way of walking next to me, keeping a hand on my shoulder as I moved farther from her. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what to say, how to say it just right.

And I knew as she handed it to me that I would never read it. I worried about contamination. I thought of her as a jinx, she needed to be sealed off from me. So I carried the letter around with me, near the bottom of my suitcase, and eventually, inevitably, I lost it. She brought it up a few times over the years, but she must have sensed I never read it, and eventually she got the message and stopped bringing it up. She must have wondered why I never spoke to her about it. Or maybe she knew.