Asakiyume mita

My friend KM is an amazing storyteller: she can tell you something that happened to her, and her face is so animated, and her voice, that you listen enthralled, and it's like whatever the thing was, it's happening to you, too.

Last week she was telling me a story that Laurie Anderson told, a story about rescuing her twin brothers from death in an icy lake when she was eight and they were two. KM heard this story on Anderson Cooper's podcast about grief,** so when she was telling the story, I was beside myself with fear that one or both of the twins were going to die. But that didn't turn out to be where the story was going.



Laurie Anderson was one of the oldest of many kids, and it fell to her to look after her little twin brothers. One winter when she was eight and they were two, she strapped them into their double stroller and took them to the movies. When she got to this part of the story, Anderson Cooper said to her, "You, an eight-year-old, took your two-year-old brothers to the movies?" and she said, "Well, it was a different era."

After the movies, she was pushing them home, but she decided to take a shortcut across a frozen lake, because there was an island in the middle of the lake, and she wanted her brothers to see the moon from the island. So she's crossing the lake, and all of a sudden she hears a CRACK! and the ice breaks, and the stroller goes in. It disappears beneath the water.

So Laurie Anderson flings off her coat and dives into the water and gets one twin free of the stroller and pushes him up on the solid part of the ice. But then she has to go back down, and the stroller has sunk deeper. But she swims until she finds it, and gets the other twin out too. Safe on the ice, one is screaming, and one is blue. She carries them both home.

And when she gets home, her mother opens the door and stares at her dripping-wet, hypothermic children. And she pauses. And she says,

"I didn't know that you were such great swimmer and such a good diver. I can see you saved your brother's lives."

That's what she said. Not, WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO!? YOU NEARLY KILLED YOUR BROTHERS. ALL THREE OF YOU COULD BE DEAD RIGHT NOW.

And Laurie Anderson said that her mother saying that changed the course of her life.

When KM got to what Laurie Anderson's mother said, tears started streaming down my face, profound gratitude for that mother who in that moment managed to say totally the right thing to her daughter.

The story kept on reverberating for me, so I looked up the podcast and listened to it, and I have to say, KM hewed pretty close to Laurie's original, but there was an intensity in how KM told the story--or maybe partly it was our setting, in a chilly, windswept meadow, after having crossed over a swollen blackwater stream--that made it even more compelling than Laurie's original, even though it was Laurie's own story.

**The podcast is called All There Is and the episode with Laurie Anderson is called "The Release of Love." She tells the story of her brothers near the very very end. Although I am fond of Laurie Anderson, the rest of her conversation with Anderson Cooper--her thoughts on the topic of grief--left me kind of cold, but grief is a complex emotion, and I have no doubt her words could be transformative for some.