I braved the scanner first. Aly sat with Martin Currier in the control booth behind a bank of monitors. That seemed suspect to me, but he was the one with all the research awards. The earpiece I wore inside the fMRI tube instructed me to relax, close my eyes, and listen to my breathing. They fed me some stimuli, for calibration. There was a bit of Moonlight Sonata and a snippet from something harsh and modern. They told me to open my eyes. A screen above my face showed, in turn, images of a bluebird on a branch, a happy baby, a magnificent holiday meal, and a close-up of a fractured forearm with bone coming through the skin. After that, I was told to close my eyes for another minute and mind my breathing again.
Then came the real experiment. Aly and I would each be given a random feeling from the eight core emotional states in Plutchik’s typology: Terror, Amazement, Grief, Loathing, Rage, Vigilance, Ecstasy, or Admiration. We’d have four minutes to inhabit our given mental state. Software would make a three-dimensional map of part of our limbic system while we were absorbed in the task.
They gave me Admiration. I closed my eyes and settled into vague thoughts about Einstein, Dr. King, and Sydney Carton. But off in the booth, my wife was watching the ebb and flow of my feeling. The thought of her made me remember an evening we’d lived through together, in the depths of an upper midwestern winter four years before.
Aly had just been appointed midwestern coordinator, and the man replacing her as state supervisor was proving to be inept. In Maryland for the organization’s three-day biannual national meeting, she’d spent hours on the phone nursing her successor through various crises. While there, she caught a nasty cold. Ice storms delayed her return flight by half a day. I picked her up at the airport at nine at night, little Robbie in tow. In her absence, he’d developed an ear infection. He howled until after midnight, when Aly let her sick and weary head touch the pillow at last.
The phone woke her at one-thirty in the morning: her hapless new state supervisor, calling in a tizzy. The police way upstate in Rhinelander had found a truck with a dozen caged dogs left for hours in subzero temperatures in a Walmart parking lot. They traced the truck to a sprawling puppy mill, which they shut down. Hundreds of dogs flooded into Oneida County’s sole overwhelmed shelter. The locals reached out to Aly’s NGO, although such a problem lay way outside her rights-oriented organization’s bailiwick.
Her successor wanted to know who to dish the crisis off on. Aly told him, What are you talking about? Go up and help them out. The man said that was way below his pay grade. They talked for twenty minutes, with my zombied wife never once sounding anything less than rational. The man still refused. So at sunrise Alyssa packed a backpack and got in the car to drive three and a half hours on icy state roads by herself. I kept asking, “Are you sure?” Not exactly the support she deserved.
She returned forty-eight hours later, after shepherding two hundred dogs to shelters across upper Wisconsin. She got out of the car looking like a Central Casting nineteenth century French peasant dying of consumption. She went straight to wailing Robin and comforted him for an hour. Then she wrote a speech she had to deliver in Des Moines the next day. After midnight once again, she looked at me with comically crossed eyes, proclaimed herself tuckered out, and slept for five hours before getting up to drive to Iowa.
My wife was admirable the way I was tall. But admiration barely touched what I felt. The feeling flowing through me felt like a geometric proof. I revered my wife. She was who she should be in this world, without once worrying about what that meant. I could never hope to emulate her. I just hoped she could see, from the control booth, in front of those monitors, what flooded my brain.
The run ended and my trance broke. The techs recalibrated the software by showing me the earlier images and having me count backward from ten to one. Then they rolled the dice again and gave me a second target: Grief.
As soon as the word sounded in my earbuds, my pulse spiked. Truth is, I’m profoundly superstitious—not in my head, which science has retrained, but in my limbs. I’m good at old feelings, and grief must be older than awareness itself. Way too easily, my body embraces my worst imaginings. The several minutes I’d just spent admiring my wife now turned inside out. I was back in that vivid night, now with disaster everywhere. My son’s ear infection turned septic and fatal. Puppy mill killers captured my wife and tortured her. Sleep-deprived and overworked, she drove off the icy road and lay in a ditch for hours.
What’s grief? The world stripped of something you admire. The things that swarmed me were utter, irrational nonsense. But I felt them as if, on some planet, they had really happened.