Quicksand

If you grew up in the 1960s or 70s, you were terrorized by quicksand. You know the concept: it looks like normal sand, but when you step on it, it sucks you right under. Quicksand lurked everywhere - The Six Million Dollar Man, Brady Bunch, Batman, Gilligan’s Island. It’s listed in the dictionary today as “a dangerous situation from which it is hard to escape.”

Quicksand is still all around. Recently I was talking to a fellow griever about the things we do. Like looking at old texts from our dead partners. We know that’s not a feel-good recipe, but we’re desperate for a piece of what’s gone. So we step in (ie, peek at a message or two) and - wham! - it sucks us in and pulls us under. Same with old photos. Or old clothes. Or anything, really. We think we’re on sturdy ground until suddenly we’re not. And there is no Mike Brady with a tree branch to pull us out of the sinking hole!

Eric also experienced quicksand. When his cancer came back in 2004, seizures were the main symptom. Eric said they were like music exploding in his head. But Eric was a songwriter, so music often exploded in his head at will. This became confusing.

The seizures scared the bejesus out of me. Often we’d be in different rooms, and I’d hear a thud, and then run in to where he was to find him on the ground, knocked off his feet by a seizure. Eric soon got frustrated with me yelling, “ARE YOU OK?!” every time I heard a noise. So we altered it. I’d yell, “Love you!” And he’d yell back from whatever room he was in, “Love you.” Which meant he was OK. It sounded like a game of Marco Polo. Unless he was down.

He was down a lot in 2004, and the doctors couldn’t figure out how to stop the seizures. I was frantic. So I did what any unhinged Gen Xer would do: I took a page out of the Brady Bunch playbook. I pretended that I was Eric and wrote a letter to Dr. Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist/writer, a la Cindy Brady pretending that she was Bobby and writing a letter to Joe Namath, the famed football player. In fairness, I did tell Eric before I posted it.

Four days later, a typed and hand-corrected letter arrived in our mailbox from Dr. Sacks. He was everything you’d expect: warm, kind, wise, full of questions. Eric took over the correspondence from then on. He and Dr. Sacks wrote letters back and forth for two and a half years about subjects like doubled consciousness, melancholy tunes, the benefits of love, and malignancies (Dr. S himself was newly diagnosed).

Dr. Sacks was very intrigued by Eric’s musical seizures. In fact, they make an appearance in his book Musicophilia, where Eric describes the music as familiar, so much so “that I am sometimes uncertain whether these songs are on a nearby stereo or in my brain. Once I become aware of that strange yet familiar confusion and realize it is in fact a seizure, I seem to try not to figure out what the music may be…. I am afraid that if I pay too much attention to it, I may not be able to escape the song - like quicksand, or hypnosis.”

And there we are, back to quicksand. Eric’s seizures eventually went away when he beat back the cancer during that round. Dr. Sacks didn’t solve the problem per se, but his attentiveness was a sort of tree branch that helped Eric out of the quagmire.

So thanks, Dr. Sacks, for answering that letter. And thanks, Cindy Brady, for the idea to write it.

I asked AI to generate a cartoony female in quicksand, and this is what I got. It looks more like she’s in Thai coconut soup than sand, but hey: free image. I do often have that expression.

So many real-life lessons from the Brady Bunch over the years: beware of tikis, don’t play ball in the house, attic beads are cool, and of course, writing fake letters to famous people pays off.

Eric stars in this book starting on page 20!

One of the typed letters. That last sentence kept me out of quicksand for a long time.