The Courage of Stars
Or: Tony Stark Saved My Life
Every night was the worst night. I wasn’t prepared for that.
I wasn’t prepared for most of the things that happened in those six weeks in Oregon, leaving New York City shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday in June of 2018 to be with my stepmom as she slowly died.
There was morphine, and fentanyl, and pills for every possible side-effect of a body in decay; the sense of isolation, so consumingly awful I felt I’d been dropped off the face of the earth; the hyper-vigilance—watching eyelids flickering in sleep, twitching hands, the rise and fall of her emaciated chest—and the constant, unstoppable crying. There was knowing that I was watching my second mother die in real time, and that there was no immovable object to put between her and the unstoppable force of her cancer. Not me, not chemo, nothing.
I wasn’t prepared for the silence.
Lynn’s existence was like an act of God: beautiful, loud, chaotic, unique, somehow fated and random at the same time. She was one of the funniest people I knew (or will ever know). She was beautiful and filled every room with her presence and her big, booming laugh. I envied her bone structure, her hands, her perfect teeth. In hindsight, I wish I’d told her she was beautiful more often than I did. She once apologized for not doing the same for me. I often wonder, now, what our relationship would have been like if we’d hated ourselves a little less in the time we had.
She’d had other diagnoses. Before the cancer. Bipolar disorder. Her reality was different than yours and mine, to the point that every day could be (and often was) a battle she felt doomed to lose. We rarely spoke of the exact nature of our demons to each other, but I knew them in her as she knew them in me.
Lynn’s mental illness was a constant no matter where we lived, what grade I was in, if the weather was good or bad or mild. It was violent, at times, and a disappearing act in others—the eye and the rage of a storm both, taking turns on her mind and our family. But I loved her, as much as any daughter could love a mother—first, second, or otherwise.
Watching her die was an exercise. A literal, tasking effort that required extraordinary stamina and the willpower to endure the unendurable. But I had to be there. I needed to be there. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t been there. But being there tore from me a piece of my soul that I’ll never get back. I had to pick Lynn’s collapsed body up off the floor, limb by limb, plaintively reassuring her just one more nudge up the bed, come on, over and over. I fed her jello and water and liquid morphine and watched her shrink and fade away. And she did. Was. Wasting away. As days passed, I saw less of her, more of her; less mass, more bones. Less life, more death. I would wake up and look at Lynn’s body and think about the Holocaust. Then I would roll over and check her pulse, wondering if this was the morning I’d woken up next to a corpse.
Shuttling back and forth between her house and my dad’s, I averaged three to four hours of restless sleep every night, if I was lucky. Drank coffee and water and ate maybe two meals a day. Nothing else mattered in my world. Those six weeks are a smear of color and smell and tears and not much else. There were moments of reprieve—spending time with my family, in the sun, in the city where I was born; the week in Ashland where I grew up, being held through the aftermath in the cradle of friends’ arms and gazing up at the stars—but a brain already scarred by past trauma was never going to be able to fully retain every moment of that experience. It would have broken utterly if I’d tried. My last memory of my birth mother is of her on a stretcher, her slack, pale face lit from without as if through frosted glass. And here I was, watching life’s warmth slowly leech from another mother’s body, wishing I was dying in her place. An old, familiar feeling, made new again.
Lynn’s death was quiet. Minutes before she drew her last breath, I cradled her head against mine and spoke to the part of her I hoped could still hear me, we’ll be okay. You can rest now.
I was a seventeen-year-old rising senior in high school when Tony Stark flew into my life. Looking back now, I wonder about that moment when the credits rolled and Black Sabbath blared, sitting there in the dark feeling electric without a single sense that I’d just met the character who’d help me survive the next eleven fraught years of my life.
By the time Iron Man came out in May 2008, The Lord of the Rings was already an intrinsic part of the fabric of my existence. So was Band of Brothers. They were the first stories I’d truly wrapped myself in, used to comfort and learn myself while I grew up, until they became well-worn talismans bleached out by the constant exposure of my need for them. If they were worn then, they’re threadbare now, beloved as a baby blanket and as important to me as ever.
But in the eleven years since I first watched Tony Stark quip and fight and struggle and change his way out of that cave and into a new life, I went from being thrilled by Iron Man to being sustained by Tony Stark. The nature of the Marvel Cinematic Universe being what it was, is, and always will be, there was comfort in knowing that, unlike The Lord of the Rings and Band of Brothers—both self-contained narratives that ended, literally and figuratively, a long time ago—he was always going to be there. That every year or so, a new movie would come along and give me more of this character I enjoyed so much. A character I came to identify with. A person I grew to love.
But why? Why this guy? Why this much? Why then, now, and so deeply? Why, when I watched Captain America: Civil War, did my PTSD rear its ugly head?
There are so many reasons, some of which I can articulate, most of which I can’t, or won’t. I laid out a few in my previous piece (or you’ve seen me go on about it on Twitter), but from my initial psychological breakdown in 2008, to being diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and anxiety in April 2010, to now, there has been a Tony Stark for every occasion. This is a profoundly human character struggling to do good, a man who wears his heart on the outside of his chest and hurtles himself through life, time, and space to save others, expressing things in ways that have made me, in many cases for the first time in my life, feel seen. And in feeling seen, I have found hope. Every movie was another rung on a ladder leading me up from darkness, even if I slipped down between films.
And new revelations are always coming through. That’s inevitable when you grow attached to a character with eleven years of screen time (and are in a lot of therapy). Watching Iron Man at home last Thursday, on the 11th anniversary of its release, I realized this moment early in the film is a pitch-perfect visual metaphor for the moment in December 2008 when my own mental health blew up in my face, the catastrophic result of deliberately suppressing my trauma for fifteen long years:
Or this moment, when Tony says: “I never got to say goodbye to my father.”
Or this moment, when Tony—riddled with self-loathing and survivor’s guilt—says: “I shouldn’t be alive, unless it was for a reason.”
I didn’t make these connections right away. It wasn’t until 2013, when Tony was actively struggling with his PTSD in Iron Man 3, that I fully realized this character I loved was someone I could look to in those moments when my own brain was conspiring against me, telling me that life was not mine to have. It was then, I realize, that Tony Stark became the rock on which I began to build my church of adult self, brick by painful brick.
“You use stories in such a profound way,” my therapist has said on multiple occasions. “They’re entertainment, but the way you use them makes them deeply personal to you in a way that is unique to you.” She has never seen a Marvel movie, but she doesn’t have to. Together we build and rebuild this ramshackle church, patching holes and laying bricks with golden mortar, and we talk about Tony Stark. All of the ways his story—his character—mirrors mine. When I told her what it felt like to watch Tony Stark watch his parents die, she understood why it upset me; when I told her how spot-on his violent reaction was to that moment, she didn’t judge.
“Trauma isn’t rational,” she said. “But the ways you’ve learned to live with it are.”
Following Lynn’s death, I went home to Ashland to try and recuperate from the hospice process, returned to Portland for her memorial service, and on July 30th flew back to New York City and returned to work. Grief dogged my steps until it became a Herculean effort to put one foot in front of the other. I was alone, crammed back inside a shoebox hellhole of an apartment at the peak of summer, struggling to fall asleep at night and struggling to wake up in the morning, wondering where everyone had gone. My brain became a feedback loop of dead faces, last words spoken and unspoken, dead faces, dead Amy I never got to say goodbye, dead Lynn I wasn’t ready to say goodbye…
The twenty-three year old scar on my brain had been ripped open, stuffed with coarse salt and gunpowder and set on fire.
But Tony Stark was inbound. On August 30th, a month after I returned to New York City, dazed by grief and new and renewed trauma, I walked into an IMAX theater alone and watched a special anniversary screening of Iron Man.
For the first time in over a month, I felt calm. Not better, but less like a heap of charred, unwanted parts. In the darkness, the world fell away. I could delight, and fly, and laugh, and breathe.
“Thank you for saving me,” Tony says to a dying Ho Yinsen, who tells him with his last breath:
“Don’t waste it. Don’t waste your life.”
I thought back to what had turned out to be one of Lynn’s last moments of lucidity. I’d asked her, “Can you hear me?” At her nod, I said, “Do you know it’s Rachel?” She smiled and nodded again. Words poured out, hundreds of them (not nearly the last), but I made a point to tell her what it meant to me—what it would always mean to me—that she came to my rescue at the end of my freshman year of college to help me move back to Oregon, where I would undergo a summer of intensive therapy.
“Thank you for saving me,” I told her, between sobs and desperate, breathless I love you’s. Even at death’s door, she always said “I love you” back.
Now a month after my return, here was Tony Stark saying those same words back to me, reaching across time to remind me why I’d walked into that theater in the first place: you are still alive. This is me, saving you.
My grandfather, my stepmom, and Roxy the family dog died within six months of each other. By the end of 2018, I was a husk, burned down to almost nothing and trying to find the will not to snuff out those last embers, myself.
I got through those bleak days by virtue of one thought:
At least Tony Stark is still alive.
…fuck.
I assume if you’ve read this far it’s because you know me and you’ve seen Avengers: Endgame and have been curious (or concerned) about my feelings on the matter, or you’re a stranger who is weirdly fascinated by this person who uses a fictional character as a kind of emotional support prosthesis and you want to know how this will all shake out.
Either way, if you’ve read this far, I assume you know that Tony Stark dies in Endgame.
I started writing this piece on May 2nd, exactly one week after I first watched Tony Stark wield the Infinity Stones and tell the world one last time, “I am Iron Man.” But that week, to be perfectly honest, is a terrible blur. Scattered throughout the disjointed memories are flashes of anger, of pain, of complete emptiness—that sense of being so hollowed out by grief the body risks floating away on the next stiff breeze.
I cried myself home Thursday night. I cried on the train to work the next day, and all the way to therapy; I was sobbing before I could sit down.
“It’s really hard, mourning someone you love when there’s no body,” I said at one point, meaning Tony Stark.
“Like it was with your mom?” My therapist replied, meaning Amy.
At the end of the session, she said: “You’ve been coming here for five years and you’ve never once walked in with your head down like that.” Thinking back on it, walking into her office that afternoon felt eerily similar to the morning I walked into the university therapist’s office in 2010 and started sobbing before I even made it to the couch. Like a hole had been blown through the middle of my chest. Only this time, the bright blue thing that helped fill it was gone.
Then the messages from friends began to trickle in. I just saw Endgame—how are you holding up? Goddamn, @rkambury. as soon as I read [the review] my heart broke for you. hey I just saw endgame finally. u, uh, ok?
While my responses were usually short and to the point (iterations of “no,” sometimes with a .gif), the thoughts in my head were a howling mess, my body and hands wracked with tremors—physical manifestations of my PTSD plucking at my nervous system like guitar strings. But I tried to push through, seeing it again last Saturday morning and spending the rest of the day walking through Central Park listening to “Saturn” on repeat in an attempt to stop the shrapnel of my cumulative grief from reaching my heart.
I cried my eyes out on a friend’s couch that night.
It was bad enough that Tony Stark was dead. That his death reminded me so much of Lynn’s just twisted the knife. It was the same quiet, disoriented fading away—the words Pepper says to Tony as he dies the same ones I whispered in Lynn’s ear that warm July night, lying next to her in bed:
“We’re going to be okay. You can rest, now.”
His death reminded me of mom’s, too. That he left behind a four, five year old daughter—a little girl, all brown hair and brown eyes—gutted me in a way I didn’t know was possible. Because twenty-three years ago, that was me.
“Do you remember being told your mom was dead?” My therapist asked me last Tuesday. By then, I’d seen Endgame three times, hoping that in re-watching the movie, I might find some peace with my own dead. Instead, I woke up Monday morning in the middle of a gasping panic attack.
“No,” I replied. “I don’t.”
For the past eleven years—from the early days before I was a hardcore fan up to now—Tony Stark has played a starring role in my hope for survival. Not just physical, but emotional and psychological; he is a strikingly true-to-life representation of what trauma does to a person and what it takes to live through, with, and in spite of it.
And every movie he’s in, from Iron Man to Endgame, represents a year of life I never thought I’d get. At my darkest, in 2010, there was Iron Man 2; in 2012, in Paris, there was The Avengers; in 2018, between my grandfather’s death and Lynn’s, there was Infinity War; and waiting for me on the other side of the Year of Hell was Endgame.
Now Tony Stark joins the pantheon of stories that preceded him in my upbringing, forming a support strut that will help keep the roof of my church of self from collapsing. Only now I have to learn how to incorporate the sizable grief of losing him, too—no longer building myself up with him, but out.
But as I stumble headlong toward my twenty-eighth birthday, the twenty-fourth anniversary of Amy’s death, and the one year anniversary of Lynn’s, I wonder at the fact that not only did I live to see Iron Man come to life, I lived to hear Tony Stark say “I love you” back.
