Decisions

I lived in Berkeley and worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear-weapons research lab, where I developed computer war simulations. On Sundays I went with my girlfriend to Quaker meetings, where people sat in each other’s company without the pressure to speak. One Sunday some fellow congregants asked if I wanted to join a protest at Livermore Lab. I told them I had to work that day. No one asked me where.

The first Gulf War started. The military used one of my computer simulations to calculate probabilities of hits and kills. Suddenly the simulations were no longer so abstract. Thousands of people were dying. I wanted to join my girlfriend and others who were protesting the war, but I didn’t feel I could as long as I worked at the lab.

At the lab’s next team meeting, I announced I was leaving. I no longer believed in what we were doing, I said, and wanted to find work I could feel good about. My office door would be open to anyone who wanted to talk to me about my decision.

One by one, the three military officers assigned to my project dropped by. Each said I was doing the right thing.

Dave O’Keefe
Palm Desert, California

It was 1968, a year after the Summer of Love, in San Francisco: Drugs were readily available. Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead performed frequently around Golden Gate Park. And I was determined to liberate myself from the uptight, war-mongering values of my parents’ generation. I made a conscious decision to be unfettered by conventional notions of commitment.

Nick was drawn to my free-spiritedness. We shared an interest in getting high and a belief in open relationships. I also admired his entrepreneurial spirit. Dozens of plastic baggies, each containing a precisely measured ounce of pot, were hidden under his bed.

One evening Nick returned home late. The next morning he told me he’d met up with an old girlfriend. When I asked if he’d slept with her, he said yes.

My distress must have shown on my face, because he said, “Guess we never talked about this, did we?”

“What’s to talk about?” I said nonchalantly. “Don’t be bourgeois.”

Nick and I stayed together for years, conducting not-very-secret affairs. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking and doing drugs that we finally split.

Nine years of sobriety later, I went to visit friends on Maui. There I met Mark and went home with him that same night: my first one-night stand in years. After I returned to California, Mark came to visit. When I broached the subject of sexual freedom versus monogamy, he said he was boringly conventional. “Me, too,” I said.

Janina Lynne
North San Juan, California

My father was dying at home from a rare type of cancer. My normally calm mother, a former nurse practitioner, was eighty years old and utterly exhausted from years of caring for him. For the past few weeks, she told me, he had been sleeping during the day but wide awake and combative at night.

I began spending nights with them, my mother and I in the double bed, my father in a hospital bed in the same room. His personality and even his way of speaking had changed, and I had to relearn how to communicate with him.

A lifelong devout Catholic, my father was losing his faith and worried that maybe there wasn’t a heaven after all. He was afraid to die. I promised that, as he died, I would stay with him and hold his hand. If he saw that he was going toward something beautiful, I told him, he could let go of my hand. He visibly relaxed. “That’s a beautiful story,” he said.

On his last evening — it happened to be Father’s Day — I sat holding his hand until my mother said, “You’re keeping him here by doing that. He needs to go. Let him go.”

Reluctantly I freed my hand from his.

My father died while I was asleep in a chair across the room. For years I’ve been haunted by my broken promise to my father. Did I give him permission to leave his earthly life, or did I leave him alone when he needed someone most?

Name Withheld

Before I got engaged, I didn't think I ever wanted to have children, but my fiancé and I talked about it and decided that children would be a part of our lives someday. Then I got pregnant on our honeymoon. We made the difficult decision to have an abortion.

Four years later, we were ready. I got pregnant and miscarried at fifteen weeks. It seemed that I was being taught a lesson. I wondered if I deserved to be a mother.

I got pregnant again a year later. When I made it past fifteen weeks, I felt relieved and started to enjoy the life growing inside of me. Then, at twenty-two weeks, tests indicated the baby had a life-threatening spinal-cord disorder and probably wouldn’t live to see his or her second birthday. We had to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or carry it to full term. We chose to have our child.

Our daughter came into the world on July 12, 2005, with ten fingers, ten toes, and no signs of brain or spinal-cord defects. The doctors had made a mistake. It was the best decision we’ve ever made.

Name Withheld

My uncle was an important man in the Texas prison system, and each year he invited my father and me to the annual prisoners’ rodeo. On my first visit I was six, and we ate lunch in the officers’ executive dining room, where a well-scrubbed but underfed inmate served us with all the formality of an English butler. Pinned to the man’s prison uniform was an engraved name tag bearing his sentence and crime. I could read the word life, but the other word was new to me.

“What does m-u-r-d-e-r spell?” I asked my father.

The prison administrators regarded me with amusement. Finally the inmate spoke up. “It spells ‘murder,’ ma’am,” he said, addressing me with military discipline. “I killed another man, and I will be in prison for the rest of my natural life because of it.” Then he slipped back into the genteel manner of a servant and asked, “Would you like a cracker?”

The experience made a deep impression on me. I never forgot what happened to people who broke the law.

Two years later my widowed father got engaged to a pushy, self-indulgent woman, and they were married in a lavish ceremony. My new stepmother would not allow the demands of parenting to cut into her lively social schedule, so she and my father began leaving me overnight with my step-grandparents whenever they had tickets or a reservation.

Their evenings out on the town were nights of terror for me. My stepmother’s father crept into my bedroom and molested me and made frightening threats about what he would do to me if I told.

I didn’t tell, but one night when I was ten I refused to go and stay at my stepgrandparents’ house anymore. My stepmother exploded with rage, and we began a shouting match that ended with her perfectly manicured hands around my throat. My father pulled her off me, and she left. I never saw her again.

The next day I made up my mind to tell my father what my step-grandfather had done to me. But before I could gather the courage, my father said, “If I ever find out that someone has hurt you, I’ll kill them.” His eyes told me he meant it.

I went outside and lay on the ground with my dog and reached a firm decision never to tell my father about the abuse. I’d seen prison, and I didn’t want him to end up there. My silence would keep him safe.

Name Withheld

It's been three months since I quit chewing tobacco. I run my tongue across my gums and think about it a hundred times a day: Copenhagen. Chewed it for twenty-five years. Goes perfectly with a cold beer.

On my first trip to my old drinking haunt since quitting, I order a beer and watch sports highlights on TV. Someone taps my shoulder. It’s Barry. He’s always got a can of Copenhagen. When I ask, though, he says, “Nope, man, left it at home. I’m trying to cut back. Worried about the gums, you know?”

“That’s all right,” I say, lying. “Haven’t had any in a couple of months myself.” I drain my can of weak beer and get up to leave.

Outside I climb into my old van and take the back roads home. A convenience store catches my eye, and I remind myself how good I’ve been the past few months. I used to chew so much I didn’t even mind swallowing the juice. Preferred it, actually.

The liquor store comes into view, and I tell myself I need some beer for home. No Copenhagen, just beer. I go in, choose a quart of Pabst, and proceed to the checkout. The guy behind the counter is in his sixties, and his cheek looks pudgy. He’s chewing. And why shouldn’t he be? Hell, this is Wyoming, isn’t it?

“Will that be all?” he asks. I look at his lip. He doesn’t spit, but swallows the juice.

“I’ll take a can of Copenhagen snuff, please.”

“Chewed this stuff for forty years,” he says. “First thing in the morning till I go to bed at night. Don’t think I’ll ever be able to quit.” His face has no expression. He’s just stating facts. I thank him and leave.

The label says, “Fresh Cope. It satisfies, since 1822.” My thumbnail traces the edge of the lid, breaking the paper seal, and I open the can and hold it under my nose. Finally I take a pinch and savor it, swallowing the loose specks. I don’t think I’ll ever quit either.

Kirk VanDyke
Laramie, Wyoming

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