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MY FATHER CLAIMED TO REREAD
the entire Russian novel
War and Peace
every year. I don't usually read a book a second time, but following his lead, I set out years ago to reread Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
. I figured if my father could get through 1,500 pages of Tolstoy's
War and Peace
on an annual basis, I could reread
Anna Karenina
at least once.

The very first time I read the book was over Christmas vacation during my sophomore year of college. It had been assigned in my comparative literature class at Columbia University, where I was pretending to be a New York City intellectual but was actually spending more time marching for civil rights in Harlem or learning to meditate at a Tibetan Buddhist center way downtown.

At Christmas break, my boyfriend (who would become my first husband) and I escaped the gray and grunge of a New York City winter and sought refuge on a low-rent Caribbean island where they allowed camping. I had visions of skimming through a semester's worth of reading while lazing under a palm tree. Instead, we pitched our tent on a sunbaked, bug-infested beach and fended off skinny dogs that begged for food all day and night. There were only two places to get away from the bugs and the dogs—either in the crystal blue water just steps from where we were camping, or inside the moldy, sweltering tent.

I chose the tent. I picked up
Anna Karenina
, described by my professor as the most important book in the Western canon. Within less than an hour of our first morning on the island, I committed to Anna and the tent for the rest of the vacation. If I stayed inside, if I stuck with Anna, if I didn't abandon her, perhaps she might avert the impending tragedy that clung to every sentence, every word.

And so, as my boyfriend snorkeled, I rode through a nineteenth-century Russian winter in a horse-drawn sleigh alongside Tolstoy's cast of characters: the beautiful Anna, who risks social exile and the loss of her children for love and authenticity; her duty-bound, patriarchal husband, Karenin; Vronsky, Anna's dashing, idealistic, and narcissistic lover; and the moral compasses of the book, Levin and Kitty. I followed the long path to Anna's destruction and rooted for her even though she behaves so poorly, even though I knew she was doomed. Her tale grabbed me in my gut. It filled my young sails with hope and anger. It brought to the surface of my consciousness feelings that needed the traction of words.

When I finished the book, I was enraged. Why did it end that way? Why didn't Anna rise up against social convention? What kind of messages were women left with—that putting personal fulfillment over social duty leads to ruination and death? That when a woman deviates from her prescribed social responsibilities she's damned, yet when a man deviates from his, he is pardoned, and even envied? And why was this “the most important book in the Western canon”? I was so frustrated by the ending (and by being in a tent for a week) that on the final day of the vacation, I walked to the edge of the sea and tossed the moldy paperback book into the waves.

WHEN I READ
Anna Karenina
for the second time, I was thirty—a young mother caught in the undertow of her own doomed marriage. This time, I identified with Anna, and I read the book as a cautionary tale. I was horrified with myself. I had made a mess of my life, and if I didn't clean up my act, I wouldn't necessarily end up like Anna—(spoiler alert) under a train—but I might wreck my family. As Anna's life unraveled with every page, I vowed to piece my marriage back together. I would stop behaving like Anna; I would try to conduct my life with less drama and more dignity. Wasn't that the message Tolstoy was trying to relay? Didn't society need each one of us to hew to an agreed-upon moral code? What would happen to this world if we all just did what we wanted? If we put the shaping of our own destiny ahead of what was good for the whole?

I didn't throw the book away at the end of the second reading. I placed it in the bookshelf, and every time I passed it I felt my heart harden into a nut-sized nugget of resolve:
I will be good. I will be good. I will be good.
Of course, none of this happened. My marriage dissolved and my life became a train wreck, but unlike the unlucky Anna, I survived, and more than that, I transformed the trauma into a treasure of the utmost worth: my own self, my true goodness, my soul.

Poor, dear Anna. Everything and everyone—including she herself—conspires against her. She is unable to consummate the real love affair of the book: the love she should have felt for herself. If she could have come home to a sense of inner validation, a path toward freedom would have revealed itself to her. She could have carried her cherished children with her down that path. As she matured into her own destiny, she could have reconciled with Karenin, or stood her ground with Vronsky, or found someone
else, or none of the above. It wasn't until my third reading of
Anna Karenina
that I came to understand this. I am not sure that Tolstoy would agree. He was a creature of his times, and in those times women were not assumed to be capable of taking the classic hero's journey toward selfhood.

One of my feminist icons, the mystifyingly overlooked historian Gerda Lerner, wrote about the particular challenge women have in defining and taking their own hero's journey. “Since the female experience has usually been trivialized or ignored,” Lerner says, “it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves.” You know that classic interview question: “What two people—dead or alive—would you most like to be seated between at a dinner party?” No one has asked me that yet, but if any one ever does, I'll answer, “Gerda Lerner and Leo Tolstoy.” I'd ask them to come up with an alternate ending to
Anna Karenina
, after Anna has overcome her deep-seated resistance toward her own self-acceptance and validation. After she's replaced all the great men in her head with herself.

For the past couple of months, on my long drives to and from Maggie's house and back and forth to the hospital, I have been reading
Anna Karenina
for a third time courtesy of an audio version read by a man with a voice I imagine to be Tolstoy's. Once again I lose myself in the Russian winter, even as the greening hills of Vermont flash by the car's windows. I am now older than Tolstoy was when he wrote
Anna Karenina
. I think I finally understand the book. Now I am able to empathize with all of the characters—Anna, Karenin, Vronsky, Kitty, Levin, all of them. Each plays a role in the story, just like each one of us plays a role in our own
family system and social system. Liberation from those roles is hard-won. And only the greatest storyteller is able to express the real drama of a human life, which is the arduous journey toward claiming one's authentic destiny. All of the characters in
Anna Karenina
in their own way attempt that journey. But only one consciously casts off the roles he was expected to assume, and eventually lives by the edicts of his soul. That character—Levin—is said to be Tolstoy himself.

To be the Levin of your own story, to risk everything for the marrow of the soul, to lay claim to your Genius or your Juno—is this not at the core of every great story, from Jonah in the whale, to Joan of Arc, to Levin and Anna, to you and me?

Today, as I near Maggie's house, the audio book comes to an end. The man with the Russian accent reads the last few paragraphs. Levin stands on the balcony of his home and looks up into the heavens and finally understands that the soul at the core of his life is good, that he is goodness itself, and that his real job in life is to bring that goodness out into the world.

Later on today, Maggie and I will drive to the hospital where I will begin the process of the bone marrow harvest, receiving the first shot to stimulate stem cell production. After that, we'll meet with the therapist. We will dig for our goodness and harvest the marrow of ourselves for each other.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”

doesn't make any sense.

—RUMI

THE THERAPIST WE HAVE CHOSEN
comes recommended by Maggie herself. Which is all the endorsement I need. I call him and set up an appointment. Because suddenly everything is happening at once. The medical team wants to proceed quickly. Maggie is receiving a new type of chemotherapy, and as soon as the treatments are finished and her tests come back cancer-free, she must receive the transplant. The doctors can't afford to leave the window open for the tiniest sliver of time. Even a crack, and the cancer can come back. They need my stem cells. I have rushed through and passed all my tests. I am cleared to proceed with the harvest. Step one—the first injection of a drug that encourages stem cell growth—will occur on the morning of the day we are scheduled to see the therapist.

Some people are naturally inclined to ask for help before their lives fall apart. But most of us drag ourselves (or we're dragged) to the doctor or the healer or the gym or the therapist only when we're desperate. Before Maggie was first diagnosed with lymphoma, our older sister, Katy, practically handcuffed Maggie and delivered her into the hands of a therapist. Maggie had backed herself into an untenable situation—finally finding enough courage to take a stand in her marriage, but too stuck and scared to make a move. Maggie approached therapy as a short-term fix, as opposed to a way of changing long-held beliefs and habits. The therapist helped her build a little boat to carry her safely out of the marriage,
and that was enough for her. She landed on the shore and went her own way.

I know it breaks some unwritten law to choose a therapist who has previously worked with only one member of a duo, but I don't care. We are not your ordinary duo. And this is not an ordinary situation. The urgency of the transplant has made us as giddy as skydivers. We are going to jump out of the plane without having answers to some important questions. Questions like: How can one three-hour session possibly get to the core of a lifelong relationship? What exactly are we expecting the outcome to be? What if it doesn't work? What if it makes things worse? Is this guy up to the task? I don't know, but I figure if he's brave enough to jump out of a plane with two sisters strapped to his back, I am going to trust that he can land us in a clearing, in that field the poet Rumi talks about.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field,” Rumi writes. “I'll meet you there.” That was the way I described to Maggie what I hoped we might achieve with the therapist. “I want to meet you in a field of love,” I told her. “And maybe that will encourage our cells to do the same.” The lines from Rumi cinched the deal, and we quickly set a date for the session to coincide with the start of the marrow harvest.

On this spring day I set out to Maggie's house as the sun is rising. The trees are leafing out, waving their bright green flags in the morning light. Each hour of driving north sets spring back a week. When I get to Maggie's, it's chilly and the trees have barely a halo of green. I leave the car idling and run into her house to get her. We have two important things on our agenda today: First stop is the hospital, where I will receive an injection of Neupogen. After that we'll head to the therapy session.

Maggie wants to drive. “You're the invalid today, Liz,” she says,
thrilled to be in the driver's seat with me as the designated patient for a change. My Neupogen shot is the first of five I will receive as an outpatient over the next five days. It's administered in the same chemotherapy suite that Maggie has visited so many times. I watch her body tense as we walk down the familiar hospital halls. Only this time, it's my body that will be poked and shot up with a chemical substance. And this time, I'm the one the nurse asks the questions I've witnessed Maggie answer over and over: “Date of birth?” “Are you aware of the risks involved in this procedure?” “Allergies to any medications?” And then the shot, and it's all over until tomorrow. We head back to the parking lot. Maggie takes the wheel again and I lean back in the passenger seat.

As we get closer to the town where the therapist has his office, Maggie says, “Tell me again why we're doing this?” She says she doesn't really subscribe to the whole notion of self-examination. Whereas Socrates believed “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Maggie thinks examining one's life is an expensive and self-indulgent waste of time.

“But didn't the therapist help you when your marriage was in such turmoil?”

“Yeah, he did,” Maggie concedes. “He helped me a lot.”

“How? How did he help you?”

“I guess he helped me figure out what I really wanted. He helped me see it was OK to . . . to . . . want something for myself,” she mumbles, barely able to say the words. “To want what was true . . . for me.”

“Well, that would be an important thing this time around too,” I say. “To know what you want; to say what you know is true; to say it loud enough for me to hear, and my cells to hear, and your cells to hear.”

“I know,” Maggie says. “That's why I'm doing it. But I don't really like spending time examining my life. Especially now. I'd rather just be living it.”

I, on the other hand, have spent a lot of time examining my own life and everyone else's too. I can't imagine taking this confusing human journey on automatic pilot. I need help! It's quite obvious we all need help—parents, children, workers, bosses, Congress, countries. How about just admitting that we have no idea how to get along, how to communicate, how to heal from the past and move on into a better future? How about requiring some rudimentary training in self-examination around the same time that people are required to take algebra or French or driver's education? There's an enormous vault of wisdom to draw from. The modern psychotherapeutic version is just one way of self-examining. The study and the healing of one's motivations and desires and behaviors dates back to the ancient philosophers—the Taoists in China and the yogis in India, the Egyptians and the Persians and the Greeks—and to prehistory, to the indigenous cultures whose shamans and witches were the world's first therapists.

In all of these settings—East and West, North and South, sacred and secular, ancient and current—the best of the philosophers and witch doctors and shrinks have always been what shamanic cultures call “wounded healers.” Wounded healers are comfortable with people in dark and troubled places because they too have been there and have found their way out. They may not have perfected the human experience, and they may be a little strange from frequent sojourns into the underworld, but they do have eyes that can see in the dark, and faith in the return of the light.

So it doesn't bother me when Maggie and I climb the rickety narrow stairs to the second floor of the old building in an old town
in Vermont and enter the eccentric office of the therapist. The waiting room is a tad unusual—just a landing with nowhere to sit. So we stand there, waiting. I look at Maggie. She is mostly bald and alarmingly thin. She looks at me. I am pale and woozy from the Neupogen shot. We start to laugh, and then we become uncontrollably hysterical. We've done this throughout our lives in a variety of inappropriate settings, including our mother's choral concerts, stores and theaters, weddings and funerals. Just one look at each other can set us off, and it's still dangerous to sit next to each other during public events.

The door opens and the therapist finds us doubled over in laughter. It doesn't seem to faze him. He leads us into his office. He looks less like a doctor and more like a cross between an aging rock star and a court jester, with long silver hair, a short silver beard, rumpled pants, and a T-shirt. There's a goofiness about him that matches the decor of the large room. A collection of teddy bears and other tchotchkes adorn the shelves and tabletops, while degrees and state licensing certificates hang crookedly on the walls. There's a refrigerator and a hot plate in one corner, and filing cabinets and storage boxes pushed into another. Three mismatched couches that one might find in a college dorm are lined up against a wall, and a sagging chair is set facing the couches. The room smells like pickles—slightly sour, slightly sweet.

The therapist motions for us to sit somewhere on the row of couches. Maggie and I perch next to each other on the middle couch, like two birds on a long wire. The therapist takes his place in the sagging chair. He stares at us for a while. Then he lays out a loose plan for our three-hour session, stopping every few sentences to ask if we are OK with it. We bob our heads, two birds on the wire. Every now and then we giggle and stop ourselves from
all-out hysteria. He ends the introduction with “I will be making myself tea and maybe a snack during our time together. And maybe feeding my dog.” He motions to a furry heap in the corner, next to the filing cabinets. As if on cue, the dog wags his tail.

I am glad Maggie already knew what she was getting herself into; otherwise I would be distracted, worrying about her reaction to the room, to the dog, to the smell of pickles. But since she seems at ease, I am too. I have met plenty of other nonconformists in the healing professions. My line of work would have dried up a long time ago if the ability to help or heal required pressed pants and a neat office. And so here we are, two sisters sitting across from a modern-day shaman, about to jump out of a plane. My heart is pounding. This surprises me. Intimacy is always an exposure; truth telling can be downright scary, but I hadn't realized I was this scared. Suddenly it feels more daunting to drill deep into my relationship with my sister than to have my bone marrow extracted. I take Maggie's hand and squeeze it. She squeezes back.

The therapist asks what each of us wants to get out of the session. I fish in my purse and find the questions we came up with when we first decided to have the therapy session. I hand them to the therapist and wait for him to finish reading. Then I explain how I have just begun the process of the stem cell harvest. I describe the pitfalls and dangers of the transplant. There's the chance I won't produce enough cells, and even if I do, there's the possibility of attack and rejection once the cells are transplanted. I tell the therapist I want to do whatever I can to encourage my cells to proliferate and then to willingly separate from my body and become one with Maggie's. I want to check out if there is anything within me—in my thoughts and my feelings and my memories and my body, all the way down to the marrow of my bones, to my tiniest stem
cells—that might interfere with the success of the transplant. And if there is, I want to examine it, hold it to the light, and let it go.

Maggie says her reason for being at the session is pretty simple. She wants to live; she wants the transplant to work; she doesn't want to reject my cells or to let my cells get too pushy once they are in her. She admits she has a tendency to judge and reject me and, at the same time, to let herself get pushed around by me. But now she wants us to be a team, to become Maggie-Liz, to work together to save her life. She says she is ready to look at whatever we need to look at in order to be that team.

“What's that poem, Liz?” she asks me. “That Rumi poem about the field?”

“‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.'”

“Yeah, that's what I want the session to be about. I want us to meet in that field—out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing,” Maggie says. She starts to cry. She puts her hands over her face, and the tension of the past weeks and months gather like rain clouds behind her hands and she weeps. I put my arms around her. I gaze at the therapist. Now he looks like Saint Francis, his eyes brimming with empathy, a halo of late-afternoon light streaming in from the window behind his head.

“So,” he says. “Let's start at the beginning.”

He leads us back to when we were little girls. We bring up incidents and images from different eras of our childhood—wrongdoings and rightdoings. It's like flipping through my mother's picture albums, providing text to go along with the photos. I've been in couples counseling before. But this feels different. The more we talk, the more stories we share, the more I feel some magical kind of lubricant easing the gears of our communication. Instead of get
ting stuck in the past—instead of using the stories as implements of blame or self-recrimination—we move quickly through the years. I don't know if it's the life-or-death nature of what brings us here, or the skill of the therapist, or help from unseen forces, but it's as if we are on a swiftly moving river, flowing fast into the field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing.

We remember the pleasure we took in being sisters—the fun, the adventures, the hysterical laughter, the cocoon of belonging. And we dredge up stories of rejection or attack. I pat my thigh bones and tell the stem cells to pay attention—to the love and to the conflict. Maggie's stories of rejection and attack focus on being one of the insignificant younger girls—discounted and invalidated by the older sisters, “the runt of the litter,” as she says. In my stories, I am misunderstood and judged by all the sisters, accused of being self-important and confrontational—“the princess” or “the Big Shit,” as I've heard myself described (or imagined being called behind my back).

The therapist, sitting across from us in the sagging chair, keeps us on track. He encourages us to listen to the other without defensiveness and to tell the truth even if it's hard to bring the stories out of the mute and secret places. We scroll through the years: neighborhood games, long car rides, family gatherings, school projects, shared birthday parties, pulling hair, stealing toys, triangulating with the other sisters, all the way up to high school. I am surprised by some of Maggie's stories; she is surprised by mine. I find myself wanting to interrupt her, to set her straight. I see her wanting to interrupt my stories too. But the therapist holds up his hand. “Just listen,” he says.