Life in Rewind

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Foreword by Michael Jenike

Chapter 1 The Day Life Stopped

Chapter 2 Time Equals Progression, Progression Equals Death

Chapter 3 Time to Go Home

Chapter 4 Something About Michael

Chapter 5 Michael’s War

Chapter 6 Trapped in the Basement

Chapter 7 The Betrayal

Chapter 8 History of Pain

Chapter 9 Leave No Man Behind

Chapter 10 A Different Kind of Doctor

Chapter 11 Ed’s Faith Regained

Chapter 12 A Step Forward

Chapter 13 Forward in Time

Chapter 14 Time Changes Everything

Chapter 15 Mayada

Chapter 16 In-laws and OCD

Chapter 17 A Choice of Dreams

Chapter 18 Building Dreams into Reality

Chapter 19 Ed’s Moment of Triumph

Afterword

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword by Michael Jenike

It has been many years since I first met Ed Zine at his house on Cape Cod. He suffered from a most severe form of an illness that I had studied and treated for over three decades - obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. Ed was as ill as any patient I had ever met. His story, his suffering and his recovery reveal an inspiring young man who has touched my own life in a way I had never expected.

I met Terry Murphy while I was consulting to a charitable foundation in New York City. I saw some of the brilliant videos and writing that she had done for the foundation. I remember one of the secretaries being reduced to tears when she viewed one of Terry’s videos about the director of the Foundation. She has a knack for poignantly capturing the most pristine essence of a person.

Ed had spoken many times about having someone write his story as an inspiration to other severely ill OCD patients who had given up hope. If he could get better, anyone could. I told Terry about Ed, and she became enthused and offered to work with Ed to write his story.

During the course of writing and working with Ed on his story, she asked me why I became so involved with Ed. She pried into my own motivations and reasons why I would be willing to do things differently from most physicians. I had known from my early years that I was willing to do unusual things to help patients. I had even been criticized during my training for making house calls - ‘Dr Jenike gets overinvolved with his patients,’ wrote one supervisor when commenting on my visits to housebound patients. Since I had been in the military for five years and was older, these comments had absolutely no bearing on how I was going to practise medicine, and to this day I make house calls.

However, Terry astutely detected parallels between my life and traumas and Ed’s life. Her teasing apart these issues has allowed me to understand my own motivations in light of my past life. This book reveals more about me than I would like, but I felt I had to step up to the plate and be as brave as Ed, for the benefit of patients who suffer from this horrible illness, as well as for the dedicated physicians who treat them.

I suppose the bottom line is that we all have our traumas, histories, motivations and accomplishments. If this story touches and motivates you like it has touched Ed and me, then Terry will have accomplished more than I ever expected.

Chapter 1 The Day Life Stopped

In the picture-perfect, white-shuttered two-storey house with its welcoming front porch, nestled among tall trees with delicate lilac bushes etched against its windows, Rita had created a gentle, loving environment for her children. It was a place where Ed could walk into the sunshine on a glorious New England day, and not worry about anything.

For, while life inside the Zine household was far from perfect, it felt perfect to Ed, because his mother made it so. She sang to him, and cooked for him while he sat at the kitchen counter watching his favourite cartoons on TV. He was her baby boy, and at a time when she was faced with the challenges of an older son who struggled with negative outside influences, she served up an endless stream of affection and support for her youngest, telling Ed that one day he would do something really important with his life. She snuggled with him while they watched movies together, carried cookies and ice-cold pitchers of lemonade out to the back garden while he played wiffle-ball or swam in the pool. She invited neighbourhood children like Rudy Harris, who would later play football for the NFL, to have sandwiches with them after school. Rita was ubiquitous in Ed’s happiest memories, and when she would pass away the tapestry of his life would change dramatically as he would be cared for by his less nurturing, seemingly antithetical father.

Bob Zine was the dark, handsome, volatile son of a Lebanese-born prize fighter-turned-bookie from South Boston who, at age 16, forged his mother’s signature, lied about his age and went off to fight for the Marines in the Second World War. During his induction, as the drill sergeant yelled, ‘I am your mother and your father now, son,’ he was frightened and homesick. Having second thoughts about what he’d done, he rang his father to bail him out. ‘Take it like a man,’ Bob was told. Whatever gentleness there was inside of him disappeared that day. His wartime experience would later inform his decisions as a father, and the regimented way he ran his family and home.

After surviving the Second World War in the Marshall Islands, and serving another term of service in the Korean War, Bob returned home to South Boston where he met and fell in love with Rita Grace Nice, a petite blonde beauty with a poodle-cut hairdo. Her name perfectly matched her quiet demeanour and style. She was ‘the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood,’ remembers Bob, ‘and I fell in love with her the minute I laid eyes on her’. The early years of their marriage were lean but loving, as Bob worked long hours as a plumber to support his burgeoning family. Eventually, though, he became a master builder and came to own his own business, enabling his family to move into Boston’s suburbs to live ‘the good life’.

Ed remembers his mother’s scent. She always smelled ‘shampoo fresh’, mingled at times with smoke from the cigarettes she dangled between her fingers as she sat at the kitchen table playing dominos and Yahtzee. She was the centre of Ed’s universe, with television coming in a distant, though not insignificant, second.

To this day Ed can recall the days and times when his favourite shows from the seventies and eighties aired. He never missed programmes like The Incredible Hulk, The Greatest American Hero and Magnum P.I., and he developed a passion for the ones that had veritable heroes in the leading role. A quiet, sensitive child, he connected emotionally with their power and honour, and used the storylines of good and evil to begin developing his own simplistic code of ethics. In one episode of The Incredible Hulk, Hulk impersonator Lou Ferrigno stops a man from using physical force against his son, and despite the fact that Ed’s father, like so many men of his generation, frequently employed physical discipline to rear his kids, Ed instantly recognized that dads are not supposed to hit their children. ‘In that moment I realized that it wasn’t something that was inherited, or predestined,’ recalls Ed, ‘and I decided, right then and there, that I didn’t have to be that way. I was never going to hit my children when I grew up.’

But it would be a fallacy to paint Bob Zine as chronically abusive. Ed and his father were actually quite close, and shared many special times during his childhood. On weekends, when his dad was at his most relaxed, away from the stresses of work, Ed would crawl up on the sofa next to him in his pyjamas and, together, they would watch the Sunday Night Movie of the Week: movies like The Dirty Dozen, The Big Red One and the James Bond movies. Having a father who was an ex-Marine and, in Ed’s eyes, a real-life hero only served to make the experience more powerful for Ed, allowing him to connect to his father in an emotional and loving way.

But television also became a necessary audio distraction for Ed. Before VCRs were a regular part of the American household, he would take his cassette tape player, hold it up close to the television and record the sound while he watched the show. When the programme was over he would go to his room and play the sounds of the show back, over and over again, rewinding to his favourite moments, to block out the arguments his parents would be having in the next room. ‘I used to see my Mom and Dad fight, which was very hard, but I chose to look past a lot of it,’ recalls Ed.

Bob and Rita Zine fought constantly about their oldest son, and issues of discipline. Adding to the stress, around this same time the formerly petite beauty had nearly doubled in size, making her a target for her husband’s explosive and often cruel verbal lashings. Unaware that the reason for her weight gain was ovarian cancer, Bob made little secret of the fact that he was planning to leave his wife.

In fact no one, not even Rita, knew she was sick. Although Ed compares his mother’s size and immobility during this time to the profoundly large mother in the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, he doesn’t ever remember being embarrassed by her size, only concerned when she could no longer climb the steps to her bedroom. His older sister Tami recalls, painfully, a comment that her boyfriend made at the time when she told him her dad was going to leave her mum: ‘If my wife was that big I’d leave her, too.’

Ed’s last great memory of his mother was a trip to the cinema in May 1980 when The Empire Strikes Back came out. It was a special experience that marked the beginning of his Star Wars passion. Shortly after, Rita surprised Ed with a set of Empire Strikes Back sheets for his bed and a Darth Vader costume for him to wear at Halloween. Whenever he and his friend Rudy got together to play Star Wars, he would put on the full costume and swing his light sabre, while his mother joined in the fun with her best imitation ‘…ahhhhhh, Luke, I am your father!’

But Ed’s happier memories are interrupted by later conversations overheard in the kitchen and hallway as he passed by, hushed conversations between his older sisters and aunts when the diagnosis finally came. No one ever said, ‘Mom has cancer,’ but Ed knew something was wrong, even if he didn’t know exactly what it was. Relatives seemed to always be making an effort to get him and his sister, Deena, out of the house to do as much ‘fun stuff’ as possible. But for a happy, intuitive young boy to suddenly be pushed away from his mother, watching as she spent more and more of her time in bed, there was little fun in leaving the comfort of his home.

These were the days when Star Wars fun and pitchers of ice-cold lemonade in the back garden would come to an end. All of those things Rita did so effortlessly to keep the house running smoothly and provide a loving atmosphere-things everyone had taken for granted for so many years-were coming undone. The house, and all of its order, was falling apart, and the ensuing chaos took the greatest toll on her husband, the ex-Marine whose life had been so carefully regimented. He was also heavily burdened by the guilt of having cruelly blamed her for her weight gain, all the while having one foot out the door. Worse still, for him, was the realization that his children were about to lose the woman he describes as ‘their best friend’, and during the holidays no less. The building frustration, guilt and sadness were understandably more than any man should have to bear, but his implicit reaction to this perfect storm of emotions would have devastating and lasting repercussions.

On Sunday 19 December 1982, as his mother lay down the hall in the hospital bed delivered by the hospice, Ed spent the wintry day inside, sitting in front of the television set playing ATARI. Looking back, the only memory that could have clued him in to the pending tragedy, had he paid greater attention, was an argument his father had with someone in the background, but he was too wrapped up in his game to listen to what was being said. That evening, he put his video game on pause, went into the kitchen looking for something to eat and managed to scrape out the last remains of dried-out peanut butter from the jar and on to a piece of white bread. After slathering the whole thing with jam, he returned to his game.

The realization that this would be Rita’s last night on earth was just beginning to sink in for Bob when he walked into the kitchen and saw the jam jar sitting open on the counter. Ed had no context for his father’s rage. He didn’t know his mother’s life was about to expire nor that his father, who would later say, ‘She didn’t deserve to die like that, it should have been me,’ was on the verge of emotional devastation. Nevertheless, that night Rita’s baby boy, Eddie, became the lightning rod for his father’s anguish and despair.

‘When he hit me, it just came out of the blue,’ Ed recalls. It’s not that Ed was ever completely surprised by his father’s temper, but most of the time it was just words. ‘A lot of times when my dad would scream,’ remembers Ed, ‘he’d throw things in the air and say terrible things, but that night he came over and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of me. I had no idea what I’d done, or not done, to deserve it.’ It would have been pointless to fight back or even run from his father, so Ed stood there and took the beating, trying not to cry and anger his father further. When it was all over he did precisely what he was told to do: he went into the kitchen, put the lid back on the jam jar and went to bed, head severely throbbing from his father’s violent outburst.

Ed lay awake for a few hours, still petrified from what had just taken place, when he began to hear a painful groan coming from his mother’s room. Quietly, carefully, he got out of bed and headed down the hall. Ed stood frozen in the midnight shadows of the hallway across from his mother’s room. His 11-year-old mind knew instantly what his heart rejected. Listening to the gasp, the groan and that final, unforgettable hiss of life as it escaped her lungs-he watched as his mother took her last breath. It would be years before he would tell anyone what he’d seen, and even longer before his father would accept the possibility that Ed’s story could be true.

In the late hours of that December evening, just one week before Christmas, among the whispers of old ghosts living in the Stoughton, Massachusetts, home-rumoured to have once belonged to the cousin of Paul Revere-Ed shivered, violently. In that moment his entire life changed for ever. In the recesses of his mind, he worried that his father might catch him out of bed, but as he wandered back to his bedroom he was in shock over what he’d just witnessed.

It wasn’t long before Ed heard the sudden rush of people coming and going outside his door. In a frenzy, his father told to him to get up and get dressed, and he was taken to the home of an aunt. No one mentioned his mother’s death, and Ed feigned ignorance, still in shock from the physical and emotional trauma of the evening.

Two days later, while Ed was having a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and hot tea, his father arrived to break the news of Rita’s passing. Ed was taken by his father out of the kitchen and into the den. His dad said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, son.’ But before he had a chance to speak, Ed looked up and said, ‘Dad, I know. Ma’s not here any more.’ Surprised, Bob assumed that Ed had overheard a conversation, and asked how he knew, but Ed refused to say anything else. This was the beginning of a silent treatment Bob would have to endure for a long time.

‘Before his mom passed, he was always a quiet kid, always happy,’ recalls Bob. ‘But he was a really good kid-who wanted to spend time with me. We always watched movies together and things like that. But after her death, everything changed. I couldn’t get him to do anything. He was shellshocked. He wouldn’t talk to me, at all.’

Even if Ed had had the emotional capacity, and the words to express what he had seen and what he was feeling, he didn’t dare tell anyone; with the beating he had sustained for leaving the lid off a jam jar, the consequences, he felt, of admitting that he had disobeyed his father by leaving his room and subsequently witnessing his mother’s death were too great. He would carry this impossible secret, buried underneath the grief of extraordinary loss, for years to come, until he could no longer manage its profound effects.

At his mother’s wake, Ed sat quietly in the back of the church, trying to figure it all out, as everyone else was busy dealing with his or her own individual grief. He had become an outsider, alone, left behind in the sorrow of his mother’s wake, and his mind was filled with a mix of memories that he could not reconcile. At one point, as he stood in a queue at the front of the room, greeting mourners with his family, he turned to look at his mother lying in the open casket, and thought he saw a facial movement, a tic of some sort, indicating she was still alive. He watched her for a long time, hoping that her death was a mistake and that she was maybe just sleeping, because she looked so peaceful and thin, all of the fluid of her cancerfilled body now gone.

Ed, who had always been at the centre of his mother’s world, was now someone else’s worry. He remembers family members scurrying around to find something of his to place in the casket, and they came up with a toy airplane. It should have been a Star Wars toy…that would have meant something. His mother would have understood the significance of that-but there was no one listening to him now.

Back at school, after the Christmas break, Ed’s friend Rudy didn’t understand why Ed wasn’t in class. Rudy had spent the holidays with family and didn’t hear about Rita’s death until the headteacher came in and made the announcement to the class. Rudy, whose own mother had died when he was seven, had lost not only his neighbourhood mother figure but also his best friend, whom he greatly missed and who would not return to school for a long time. When Ed did finally go back to school, his home life was so unsettled that he struggled to get through the rest of the year.

After Rita’s death, everyone in the family seemed to scatter. While his older siblings were off living their lives as they had before his mother’s death, his brother Tommy, with whom he shared a bedroom, went off and joined the service. His older sister Tami moved out of the house and into her own apartment down the road, while Deena, who is closest in age to Ed, withdrew into her own world and spent every night crying herself to sleep.

Ed spent a lot of time thinking about the fights and the harsh words that had passed between his parents before his mother’s death. He wondered if his dad, whom he describes as ‘disconnected’ during the funeral, never crying once, even cared that his mother was gone. But then one night, as he passed outside the room where his father was packing up some of his mother’s things, he was witness, once again, to a rare expression of his father’s despair as the strong, proud Marine broke down and wept.

Like most men of his generation, raising and nurturing children did not come naturally to Bob. It was something that women were supposed to do while men worked for a living. Now, without a wife, he was completely at a loss as to how to deal, sensitively, with his two youngest children. ‘I kept Christmas in the new room for them. I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to talk to them, but I wasn’t any good at it. They’d had a bomb unloaded on them. And then Eddie started to act strange, standing in the corner, talking to himself, all mumble-jumble,’ recalls Bob. ‘He would stand in the corner making strange noises, waving his arms and grunting to himself. I didn’t know what to do. I swear to God, I didn’t.’ Before heading off to the service, Tommy remembers, at night Ed would lie in bed making strange sounds in his sleep. Tommy knew something wasn’t right.

As Ed’s trauma over the loss of his mother continued to manifest itself in bizarre physical affectations, his inability to articulate his sorrow and pain created concern. ‘The problem is,’ says Ed, ‘nobody knew what I saw; only I knew. So they’re thinking, “Poor kid, his mom just passed away and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.” At that point I not only understood what had happened, I had more going on inside of me-more emotions stirring-than anyone could possibly understand.’ The one person who would have understood was gone, and life was confusing. Ed was wrestling with many strange new feelings and fears. ‘Suddenly, whenever I would get in the car with my sister to go do something fun,’ he recalls, ‘I felt like something bad was going to happen if we went a certain way, or did a certain thing.’

As the situation grew more desperate, and Bob’s frustration increased, he made a decision that he thought was in the best interests of his children: he sent Eddie and his sister to live with his brother and sister-in-law. He hoped they would be better equipped to bring Eddie back to life than he would be on his own. But for Ed, being uprooted from his home, and the place where the memories of his mother were alive, was devastating. It was also compounded by a certain fear. Even at his young age he was trying to conceptualize death, and the idea that his mother had gone to a place where Ed couldn’t see or touch her was terrifying. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to his dad. He wanted to stay by his side, be near to him, watch him to make sure nothing bad happened to him. Ed nevertheless yielded to his father’s wishes, and the traumatized boy went to live with his aunt and uncle. ‘I didn’t have the words to express myself, and what I was feeling,’ remembers Ed. ‘I could only do what I was told to do.’

Ed may not have had the ability to express his thoughts and feelings aloud, but his deepest emotions rose up in silent expression as he related to the scenes of the movies and television shows he watched. He connected with storylines dealing with the issues of love, honour and family, as they played out before him on the television set.

Ed recalls a specific moment during this time when he was visiting his Auntie Queenie’s house. Auntie Queenie was upstairs making his favourite chocolate-and-marshmallow sweets, while downstairs he watched Uncommon Valor with his Uncle ‘Crunch’ Mac in their new entertainment room. ‘When you see moments like this on television, or in the movies-the love of a son, played by Patrick Swayze, for his father-those are real moments of emotion that live inside of us, and stir us at the very core,’ Ed remembers. ‘I was raised on moments like that…television brought it out in me.’

According to Ed’s father, ‘not much changed’ while Eddie lived with his Aunt Betty and Uncle Junior. And while Ed was drawn to Junior’s strength and integrity, and cites him as a role model for living a life of honour-being a man’s man who meant what he said, firmly believed in being truthful, and never talked bad about anyone-it wasn’t enough to erase the feelings of being so desperately unsettled. At the urging of Ed’s sister Tami, Bob took Ed to see a psychiatrist, hoping to find answers for his son’s silence. Ed refused to talk to the doctor.