Love Is the Healer

By Maryanne Sea

At 25 years old, Maryanne Sea was hit by a car while crossing the street during an Ann Arbor, Michigan blizzard. Two years later, her immune system collapsed completely. This is the true story of the first woman labeled "permanently and totally disabled" by the U.S. government as a result of multiple chemical sensitivity.

Maryanne's doctor, an Environmental Medicine specialist named Dr. Paula Davey, spent their first three-hour appointment asking questions like, "How do you feel when you put gasoline in your car?" and "How do you feel when you polish your nails?"— to which Maryanne replied that she loved these smells.

Dr. Davey recognized that Maryanne could not tolerate the influx of petrochemicals that had come into the air, food, and water since the 1950s, including pesticides, synthetics, and plastics. To heal, Maryanne had to live in a bubble—a room with nothing but three chairs, a lamp, and an old TV set—and wait, however long it would take, until she regained tolerance to the modern world.

The bubble was stark. She sat on a wooden chair all day, and at night, she pushed three wooden chairs together to form a bed. She could not talk on the phone. She could eat only one food, shipped on dry ice from Africa, each day. She could not have pens, papers, or any books near her, and she could not read her own mail.

Yet Maryanne did have a powerful resource in her awareness and every day she focused it on one question: "Why was her body rejecting life?" Maryanne realized that she had been frightened of life from the very beginning, that she had become frozen in fear, and that she could not feel love. And she knew that this fear was at the core of her reacting to virtually everything on this earth.

Then into the bubble came Cory Sea, Ann Arbor's "Renaissance Man," to bring Maryanne back to life. Instead of recoiling from the sight of a 68-pound woman sitting on one old chair all day, he moved closer to her and opened his heart.

"Love is the Healer" is the story of two people, who were tested in dramatic and extreme ways, and who were on the brink of losing touch with themselves. In the end, they discover that the only thing that they could not afford to lose was their love for each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9789893318805

Book preview

I didn’t know why she had never finished the pastel green sweater. One arm dangling, without the other on the opposite side, looked strange. I always felt a little embarrassed when I found it among the pile of mending that my busy mother never got to. I knew she had started it when she was pregnant—and she certainly would have had time to finish it, for she had spent much of the pregnancy in bed. She always laughed when I showed it to her, but I never believed in this laugh. I felt she was sad about the sweater, just as she was sad, always sad, about me.

My mother had waited so long to have me—almost five years, way beyond the time in which most Catholic newlyweds would have borne progeny. In the end, it took a pilgrimage to bring me in. It was St. Anne, my mother told me, who was responsible for my conception. After the pilgrimage she and my father made to her shrine in Quebec, Canada, the miracle happened.

She rested dutifully, puffing away on cigarettes as advised by her doctor, who encouraged anything that would keep her relaxed, while I prepared for my birth into the world.

These nine months were not what either of us wanted. Buffeted back and forth by the waves of my mother’s emotions, I tried to hold together, but I couldn’t. Other children may have been able to, but I was different—so sensitive...too sensitive. My mother’s suffering felt like my own. I reached out to connect to her but found only her fear of losing me.

In moments, this fear tightened into a grip that seemed unbearable. But how could she not have these feelings? Five years of waiting and hoping, and now nine months of living with the ever-present threat of loss; it could not have been any other way.

My mother and I were locked together in a cycle of fear and recoil from each other that neither of us could stop, however much we each silently beseeched the other. One day, I snapped. Not a hysterical outburst, not a relentless tirade, not the kind of snap an adult chooses, but the kind that is the only choice available to those so young. Like a string bean in strong hands, I snapped and broke off from my body. Broken into two—body and awareness separate.

I started to grow inside my mother’s body. The bones of the spine and skull were there, but they were not alive with a sense of me. The arms and legs were there, but they were only vaguely connected to the rest of my body. Then the chest, a hole in space, and the eyes, vacant. There was nothing missing, and yet everything was missing. There was no me holding this body together. Swirling, wanting a connection to life but too frightened of what it had felt like, I got caught between wanting life and refusing it.

Now I understand why my mother laughed at the sweater with only one arm. If she hadn’t laughed, she would have cried.

My mother knew, before words, before thoughts, before actions, that I was lost even before I was born. My mother was right not to finish that sweater. She wanted me to finish it.

I have spent my whole life knitting.

On November 30, 1950, at 5.45 a.m., the long wait for me and my mother was over. I remember vividly the bright hospital lights blazing above me when I came into the world. I moved towards the lights without hesitation. They announced that there was something other than the swirling darkness that had become my home. I knew from the first minute of seeing that light that I must never let go of it; that I must hold on, no matter what.

Breastfeeding was impossible. I refused. Alive less than a day, I had already learned how to push life away. I felt safer refusing life than receiving it.

Mother holding daughter, we came home. Home was Summit, New Jersey, forty-five minutes from New York City, and a new, creamy yellow wooden house with black shutters—a reminder of houses in New England, where my mother lived as a child. Seventeen days after my birth, amid a flock of relatives from both sides of the family, all devout Roman Catholics, I was christened in the Catholic Church. My Aunt Josephine announced, Thursday’s child has far to go—a prophecy she was to repeat all through my childhood.

In the church, I felt the same brightness I had been drawn to at birth, and knew I wanted it again. On this day, my father recorded in my pink satin-covered baby book, in his perfect print, that I smiled for the first time.

The light seemed to be a gift; I could not bring it back just by trying. I would have to wait until it touched me again. I next felt it when I spent time with my paternal grandmother, Hilda Kentz. When she touched me, I was less afraid. I pushed against my fear to allow her love into the frozen space that I called home. When we drove in her car to a place where children could feed the deer, I found the courage to put my hand through the wire and touch these living creatures. And when I was a little older, I would kneel next to her and pray to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost objects, for her glasses, which she was always losing. We would find them right after our prayer.

Nee-Nee, too, drew me to the light. She arrived from Ireland to be my nanny, carrying her one suitcase in one hand and her large sewing machine in the other. Leaving her huge Irish family behind, she came to the creamy yellow house—and to me. Every day, she donned her blue uniform with the white apron and helped me find a home in the world.

Nee-Nee had little education, but she needed none to understand intuitively my struggle. She made a silent vow, even unknown to herself, never to leave me, and she never did. Through all the illness that followed in her life, Nee-Nee always held on to me in her heart.

On January 9, 1952, my brother Rick was born. Big, blonde, beautiful—I was entranced with Rick, but even more entranced with the idea of taking care of him. I felt he had been given to me to protect, and I wanted to make his life free of the pain I felt in mine.

Rick did not need me as much as I needed him. He was alive in his body. He was robust and pink-cheeked, while I was pale and fragile. He was handsome and self-possessed, even as a toddler, while I looked lost and remote. He moved towards life with little hesitation, while I always pulled back. He was even-tempered; I was moody. He was unafraid to be here, and I was. I wanted to be like Rick, but I couldn’t. I could only be his friend.

Patsy, my only sister, arrived two years later. She was blonde, with blue eyes and my father’s olive skin, while I had brown hair, hazel eyes and freckles. But I loved Patsy and wanted to protect her. She was more vulnerable than Rick; I could feel it.

An unexplained rash covered Patsy’s body when she was very small. No salve, no ointment, no medication would bring relief. Finally, my mother took her to the Rosary Shrine, a convent of cloistered nuns who prayed and chanted almost all day. Patsy was placed on the altar while the nuns, behind grilled windows, prayed for her. The rash went away.

When spring came two years later, Andrew, the baby, arrived. Now we were complete—two girls and two boys. A friend for each of us, and four altogether. My role of protectress was full-time now, and enough to make me want to stay here on earth. I would not leave my brood.

The bond between us was strong, in part because my Irish Catholic mother had grown up with such a bond in her family, and wanted us to enjoy what she had had. But she did not have to force this on us; it was there naturally and only grew stronger in the face of my father’s volatility.

I don’t think my father had any idea what it would be like to have four children under six. After all, he had been an only child whose parents doted on him completely. My grandparents had enough to afford the best schools, the best clothes, for their one son, and no expense had been spared. Many of his clothes were still monogrammed.

But with four children of his own, there was no time for anyone to fold his monogrammed handkerchiefs and place them in neat piles in his bedroom dresser, which he called his chiffonrobe. Being the center of attention was now a thing of the past for my father, as were the control and the order that had characterized his life.

I felt that we were all too much for him. He loved us but could not handle the pressures that an overnight family brought with it. At times, these pressures rendered him harsh, demanding, insensitive and enraged.

My father was a strong man, with great vitality. His mother had miscarried many times before and after he had come into the world. His strength and will were powerful, but they became enmeshed in a great fear of things not going right or the way he wanted them to go. When he became frightened in this way, he would erupt in a volcanic anger whose lava spread over everyone, damaging us all in different ways.

He was both utterly predictable and utterly unpredictable. We knew exactly what would set the house on fire with his rage, and then again, we never knew what would set him off. We all learned to walk on eggshells, developing almost a nonchalance about the predictable. If he stormed into the house at night, having had to move a bike out of the driveway, we would scatter to the four corners of the house, looking earnestly absorbed in our homework, while he yelled and yelled and yelled. If it was something we could not predict, we would just sit and wait it out, usually at the dinner table.

My mother was frightened of my father—more for us than for herself. She tried to keep the peace to protect us, but it was a superficial peace. We all knew what was underneath.

The need to keep his anger at bay sealed the sentence I gave myself before birth. I would spend my childhood lost in a sea of painful emotion that I did not recognize to be my own, and when it got too much, I would disconnect from reality—to the point that I would stand in front of the mirror and practice the eulogy that I would give at my father’s funeral.

I was often sick, always diagnosed with the same illness— the flu—which in my case meant a searing sore throat, swollen glands the size of golf balls and an intense cold. It might have had something to do with the allergies to chocolate, orange juice, and other foods from which I had suffered when I was very young, but this was the 1950s and no one questioned a doctor’s diagnosis. Instead, I was given more and more antibiotics until I was taking penicillin like other children ate candies.

In hindsight, taking those antibiotics was probably a mistake. They may have been killing the bacteria, but they were weakening me and, in the end, did more damage than the flu ever did. My paleness became greyness and I simply could not keep up with the other children physically.

My ears were a major problem. I suspect that I decided that the best way not to hear my father’s yelling was not to hear my father’s yelling. Whenever I see violence in a movie, my ears start throbbing as if reminding me of the battleground that our home often was. My mother was not afraid to yell back. Hailing from the state of New Hampshire, where everyone is nicknamed Granite Chip, she was no push-over. Her basic strategy to calm the volcanic force of her husband was keep the peace, but she was not unwilling to let her anger come to the surface, too, and sometimes the yelling, interspersed by periods of stone-silence, would last for days.

Whether it was because of the antibiotics, the yelling or both, my ears were remarkably sensitive. Every summer, while other children ran to the pool and jumped in with abandon, I would sit twisting lambswool into tiny cones, then slathering them with Vaseline before placing them in my ears. Then I would pull the first bathing cap, then the second and then the third tightly over my ears, hoping that not one drop of water would get in.

Frightened of so much, weakened physically, I struggled to keep up. But I did have something that not everybody had and it helped make up for what I lacked— passion!

I’ve got rhythm...

I belted out the song like a Broadway star while dancing across the room. I did this by myself until I perfected it, and then I invited others to watch. On stage my timidity seemed to just fall away.

I gave many concerts to family and friends. At each, I would introduce myself with a curtsy and end with a bow, always to strong applause. And no Christmas passed without a pageant, one that I had worked on for weeks. I always cast Rick as St. Joseph and Patsy as the Virgin Mary, and Andrew was baby Jesus when he was small enough, and then a shepherd, an angel or a cow as he grew. These Christmas pageants were multi-media events, complete with beautiful costumes, acting by my well-rehearsed cast and my own songs and recitations.

Every year, my parents would give me a trip to Broadway as a birthday present. By the time I was 10, I had seen My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Oliver! and Peter Pan. My father revelled in the excitement of New York. First, the musical, then drinks at the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel, and finally dinner at a special restaurant whose maitre d’hôtel always gave me cookies wrapped in white tissue paper etched with a map of France or Italy in thin blue ink. My father put his struggles behind him on these occasions, often becoming ebullient as the day passed. I learned quickly that this was the best way to connect with him: through enjoying what he enjoyed. It was not the same as real intimacy, but it was the best we both could do.

My father seemed to love planning special events for us. Whether it was a special restaurant in New York, or a trip to Chicago, or seats at Yankee Stadium, we children delighted in being together and having fun. Invariably, our family would be the last to leave a restaurant, so much did we enjoy telling stories and laughing at ourselves—even at my father, who would laugh along with us on these occasions. No one organizes a special event better than my father does. Things would flow throughout the day because he had thought and planned so much ahead of time, and they flowed with gusto.

The four of us knew how to have fun together at home, too. Every Saturday, we would pile into the upstairs TV room and lie on old leather sofas, while our dog, Gretchen, lay on her chair. The television would go on for about three or four hours and we would watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other sitcoms, the wrestling, and the dreadful roller derby, where women on roller skates would go round and round, trying to push others out of the rink and out of the game. No one would say a word, or laugh, as we watched these shows. There was a silent appreciation of how much fun we were having, and of the love that we had for each other, and we did not want to waste our energy on talk or laughter.

When the ads came on, two of us, previously appointed, would leap from our seats, race down the back stairs into the kitchen, and get the ice cream. Ours was a house of ice cream lovers. There was never only one tub in the freezer; we always had at least three and sometimes four or six. The two in charge of the ice cream would work fast, bending the spoons back as they dug them into the frozen treat, and then rushing back upstairs to arrive just in time to hear the end of the Proctor and Gamble toothpaste ad.

I was happy when I was with Rick, Patsy and Andrew. I felt safe. Moving beyond this, though, always frightened me. So it was a surprise to everyone when I wanted to go to school. The night before my first day, I could hardly sleep. I gazed at the brown dress with the blue flowers and the white collar that my mother had ironed and left on the doorknob, and at the black patent leather shoes and the white socks, and I just couldn’t wait to hop out of bed and start the day.

My mother, though, was not ready for me to leave her. She had coped with my going off to pre-school for a few mornings a week, but the idea of seeing me leave every day was too much. When she realized she just could not take me, she called a neighbor, who came to the rescue and drove me to school. I turned back, looking at my mother crying in the window, and felt confused. This was supposed to be a happy day. I didn’t want my mother to be upset, but I knew I could not run back. So, I got in the car and went to school, the school that became my favorite place on earth.

Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child

Let the name ring out

Lift your heart and raise your voices

Let the whole world know your choices Oak Knoll, our school so dear

Ring it out so loud and clear

Like a fanfare, let it r-r-o-o-l-l-l! School of the Holy Child

Oak Knoll.

My father’s struggles had taken their toll on me, but then he made up for it by giving me an extraordinary gift—thirteen years at Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child.

Oak Knoll was an oasis in my body’s desert and a harbor for all who walked through the white doors with their shiny gold knobs. And just about everything shone at Oak Knoll. The building had been a gift from a wealthy woman named Bonaventura Devine, and no expense had been spared. Oak Knoll had an aviary with cockatoos that squawked all day, a kindergarten with large orange trees in pots, art rooms with a big desk of polished wood for each student, little music rooms for private lessons, and a library with perfectly polished wooden tables and gold chandeliers hanging overhead.

I felt safe and happy in every room of Oak Knoll School but my favorite place was the chapel. The entire chapel was painted a serene ivory: the statues, the pews, the wooden louvered shades on the windows—even the altar. The only thing that wasn’t ivory was the floor. It was real marble, speckled green with two gold lines running up and down, one on the right and one on the left.

Every morning I would stand, with the other girls, on the thin, gold line on the left, while the boys were on the right, before we walked silently into the chapel to pray. When I sat down in the ivory pew, I forgot that I was sick a lot of the time. I forgot the fear, the pressure, the feeling of disconnection from my body. I just felt happy.

When I was not in the chapel, I still walked with my head down, as I had always done. My mother would often offer me 25 cents to look up at the top of a telephone pole. But this shyness did not stop me from challenging the kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Converse, on the very first day of school, when she insisted my name was spelled Mary-Anne. I set her straight quickly; there were no hyphens in my name! She did not back down, but nor did I. I told her that my mother would say I was right when she came to pick me up, and she did.

It was incidents like this, along with my ease in reading, that made Mrs. Converse suggest that I skip first grade and go on to second when our kindergarten year finished. My mother, however, had a different view. She felt that whatever I had going for me academically, I was missing socially. I would be going along to first grade like everyone else.

In the first grade, my teacher was Mother William Mary. In her class, I realized for the first time that I lived behind a glass wall, frightened of everyone and everything around me. I could see that she loved all the children, but I recognized the fact that I could not feel it. I became paranoid, convinced that she did not love me the way she loved the others. It was something I could not explain, because I didn’t understand it, but I did recognize it. I just stayed behind the glass wall, cut off from my body, hoping that if I got everything right, did everything perfectly, I could hold together.

The nuns who taught at Oak Knoll belonged to an order called the Society of the Holy Child. The order had been founded by a woman who had a profound dedication to children—to nurturing, guiding, teaching and inspiring them.

Action, Not Words was Oak Knoll’s motto, and the nuns lived by their motto. They did not preach to us, threaten us, cajole us. They simply lived a life of devotion and service to the Divine and drew us into their happiness. It did not matter if they were on a baseball field, running in their long, black habits to catch a fly ball, or in the classroom, teaching us how to recite a poem with passion—these nuns gave of themselves fully to us and to life itself.

A.M.D.G., we wrote at the top of all our school papers, long before we knew even a word of Latin. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, To the Greater Glory of God. We wrote it, invoked it, breathed it from the moment we walked into Oak Knoll School to the moment we left. In my case, I never wanted to leave. I could not arrive early enough nor could I go home late enough. The secret to my success at clocking up the most hours at Oak Knoll was volunteering. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I had volunteered for every job: feeding the cockatoos in the aviary, watering the orange trees in the kindergarten, dusting the statues of St. Joseph and Mary in the chapel, putting books away in the library, and, my favorite, waiting until each nun packed up for the day and running up to her, asking, Mother, may I carry your books?

If there was no volunteer work to do, I would sit in the library and imagine myself doing some. With the gold chandeliers above me and the polished wood floors and mahogany tables below, I sat in splendor with a pile of orange books. Each one’s title, written in black ink, was the name of someone who had done great service helping other people. Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, the first American woman doctor—my heroes were all heroines, and I basked in their glory as I sat imagining myself doing similar good works.

In these daydreams, and in service to the nuns in daily life, I found a temporary respite from the pain of feeling no home in my body. I felt that I was someone if I made another person happy or made something right in the world. This impulse to serve, despite its entanglement with my own pain, kept me willing to stay here, and through it I would continue to take steps towards rather than away from life.

Even at home, my life revolved around Oak Knoll. If I did not have a project of my own to do, then I would throw myself into one of Rick’s, Patsy’s or Andrew’s. I doubt that my athletic brother Rick really cared if he became an altar boy, especially since it meant mastering a lot of Latin, but I took it on as my mission to prepare him and his friend George for this sacred role. Dutifully, I would stand tall between them—the priest—chanting, Dominus Vobiscum, and then whispering, Et cum Spiritu to tuo to my two students, who knelt with bowed heads beside me, repeating my words.

There was nothing I would not have done for the nuns. I expressed this sense of devotion clearly in my autobiography, written at the age of 9:

As we pass through the grades right up to the fifth, you will see me pondering over a composition entitled, My Ambition. Well, I knew what I wanted to be but how to say it was my problem. After thinking for a few minutes, I decided I would bring it out bluntly. I have a double ambition, one to be a doctor and one to be a nun. Now, let me test your arithmetic. What does that add up to? You don’t know! Why, it adds up to a medical missionary!

I knew that the world needed missionaries; that there were tragedy and despair outside the walls of our school. But at Oak Knoll, we believed in the power of prayer. During the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, we all prayed fervently that Russia and the United States would not go to war, and our prayers were answered. Two years later, all we could do was pray through tears for our assassinated President, John F. Kennedy.

Some days I didn’t want to be a doctor, too; I just wanted to be a nun. Who wouldn’t want to look as serene and happy as the nuns did? They rested in something greater than themselves. I felt this presence in the chapel most of all, but also in every room and every activity. These nuns demonstrated that happiness came from surrender, and I wanted to do just what they did. Only in my case, I never felt that there was any person there to surrender. I could feel the will to surrender but no body connected to that will.

I saw all of this only in fleeting moments. Oak Knoll cocooned me from the depth of my aloneness.

After several years at Oak Knoll, my passion became more intertwined with my desperation. I was learning that I needed to succeed. It was expected. When I had been a little girl, receiving awards was assured, but by the time I was 13, I really had to work for them. I did not shun hard work, but nor did I know how to rest and relax. I would sit for hours after school and on weekends, memorizing, organizing, creating, in the hope of shining academically and in every way. I was not even aware of the social life that most young girls aspire to. How could I be concerned about whether a boy liked me when I was not sure of getting an A in English? I sought perfection as much to please my parents as to hold myself together. The more accomplished I was, the more in control I felt; the more in control I felt, the less I felt I would shatter into pieces. Unrelenting performance and achievement shielded me from my terror.

Every year at school’s end, Oak Knoll invited parents and friends to Prize Day. Triumphant music playing, red roses for the graduating class—Prize Day was a celebration of excellence in academics, sports and music. The two most coveted prizes given each year were Highest Average, and General Excellence. Virtually every year, I won General Excellence; I would not have had it any other way. Quietly clasping rosary beads for weeks ahead of Prize Day, I would pray to every saint that I knew to be rewarded for my hard work.

At 13, when it was my turn to carry red roses and graduate from eighth grade, I won General Excellence again, and Highest Average in History and English, but I understood pride in these achievements only by observing other people’s reactions. I did not feel pride in myself—just the same blankness. So I watched my parents, my friends, my friends’ parents for signs that I was good and worthy of congratulations. This wasn’t hard to do: I had always been able to sense what other people were feeling.

I shone academically but was still socially retarded, as my mother had recognized eight years before. Boys, dances, make-up, high heels—all the things my friends talked about seemed remote to me. I still held on to an infant-like doll that I named Imelda Marcellino, after my favorite two child-saints. And at night I prayed that my mother would have one more baby, someone else for me to take care of.

There was no new baby, and I had to leave Imelda Marcellino behind so that I could keep up with my friends. I always wanted to have friends. And so, I asked a boy to a dance. How I made that phone call I will never know, but I did and the boy agreed. However, on the night, he arrived late, by which time my dress was soaked in fear. I looked in the mirror and saw a slightly overweight girl with vacant eyes in a pale, freckled face. I got through the dance by sheer will, and held on to the secret hope that maybe this boy could find an attractiveness in me that I could not find in myself. He didn’t. He preferred my best friend and asked her to the next dance.

A year and a half passed before I went to another dance. During this time, I became sick, suffering the usual swollen glands and unable to speak. Weary of my poor health, the antibiotics and my own demands, I could no longer maintain my passion.

Why get well? I began to wonder. If it just meant more of the same—trying to compete with other girls for honors or for boys—then I was not sure I wanted to try any more. But if I did not keep trying, then I would not know how to live or what to live for. I had been trying to feel safe all my life. I lay on my bed