How It Started In that ironic, give-and-take way the universe often works, I learned of my "new" life -- that is, my real life, unclouded by a lifetime of lies -- just as my mother's life was ending. My mother, Maddie Wheeler, was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer at age 49 in May, 2006. Prior to the two-week string of visits to the various clinics it took to determine this, my mother had not been to a doctor since before I was born. My mother didn't "believe" in doctors, in much the same way she didn't believe in $200 designer jeans: a big waste of money that ultimately didn't make you look or feel any better, except maybe in your head. So by the time she started to complain of symptoms toward the end of my spring semester, there wasn't much that could be done. I stayed with my mother at my childhood home in Austin and cared for her all summer. I wanted to take the fall semester off and stay with her, but she insisted I go back to school. Education was the most important thing, and she was feeling much better. Or so she said. My mother was a tough, rugged woman, born of what some would call "pioneer stock," with a high threshold for pain. So I believe her illness was much worse than she'd let on at that point. Somehow the thought of me dropping out of school, even for a semester, was harder for her to bear than the abdominal pains which kept her doubled over through the night. So I returned to NYU in September, 2006, to start my junior year. I returned to Austin for Thanksgiving, happy that my mother seemed to be doing much better. I cooked a turkey dinner for the two of us, of which she ate a pretty good plateful. She asked me to help her clean out the attic, which she'd wanted to do for months, but wasn't up to climbing the ladder. I went up to find the old clothes she wanted to donate to charity and a colorful corner of paper caught my eye. It was an old certificate with a bunch of handwritten numbers, letters and symbols on the back. I asked my mother what it was, and she told me my grandfather received it when he was stationed in Southeast Asia during Vietnam, a humorous little honor they gave people back then. She said she didn't know what the writing was, though, probably just figures he needed for his research, which he jotted on the back when he ran out of paper. She told me that all those old boxes full of musty paper were a fire hazard, and needed to be thrown out. "Don't even open them, you'll probably get a sinus infection from all the dust," she said. I didn't get the chance to really work on the attic much, though, before the holiday weekend was over.   A few days after that, I completed my exams and got ready for a brief sojourn before going home to see my mother. I was going to accompany my roommate on a weekend cryptozoological expedition in Upstate New York before flying home on Christmas day. Then my mother called and said I needed to come home, now. I took the next flight to Austin. There, I found my mother on what would literally be her death bed. Her condition had taken a considerable turn for the worse about three weeks prior to my arrival, but she'd never let on when I talked to her. She said she didn't want to ruin my concentration during exams by making me worry. She passed away the next afternoon, Christmas Eve. It was a very emotional time, and many things were said between us in those final hours. She made me promise to stay in school until I graduated, and I told her I would. But one thing that struck me as odd was that she repeated how important it was to throw everything in the attic away before the house burned down. She went on and on about the house burning down, and I promised her I wouldn't let that happen. At the time, I just attributed it to the morphine she was on. The day after the funeral I started cleaning up my mother's house, mostly just to have something to do. My mother had thoughtfully pre-chosen and paid for all the arrangements. Since I had no other family, the service itself was attended by me, the pastor, the old lady who played the organ, and three of my mother's former co-workers. So there were no out-of-town inlaws I had to "entertain" or headstone catalogs I had to spend hours thumbing through. I was totally alone with nothing to do. I dusted, scrubbed, mopped or polished just about every conceivable surface in the house. I threw away three kitchen-size trash bags full of old, half empty containers -- everything from ketchup to cold cream -- before I had a chance to assign them sentimental value: This was the last pint of ice cream she ate before... This sort of maudlin and morbid attachment to insignificant things served no purpose but to drive you crazy -- a lesson she was quick to point out after my Grandma Grace passed away when I was 17. With nothing left to clean or throw away downstairs, I moved to the attic. Against my mother's wishes, which I believed at the time to be possibly drug-induced, I did not immediately throw away all the boxes of papers, but instead opened them. Risking a nasty sinus infection, I sat in the attic for hours, going through box after box of my grandfather John Wheeler's 40-year-old personal effects. I soon found myself lost in a sea of his old papers and photos, transfixed by them. Time became meaningless and I had to start setting the alarm on my watch to remember to eat. Holding these papers in my hands that John Wheeler had once held between his own sweaty, tired fingers made my grandfather human to me for the first time in my life. Reading his own words, scrawled in a journal in Thailand in 1966, made him come alive to me in a way that the few photos I'd seen and anecdotes I'd heard never could. My own father was resurrected as well, at least in my mind. I now saw my father not as a long-gone hero, a shadow cast by a chiseled stone monument, but as an 11-year-old boy who missed his Daddy terribly. Despite my recent family tragedy, I felt strangely happy, finally getting to know these men I'd missed my whole life. I wondered why my mother and grandmother had never shared this wonderful treasure with me. As I read more of the journal, I began to figure out why. At first I thought it was a matter of shame or regret. I learned that my grandfather had been involved, at least tangentially, with one of the most tragic and far-reaching mistakes ever made by the military. Even though he thought he was helping to fix this mistake, perhaps it was still not something they wanted me to associate with my grandfather's memory. As I delved even further into the depths of my grandfather's top-secret project, though, I began to think my family's decades of silence might have been an instinct of self-preservation. This top-secret project, I believe, was somehow responsible for my grandfather's death. I also believe my own father lost his life trying to discover the secrets of this project, the real story behind John Wheeler's death. I believe my mother wanted me to get rid of these artifacts not for fear of dust, but of doom -- the third-generation Curse of the Wheeler Men that she must have feared would befall me when I started asking too many questions. The fear of death holds no power over me. But the questions that ricochet ceaselessly through my mind do. I started this site because I know that someone out there has the answers. And it is now my life's mission to find them. |
