Whenever I have drowned, it has been in four feet of water. Thank God, I guess. My aunt, as I have very often told nearly everyone I have ever talked to more than once, one time came damn close to drowning off the coast of Thailand, when a rip tide took her out to the open seas and she watched as the bodies grew smaller and smaller on the beach (which really had not been very much fun to begin with, as beaches go, for this was Thailand in 1963 and she was homesick and miserable in the very first Peace Corps and, for all that Kennedyesque commitment to peace, not far away from Aunt Joan's beach the U.S. was cranking up a major war). After awhile she couldn't see the beach at all. Consider that. Think about floating in the ocean, an ocean full of stinging biting things, floating in it so far out that the sounds of human voices have long since disappeared, and then the sound of crashing waves against land was gone too, and no one knows you're there, and never will. Below you is water so deep that eventually the light is gone too, and your body could settle to the bottom like a pebble in a well that no one will ever find or think to go looking for. And you could start to work up a good panic thinking about being lost at the bottom of the sea--I could; I could panic right now just imagining how long it took the titanic to sink two miles, and how long it took people to find a ship that large in an ocean so much larger--but back in my aunt's ocean, in 1963, there was no time to think about that because the real panic of drowning in that manner surely must involve the mad, mad, futile effort to swim back to shore, swim back, get back there, because if you don't your mother will never know what happened to you.
The answer to that kind of drowning, of course, is never to swim back to shore. In my Aunt's case the answer was to float until a fishing boat found her. One did; they returned her to land (after finishing whatever they were doing, I'm sure; gaffing more edible creatures from the sea, eeking out a living, while Aunt Joan sat aft and hugged her knees and shivered even if it was 103 out) and then she walked back to the hut, I imagine, as if nothing had happened, because there was no one for her to tell this too, and there was nothing else to do. But she was never the same. It's hard to be the same after you've just once been that afraid.
It's funny that swimming is really never the right answer to drowning. If you find yourself drowing in four feet of water, for example, and you are 5-foot-6, like me, the thing to do is stand up. But while you're drowning, you don't usually think is clearly as that.
My aunt married my mother's brother in 1969, when I was five, and I was in love with her instantly because she wore a mini-skirt wedding dress. Thirty-seven years later, my uncle died, and my mom and Aunt Joan never did get along very well, and the layers of this family I've known all my life are slowly peeling away. Today we got word from Milwaukee that my mom's step mom has died, but mom isn't doing real well and can't get to this year's funeral. She and dad have spent the past six months giving away most of what they own so that they can sell their house and move into a senior housing community. They've given most of their stuff to me, and I've been dutifully packing it away in my own various attics and rat holes and trunks and caves and such. I'm the keeper of the story. The last in our line. I've got so much of everyone's stuff now that I'm pretty much drowning. I can tell I'm drowing because breathing doesn't seem to be working for me anymore. When it's just ordinary anxiety, you can breathe yourself out but when it's full-out death by deluge, breathing seems to make it worse, and so the flailing begins, and the crazy thoughts, and the urge to swim as hard as you can to get back to mom...

This will be a serialized account of anxiety in a typical female neurotic, and the origins of that anxiety, and some discussion of its treatment with varying degrees of success. My friend Tzivia says that I am a WASP lesbian Woody Allen. Here's proof.