Through it all, Laura never complained.
Says her editor, Jonathan Karp: “Like a lot of athletes, she knew how to play in pain and kept it to herself. Not only didn’t she complain, she was the epitome of ‘sunniness.’ If I hadn’t known she had CFS, I would never have suspected it.”
Her agent, Tina Bennett, calls Laura heroic. “I don’t know anyone who has struggled with the kind of adversity that Laura has. Hers is a particularly grueling challenge because there is no letup, no relief…If there is any silver lining…it is that her inner life is correspondingly richer: Her imagination is incredibly vivid, and her empathy for her characters, profound.
“I also think that adversity may have something to do with the unusual clarity and focus of her work. It goes beyond mere narrative or writerly gifts; it’s a kind of existential credibility, a current of unusual power.”
Now that you’ve heard about the horse and the albatross, it’s time to hear about the two people in love.
“I’d be dead without Borden.”
Yes, it’s the same Borden who was sitting in the back seat of Linc’s old Mercedes, the same boyfriend she met at Craig’s Deli in the middle of Kenyon’s Gothic campus.
“Sept. 6, 1986,” she announces brightly, like a school kid reciting the day Columbus discovered America. That was the day they met. “We’ve not married so we celebrate that as our anniversary.
“I was known as a deli rat. I was in there sucking down coffee…It was one o’clock in the afternoon, a sunny day. I was wearing a yellow dress. I was very tan from a summer trip to France. I have kept that dress…I remember having my face in a book, hearing the door open and having the strongest urge to raise my head.”
In walked Borden Flanagan, a 20-year-old senior from Seattle. He was wearing a white T-shirt with “The Smiths” written on it. As he walked by, she called him over.
“I thought he was cute and I cared about the Smiths.”
Laura was a fan of the ’80s British indie rock band, but if the young man, whom she’s described as gentle and handsome with wavy black hair, came in wearing a Monkees shirt, she’d have still found a way to start up a conversation.
They remember their first meeting differently.
She remembers he was charming and articulate.
“When he walked into the deli he had the inverted expression of someone who is struggling with an idea that fascinates and perplexes him, and who is so absorbed in it that he isn’t really seeing what’s in front of him. He was working on a paper, and hadn’t broken his focus on it for hours. So when we first spoke, what came out was Hegel and Marx. That sailed over my head, but the longer we spoke, the more I was impressed with his emotional subtlety. He was someone who felt things hard, who considered the world, and who wanted very much to understand himself and the ways people thought and acted. He also knew how to use language so beautifully.
“With him, I felt like I was home. There was a tremendous physical magnetism there also. He was radiantly handsome.”
He remembers being a pontificating bore.
“I’m really embarrassed about our first conversation,” he recalls. Borden, a political philosophy professor at American University, is sitting at a table in a Starbucks near their row house. Laura is home interviewing someone for her next book—a biography of the Olympic runner and World War II POW Louis Zamperini—and he doesn’t want to disturb her. His black hair is now flecked with gray and cropped close. “I just started nattering on about Hegel and Marx. I couldn’t shut up about it. She acted interested and then she invited me to a party the next weekend. One thing led to another…”
And in Laura’s words, “We have been inseparable since we met.”
They’d been dating just six months when she fell sick. Too ill to leave her dorm room, Laura dropped out of college and moved back to her mother’s house at 5104 Moorland Lane. That summer, Borden, who’d just graduated from Kenyon, got a job as an associate editor at the National Interest, a foreign policy journal in Washington, and moved into the white Colonial to take care of Laura. Together, they made plans for when she would be healthy again.
“For the first months of the illness,” Laura writes in an e-mail, “I thought as young people do; I had plans for my life without disease. My hopes and my fears were always in conflict, but the hopeful part of me built an imaginary future. I was very into cycling just before I got sick, and I recall cutting out an ad for a new bike and hanging on to it in those months, looking at it from bed, seeing myself riding it. Whatever I imagined for myself, Borden was always a part of it.”
But things only got worse. By September, her blood pressure dropped to 70/50 and the doctors were telling her it was all in her head. A year later, in the fall of 1987, she emptied a bottle of Valium on her bed and considered taking all the pills. Then she thought about Borden.
“I don’t have words to express how wrenching that time was. I was desperately ill and growing sicker every day. I was very unsure if I would live through it. Worse was how bereft I felt. People I should have been able to count on simply vanished, or were actively hostile. The bottom fell out of my life. Borden was the only thing I could grab on to.”
Finally a diagnosis came. Dr. John G. Bartlett, the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told her the other doctors were wrong. She did have a disease. It was called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. That was the good news. The bad news was it had no treatment.
The doctor told her some patients get better on their own. And Laura did, to a point. By the fall of 1988, she was feeling well enough to move to Chicago while Borden did graduate work in political philosophy at the University of Chicago. She wasn’t well enough for an outside job, but she could write.
“You write what you know, and I knew racing. I had been in love with the track since childhood, had read everything I could find on racing history, and as a teenager, even papered my bedroom walls with Andy Beyer’s Washington Post racing columns. Susan and I used to take the Greyhound bus to the track every weekend. We never once placed a bet. We just loved the atmosphere, the exhilaration of the competition, and the beauty of the horses. I loved riding out on the bus with the retirees. The race track is such an odd place, full of such an immense variety of people, and it’s a world predicated on the embrace of risk. That made it so captivating to me. It was something of a second home for me.”
A video she’d watched about the 1988 Kentucky Derby led her to write an article about the dangers of too many horses in a racing field. She sent it off to Turf Flash, an obscure horse-racing magazine. That led to a job, $50 a story. The only assignments she accepted were the ones she could research and write from her bed. That led to assignments from Equus magazine, based in Gaithersburg. Through it all, she had to guard her health carefully, doling out her energy—even for the most mundane tasks like getting the mail—with miserly caution. Anything—and nothing—could send her back to bed for weeks.
“No matter how well you’re doing, it can evaporate in a second,” says Borden.
