The Invisible Husband of Frick Island - Colleen Oakley Page 0,35

as they feared friends and family would think they were mentally ill.

Anders’s first thought: Well, yeah. His second: Was that what was happening? Piper had recently lost her husband, that much he was certain of. Was she having some kind of prolonged PBHE? He shot off an email to the study author and got a response two days later.

Thanks for your inquiry. Please find my responses for your article on grief and spousal death as follows:

Yes, grief can manifest itself in many different ways, and yes, these “post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences,” or PBHEs, are actually quite common for widows/ers, particularly in the days and weeks directly following the death. Typically they are momentary—not lasting for more than a few minutes, so to your next question: someone who was hypothetically constantly seeing their loved one and behaving as if they were still alive. Without being able to speak with the patient directly, it’s hard to diagnose accurately, but the most likely explanation is a general psychotic break. Someone whose grief has gripped them so immensely they have disassociated with reality. Though I haven’t dealt with that particular scenario, it brings to mind a news story I read a few years ago about a woman in Australia who lived with her husband’s dead body in their home for weeks, until neighbors started to smell the decomposition. He had died of natural causes, but she simply couldn’t let go. Perhaps you’ve come across that one in your research.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Anders wrinkled his nose. At least Tom’s body wasn’t lying in wait, decaying in Piper’s carriage house. He didn’t think.

But he did think he finally had enough pieces to start pulling together an episode for his podcast. And he spent another week writing, recording, and editing it, until he had forty-nine minutes of a perfectly paced (if he did say so himself) story—beginning with the cryptic email he’d received from someone on Frick Island and slowly revealing his journey to understand climate change (peppering in a few of Mr. Gimby’s wacky clips), which turned into a possible investigation into a missing waterman, which turned into the shocking realization that the wife of that missing waterman was experiencing a delusion on a grand scale—and that the entire island was going along with it.

Ira Glass himself couldn’t have done it any better.

And last night at 3:20 a.m., he’d finally hit enter, uploading the episode to his website, posting it on Instagram and Twitter, and then falling into a deep, restful sleep. When he woke this morning with a start, sitting straight up, he knew without even glancing at the clock that he was wildly late for work. When he did look at the clock, he saw with a shock that he was nearly four hours late.

“Seriously, though, what’s up with you?” Jess said, her head popping up again like a game of whack-a-mole. “Is this about all that Frick Island stuff again?”

“Kind of,” Anders admitted, pulling his laptop out of his bag and powering it up.

Jess shook her head at him before disappearing once again. Last week, when Anders told her what he had seen, Jess was nonplussed. “I told you Frick Island was weird.”

Now he waited as his computer screen came alive and then went through the motions of checking his emails, responding to any that needed responding to, checking the news headlines, and then pinging Greta to let her know he was in.

Then he clicked on his website to see if his father had listened to his podcast. It didn’t load immediately—which was sometimes the case at work; the Internet was spotty no matter how much the higher-ups complained to the board, explaining that a slow Internet connection should probably not be an issue in a newsroom. Not knowing if it would be ten seconds or two minutes, Anders stood up to take Jess’s suggestion of finding coffee. In the break room, as he was filling a foam cup to the brim with the hot liquid, Greta walked in.

“There you are.”

“Yeah, sorry I was running late this morning. I overslept.” He hadn’t ever been late before, so he thought honesty was the best policy and hoped for leniency on his first offense.

Greta waved Anders’s sentence away as if it didn’t matter. “Listen, I need you to go out to Salisbury High School, like, fifteen minutes ago. It’s on lockdown. A man knocked off a 7-Eleven with a hunting rifle and he’s on the loose.