Story Frame 10 – The Man Behind The Mask

May 07, 2024

Meanwhile, escalating tensions on the home front over our financial insecurities had turned my fragile marriage into an emotional fault plane, exposing the deepening cracks and widening crevices between me and my husband.

A friend suggested I see a therapist to help manage the stress – something I’d never done before and something I could not really afford to do. She persisted, suggesting Dr Paul Peckar, a psychiatrist whose children went to the same local school as ours. Yielding to suggestion, I booked a single-hour consultation and on the appointed day, showed up at his office.

There’s no mistaking him. Paul Peckar is quickly recognizable for his badly scarred and disfigured face and hands, resulting from a horrendous incident a few years ago.

“Paul Peckar was about to start a psychiatric session with a patient when the mystery package arrived at his Fairfax County office.

Peckar joked with his patient that “it’s probably a bomb.” As the patient relaxed in a brown leather recliner, the psychiatrist opened the package and peeked inside.

Then the room exploded.”

As I only had enough money for a single session, Paul moved quickly through my background bio, work, and my family life, like a counseling version of speed dating. He was curious, interested, and empathetic. He even laughed occasionally – but only at the right places. Then he got serious and asked about my marriage.

I told him about a recurring dream I’d been having in which I was trying to keep from drowning in swirls of black water while carrying the weight of my husband on my back. When I was able to look up, I could see the sun shining down on a beautiful jungle of thriving plants on a distant mountaintop.

I wish I could paint, I said, so I could put that dream down on canvas and get it out of my head.

Paul listened intently, asking the occasional perceptive question and taking a lot of notes with his damaged hand curving awkwardly around his notepad. As I was talking, my mind wondered, is he is even able to read his own writing?

“Peckar, his clothes on fire, followed the voice of his patient, whose leg was broken — past the missing walls, under the collapsed ceiling, through the warped front door 15 feet away.

‘I can’t tell you what it was like, except it was a flash,” Peckar said. “I knew I was burned. I knew my life had changed.”

My life was about to change, too. Fortunately, not so dramatically. But for me, the kids, and Steve, it would still be a seismic shift.

Somewhere around minute forty-five, Paul paused, looked at me intently through his glasses and said, “So why don’t you get a divorce?”

The room was quiet as his words hung in the air.

“It’s okay to do that?” I asked tentatively, eventually breaking the silence.

“The blast … left burns over nearly 60 percent of his body, flaps on his scalp and face, a gaping hole in his abdomen and a three-inch chunk of pipe bomb just a heartbeat from his aorta. The scars on his arms look and feel like raw chicken skin. Because of severe nerve damage, his wrists flop and require splints for support.”

“Why not?” he said.

He didn’t tell me what to do, he just asked questions.

But something in my head recognized the thought of being on my own again as the right next step for me. Perhaps the idea had needed to come from someone who barely knew either of us. I don’t know. But what I did know is that at that moment, light seemed to flood into my head, chasing out the sharp edges of the bad dreams.

I can wear this, I thought.

“After a year’s worth of hospitals and rehabilitation, Peckar, 51, looks at life differently through his hard plastic face mask.

What he sees is something positive emerging from all the pain. He says he is closer to his family now, more aware of how little of his life truly is under his control.

I left Paul’s office, knowing there were more difficult times ahead of me, but also mindful that my troubles paled in comparison to what he’d been through. That helped me find a new perspective and – to use a film term – pull focus.

I also left unaware that the time I had just spent with Paul would bring a new documentary film into my life, one that would take it in a whole new direction – like a runaway horse bolting across the landscape with me clinging to its back and watching what unfolded with amazed eyes.

A Storyboard Life

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