The Story Behind the Book (ALMOST finished ) December 7, 2019

On a dead-of-winter night in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, blistering winds howled outside the closed windows of my old white sedan as snow piled up high around it. The temperature was in the teens, and even with the car running and heat on high, I was chilled to the bone. I was afraid I would die from hypothermia and that someone would find my lifeless body when the sun rose the next morning, ending my battle with environmental illness before I could find a means of healing myself. That night I prayed fervently to have all the broken pieces of my life put back together again.

I had become a prisoner caged in my own body, with a dysfunctional immune system caused by exposure to a barrage of toxic substances that had made me hypersensitive to fragrances, laundry detergent, fabric softeners, shampoo, and other everyday products. My body could not tolerate even a minute exposure to these substances. This extreme sensitivity to my environment had left me literally out in the cold, living in my car as the only tolerable environment for days and nights on end.

I had first fallen in love with New Mexico in the late 1980s during a vacation there with a friend who had moved from New York City to Santa Fe to establish a new beauty salon. In 1993, after seventeen years in New York City, where I had owned an event-planning company and maintained a practice in psyche-soma healing of grief and trauma, I decided to move to Santa Fe myself.

A few nights before my departure to Santa Fe, I had had a dream delivering what seemed like a prophetic message. An elderly Native American woman, her face with beautiful lines etched with age, was visiting me in my home. I was crying and apologizing for expressing my sorrow when she pointed to a door and asked me to open it. As I opened it, I was surprised to see a forest of young trees. The old woman whispered, “Never apologize for your tears; they water new life. Your tears have a purpose.”

A few days later, I left New York for a new life in New Mexico with my dog Lilly, a Jack Russell terrier and Chihuahua mix I had adopted at the ASPCA, a white dog with one black eye and a black heart-shaped mark on her side, who was the love of my life.

After living in Santa Fe for four years, I decided to adopt a baby to fulfill a long-held dream. Because I was not in a serious relationship at the time, I resolved to adopt as a single mother and moved back to New York to pursue better employment opportunities, landing a job as a public relations and events manager at Rosa Mexicano in Manhattan and finding an apartment in a charming old house in Yonkers, right across the street from the Hudson River. After I settled in, I chose an adoption agency that worked exclusively with orphanages in Vietnam and, after a discussion with the agency supervisor, agreed to pursue adoption options more specifically after I had had time to save more money.

Being back in New York greatly challenged my body in ways I did not understand at the time. Fumes from buses and cars made me queasy, and the smells of perfumes, hair products, and laundry detergent on clothes caused me dry heave in the streets and subway stations. I suffered from headaches, ocular migraines, digestive issues, Bell’s palsy, tingling and numbness in my hands and legs, and, at times, debilitating fatigue. Brain fog affected my ability to concentrate and find relevant words for use in daily conversations. These symptoms made it increasingly difficult to hide my illness at work.

All the doctors I first consulted concluded that there was nothing wrong with me, that my symptoms were caused by my mind. Finally I found a physician, Dr. Leo Galland, who diagnosed me with environmental illness, also known as multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). While it was a relief to know I wasn’t losing my mind, I now realized that I was like a canary in a coal mine, reacting to chemicals not yet affecting the mass population. Dr. Galland and I worked together for a year and a half, but since I did not improve substantially he suggested I leave New York for a healthier environment, so I decided to move back to New Mexico.

Before leaving New York, I received a phone call from the supervisor at the adoption agency who told me that twelve baby girls were currently available for adoption and that the agency would like to expedite my application. For a split second, I was thrilled at the possibility of realizing my dream of becoming a mother, but then reality set in, and I had to explain that I had become very ill and could not move forward with the adoption.  After I hung up the phone, I fell to the floor and cried for a long time. I felt like my life was falling apart because of my illness, forcing me to leave my job, move out of my home, give away almost all my possessions—towels, pillows, blankets, furniture, clothes—and forfeit my dream of adopting a child.

After returning to Santa Fe on September 17, 1999, my forty-sixth birthday, I first stayed in a friend’s house, but I had a difficult time with the environment there because he was an artist and woodworker with paint and glues all around the house. I began staying in other rooms and homes, desperately trying to find a safe environment without success. During this time a doctor in Santa Fe who specialized in environmental medicine figured out that my immune system had stopped functioning normally because my New York landlord had sprayed pesticides on rose bushes and fruit trees below my bedroom and kitchen windows, toxic chemicals that had had poisoned me.

The magnitude of the physical and emotional tsunami engulfing me was now immense. My heart was completely broken open and I collapsed into a deep well of sorrow, despairing that I might be living in isolation for the rest of my life. My connection to the Divine was the only thing that gave me hope.

Eventually I began searching for safe housing outside New Mexico and finally found a hotel at Deerfield Beach, on the east coast of Florida that catered to people with MCS. It had a studio apartment available a block from the ocean and was equipped with air and water filters, as well as organic cotton bedding and towels washed only in white vinegar and baking soda. But animals weren’t allowed in the rooms, so my mother, who lived thirty minutes north of Deerfield, took Lilly when I moved in. Although I was devastated to part with my dog, my mom adored her and I could relax knowing she would be treated like royalty.

I followed a therapeutic regimen created by my doctor in New Mexico that included dawn and evening walks on the beach for exposure to negative ions from the ocean air; frequent visits to an infrared sauna; daily vitamin injections; meditation; journaling; and large quantities of supplements. This regimen, combined with living in an environment free of toxic chemicals, allowed my body to slowly begin to heal. As the months passed, I felt increasingly stronger, and in six months I was ready to continue my healing back in New Mexico with Lilly.

Just before leaving Florida I had a powerful dream: During the opening of an artist’s exhibition at his home deep in the Canadian woods, he introduced his new photography book titled Animal Expressions, which captured the soul of each animal. The book was so huge it was necessary to climb a ladder to turn the pages. Mesmerized by it, I asked the artist about the animals and how he had found a home in such a beautifully forested area. He looked me directly in the eyes and said, “Debra, be receptive to the beauty and grace of the forest, the animals, and our own human nature. That is your healing place.” When I awoke, I described the dream in my journal, without knowing at the time that its message would change my life.

Once I arrived back in New Mexico, I moved into a house that I thought would be a safe environment for me, but I soon discovered mold and had to move to short-term rentals while it was being remediated. There were a few times between rentals that I had to sleep in my car. Physically and emotionally exhausted, I felt broken and alone, living in survival mode, but after five months I was finally able to move back into the house, a safe environment where I could continue healing.

One afternoon while thumbing through a magazine in a doctor’s office, I saw a photograph of a clay pot that had been broken and mended with gold, making it even more beautiful than the original, a technique the Japanese call kintsugi. I tore the page from the magazine to take home, where I put it on my refrigerator to look at every day, while reflecting on what pieces of myself and my life I might be able to salvage and mend.

Two years after returning to New Mexico I started having dreams about chimpanzees that transported me to a new, wild world where chimps happily played on forest floors and swung high in the treetops. Feeling like the dreams invited me to walk on ancient lands and commune with chimpanzees, I welcomed the dreams as part of my healing medicine. I began to spend more time in nature, walking on mountain trails lined by piñon and juniper trees, or lying on the desert earth, surrounded by flowering cacti. It wasn’t like exploring the African jungle, but I was connecting with the earth and its life-form in a more intimate way.

Wanting to know more about chimpanzees, I began reading everything I could find in bookstores, libraries, and online. The more I read, the more depressed I felt, realizing that these majestic forest dwellers were in serious peril. Chimpanzees in the wild were commonly being killed or captured from forests for profit, to be used as subjects in biomedical research laboratories; sold for human consumption in marketplaces and through the black market to support expatriate communities in London, Paris, and New York; and the babies ripped from their dead mothers’ arms to be marketed as house pets, performers, and attractions at poor-quality zoos. As a resident of New Mexico, I was especially shocked to find out about the role my state had played in the exploitation and abuse of chimpanzees. The US Air Force had captured sixty-five young chimps in Africa and brought them to Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they had been bred for its Air and Space Research Program and used in barbarous experiments that had mutilated and killed them.  

Learning about the suffering of the chimpanzees deeply affected my psyche, changing the tone of my chimpanzee dreams. One particularly vivid dream rattled me: I was walking down a dusty road in a rural area somewhere in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I passed a vehicle that had a sick, frightened baby chimp in the back seat. I reached in through the open window to rescue her and then abruptly woke up.

After that dream, I remembered Casey, the two-year-old chimpanzee I had hired for a client’s birthday party more than a decade earlier, when I had owned an event-planning company in New York. Casey had arrived at my client’s Long Island summer home wearing white roller skates, a hot pink top, blue-and-pink floral pants, and a diaper. She had been a ball of energy and the hit of the party. I had photographs from that party in a box in my closet, and as I looked at them I realized, with a sickening feeling, that in hiring Casey I had contributed to the businesses that exploited captured wild chimpanzees. In that moment, I vowed to Casey that because I had been part of the problem I would find a way to be part of the solution. My advocacy for chimpanzees started that day.

At first my vow to Casey took the form of writing articles about the ethical and moral implications of our abuse of chimpanzees and starting an educational program for children designed to foster respect and empathy for chimpanzees and other animals. Then I wrote and edited The Chimpanzee Chronicles: Stories of Heartbreak and Hope from Behind the Bars. I have never waivered in my promise.

It was essential for me to bear witness to the suffering of chimpanzees. I felt their pain and understood from my own experience what it was like to lose personal freedom and beloved aspects of life to live imprisoned, cut off from the world. Although my experiences were nowhere close to what chimpanzees had gone through in captivity, something in their pain and isolation mirrored my suffering and triggered great empathy for their fate. My chimpanzee dreams, coupled with their real-life stories and my personal encounters with retired entertainment, pet, and biomedical research chimps helped me listen below the surface of my own suffering to hear a call to expose the exploitation and act for change, which opened a new door to healing, not just regarding my own my own physical illness but also relating to the healing between humans and violated and exploited chimpanzees.

There is no separation between individual and collective trauma and grief because all living beings are connected in powerful yet often mysterious ways. The chimps’ suffering connected me to the soul of the world—anima mundi—making me aware that what happens to one happens to all. My ability to be a witness to the chimpanzees’ suffering helped me cultivate more compassion and expand my small sense of self to attain a deep-rooted connection with animals and the earth.    

While I was writing and editing The Chimpanzee Chronicles, many friends thought the book was too stressful for me during a time when I was unwell, but I was driven by something beyond myself to complete it for Casey and the other chimpanzees who suffered at the hands of humans. I am grateful beyond measure for the journey I have been through and the inner strength I have found to walk the labyrinthine path of illness, homelessness, and isolation in order to to become an activist for chimps and other animals. I now see that my sorrow about my health challenges ultimately did serve a purpose, of watering new life, as the old woman in my dream indicated. I also now see the significance of the prophetic dream I had about the artist advising me that being receptive to the beauty and grace of the forest, the animals, and our own human nature was my healing place. And I finally feel that, like the kintsugi pot with gold holding together its broken pieces, the shattered pieces of my life have been fused together again, with the chimpanzees being the golden glue binding together the shards of my courage, trust, compassion, and newfound understanding of interconnectedness with all beings.