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TwitThisThe Call That Changed Everything
Three and a half months after his surgery, Jon was finally able to return to his Gloucester home. He arrived via a medical van, emerging in a wheelchair. "We were coached beforehand not to be frightened by how horrible he looked," says his long-time friend John Keegan. "Jon had been a super-strong, athletic guy. Now his once-muscular arms were like an inch in diameter, and his skin was yellow. He'd lost almost everything."But Jon made great physical strides through rehab. Within five months, he was walking and had regained most of his strength. Inside him, though, profound emotional changes had been wrought. While his intelligence and sharp wit remained intact, Jon was now unfocused and unable to attend to the minutiae of everyday life. Bills were left unpaid, appointments forgotten. He also, for a time, developed all-encompassing obsessions. One was with recycling. Since Gloucester didn't recycle at the time, he got the idea to send all his family's plastic bottles 500 miles away to his brother in the recycle-friendly city of Buffalo.
The Sarkins had known that the removal of the left cerebellum would have physical consequences, but doctors didn't have a concrete explanation for the psychological changes. Jon, it seemed, was now devoid of the intangible censors that control what we think, what we say and how we act. He would blurt out anything that came to mind, no matter how inappropriate. "I was like that character in the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar," he recalls. "I had to say everything I was thinking. It really was scary."
Social conventions were a thing of the past. If he thought someone was not interesting, he would walk away mid-conversation. He'd laugh at the wrong moment. He found himself having trouble empathizing with others. "I would say, 'I know how you feel,' " Sarkin says, "but inside I was thinking, What?"
Meanwhile, Kim felt like she'd lost the anchor of a steady, reliable partner. "He was very much like a teenager who has a lack of control over his emotions," she says, "whose perspective is warped and who is terribly self-absorbed. I hung in there because Jon is my family. I love him and I believe firmly in looking out for family." She also felt her husband's core had not changed. "Jon's inner personality and values remained the same."
"My wife is great," Jon says in simple understatement. "She was like one of those dolls that you hit and it always pops back up."
In 1990, a year before his second child, daughter Robin, was born, Jon felt that he had relearned enough of the social skills required for a health care provider and decided to go back to work as a chiropractor. "I wanted to support him," says Kim, "but I was very uncomfortable with it, because he got so fatigued trying to keep his composure."
The first few months went all right, but it soon became clear that Jon's heart was no longer in his work. Seeing patients exhausted him, both physically and emotionally. What now fired him up was the compulsive sketching he did in between appointments. He drew anything from pointy-haired people to the Chrysler Building, then scrawled quotations around the images, scrambling the words, creating whole new meanings. Lines from Thoreau were interspersed with cut-outs of Elvis or car tail fins. He explains, "Where once my art was very linear and organized, it became driven and chaotic."
Jon's sister Jane, impressed with the work, asked her brother if he minded if she submitted some of it to the venerable New Yorker magazine. "I remember thinking it would be kinda cool getting a rejection letter from The New Yorker," Jon says.
Then one day, as he sat at his desk furiously creating one of his "doodles," the phone rang. The voice on the other end said, "This is The New Yorker." "First thing I thought," Jon says, "was, Well, it's nice of them to call with the rejection." To his surprise, the magazine was accepting not one, but eight, of his drawings.
In the spring of 1994, Jon sold his practice. It was not an easy decision. "He was heartbroken," says Kim, "but both of us knew the stress was too much for him." He began to turn to art full-time, not so much as part of a conscious career change but as an outlet that suited him like never before. In art, he had found a place where he could express himself without worrying how anyone judged him.
The transition wasn't easy for Kim, who had just given birth to their third child, Caroline. Though the family was receiving disability payments and Kim, in a pinch, could have returned to teaching, she had reservations. "My biggest concern was having to leave the children to go back to work. Jon was not someone I could leave them with. It took me a while to give up the idea of a normal life," she says.
Meanwhile, Jon's work had caught the attention of art dealer Jane Deering. Over the last few years, she has had successful Jon Sarkin showings at her gallery in Gloucester. "His work is like a shock in its abundance," she says. "Pictorially, it's a puzzle. There may be a beautiful pattern. Another level is the language."
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