The Love You Take: Michael and Gabriella Salsbury’s Implausible Parental Nightmare

On a lark, Michael and Gabriella Salsbury walked into Madame Rosinka’s fortune-telling shopfront on Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. Rudderless and adrift on the open ocean of unspeakable parental sorrow, the couple were emphatically not looking to Madame Rosinka for the answers that had otherwise so eluded them. The Salsburys were not seekers after the secular metaphysics of daily life. But rationalists have their limits. 

When they told a dear new friend of their intention to meet with the palm reader, Hospice of Santa Barbara Executive Director Gail Rink nodded appreciatively. “Oh, you’re going to see Sonia!” she said. “Well, make sure you listen carefully. She’s the real deal.” Michael Salsbury – a finance guy who would later found American Riviera Bank in Santa Barbara – had just returned from Geneva, Switzerland, where he’d interviewed for a corner-turning position with Merrill Lynch. His wife Gabriella was a neonatal nurse at St. Francis Hospital on Micheltorena in Santa Barbara. They had suffered two nearly spirit-breaking losses. One more lay ahead. 

“We walked in and sat down,” Michael says of the visit, “and right out of the box she looks at us and says, ‘you both have the worst type of grief inside of you’!” He and Gabriella looked at each other. “Then she said, ‘I see more kids’. She knew nothing about us at all!” 

Michael Salsbury’s memoir Running from Tragedy details a voyage of such mathematical and spiritual implausibility one is tempted to use the word “charmed” to describe the merciless privation that would define his and Gabriella’s stunned days and nights for a decade – a refining crucible that would ultimately reveal itself as numinous. Are there willful forces in the cosmos whose complex lesson plans are illegible in the moment? Are the stars more than fire?

Bahamian Rhapsody

Michael and Gabriella met cute at Club Med Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas (as can happen) where they were both working. From their respective vocational and geographic bases (he: finance in Denver, she: nursing school in Vienna) they’d each lunged at the chance to spend a couple gap months earning a little money and wriggling toes in the white sands of the Caribbean before heading home and carrying on. 

Michael was a handsome young guy and avid distance runner whose fresh-faced Americanism and frank absence of verbal panache charmed the confident, amused, and adorable Gabriella. Their intersection was unlikely in other ways. Michael and his brother had been raised in single parent penury by a loving mother, while Gabriella was descended from Austro-Hungarian blue bloods cast out when that empire collapsed post-WWI. Or as Michael more economically summarizes, “She comes from a family of royalty, and I’m just this poor dumb kid from Denver.” The two fell hard for each other, the unseen fine print heavy with implausible foreboding. 

They each unknowingly carried heterozygous protein mutations on gene EIF2B2; complementary genetic wrinkles that would combine momentously through their union. Never mind. The cosmos almost gushingly approved their relationship. One night they would find themselves standing on a whispering Bahamian beach and staring up at the faint but unmistakable smear of Halley’s Comet traversing the jeweler’s cloth of densely-packed stars. 

Life and the Mysteries

The lovebirds painfully separated when the Club Med job ended, but they’d locked hearts. In fairly short order Gabriella travelled from Vienna to visit Michael in Denver; her first trip to the States. One fateful night they were out for a walk and were accosted by a gang of armed thugs who, finding nothing of value on the two, would leave them shaken but unharmed. Elsewhere in the city that evening, the gang would rob and murder seven people in a furious crime spree. 

The terrifying episode was so out of nowhere it seemed almost to signify something. Michael and Gabriella had been spared. Their story would now unfold in a not-readily-identifiable state of grace. 

Denver to Austria to Boston to Santa Barbara, then off to Geneva and back again. The two packed a lot in. They would tie the knot in an Austrian civil ceremony with picturesque Salzburg as backdrop. Michael would next have to embrace Old World Catholicism in order to marry in the requisite church ceremony, taking communion lessons and effecting a functionally shallow dive into the divine Mysteries. This was coursework at which the practical Salsbury briefly bridled. The man’s New World naivete and baked-in American alacrity may be best reflected in his initial query. “Couldn’t we just tell everyone I’m Catholic?” 

In March of 1990, the transplanted Bostonians welcomed baby Nicholas into their lives. Soon thereafter, Michael’s Best Man role in an old friend’s Ojai wedding would introduce he and Gabriella to California, and a laughably delicious Erewhon called Santa Barbara.

Before long they were hitching an overstuffed U-Haul to their worried-looking Subaru wagon and heading west, following a longish transcontinental tradition. 

Stephanie. Jennifer. Gracie.

The arrival of their second child was a bit more fraught, but joyous. Five months in, though, little Stephanie began exhibiting strange behaviors that were soon identified as seizures, the episodes initiating with a strangely fluttering left eye. As the doctors feverishly worked to figure out what was happening, Stephanie’s seizures became more frequent and she began to dwindle. 

Her doctor offered aloud that she may be experiencing the effects of leukodystrophy, an indescribably rare neurological condition in which the “white matter” of the brain – the collective insulating material that both sheaths the axons and conducts their electro-chemical messages – begins to inexplicably vanish. Still, they were stumbling around in the dark. Stephanie would pass in her parents’ arms, the devastated family taking her to their beloved Butterfly Beach to share with her unseeing eyes a final moment at the shoreline they’d come to love. A disturbance in the gently turning waters caught Nicholas’ eye. “Look at all the dolphins!” he cried out. Just offshore, several dozen dolphins gamboled about, some of them arcing out of the water in playful leaps. The Salsbury family stood and stared. And wept copious, indefinable tears.

Energies (plural)

The family’s journey was just beginning. Bogglingly rare medical misfortune would test the Salsbury’s perception of a largely benign universe again and again. And again. These manifold losses would themselves provide science the means to finally identify the exact nature of the family’s physiological haunting. 

Today siblings Nicholas, Lauren, and Sebastian round out the Salsbury clan. Through it all, Michael’s lifelong running habit had seen him through the deepest emotional valleys and, at the birth of his and Gabriella’s youngest, would curiously remanifest in a young man who would discover the sport of trail running the way a fish discovers water. 

Sebastian Salsbury’s accomplishments and preternatural endurance have, at this writing, given the young man a global reputation. It’s almost as if he is running on the unspent energies of his departed sibs, energies now happily on loan from wherever these ledgers are drawn up – the First Law of Thermodynamics as a gift from the next room. Believe it. 

Sebastian’s competitive running has, from an early age, stunned onlookers, trainers, and casual observers, and he is just coming into his own. A lifetime of running gives a guy a heart like a thoroughbred, and while there are few hearts that can’t be broken, there are fewer still that can’t be made stronger in the reassembly.  

Michael Salsbury will be discussing and signing his book Running from Tragedy on Thursday, August 8, at 6 pm at Chaucer’s Books