By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Spring 2018

After being struck by lightning, Lysa Selfon Puma, JD ’99, met the Dalai Lama in a Washington, D.C., hotel. Twenty years later, the plot of that meeting is lost to time, life and Puma’s fritzing hippocampus, just like the strike itself.

“It’s been filled in by some people,” says the now-45-year-old Puma. “But I have no memory of that.”

It’s a gray Thursday in January, and we’re sitting in the back of a French restaurant. It’s a few blocks from Puma’s house in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia, where she lives with her husband Michael, JD ’99, who’s an employment lawyer, and their kids, 14-year-old Madaline and 10-year-old Lev.

Lysa’s a regular at the French restaurant. Someone should film an A Moveable Feast adaptation here.

“From memory tests then to memory tests years ago to a memory test last year,” Puma continues, “there’s been a pretty aggressive increase in memory problems. If you’re talking to me and someone interrupts, I cannot listen to them or I have no idea where you and I were. It’s so hard to get back.”

The memory of that November 1998 meeting with the Dalai Lama has been especially hard. Puma recalls only fragments and feelings. Even the name of the hotel eludes her, although she suspects it may have been near Capitol Hill.

“I don’t remember,” Puma says. “But he had a whole floor.”

On June 13, 1998, Puma was struck by lightning on a sunny day at RFK Stadium. She and her sister, Amanda, BFA ’01, were on an upper concourse and wandering among the more than 60,000 in attendance during a Herbie Hancock performance at the D.C. edition of the Tibetan Freedom Concert.

Puma was 25 years old and on a cellphone. She had just finished her second year of law school at GW. Eyewitness accounts being famously unreliable, it’s impossible to know what genre of lightning hit Puma—a direct strike or a glancing flash off, or through, whatever did take the direct strike. And unless there’s video of Puma getting hit (there isn’t, that she knows of), we’ll never know. But whatever exactly hit her—paramedic Johnny Shaw describes a hovering blue ball, a shotgun bang and black smoke—the force of it stopped her heart and knocked her prostrate across the concrete, the impact breaking her nose and leaving her face a mélange of burn, blood and char.

She was dead for about seven minutes before serendipity smiled. An off-duty paramedic (Shaw) and a hospital resident were nearby and they ran to her. If they hadn’t…

“I never thought about it like that,” Puma says, “But, yeah. Wow.”

Officials canceled the concert for the rest of the day. The following morning, Puma looked not unlike an unmasked Darth Vader, and Sean Lennon announced to a reassembled RFK crowd that she was still alive.

Today, Puma believes she took a direct strike to the head, an assertion she defenses with the big scar under all her curly, regrown auburn hair and the severity of her injuries.

The lightning, whatever its form, undeniably burned a tuft off the back of her head, exploded her right eardrum, left burns down her face and the right side of body, and heated the underwire in her bra enough to brand her upper torso.

The incident was well- and widely reported, conferring unto Puma a minor celebrity. She appeared on MTV News, received personal attention from some of the Tibetan Freedom Concert acts and went on a special tour of the Clinton White House.

“We did not meet the president,” says Amanda Wachstein, Puma’s sister. “But we met Buddy the dog.”

The Beastie Boys, a Tibetan Freedom Concert headliner and still one of Puma’s favorite bands—“I was so sad when Adam Yauch died”—sent her a signed Hello Nasty CD, then just-released, and had her attend a later show. Dave Matthews, who hand-wrote her a thoughtful note, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers also invited Puma to concerts.

A few days after the lightning strike, Anthony Kiedis, the Chili Peppers’ frontman, visited Puma in the hospital’s burn unit. Puma, suffering second- and third-degree burns, was at the time on Dilaudid, an opiate comparable to morphine.

“I just remember this man had the most beautiful skin, ever,” Puma says. “He must have sat and talked to me, but I really couldn’t talk much. And then I had two friends come and visit, and they said that I said, ‘Oh, Mike and Roland, this is my friend, Anthony. Anthony, this is Mike and Roland.’ They couldn’t believe I could do the introduction and then they were like, ‘Oh my god, you’re Anthony Kiedis.’”

Puma healed quickly. Her first night out was just two months later at the now-defunct Toledo Lounge in Adams Morgan. It’s where she met her future husband, Michael.

“He was sitting at the table, a couple drinks in, when I sat down,” Lysa Puma says. “We had the same friends but we never knew each other, and he said, ‘You know, your hair looks nice short. You should keep it like that.’ It wasn’t a secret that I got struck by lightning, but him saying that was huge because, you know—I felt ugly. I didn’t look like me.”

The ensuing November, the Dalai Lama, in the United States to talk with Washington officials about Chinese rule of Tibet, asked to meet Puma, making his request through her hospital. She describes the invitation as “whacky” and remembers asking, “Me? Why?”

For security and privacy reasons, Puma says, she couldn’t bring a buddy and she couldn’t record the chat.

“That was hard because my memory wasn’t good,” Puma says. “So it was his holiness, my American translator, one of his assistants and me.”

Reconstructing the visit isn’t easy. Time has also hazed the memories of the family and friends who debriefed Puma after the meeting. Twenty years later, they recall less than her. But Puma remembers driving her green, stick-shift Saab from her Dupont Circle apartment to the meeting at the now-forgotten hotel. She dressed modestly. The Dalai Lama wore his robes.

The visit, she estimates, lasted about a half hour and included time for pictures. They sat by a window in the parlor of a hotel suite.

“We went to a room, and the assistant had given me a version of a prayer shawl,” says Puma, who’s Jewish and familiar with similar rituals in her religion. “In Judaism, it’s called a tallit, but it was a Tibetan one. You were supposed to present it to the Dalai Lama, and he blessed it and he put it around me.”

She says he asked about the physical effects of the strike and how she felt and that he spoke slowly.

“I remember just feeling he was very calm, loving,” Puma says, adding that she seemed to be in the presence of someone “not regularly human. I felt this, sort of, kind of like, greater sensation than regular life—a lightness.”

What was said remains murky, except this.

“I asked him,” Puma says, “‘Why do you think this happened?’ And I figured, maybe he would know. And he said, ‘Maybe it’s something about what you will do or what your children will do that will have a huge impact on the world.’ And I left.”

Mary Ann Cooper is a doctor who has studied lightning and treated lightning-strike survivors for 30 years. Her father was fascinated by lightning, and later, she chose to specialize in lightning- and electrical-related injuries after a mentor told her, “If you want to be known for something, find a niche.”

Lightning strikes on humans are certainly that.

Medical research all but ignores them because not enough people are hit to merit a multimillion-dollar medical-research grant, unlike, say, cancer or heart disease. But the grant-givers don’t arbitrate mystique, and the rarity and lethal spontaneity of the thunderbolt has affixed it in the most ancient parts of man’s imagination.

“Lightning is probably experienced by nearly everyone on this Earth,” says Cooper, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Emergency Medicine who has largely self-funded her research. “It’s far more experienced than floods or tsunamis or earthquakes or volcanoes or any of those things. It’s somewhat unexpected, so naturally, you think that a lot of people would think it must be something that the gods in Greece or the gods in Rome or somebody like that is doing. People get killed. Maybe it’s retribution for something they did in their life? A lot of myths grow up about this kind of stuff.”

Across cultures, lightning is a semiotic hallmark of myth and religion. The thunderbolt is the weapon of choice and vengeance for the lords of various pagan pantheons as well as the Abrahamic god.

In the Bible, thunder and lightning parallel the voice and fury of God (Exodus 19:16-18) and presage the second coming of Christ (Matthew 24:27), and we continue to ascribe supernatural wonder and meaning to those billion-volt flashes that strike the Earth an estimated 100 times a second, traveling at a tenth the speed of light and burning five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

In more recent lore, we have the story of Roy Hobbs cutting his bat from the wood of a tree split by lightning, and a thunderbolt imbuing the Flash with superspeed. We believe that rubber soles are tantamount to lightning repellent and that there’s more to human lightning rods than sophistry and superstition.

“After lightning has burned its way a mile or two through the air—which is a very good insulator—you think it cares what it hits?” Cooper says.

In any single year from 2008 to 2017, no more than 39 people in the United States, a country of 325 million, were killed by lightning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only 16 were killed in 2017.

The odds of a person being hit in their lifetime are about 1 in 13,500, but one man, a Shenandoah National Park ranger named Roy Sullivan, was struck seven times between 1942 and 1977. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot in 1983.

Reliable data on lightning strikes, largely assembled by dredging news stories and obituaries, goes back only a handful of decades, but it’s believed that people today are struck less than ever. Urbanization and the profusion of lightning-safety knowledge help keep people from dangerous areas—elevated, open spaces—and away from obvious targets like trees and big metal poles. Most people when struck, about 50 percent, experience ground currents.

Cooper says the type of strike is best determined by the situation in which a person is hit, not their injuries. (They don’t vary enough to be of great use.) For example, if a bunch of people are standing in a field and they all go down, it’s probably a ground current. If one person is in a forest and next to a tree, it’s probably a side flash. Direct strikes typically involve a lone victim in an open area and, according to Cooper’s research, make up just 3 to 5 percent of all incidents.

It’s suspected that a direct strike results in death more often, but there’s no way to prove it, short of paying hundreds of people to get struck by lightning and then counting the bodies. But if hundreds of people were willing to take a bolt for science, they’d be happy to know that lightning strikes are more survivable than ever. Ninety percent of people struck by lightning in developed countries live because of modern medicine and access to it. Also (surprisingly) working in their favor: the immense power of lightning.

Essentially, one lightning bolt contains more energy than the human body can absorb, so the body rarely, if ever, takes a full dose. Here’s a rough analogy: Think of aiming a firehose at a small bucket.

“A very small amount of that water is actually going to go into that bucket,” Cooper says. “The vast majority of it is going around the outside of it.”

Then the water turns the bucket into a projectile. Now, pretend the water is lightning and the bucket is a person.

“It’s similar to being close to a 5-kilogram TNT bomb,” Cooper says of a lightning strike. “You can get blown away if lightning hits the concrete next door. You could have had concrete shrapnel blown into your legs or something like that. So you could not only have the electrical injuries, you also have the concussive injuries that you would have from an IED.”

The violence of absorbing any amount of a lightning strike can bounce the brain, basically Jell-O suspended in a hard case, off the skull just like anything else—a car crash, falling off a bicycle, playing football.

The after-effects of a lightning strike are similar to those of post-concussive syndrome. Victims are amnesiac of the event and develop memory problems. They suffer hyperirritability and years of debilitating headaches. They can’t multitask, they lose executive function and have trouble sleeping. Brain scans of lightning-strike survivors, Cooper says, don’t usually show abnormalities, so to explain why many lightning-strike survivors turn out a bit askew, Cooper uses another analogy: a computer after an electric surge.

“If you opened up the computer and looked at it, you probably wouldn’t see any burns on the inside of the computer,” Cooper says. “But when you try to tune it up, some of the files aren’t to be found anymore. Some of the files are corrupted. Things don’t get retrieved from where you thought you had them or they’re missing or the file’s name got changed. That’s s basically what happens with the brain, as well.”

Madaline Puma is on the phone from her parents’ house in Philadelphia and talking about when she found out her mom, who is in the background cutting vegetables for dinner, was struck by lightning. Madaline was 8 years old and hiding in her parents’ room during a thunderstorm.

“My mom just took me aside and said, ‘You don’t need to be afraid of the lightning,’” says Madaline, now 14. “And then she told me the whole story and I said, ‘Well, why would you tell me that? Because that’s going to make me even more afraid.’ And she said, ‘Well, because then you know you can get better. It’s nothing to be scared of.’”

Madaline, who’s interested in science, has since mastered her fear and now just thinks it’s a strange, crazy story. Her 10-year-old brother Lev thinks that, too, but also has other opinions.

Madaline passes the phone to him.

“I thought it was pretty cool because she got to meet the Dalai Lama and the Beastie Boys,” says Lev, an aspiring Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and secret agent. “I asked if it hurt,” he adds. “Then I realized she couldn’t really even feel it.”

The kids—but mostly Lev—also lament her lack of top-tier superpowers. What their mom (allegedly) got wouldn’t even get her on the Avengers’ JV team.

“Whenever she’s around electronics,” Lev says, “they don’t work. They stop. Something weird happens. It’s kind of awkward.”

So she can’t use the microwave?

“Yeah, she can’t,” Lev says. “We have to use it.”

Madaline, compelled to clarify, reclaims the phone. Presumably by force.

“Electronics do work,” she says. “Just around her, they usually stop working for a little bit. She doesn’t really have a superpower or anything. It’s just weird. Things will be loading slow or it’ll say she doesn’t have Wi-Fi when there’s Wi-Fi or something like that. But it just ends up happening a lot. Not like an actual superpower—just like a weird coincidence.”

Madaline relinquishes the phone.

“Hi, it’s Lev again.”

Sitting in the back of the French restaurant, Lysa Puma is considering what the Dalai Lama said to her 20 years ago in the hotel she can’t remember, half-eaten chicken paillard on her plate and a white wine at hand.

“I waffle between thinking it happened because just ‘wrong place, wrong time’ to: ‘Am I supposed to do something good with this?’” Puma says. “‘Am I supposed to do something bigger than me?’ But I haven’t had that moment, yet.”

She thinks some more. “To me,” she says, “it was probably just a random, freak occurrence. I wouldn’t ascribe any higher meaning to it, but that’s not romantic at all.”

Puma is more culturally Jewish than religiously Jewish. She wouldn’t describe herself as secular, but her theism might be tenuous. At one point, she posited that God may have been once but isn’t anymore. She’s taking theology classes to work it all out.

“Everybody wants it to be romantic,” Puma says about being struck by lightning. “It’s not. It’s just a thing. It happened. I had help around that most people wouldn’t in that circumstance, and I was a good patient. I followed directions. I worked hard. I was determined. I was optimistic. I didn’t let it deter me from having a happy, healthy life and wanting to go back to law school and finish and take the bar exam. It could have been a really easy excuse to not do all those, but I was me and I wanted to continue my life.”

Puma graduated from GW less than 11 months after getting struck by lightning, spending the fall semester in an independent study with former law school dean Michael Young, now the president at Texas A&M.

“That’s what she needed,” says Young, who remains friends with Puma. “She was still in [physical] therapy and things like that, so it seemed like an opportunity for her to get a good educational experience and for me to do a little good for one of our students.”

Young says Puma’s independent study involved working as a research assistant while he served as chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Liberties, a position that had him cross paths with the Dalai Lama a few times.

Once, Young says, he asked the Dalai Lama about his meeting with Puma.

“He just talked about how brave she was,” Young says.

After finishing her law degree, Puma spent a year and a half practicing immigration law before getting into legal recruiting, eventually founding her own firm. In the past year, she’s gradually shut that down to spend more time with her kids and focus on charity work, aware (and very grateful) that her husband Michael’s position as a partner at Morgan Lewis, a big international law firm, makes that possible.

Puma serves on the board of the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, a nonprofit that provides legal help to sexually abused children. Like her parents, David and Rosanne Selfon, she’s also active in Reform Judaism. She wants to start an after-school program for Jewish teens in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia, and in the weeks after being struck by lightning, she founded a charity for burn victims: The Burning Bush Fund.

The name alludes to the Exodus story in which God speaks to Moses through a conflagrant shrub. It was a rabbi from Puma’s hometown synagogue in Lancaster, Pa., that pointed out the less-than-subtle parallel between Puma and the bush. Both were burned, neither were consumed.

Now, as much as anyone can be, Puma is a normal, functional human being. She sings but can’t dance. She likes white wine and to recommend books. She became an occasional carnivore shortly after the lightning strike, taking a doctor’s advice to eat a little meat to abet her convalescence. She doesn’t remember the logic behind it. Recently, she quit yoga after 10 years because it took her that long to decide she “hated it.”

Outwardly, other than some discoloration on her right cheek, some “tacky” skin on her torso and the grill marks from her bra, nothing about Puma indicates I was speared by god-fire and lived. But there are long-term, scar-less injuries. Some are attributable to the lightning—the memory loss, for instance—but for others, the lightning can be blamed only anecdotally.

Three years ago, doctors diagnosed Puma with renal cancer during a hospital visit for back pain. Shortly after, the doctors removed a portion of her left kidney. Well before that, she developed asthma that’s become increasingly virulent, with some attacks lasting months. Her once-20-20 vision is no more, the hearing in her right ear is spotty, she suffers phantom nerve pain, has what seems like a second-hand immune system and on some days—her “lightning days”—she’s just inexplicably exhausted.

She says she feels like she’s aging at an accelerated rate. Health insurance companies must despise her.

Two decades removed, the lightning often means more to other people than it does to her. Puma’s celebrity is diminished but not gone, and every month or so it flares up when someone blunders into the story of June 13, 1998.

Puma says she doesn’t think about it and that it comes back to her only if she’s asked, or on those “lightning days.” But she understands the story’s allure, even if it’s morbid, and people are forward and pry.

“It’s a curious thing,” Puma says. “Lightning is something scary and so huge. I understand that people want to know what it was like, and they can’t believe someone’s alive. They want to know what I remember and if I have powers. I understand because that’s what we’re shown in movies, with people coming back from the dead—that they saw a light.”

She says she saw no light and that she didn’t know she was dead for seven minutes until someone told her after she came back to life. She neither remembers nor dreams about it, the subconscious memory, if there ever was one, burnt away by an early summer’s thunderbolt.

“No light, no tunnel,” Puma says. “Maybe if I was there, I’m not supposed to remember it. Or it was never there.”

She supposes she could have asked the Dalai Lama that—maybe she did—but she says she’s never been self-pitying about what happened to her. She thinks she knows why, too, propounding that it took so much effort to get off the ventilator, to learn to eat again, to walk, plus the multiple surgeries to rebuild her broken nose, that she just didn’t have the time to consider etiology or the dark minutes she spent glimpsing her mortality. She has time now.

“I don’t know if I think about it more than the average person,” Puma says, “but I think that comes into my head. I think, how long can the luck go? If everyone has a certain amount of luck they’re allowed, am I running thin on mine?

“As you can tell, I’m not into the mystical component of this or the faith part, but I definitely feel like the aging process was accelerated from that, for sure.”

We’ve been at the French restaurant so long, we’ve sat through the shift change. The new waiter, like the old one, has a bow tie. The chicken paillard’s still half-eaten but the white wine’s all drunk. The sun’s come out.

“It’s kind of why I slowly stopped doing my business without ever officially ending it,” Puma says. “That thought’s been in my head when it never really was before. It’s like, you know what—I’ve been through a lot. Maybe I’ll just stop trying to do everything right now and focus on my kids, on Mike, on me, do my charity stuff.

“That’s enough.”

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