Tag: living with addiction

Paying Attention for What’s Next

What next? I’ve been batting this question around quite a bit, especially inspired by seasonal changes. Back-to-school activity, Monarchs frenetically flying around in migration prep, evening and morning temperature drops, these shifts into autumn prompt my own search for another gear.

‘What next?’ has recently been a question I particularly ponder about my writing. I’m ready to let go and get my memoir out into the world. While there are certainly still rewrites ahead on that, the question is, what to write about? I needed to write about my husband, our time in Bosnia, my daughter’s premature birth in Italy, struggling with his addiction, navigating Molly and myself out of the shadow of his suicide. The compulsion to tell that story got me up on the coldest of mornings, 7 days a week.

And the discipline stuck. For the past few years I religiously rose before dawn, before setting off to my day-job, rewrote, rewrote, rewrote. Now, it’s time to move on. I need to find a new story-itch and I think if I pay attention to the clamoring voices inside of me, I will. Perhaps that’s one of my best insights from years of living with insanity. Paying attention leads me to a feeling of serenity. Focused, present in a thoughtful way – that’s the state I aspire to be in as much as possible.

Writing helps me get there, especially if I do so with the expectation/hope of being read. So in a kind of letting-go exercise, I’m setting myself the challenge to come to this space each day rather than revisit old pages. If even briefly, to write — as a kind of meditation, or perchance to find my next story. It’s a start.

A Closet of Journals

Stashed in my closet is a plastic bin overflowing with journals of scribbled emotions, recordings of events, travel notes. From adolescence up until a few years ago, I compulsively filled notebooks with thoughts, thrills, anxieties and dreams. It was as if by recording it, I might save my life.

College journal.

Early journals have the curvy writing of teenage angst, annoyance with my parents, first love, terrible heartbreak. College – more adventures in love, discovering and floundering on my own. Studying was eclipsed by my desire to travel the world, so for a few months at eighteen, I traveled alone through Europe, a lined notebook (now missing) my constant  companion.  The next batch of beat-up spirals are scrawls of years in Kentucky where I enjoyed the friendship and support of the community of fellow Studio 70 artists. Kyoto is next – bicycling through the narrow streets, hours sitting in gardens – dream-like musings. Returning to New York, I filled books with my life in the city, job at the United Nations.  Pages brim with romantic thrills followed by heartbreak. Then, the war in Croatia and Bosnia – meeting and marrying N, having Molly.  The joys of being a mother, the pain and confusion of living with addiction. All of it jotted into these books.

From today I will try to write every day as a way of taking time for myself, of touching/listening to something from within, as a way of organizing my time in a way that some ‘work’ is possible. I would love to write – to have the life of a writer. For this I think I need not only discipline and stories to tell but an ability to listen and to tell, of the inner life. So from today I will take at least half an hour every morning, if not more, to keep this little journal. I can do this now as Molly sleeps…  a way of not just getting swallowed by the daily chores of my life.

I wrote this when Molly was 4 months old. The rumbling of desire to write a book –  I imagined a love story about  meeting and marrying N in Sarajevo during the war, giving birth to Molly prematurely in Italy. I thought I had the elements for a good story — little did I know of  the drama yet to unfold.

I no longer keep a journal. No time? No inclination? Because I blog instead? Perhaps a little of each. I think the answer is in the closet — that bin of books. I will probably just burn them one day. Braver now and less inclined to keep secrets, I am ready to move beyond the closet – and write with the hope of being read.

About Grief

During the run of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking  in June, I was invited to write a guest post on grief for the Westport Country Playhouse’s blog. Here it is:

A story not so different than my own
June 27, 2012

My husband died when he was 48.

Photo by Leslie Datsis

The lurking question with a death so young is: How? Was he ill? An accident? We can’t help but rubberneck. Rebelling against the urge to bow to the stigma of shame associated with addiction and suicide, I usually spill my story pretty quickly. I tell them exactly what happened. “I’m so sorry,” is the usual wincing reaction. But often, there is recognition and relief because they have a story not so different from my own.

My daughter was 8 years old when it happened. She felt sure all of her classmate’s lived normal, happy lives. I assured her nobody gets to escape sadness, and brought her to The Den for Grieving Kids in Greenwich. There she gathered with other children who had lost their parents and I joined the surviving spouses. We found comfort in baring our raw hearts. Our own particulars seemed terrible to my daughter and I, but we learned those left behind always have painful and complicated feelings. Over the years of going to The Den, we received and, I like to think also gave, solace to our groups. As lonely as we sometimes felt, it helped knowing we were not alone.

Indeed, memoirs of grief outnumber even celebrity reveal-alls on bookstore shelves. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking came out a year after my husband’s death. I recognized her language of grief, the trance-like telling of numbness and eventually, the glimmer of feeling again. I still read memoirs of loss compulsively, as if I might find an answer to the myriad of lingering questions I will always bear like a ragged scar. My life is full of joy but not a day passes without at least a passing shadow of memory.

But books like Didion’s or Nina Sankovitch’s elegantly written, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, remind me that the survivor’s intimate knowledge of mortality is not an awful thing. I know to breathe deeply the air I share for some finite time with my loved ones. To pay attention, to cherish moments and do my best to never be blithe about leave-taking, even for sleep.

Admitting I am Powerless

The first of the 12-steps has always been a challenge for me, although I’ve had plenty of lessons. Like when my daughter was born 17 years ago last week — in the wrong country, almost 2 months early. You’d think that physically experiencing my powerlessness, I would have gotten it…

Mind you, there were things I might have done differently. (see, there I go!) I certainly should not have taken a helicopter to a UNICEF meeting 6 months into my pregnancy. Whipped through the sky by the Bora, a fierce wind that blows across the Adriatic in the spring, was like riding a roller coaster. It was the only time in my pregnancy I threw up. I felt her tightly wound up inside of me, my stomach taut. I imagined her holding on to the umbilical cord for dear life as we lurched through the air. Or perhaps it was descending the 17 flights of stairs from my office to the safety of the garage every time Serb shells were lobbed into Zagreb that spring. Maybe if I hadn’t done those things…

Or it may have been Molly’s first declaration of independence, claiming her right to Italian residency, like the smart girl she is. In spite of all our best laid plans, even though we had  plane tickets to England and an apartment rented in Oxford, and a midwife ready to deliver her. Molly’s name is instead, forever inked into the registry of births in an impossibly picturesque town in the heel of Italy. My little (just shy of 5 lbs) premie Italian.  I admit I cannot control a boundless love for her.

 

What Could They Know?

I can’t help it. I’ve been compulsively reading about the suicide of Mary Kennedy. I follow the family’s sad story as if I might find an answer to my own. Disconcertingly similar: addiction, depression, debt, imminent divorce, hanging. I imagine terrible details again. I picture her tying knots in a rope and wonder if she always knew how to do that? N sometimes showed off his fancy rope tying skills. Should I have seen that as a warning?

Grocery shopping this morning, I paused at the newspapers to read the front page of the New York Post, of course featuring photos of anguish and heartbreaking details. My cart full of fresh corn and strawberries, bread and yogurt, I read. Then, pushed my food through the checkout in a gutted daze. I feel it all again. The despair. I recognize Robert’s face — the last possibility of hope, now gone. The eruption of accumulated grief. Years of grief. Not the shock of sudden death, nor the exhaustion of death after cancer. I see a look of pain from a long-festering, ugly, terribly sad wound, exploding. His children, masks of control perhaps learned, like Molly, after living with what craziness?

And the wrath of her family. They blame him. I know about that too. One of N’s sisters phoned me a few months after his death. It was a summer day. I took the call outside. I could tell from her tone that she was not calling to find out how Molly and I were doing. “You as good as put the noose around his neck,” she said.

From England, she knew nothing of our life together. Nothing about the years of anxiety and despair. Nothing of the years I pleaded with him, bullied him, tried any possible way into recovery, begged him to reclaim his life, us. Our love, his home, all his — if only he could free himself from the cocaine, literally driving him insane. None of this, we – were not enough. She did not know what our lives were like in this little house in Connecticut. She’d lost her handsome, loving, big brother. That’s what she knew.

I forgive her for saying such a hideous thing to me. Only N’s two older daughters in England — who, like their little sister Molly, bear scars of broken promises and missed love, remain in my life. Having lived with him, we know. We are veterans of the same battle, our injuries invisible and mostly, unspoken.

 

Another Anniversary

This is a fraught time of year for me. Vivid morning light, the new green of trees against an impossibly blue sky, porcelain beauty of the Dogwood blooms and the perfume of Lilac in the air are all stunning — but for me, all are triggers. Even before my mind, the cells of my body remember – my shoulders knot, my jaw clenches and my heart beats faster with an anxiety I can’t account for. During these last days of April, an echo begins like a breeze turning into a wind, as vivid and weighted as the light and branches. A darkness hovers even with all this light — leading up to May 1 when my husband ended his life. Even 8 years later.

A friend who has worked with me since that terrible time told me the other day that I was a different person before and after. The wound-up stress of this week reminded me of how I felt before: always wondering what bad thing would happen next. For years I stayed, feeding a hope that seemed impossibly locked away in the sad cage of my imagination – that my husband would get well and our life would be normal. Normal was all I wanted anymore – not extraordinary. My friend said, after his death, I just blossomed – became lighter and joyful. It almost feels wrong to write that – but it is the truth. I felt lighter. Of course there was anger, shock, sadness, anger, anger, and an awful grief — but also relief. His terrible, final act did free me from the awful life he had woven around us in his crazy drug quest. And with time, I felt joy again – joy I’d forgotten could exist. Still, each spring, an ember of sadness – once hope, is fanned by spring breezes and memories of the tortured soul I once loved.

A Different Color

We are painting the exterior of our house for the first time in the 15 years I have lived here. Actually, to be clear, Rob is painting. While he climbs the ladder, I stand guard and hand him buckets, drenching the roller in the Rookwood-Jade as needed. Like the musician he is, he has composed the entire job to be done, in his head. And dancer-like, he moves around the house, stretching his long arms in fluid movements. The peak is done, and this part, just visible over the hedge, makes it already look like a different house. The happy house it is.

I wonder why we didn’t do this sooner? Apart from the fact that the paint had worn off so much of the aluminum siding (yes, we are painting aluminum siding) that sometimes, the reflection of the sun was blinding, our home begged a new look. For many of the years I lived here, these walls defined a space of pain and sadness. Behind these walls I worried, I railed, I yelled and finally, I grieved about my husband’s addiction, his suicide. Living that way became so a part of me that I fear proclaiming the sweet serenity of now, might jinx it.

But as the shabby-white becomes a meditative green, the house seems to fuse with the landscape –  the lush hedge, the maples and oaks.  Spring is emerging like a profound exhale, and our sweet abode breathes deeply too.

My Hubris

The roads are empty this morning as I drive to pick Molly up from a sleep-over so she can be at her weekend job by 7 am. I am thinking about what to write. The moon. No longer quite full, it hangs over the tree-line. Magical how the moon’s visibility is determined with reassuring predictability by the sun. Car heat cranked up against the cold, I sit in the friend’s drive and wait for my daughter to appear. Amidst messy winter bramble next to my car I can see a patch of green and white: snowdrops. A sweet harbinger of spring. I know where to find some near my house – I can get my camera and post them later – and write more about the end of winter.

But none of this clicks into inspiration this morning and I recognize that I am searching for something, anything to move me away from the subject I’ve been thinking about since finishing Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. Then, this morning I see the news that Whitney Houston is dead at 48, the same age N was when addiction won the battle.

I lived for years looking for distractions from the truth. Anything to avoid dealing with the reality of living with an addict. Hating myself, I welcomed the well-spun lies and chose to believe the crazy excuses for strange and bad behavior. Believing his promises, and making and breaking my own. Believing it was just a matter of time before he realized there was too much to lose, sure he would decide he loved us enough to quit.  Even as he shrank into a shell of a man, as his once hazel eyes turned empty – his soul swallowed into blackness, even then – an ember of hope remained that he would find an exit out of his drug-maze, back to us. Even when I’d had enough and finally was ending the marriage, I imagined his recovery as possible.

In the pages of Bill Clegg’s addiction memoir I glimpsed N. As I read, it was N I visualized living for his next hit, scoping out a bathroom to get high in. It was N I read about – a view of his secrets, of what he was up to, what he was thinking through all those missed appointments and lost jobs. In reading Clegg’s story, I stepped out of my own story of despair of living with an addict, into N’s world – the story of being the addict. This dark world, insane existence he lived while just beside me. And me a fool, so sure I held the light that could lead him away from his demons. What hubris in thinking there was anything I could do against such an enemy.

The Den

After my husband’s suicide, shock and fury masked my sadness for months. Molly propelled me to pay attention to grief one afternoon as I heard a friend ask her where her father was because she hadn’t seen him in awhile. Molly answered, “In England.” She could not speak this new terrible language of death and loss. Shortly after that car ride and 9 months after his death, I began taking 9 year old Molly to The Den for Grieving Kids. She was afraid The Den would require her to talk about feelings and make her cry like the therapist she’d rejected. The Den would be different, I assured her. She’d be with other kids her age who’d lost a loved one and they’d have activities. If she didn’t want to, she need not utter a word.  Immediately, Molly felt at home and marveled she was not the only kid whose parent had died.

There were years we never missed a session. Two Mondays a month, I’d make the drive down to Greenwich where we ate pizza and salad perched on tiny chairs in the pre-school classroom before moving into the big room for introductions. We formed a heartbreakingly large circle. We took turns saying our names and, only if we wanted to, who died.  Or simply: “I pass” because, at first, it was hard to get the words out: my husband, wife, father, mother and worse — child, brother or sister died. But over the weeks, as the realization and pinch of our losses grew into scars, it became easier to share the declaration of these deaths. At least with this group of fellow survivors.

From that very first session, Molly loved going to The Den, easily going off with a group of children her own age. In another room, us parents gathered in a circle, sharing stories, struggles, tears — and laughter, too. Initially, I found myself envying what seemed the tragic but uncomplicated grieving of the others whose spouses died from illness or accidents – not suicide. How could I admit to them, that in the mixed up soup of my emotions I also felt relief? I discovered no shame and much healing. Regardless of anyone’s tale, grief is thorny territory and we were all traversing it together, reluctant members of the same club.  The Den for Grieving Kids eased our travel on this road.

Seven years later, my daughter has decided it is time to say farewell to this amazing place.  For these few hours a month, she and I reflected on N’s death. Then, in the car driving through the dark towards home, the two of us shared stories, carefully paying attention to each other and our healing hearts.

Art Therapy

‘Only in confronting pain can there be real healing’ — I’m paraphrasing something Bosnian actress Vanesa Glodjo said during the Q&A with Angelina Jolie about their recently released movie “In the Land of Blood & Honey“.  She was speaking about the reaction of Bosnians to this film. Glodjo’s comment resonated with with me as I continue to ruminate on this subject.

This morning in the car, a discussion on global conflict resolution came on the radio. A Jean Paul Lederach spoke about the power of music, of sound, as healing: “…it this notion of transportability, we think,is a window into several places in which reconciliation and healing … this idea that vibration touches us… healing is about feeling like a person again…what music does is it permit people to touch again, feel touched by, and to even maybe touch their own sense of personhood and voice…you may not be able to explain, you may not be able to speak your way through certain things, there are times in which music and/or sound may in fact permit that to happen in a much deeper way.”  He goes on to talk about poetry, particularly haiku in the same vein.

This possibility of healing the psyche and soul through, as Lederach says, — the ineffable — through music, through art, fascinates me.  To facilitate recovery from the wounds of war, the damage done by addiction, illness, from violence, the deaths of our loved one, suicide. Time may ease or at least dull an ache, but art can help us to process grief and find a way to the other side.

 

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