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Tag: alcoholism
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This morning I woke up in a fog to the sound of the children creeping down the stairs to watch TV. I got up, feeling somewhat rested as I slept early the night before. As I was making coffee I realised I had been dreaming, back in the familiar architecture of my dreams. I was in Trenton, or we were, the town where my grandma lived when she was alive. Many family members were there. We walked the route home from the park, as we did so many times in my childhood. I realise now that I have visited this place many, many times in my dreams, for it was not just the familiarity of the memories of visits in real life, but of dreams, as well. It all comes flooding back now. How strange, to realise an entire imagined landscape has existed in my head. It’s like all these disparate elements are suddenly coming together and seeping into my conscious memory as I write.
It is no wonder that I am so tired, even after I sleep, as I have travelled so much and seen so many people in my dreams. My mother’s house is there, too, but in this dreamscape it is just down the road from our old house, where we all lived together. There’s the long stretch of the two-lane county highway road, the one just after leaving our house, turning left, and heading out to Gramma’s house. The start of the journey I loved so much and on the return, the long , straight stretch I loved so much, before returning to the warmness of home. I would rest my tired head against the car window and stare out at the telephone wires moving past, bobbing up and down like dependable waves, from pole to pole.
I drew a vessels card this evening, the card of mourning, as if to remind me of exactly what it is I am going through. It is not just the mourning of my mother but of my past, of finally letting go of those sad longings that I have for that time when things were not easy but simpler, when the world was small. The warmth and safety of simple things, of living in someone else’s care, no matter how much it wasn’t what I may have wanted it to be; it was everything, nonetheless. It was a time when I had still my safe inner world, and dreamed of all of the things that I would do when I was out of it. I remember visiting ‘home’ with my grandmother, going back to where she grew up, seeing her sisters that still lived there, and their lovely homes and husbands. Aunt Rhodie and Uncle Bill, Aunt Goldie and whoever he was. They were fabulous and funny, happy as could be in the little town that they grew up in. I never saw a house where they lived before, nor the farm, never heard them speak about where or how they grew up. I only heard tales of a farm and too may children and a mother dying young and my grandmother having to step up and help care for the rest. There was no pride in their past, only their present, in which they’d built their own versions of success.
Their mother would have been half Indian, if my math is right. I’m a 16th, so Dad was an 8th and Gramma 4th. Her mom was 1/2 which made her grandmother was a full blooded native. Choctaw, I believe, or at least that’s what my research led me to. Now that I am older, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. When I was a child, it seemed like ancient history, a history that had nothing, really, to do with me. But now as I learn how much we inherit, both by blood and through behaviours, I think about how much that shock, the shock of being stripped of culture, of having to deny one’s self, of having to learn how to be someone else to survive in the white world, how much that would have effected my ancestors. She was just a woman, not a concept, not a group of people. When you think of a group, it is tragic, but it also makes it easy to generalise the experience, to simply think of something horrific that happened long ago that to some faceless people. But when you think of it as something that happened to one person, and feel that individualised empathy for another soul course through your veins, suddenly it seems so very much more real. At some point in our history, in our family line, someone was told that they had to change, to forget all that they knew, because what they knew and who they were was savage and wrong. They had to relearn everything, or they would continue to be part of the problem, and they would not survive. Imagine what that does to a person. No wonder they were quiet, they had to be to survive. This was my grandmother – with her quiet strength, her absolute, unmovable stoicism that was never enforced through violence. Perhaps it was, when her children were small, god knows that we do change as parents as the kids grow, but from my perspective, she only enforced it through love and care.She and her siblings made it, all of them from what I could tell, or perhaps I only knew the ones who made it, with her. There were eight of them at one point and I surely don’t remember knowing them all. The ones I did know, they made it, they were the archetypal American dream. The went to war, and to the factories, they won, they came home, they married, they had kids. Many of them stayed in the service for life, like my grandfather. They lived the lives of service wives, with fancy parties and couture cocktail dresses, big baubles and flashy jewels. They bought up fancy furniture for a song at auction and in shops across a decimated western Europe. They brought home Samurai swords from Japan and set them atop tiki bamboo bars, relics from a conquered land. All along, they drank to remember or drank to forget, depending on the day. They raised their kids in this backdrop of relative wealth and success and security, and American pride, in a way that only the military could provide.
All these things are somewhere inside me, ready to be unpacked. How proud I am to be American because of them, whether it’s the right way to feel or not. Every parade I went to as a child, my grandfather was in it, with the Shriners, in his little car doing their funny zig-zag routine in their fez hats. I was always so pleased to see him, to be recognised. He was always sweet and kind and funny to me, I never knew the man that I later learned used to terrify my father. How much of this inheritance have I absorbed, unknowingly? How much of his death was due to damage done by alcohol, by PTSD?
For now I have to put it all aside, to go on as though everything is fine, that when I close my eyes my family isn’t dancing around in my head, that my Pandora’s box hasn’t been blown open. Sleep early, rise tôt. Keep on allowing myself to figure it out, to mourn, to rest, to remember, to question, to let go. I must go on living today like it is the new day that it is, unencumbered by the past, if I just let is be so. I remind myself that this is the work – the work that you can wait to do until you are dying, days with eyes closed, when all the memories come back to be processed one last time, when you finally have time just for this and nothing else, if you are so lucky. Or, I can do it now, I can slow down enough to let these memories and emotions back in, so that I can truly live, free of their shackles to the past, for the rest of my days. Born anew by the forgiveness I can offer to myself and to others, I can remember what and who is really important to me and start again, with fresh eyes, a clear mind, and a full heart, recovered and renewed.
This morning I woke up in a fog to the sound of the children creeping down the stairs to watch TV. I got up, feeling somewhat rested as I slept early the night before. As I was making coffee I realised I had been dreaming, back in the familiar architecture of my dreams. I was in Trenton, or we were, the town where my grandma lived when she was alive. Many family members were there. We walked the route home from the park, as we did so many times in my childhood. I realise now that I have visited this place many, many times in my dreams, for it was not just the familiarity of the memories of visits in real life, but of dreams, as well. It all comes flooding back now. How strange, to realise an entire imagined landscape has existed in my head. It’s like all these disparate elements are suddenly coming together and seeping into my conscious memory as I write.
It is no wonder that I am so tired, even after I sleep, as I have travelled so much and seen so many people in my dreams. My mother’s house is there, too, but in this dreamscape it is just down the road from our old house, where we all lived together. There’s the long stretch of the two-lane county highway road, the one just after leaving our house, turning left, and heading out to Gramma’s house. The start of the journey I loved so much and on the return, the long , straight stretch I loved so much, before returning to the warmness of home. I would rest my tired head against the car window and stare out at the telephone wires moving past, bobbing up and down like dependable waves, from pole to pole.
I drew a vessels card this evening, the card of mourning, as if to remind me of exactly what it is I am going through. It is not just the mourning of my mother but of my past, of finally letting go of those sad longings that I have for that time when things were not easy but simpler, when the world was small. The warmth and safety of simple things, of living in someone else’s care, no matter how much it wasn’t what I may have wanted it to be; it was everything, nonetheless. It was a time when I had still my safe inner world, and dreamed of all of the things that I would do when I was out of it. I remember visiting ‘home’ with my grandmother, going back to where she grew up, seeing her sisters that still lived there, and their lovely homes and husbands. Aunt Rhodie and Uncle Bill, Aunt Goldie and whoever he was. They were fabulous and funny, happy as could be in the little town that they grew up in. I never saw a house where they lived before, nor the farm, never heard them speak about where or how they grew up. I only heard tales of a farm and too may children and a mother dying young and my grandmother having to step up and help care for the rest. There was no pride in their past, only their present, in which they’d built their own versions of success.
Their mother would have been half Indian, if my math is right. I’m a 16th, so Dad was an 8th and Gramma 4th. Her mom was 1/2 which made her grandmother was a full blooded native. Choctaw, I believe, or at least that’s what my research led me to. Now that I am older, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. When I was a child, it seemed like ancient history, a history that had nothing, really, to do with me. But now as I learn how much we inherit, both by blood and through behaviours, I think about how much that shock, the shock of being stripped of culture, of having to deny one’s self, of having to learn how to be someone else to survive in the white world, how much that would have effected my ancestors. She was just a woman, not a concept, not a group of people. When you think of a group, it is tragic, but it also makes it easy to generalise the experience, to simply think of something horrific that happened long ago that to some faceless people. But when you think of it as something that happened to one person, and feel that individualised empathy for another soul course through your veins, suddenly it seems so very much more real. At some point in our history, in our family line, someone was told that they had to change, to forget all that they knew, because what they knew and who they were was savage and wrong. They had to relearn everything, or they would continue to be part of the problem, and they would not survive. Imagine what that does to a person. No wonder they were quiet, they had to be to survive. This was my grandmother – with her quiet strength, her absolute, unmovable stoicism that was never enforced through violence. Perhaps it was, when her children were small, god knows that we do change as parents as the kids grow, but from my perspective, she only enforced it through love and care.She and her siblings made it, all of them from what I could tell, or perhaps I only knew the ones who made it, with her. There were eight of them at one point and I surely don’t remember knowing them all. The ones I did know, they made it, they were the archetypal American dream. The went to war, and to the factories, they won, they came home, they married, they had kids. Many of them stayed in the service for life, like my grandfather. They lived the lives of service wives, with fancy parties and couture cocktail dresses, big baubles and flashy jewels. They bought up fancy furniture for a song at auction and in shops across a decimated western Europe. They brought home Samurai swords from Japan and set them atop tiki bamboo bars, relics from a conquered land. All along, they drank to remember or drank to forget, depending on the day. They raised their kids in this backdrop of relative wealth and success and security, and American pride, in a way that only the military could provide.
All these things are somewhere inside me, ready to be unpacked. How proud I am to be American because of them, whether it’s the right way to feel or not. Every parade I went to as a child, my grandfather was in it, with the Shriners, in his little car doing their funny zig-zag routine in their fez hats. I was always so pleased to see him, to be recognised. He was always sweet and kind and funny to me, I never knew the man that I later learned used to terrify my father. How much of this inheritance have I absorbed, unknowingly? How much of his death was due to damage done by alcohol, by PTSD?
For now I have to put it all aside, to go on as though everything is fine, that when I close my eyes my family isn’t dancing around in my head, that my Pandora’s box hasn’t been blown open. Sleep early, rise tôt. Keep on allowing myself to figure it out, to mourn, to rest, to remember, to question, to let go. I must go on living today like it is the new day that it is, unencumbered by the past, if I just let is be so. I remind myself that this is the work – the work that you can wait to do until you are dying, days with eyes closed, when all the memories come back to be processed one last time, when you finally have time just for this and nothing else, if you are so lucky. Or, I can do it now, I can slow down enough to let these memories and emotions back in, so that I can truly live, free of their shackles to the past, for the rest of my days. Born anew by the forgiveness I can offer to myself and to others, I can remember what and who is really important to me and start again, with fresh eyes, a clear mind, and a full heart, recovered and renewed.
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Now that it’s happened, it seems like it was inevitable. Last night I drank. Today I am hazy and dull, with a hangover not only from the alcohol but also from the emotions and the desperate need that I felt – to either stop and process them or escape them – for the last two weeks. Unfortunately, the latter won out this time – I tried to escape from their grip with alcohol. After a sunny day of celebration filled with conversations, social pressures, and champagne – which I resisted with ease – the night came and I caved to my desire to drink. Sitting around a warm fire with nothing to say, I felt that I might as well, and so I did. One glass finished the magnum of red, and the friends left. My husband went to put a child back to bed after a nightmare, and then it was just me and an empty glass, alone. I remembered the bottle I’d opened the week before, something nice, made by friends. It was under the sink. I’d left it there the day of my mother’s internment service, last Friday, when I’d first caved. Though then, I hadn’t liked it. It felt like a poison, the taste and then the feeling of the alcohol in my blood, a toxin needing to be rid of. This time I was ready for it, and enjoyed it.
Alone by the fire, I had another glass while I stared into the flames and tried to process. I tried to be aware of my own desire to drink and drink more. I probably had about three glasses in total. It’s hard to say as I only filled up a bit at a time, bargaining with myself over when I would have enough and go to bed.
I remember in a meeting recently someone said that the relapse starts well before the first drink. This stood out to me, tangibly, as if everything else just silenced for a second and this concept just hung in the air, resonating. I could relate to this viscerally, as if something I’d always known but had never been able to put words to was suddenly explained for me, to me.
I’ve also read recently that a sign of healing is falling back into old patterns, finding comfort in the familiar. I would assume that the second, healthy part of this is recognising them and moving forward out of them. Instead of beating myself up about this relapse, I can try to look at it as a sign that I am healing, that I just needed a return to the course I’ve known, to see the feelings and patterns from a new perspective, one that has, ironically, been made possible by almost 8 months of alcohol-free living. So what have I learned from this and how have I changed?
I now know this about myself – I am sensory seeking, creative, and sensitive to my core. I am still reeling from the pain of losing my mother, and from the loss of so many years and moments during which I did not understand her, and I expected things from her that she was just not capable of doing or being. It is normal for me to feel this way, to feel sad and lost and alone. This is the right way to feel, the appropriate, necessary thing, but it still sucks to be so tired and empty from all of this.
I am detached from my father. I don’t know why, I wonder, but have no clear answers. For starters, the man he was at the end of his life was not the man I knew growing up. How much the weight loss, the result of an unhealthy, improperly done gastric bypass, effected him I can only imagine. His body was completely changed, at the end he was a skeleton. Ultimately, I think, alcohol killed him, as his addiction to food transformed into an addiction to alcohol, and could never be fully satisfied. That is the problem – it’s nearly impossible to satisfy this urge to completely self-obliterate but oh how we try – through food, or alcohol, or cannabis, for starters.
My mother is easier to feel the absence of, as she was so present in my life in the end of her life and her death is so recent. I began to understand her mental and emotional shortcomings, the new ones that had arrived through experience and the ones that had been with her my whole life. The mechanics of denial had instructed her thoughts for such a long time, they had made well worn paths in her mind. These paths had begun to influence other thought processes, of comprehension, understanding, and remembering, all very interrelated functions.
My desire to drink came from a place of needing and wanting to escape all of this, a life where I feel out of place, disconnected, living a lonely existence while my children’s childhoods pass me by. I don’t know what breakthrough I am hoping for, waiting on, but in the days of recovery after this at least I won’t have to think of everything all at once, the quiet misery and then slow victory of recovery will be quite enough. After that, who knows, maybe I will have to face the objective reality of my life from now on, finally. Perhaps it is time.
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My dreams keep getting stranger and scarier, but at least I get to see my mom. She seems happy, too. Last night I dreamt again of San Francisco, of this strange apartment building that feels somewhat like a transient hotel. What is this coming from? Perhaps it’s a mix.
On my first visit to SF, I stayed at The Hotel Bijou in The Tenderloin, a seedy district with a long history of transience. The neighbourhood butts up against the luxury district that now functions with their windows boarded up to protect the goods inside against rampant smash-and-grabs. Here, people sleep on the sidewalk in front of Neiman Marcus and shit in front of Gucci. The Bijou, like many others in the area, used to be a single occupancy unit residence, like the ones you see in old movies where the unfortunate people live, the ones that are just trying to make it in the big city. The ones for which the Murphy Bed was invented, a device that made it semi-decent to invite the opposite sex for a visit, as it meant you could put your bed away, to hide the inevitable insinuation of sex that being invited into someone’s bedroom implied. Now even the cheapest charge $120 a night and you can buy any drug you want out of somebody’s car on the next block to the east. All of this is just a five minute walk to Trader Joe’s and Filene’s Basement where you can catch the shuttle to the UCSF Mission Bay campus. It is truly a crossroads, a rare find in this day and age.
The next time I stayed at The Rodeway Inn, as it’s closer to the other campus at Parnassus, and after several days of rooming in with Mom on the pull out chair bed, I needed a shower and to wake up in a place that didn’t smell of hospital. The Rodeway is the last stop before the Pacific Ocean and it feels like the world’s end. It’s an old Art Deco era motor inn that still has a beachy, Hollywood feel. If you ever go there, ask for one of the rooms in the part to the left of the office, those are the original ones and they feel like a tiny apartment. If I ever moved there, to the Outer Sunset, I would open a bar or cafe of sorts and call it World’s End and I would offer tonics with CBD and herbal remedies instead of alcoholic drinks. I’d make it strange and wonderful and homey. I’d sell second hand books and local canned food in glass jars.
My imaginary dream hotel also has this hint of New Orleans to it, which is strange, as I have never been there. All I have is my imaginary impressions of it, of the Victorian terraced upper level, creating a dramatic balcony, as seen in A Streetcar Named Desire. What are the common elements of all of these places, real and imagined? Desperation, perhaps, and the threat of poverty. Solitude, with or without loneliness. Mostly though, I think of these places, and of my dream hotel, as the last stop before completely teetering off the edge, and falling into nothingness, no going back, no more normalcy. They are the last stop before fading into oblivion, to live a faceless, nameless, unimportant and forgotten life, with no hope of ever coming back. I think this is my deepest and darkest fear – that I could lose everything at any moment, that any and all stability could be taken away from me, all at once. It’s the threat of the rug being pulled out from under me and it’s always been there, all of my life.
Now, I can bet that I took on this feeling by osmosis, from my mother. This was probably how she felt as she tried to adjust to the mania of my father, a man that would have been happy in a tent, with his dog. He needed nothing, maybe that was the Indian in him, I’ll never know. What I do know now is that my mother was the young sophisticate, growing up in cities, to parents that both worked, and took pride in that, with a mother that had been highly educated, and had left rural Georgia to live her life. She was in New York first, I believe, but I will have to ask my Aunt about that, an Aunt that I need to write back soon, among others. My mother learned to pretend that everything was fine, when it most certainly never was, not during my whole lifetime. Her world had been shattered in the years before I came along – shattered by violence, by silence, by decisions made for her that she didn’t want to make, all taken, all committed, all hidden by the men in her life. Then, without recovering, she married my father. He was probably the first man to come along after all of this, he likely seemed gentle by comparison, and warm, and simple. I imagine he was a safe and an easy place to land, and so she did. They married quickly, and eloped. They’d thought of a ceremony in a sunken garden in full bloom, but for some reason or another the families couldn’t agree so they eloped in October of 1974 and a year later I came along in November. I often wonder if that is the real story, or if they actually got married when she was pregnant with me. I’ve never seen a picture of their wedding, nor an announcement. I don’t remember who told me the story of the sunken garden, but when I heard it I imagined a whole different life for our family, one of beauty and grace and hope, rather than feeling as though we had always reached a dead end, a rut that was just too deep to get out of. I wonder how much of what I think of as my personality, my temperament, is really the years of unspoken exchanges between my mother and my father, the tension, the problems, the disagreements that had seeped into and been absorbed by every cell of my being. If you grow up surrounded by love, you feel love but if you grow up surrounded by this, then what is to become of you?
Back to my dream, I have gone so far off topic, as I do. We were in this hotel apartment, my mother and I, and we needed to go somewhere urgently to do something, I cannot now remember what it was but I think it had to do with administration. Constantin, my son, was there with us too, but younger than he is now. He couldn’t come with us, so we found someone in the building to watch him. I wasn’t too sure about leaving him but it wouldn’t be for but an hour or two, so it should be fine, I thought. We went to a building, of administration, or police, I’m not sure again, perhaps we were there to let them know that her death had been a mistake, as she was still alive somehow, even though she’d been cremated. There was again this brutalist architecture outside, in a terrain that reminded me of the streets of downtown St. Louis, the long empty street with some abandoned building and some vacant lots, fenced in with barbed wire. We made it into the building, with its smell and look of administration, of old papers in tin file cabinets, of cleaning products, of old polish and time. We did what we needed to do, got separated for a bit, as we always did in stores and buildings, as one of us would always wander off without alerting the other, each inevitably in our own worlds. We found each other, finally, and got on the elevator to leave the building, but the buttons made no sense, they were confusing, so I made a guess, perhaps chose the basement, and it was from there that the voyage commenced.
The elevator did not go to the exit floor. Instead, it took off horizontally, then it turned to glass, and sped out of the city towards the ocean airport at a terrible speed. It moved with such velocity that I was terrified, as I felt the glass exposed me. I feared that I would be triggered into one of my episodes, that I would lose all control and leave my body, and that I would never get back to my son. Everything was exposed now – the sides, the floor, and the ceiling of this glass elevator – leaving no protection from the outside world racing by at an incomprehensible speed. I crouched in a corner and held on to the rails, hoping to find a position of security, but there was nowhere to hide, to feel safe. I watched the world speed by as we left the city. The highways seemed to crawl in reverse and my vertigo increased as we got closer and closer to the ocean and the airport. Somehow I have placed these two things together, on some sort of peninsula, removed from the city as they often are. The elevator makes no stops, zooms by platforms where there are people waiting. I am reminded of a platform in another dream, underground, missing my stop, trying to get back to where I should have been. Maybe this is all me processing the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, if I’d only made another decision, taken another exit, not missed my stop. Always travelling, but never arriving, never settling down.
On this express trip I am crouched in the corner, terrified, as my mother is somehow calm, with her serene smile, a smile that only a WASP can have, as it gives away nothing, means nothing, and hides all. Only now it seems real, as though she is completely, and reassuringly, unbothered. It doesn’t reassure me though, as I know the further I go, the further away I am from my son, and the more time it will take for me to get back to him. I cannot leave him, this was not anticipated, he is not going to be ok if I am gone too long. Worst of all, he will be scared, as he wasn’t expecting this, and he will think that I have abandoned him.
The worst thing really is, though, not the dream, but the reality of me, me being a mother, me not being able to handle my kids in the way that I so desperately want to – with kindness, understanding, and love in my actions. I’m instead yelling at them to be quiet, breaking promises, losing my shit, and threatening to take away toys and so on, to try to get them to comply with my demands. I’m currently sick, with Covid, and the irony is just horrible – after all of those missed hugs and avoided kisses with friends and family for how many years now, three? I finally relaxed, we had people over on Easter Monday, and I kissed everyone hello, as you do in France, and goodbye. That very evening I felt funny in my throat and my ear and the next day thought to take a test and voilà, Covid positive. It is exactly one year after the day my mother, two days after Easter, tested positive as well, when the boys and I were there to visit her.
Fast-forward a day, and I’m home with my kids as I am every Wednesday as there is no primary school on this day in France. I am alone, as my husband is working in the UK, and I live too far away from town to have regular help, so I’ve no one to call on. I’m tired, more crabby than usual, and trying to keep them from fighting with each other and out of the mud that they love so much outside. Gone is any attempt to greet their frustrations with positivity. I lose it in the car, scream my head off when they can’t be quiet so that I can call a doctor’s office. I call them names and say terrible things. My son in the front cries as now today he wont be getting the skateboard we were supposed to go and pick up, he calls me a liar, and my son in the back apologises for upsetting me. I see my daughter turn her head to hide her face in the crevice between the seat and the door. Her gesture especially stays with me. What have I done, what am I doing to these poor children? How do I stop unleashing my madness upon them? This is the last thing that I want, to hurt them like this. The worst thing is, I think that I’ve begun to desensitise them to my yelling, which means that they’ve heard it so often that it’s become normal. This makes me shudder to my core. This is what it was like with my mother. I have to stop this, but how?
Back in my dream – The elevator finally stops, but we are on the ocean, on some kind of inflatable platform on the water, like a big bouncy castle. I must step out of the elevator onto a big bright blue cushion of sorts, it’s huge in all directions, but I am still scared that I will slip and fall into the ocean and never get back to my son. I never should have left him. My mom goes ahead first, not at all concerned of these things, and with no fear. Now she is just enjoying it all, finally. I see up ahead that there is a solid part of this terrible structure, a staircase made of metal that leads up to a part that can be crossed to get to the other side, where the express elevator can be taken in the opposite direction, back to the city. I struggle to get my footing on the stupid slippery blue thing to make my way towards the platform, and back to my son.
Then I wake up. I catch my breath. I thank god this was a dream. My son is just down the hall, I haven’t abandoned him, and his brother is next to me, sleeping peacefully. The sky outside is a dark blue; it is almost morning. I keep myself awake a few moments to make sure I don’t continue this terrible nightmare, just as Mom taught me to do when I was small. It was nice to see her, though, and to know that she is finally enjoying herself.
I must remember though, this feeling of the terror of uncertainty and instability, of teetering on the edge of some giant horrible inflatable thing that I could slip off of and fall into the bottomless ocean, of racing further and further away from who I want to be with, of being terrified and out of control, and how I took on this feeling from her. Now I know I must give my children a different and better feeling – of love, safety, stability, stillness, and peace – instead of just passing on to them that which my mother gave to me.
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Grief is hard. It is a thing, a noun, an entity, at once fluid and smoky, heavy as stone and light as a breeze. I have to write now to move on from this morning, when I took a deep dive into it, into the losses of both lives and of what could have been. So much digging in the muck, in the filth of the past. My god, how have I survived even as well as I have?
Who was the first? My Grandpa John, he was in and out of hospital, but left us so suddenly, or at least so it seemed to an 8 year old. Then my cat, Uncle Andre Kitty died suddenly and it tore me apart. I sat at his kitty grave in the garden, next to a cross I made for him out of sticks I lashed together. My mother’s cousin died suddenly, she was sad and reclusive for a day or so, she said it was a sudden aneurism, but maybe it was suicide, who knows, and now I can’t ask her. Finally, my other grandpa, my mother’s father, who’s stroke and alcoholism put him in a home, on a drip, and he never returned home from that. I tried to visit him once, but it was too scary, and he died when I wasn’t living at home anymore and I didn’t go to the funeral. He had been dead to me for so long already, so different than the man in the photos, pictures taken while travelling, while he was alive and happy. To me he was always the corpse in the chair, at the table, checking his stocks in the paper, smoking, drinking, and occasionally spouting nonsense at the holiday dinnr table, ruining everyone else’s time. How narcissistic it is, alcoholism, with the ill person at the center of everything, always, even if they are not participating. It is covert, at its best, and hatefully destructive at its worst. Unfortunately, I have known al kinds. I didn’t go to his funeral and even when I last saw my Grandmother, at her 80th birthday, she was disappointed I didn’t show and told me as much, but how could she not understand why, even so many years later? How could she not see how his drinking had ruined things for everyone, even me?
These deaths could all be seen as normal or expected, in some way. But then the overdoses came. The first was Jajo perhaps? Or Terry’s brother? Then Emily. Then came Laura, who wanted to get out but just couldn’t help herself. She died on the way to LA straight from leaving rehab, Promises, Sober Living by the Sea. She was on her way to Jessica’s to see her for her birthday. She never arrived, and we all knew why – she’d stopped to get high and that was it. The silence was deafening, we all waited, but there was no news. Finally the call came, days later. Her body was found in a transient hotel in downtown LA, and her mom had to fly out to identify her. She was 24.
Who else? To make a list is so painful. Then was my Gramma, the biggest hit of all. She was my world, my only motherly love, the warmth, gone, so suddenly. Killed by pancreatic cancer, it was just six months between her diagnosis and her death. Destroyed me, and also my father. He was shaken to his core, as she’d been the one that had always held everyone together, and they all fell apart after that. I remember the morning of the funeral, we were at her house. All of us had gathered the night before, after the wake, telling stories, searching for comfort. In the morning, I realised that the carpet needed vacuuming, she wouldn’t ever have received guests in such a state. So I vacuumed, realising that no one else was going to do it. From that point on, I felt like I was the matriarch, at least in my branch of the family.
Then, in California and so suddenly, there was Brody, my brother’s best friend he’d probably ever had, the friend that showed him a softer side of masculinity. I swear I felt his spirit leave this earth as I drove into the sunset on the 91 on my way back into LA from Corona, where the family was living. A family already broken, this loss made everything come crashing down. We all knew and loved him, so it hurt us all. Then came the death, the slow painful death of my parents’ marriage. With me having to step in to try to save my baby sister, who was still so young, just in high school. Mom had her arrested for breaking curfew in the early morning hours, after leaving the house to get some air after they’d had a huge row. I paid for her to have a phone, in case the phone bill wasn’t paid for by one of our parents as part of a responsibility row. One day she called me on it, as mom was about to have her arrested again. I had to talk to the cops to explain that there was something wrong with my mother, and to not arrest my sister. I moved my sister to live with me in DC, realising that living in squalor with my father in an apartment in Corona, with her boyfriend sleeping over and barely passing high school, was not going to end well. I moved her to live with me, in my single girl apartment in DC, making a bedroom with a curtain out of the dining room.
Then Dad got really sick. He’d had a gastric bypass a couple of years prior and was no longer obese. Quite the opposite, he had withered away to practically nothing. Plus, he was drinking, and it went right through him. The story goes that Mom told Camille that she’d seen him driving around town using a grapefruit to hold his head up. That’s how weak he was. He’d been in the hospital, and back out again, from something or another. Then he went back in, after Mom didn’t show up to take him to the doctor, when he couldn’t get there on his own. I remember waiting for the bus to come to go to work in DC, and called her in California see how the appointment had gone. Well, she’d slept through her alarm and didn’t seemed too fussed about it. Then he went back in the hospital, the local community hospital. He needed to be moved for treatment but couldn’t be, because the COBRA hadn’t been paid, the coverage that you pay for to continue coverage after you’ve left or lost a job, in Dad’s case it was the later, as he was too weak to work. She could have paid it, but she didn’t. That’s when I knew I had to go.
So I left to California, to try to save dad. Long story short, it didn’t work. Two and a half months later, on February 9th, he was gone.
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Sleeping in the night is difficult these days. I am tired, and love to nap, but at night come the dreams. It is hard to dream, to go there, as I never know what awaits me or what I will uncover. The stress of the packing and travelling dreams is so real, I feel so much in them. Rushing, trying to get prepared to go somewhere, always falling short, forgetting something. Panic. Fear. Sadness. Stress. But wait, I have to do this, or that, get here, or there. Why, what does it all mean? I am alone in this world. No more parents. No more adults to look after, instead of them looking after me. So now what?
I’ve slowly realised that I am watching the film of my life in these dreams. Some of the locations have changed slightly; of this I am not sure why. But I recognise a version of the high-rise apartment building in Chevy Chase, just across the DC line in Maryland, my last home in the US. I dreamed of this place for years after I left the country while living in tiny spaces in London. I also visit versions of the apartment I had before that one. It was just a couple of miles down the road on Wisconsin Avenue; it was here where I was the happiest in the seven years I lived in the area. It was mine, it was doable. I could walk to the Corcoran print lab, the Georgetown building, where I spent so much time learning to make things again, after stopping for awhile, having abandoned my artistic pursuits for an easier life, one with a job and money. On the way was a cemetery, where in the early spring I would stop to be in peace, in nature, on my days off, and take pictures of the tiny, easily overlooked flowers with my first digital camera that was a gift from that same boyfriend who didn’t understand my self-portraits. I would fill the frame with these flowers, in wonder of their beauty. Then later, in the lab, using photoshop, I separated these photos into their four digital colours -cyan, magenta, yellow, and black – printed them in negative onto clear plastic sheets, made a screen-printing screen for each colour, and printed them by hand. I had found something new to make, it was beauty for the sake of beauty, and I was at peace with it.
It was a lovely apartment, with a chandelier that I bought at Home Depot with my own money to class up the place a bit. Behind it on the wall were two large vertical canvases that I painted a textured gold and displayed on a shallow shelf, and in front was a shaker style round wooden table and chairs. Between the chandelier and the canvases, the room radiated with a warm golden light. It was the perfect single girl apartment. There was no view though, and the heating/AC unit smelled of DC mould, but other than that, it was ideal. The rooftop deck looked out on all of Washington. I wish I had enjoyed it more, just as I wish I’d enjoyed the rooftop pool in Chevy Chase. Once, a unit opened up on the top floor with a view on the city. Perhaps if I’d moved to that apartment, instead of selflessly recommending it to a sad, single colleague who was in her forties and living with her parents, my life would have gone a completely different way. Perhaps I would have never moved to the two bedroom in Chevy Chase, stolen from my sister to make her help me pay for it, and destroyed her trust in anyone, forever.
I think again of the airport photo, and the others I did to finalise my studies, after I was told to do something else, and I did, but the prof didn’t like that either. The project I did for her was about time. Not images, but time. I took all of the ends, or maybe it was the beginnings, of the rolls of film that I had shot of my friends, my life, my memories, and I printed them as abstract vertical pictures. You see, when colour film is exposed as you are loading it, it gets a bit of light exposure. The class was a colour class, and I was in love with the range of colours you could make when printing just by turning the dials one way or the other in the printing lab. The balance of green, blue, and red light when filtered through the film, creates the opposites – magenta, yellow, and cyan – when hitting the paper. It is the additive mix of just these three colours that make up all other colours and when you put them all together, they make black. When printing the abstract composition from the bit of the film that hits the light, you get a random display of colour – uncontrollable, surprising, sometimes shocking – but to me, always interesting and beautiful. These pictures to me were abstract accounts of my life, artefacts even, that time had passed; time, light, colour, and memory. Memory of what? How I felt, what happened, the symphony of dysfunction that were my friends, my associates, the others who had all fled something to come to the city in search of something else. We were all transplants, refugees from lives we wanted to leave behind. In those days, there was not a lot of self-awareness among my friend group. When you put together a bunch of people who never really felt like they belonged anywhere, you get a sort of chaos. The only thing that calmed us was creation. To make something is to externalise your inner process and inner self, demons and all. I think that most of us were really searching for something, not the least for a sense of belonging. Not sure if we really found it, but many of us found a portion at least, of ourselves along the way. For me, moving beyond self-portraiture and snapshot portraiture was a big step. I didn’t only take pictures of myself at that time. As photography students we were encouraged to take our cameras everywhere, so that we could photograph at any time, when the urge hit us, so that we could discover our subject. So we did, and for me, my subject was my friends, my life, as it was for many others.
It was the age of Nan Goldin, an artist I was introduced to by my friend Laura. She lasted just one year, or maybe a year and a semester, and I think I’d forgotten that she was even at school until now. We’d both wanted to go to Columbia. I don’t know how she discovered it, but since my senior year I’d wanted to go there, since I had the box of college info that kept arriving to my house, a box that sat in my room. It had filled up quickly, full of hope, promise, and the future. It sat, looming. I had no idea what to do or how to choose. I was interested in Columbia as it was in Chicago, the big city of my childhood, one that I loved deeply. The building, the arts, the museums, the cosmopolitain feeling of my grandparents apartment; I loved it all. It also felt safe, familiar. The brochure tempted me, it seemed like a place full of interesting people and programs, a world away from my past experiences. It also had open admissions, so I was very unlikely to fail if I tried to go there. With a campus in downtown Chicago, it was the antithesis to the sprawling University campus that everyone else seemed to be so interested in. No thank you to that, being surrounded by sororities and frat houses seemed like a version of hell to me. More fitting in, more boxes, more conformity. No, thank you, I’d had enough of that already in my short lifetime, no way. But I didn’t know what to do, so I let the box sit through the first semester of my senior year, and then the second, and then through the summer of ’93. It just sat there. While my friends had their parents making sure that they met the early admissions deadline for their top choices and their back-ups, my box just sat there.
It was a miracle that I had a full box of choices at all. You see, my grades were pretty mediocre in high school. I had stopped trying after about my sophomore year. School had always been so easy for me before. In primary, grade school as we call it in the US, I was levels ahead in reading, writing, and math. I was in the ‘gifted class’ in my first school, and I got to leave class to do fun stuff like number games, where you figure out the next in a sequence of numbers, which required an understanding of how the first few numbers related, and then continuing the sequence. I loved that game. There was a lot of spatial arrangement games too, but I don’t remember those much. I remember when I changed schools in the third grade, my mom and I went in before the year started to meet my new teacher and have an informal evaluation. She didn’t or couldn’t believe that I was reading at the level I was. She searched for and brought out the lesson books to ask, you mean this you’ve already done, and this one too? Yes, exactly, we answered. So off I went to the upper classes for several subjects, away from my peers, who were not so welcoming to the girl that they assumed thought she was better than everybody else, when if fact, she didn’t think about them really, at all. Oh and how cruel they were.
I perceived my family as incredible poor, which as you may know, is a sin among sins, a default like no other. Poverty is the greatest disgrace one can have, especially in a place like ours, a rural farming community that had been settled there for generations. I think it was and perhaps still is this way, because if you are poor, that means you haven’t worked hard, haven’t stayed the course by working hard, saving your money, buying your home, staying put, and making the expected life with a wife and kids, and survived. This was not a rich land by any means, but it was one that demanded a certain standard of existence, one of weekly church-going white Christians who dressed themselves and their kids well and cared what people think. We were not that. My parents were hippies in a way. They, or perhaps just my father, wanted to homestead, go back to the earth, and drop out of normal society. He’d been raised in a military family, living on or near bases his entire young years, with time spent abroad as a child in Germany, France, and I can’t remember if they were in Japan before the kids or with them, and perhaps Italy. Anyway, he’d been scarred deeply by the violent alcoholism of his father, which was likely a trauma-response to the PTSD of war and the things he experienced during the reconstruction after. My mother, as I’ve recently come to know and understand, was oh so very different, she grew up an elegant young thing, in cities, with working parents, both of them, which painted a much different picture. I am sure she was ignored at home in a way too; her mother was cold, and perhaps her parents were both drinking then. She told me once that her parents were part of the cocktail culture, where drinks and smoking every night were par for the course, but that her mom at some point stopped drinking, while her father continued on. She had experienced a considerable trauma just before meeting my father, and it had broken her completely, as would be expected. She told me recently that she thinks that she just wanted to get married, and my father asked her, so she said yes. There was not much reflection or consideration there, how could there have been, she was probably completely disconnected to her body at that point, and perhaps stayed that way for may, many years, if not forever. At least now she is free.
My father was likely bi-polar, in retrospect, and through no fault of his own. He’d been made to sacrifice a lot in his formative years, and was probably rebelling against that too. So the story goes, he heard of a parcel of land one day, went to see it, and the same weekend asked his parents to borrow the $10, 000 needed for a deposit on it, and bought it. He did this all without my mother knowing, or so the story goes. Knowing her affinity for re-writing history to erase any fault or complicitness, I am not sure of the truth of this, but there it stands. On this land he would build our family home, but it took years, and we lived in a one room shed with an outhouse for a toilet for at least a year or two, maybe more, before we moved into the house, still and forever unfinished. He was a creative genius, always drawing, designing, making and building, and was decades ahead of his time. If he were my age, now, he would be flourishing. But he is not, he is fifteen years dead already, a casualty of oh so very much, but most likely, of his own unresolved misery and a deep, deep sadness for a life not lived as it should have been.
The box of college mail was there, in fact, not because of my grades, which began to slip as school got harder, as I became less interested, as I needed more help, more parenting, from my parents, and they couldn’t step up due to their own deficincies. It was there due to my high testing scores, specifically the ACTs and PSATs, one of which I took while painfully hungover, one of my very first. I may have still been a bit drunk at the time, as I had no tolerance then. Other parents would have made sure their kids were home the night before, well-rested and fed. But I had lied and said I was staying with a girlfriend the night before, when I was in fact at a small party with a group of friends, mostly boys, at the house of my boyfriend. He lived across the street from the park where we had our first kiss. He was at least two years younger than me, so cute, a skater boy. We started out as friends, we liked spending time together, I could be myself with him. He was funny, goofy, and quiet. No father around, he lived with his mom, who wasn’t around much either. I think I drank Purple Passion that night, and I think I threw up outside in the early morning after sleeping on the couch. I’m pretty sure my boyfriend met his next girlfriend that night. She was 19, older than me, and stole his affection and friendship from me, right out from under my nose. Losing him broke my heart, and made me feel always on alert for danger from other women. The point is, I took this very important test still drunk, but I still did well enough to convince a whole lot of schools that they wanted me, and my money, to go to them. Enough colleges to fill a box with materials that would never be looked at by my parents, not once.
I thought about Bennington in Vermont. The classes were very progressive, and they had no grades, only pass fail. I liked this, it not only felt safe, but I liked the idea that you either did it, or you didn’t, there was no in between. I liked that concept. There were small class sizes, which meant manageable social situations, discussions, a way of learning that I’d always enjoyed. Vermont was enticing; my first love, my long distance boyfriend lived most of the year there, and would visit, with his cool younger sister, his dad in Edwardsville for the holidays. We met during one such visit and fell in love as only two lost, lonely, sensitive, and intense teenagers can. We’d talk every Sunday night, taking turns on the long distance charges, with an intimacy and calm that I don’t think I’ve known since. He snowboarded, and was from Burlington, Vermont. He was actively anti-racist, part of SHARP, skinheads against racial prejudice, and liked music I’d never heard of. He sent me mix tapes full of love, longing, and angst. One of my first times getting high was with him. We watched snowboard videos and I spent a great deal of time wondering how their feet would detach and then reattach to the board in mid-jump. Finally, I realised I was just high.
Later on, while in school in Chicago, I came to realise that Bennington College was the first choice for spoiled rich kids from New York City with a penchant for clubbing and casual heroin use. My ‘friends’ Ali and Jessie went there, I believe that she was kicked out for drug use, and sent to rehab, one of many stints. Oh how I would have been eaten if I had gone there, so far away from home and anything I’d even known. Or maybe I would have actually met some good people, not the rejects who came to the Art Institute as their second choice, their easy way out. The Art Institute of Chicago to me was a dream school, the kind of school that gets you gallery shows and easy access to an MFA program, the fast track to the art world. To them it was just a place far away from home where they could shore up in a high rise and do drugs without interference. This is where Laura got turned on to heroin, when she got together with Jessie. He had a New York pedigree with LA money. His dad was a songwriter, I believe his biggest hit was ‘Natural Woman’. He was an asshole, an addict, with the safety net of wealth and escape. When rich kids get a drug problem, they take a vacation at Betty Ford. When other kids do, they prostitute themselves and end up dead.
I ended up at Columbia. Luckily, heroin wasn’t my thing. I tried it once, snorted it with Ali and got high as fuck. It felt amazing. We just went to the posh late night coffee shop next to The Three Arts Club where I was living, in the Gold Coast. I literally lived in a neighbourhood called The Gold Coast and still felt poor. I lived just around the corner from the real estate developer at the time he was murdered by Andrew Cunanan, who went on to murder Gianni Versace before killing himself. It was the original center of wealth in Chicago city. I still felt like I was not enough, and couldn’t even enjoy living there, I felt like I had failed by not having my own place, instead of feeling like I was living a privileged life in an historic residence for women but it felt like the sorority I’d never wanted to be in. I never once painted in the light-filled top floor studio there. At least I did use the piano room, the stage, and the art gallery for a photo shoot.
After that night, I went to see Laura the next day with some coffee, to check on her and maybe see if she was still going to go to school, as she was on the verge of failing out. She was living with her asshole boyfriend at the time, a relic from the group of Chicago Hardcore dickhead promoters we were hanging out with at the end of our raver days. These guys once though it was funny to start a fight at a 4th of July party we all went to together on one of our visits from St. Louis. Her guy was why she really moved to Chicago, to live with him. I first went out with one of them. I was at first taken by his kindness, but after a few months I was bored with his limited intellect and penchant for meth and violence. That relationship ended with me throwing his jeans out of Laura’s mom’s 4th floor loft in St. Louis, followed by a jar of Ragu pasta sauce. I loved a dramatic gesture like that, probably inspired by films and soap operas. For Laura, Sage, an ironic name for such an asshole, it was more than that. It was her first tough guy boyfriend, the strong silent type that would protect her, or so she thought. First Jessica moved to Chicago with her man, who was fleeing imminent arrest had he stayed in STL, as the DEA had gotten wise to quite a lot by then. Laura left soon thereafter, to be with Sage in a shitty apartment in sketchy Humboldt Park. I think the abuse started there, and Jess was the one who figured it out.
By this time, the late morning of me bringing her coffee, they had moved into a loft in further downtown, where she befriended a kind guy named Michael who lived next door. So I show up with coffee, and while still holding it, she made some remark in our normal bitchy tone, probably about her dick of a boyfriend, or something else that injured my ego. Anyway, she pissed me off, so I threw the coffee at her. I was frustrated and coming down, so I didn’t think twice about it. It was emotion straight to action. She was shocked, I immediately apologised, she threw me out. I’m sure I said something about him hitting her but sure, I’m the asshole, or something like that. She forgave me in the next few days, but something changed after that. Maybe it was me, her affair with Jessie which I learned about shortly after, or the heroin that she used more and more, with them. I never did it again, after that, luckily.
I later shared an apartment with Ali for a short six months, a cool loft style back house in the Old Town area. I can’t imagine why I though that would be a good idea, but it probably had to do with her convincing nature, and my desire to get the fuck out of that posh club, to be somewhere where I could be depressed in peace, not having to cross paths with a doorman all the time or fifty other women when I wanted to eat something. We inevitably fell out, I hated her drug use and her bitchiness. She was such a mean and spoiled cunt. Laura and Ali were closer now, and there were others more important than me, too. It all revolved around heroin, but I didn’t see it so clearly then. I remember when Ali moved out she called me fat. I wasn’t fat, she was an asshole, and my response to her was, well I can lose weight but you can’t fix ugly. I’m pretty sure she stole my new camera the first few weeks I knew her, probably to sell it for drugs. She was poison, through and through, but it took me almost a year to figure it out. Legend has it that when our friend Emily was dying or already dead from an overdose, she and Laura stole her jewellery and some clothes from her apartment. I saw her once after that, a couple years and lifetimes later. She had spent some time in rehab in Florida and was living down the street from me in Pilsen on the South Side of Chicago with her boyfriend, a total douche that was part of the group from the 4th of July party. She had chased him for so long and finally trapped him into living with her, he was likely gay and covering it up by being an asshole to everyone all the time, trying to be the biggest, manliest dick he could be. She was miserable, and trying to finish her degree and get out of there, get back to New York in time to still try to marry well. I felt nothing for her. Laura was dead, and she was still here, and all I could think was that she finally got what she deserved, an empty, miserable, pointless life.
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At Royal Kids, the indoor play park, I sit in my noise cancelling headphones, kid size of course, leftover from the music festival where, as it turned out, you could rent them for a fiver. I sit here, depressed and a bit stoned, to be honest. These last two days have really taken it out of me. Aristide runs up, and asks me for money, two euros. They always have a bit of add on at these places, to really test your limits as parents, and to commodify everything. Oh how fun, but I easily say no. I had to practice with him earlier, saying no at least a hundred times when he asked if he could have his candy now instead of having to wait in the car. I should have just said that it was a motivator for him to hurry up and get ready, as he seems to take the longest. But then he did a little Broadway show for me to make me smile. It was quite surprising, but I loved it. I loved him. I just hope he doesn’t feel responsible for my feelings like I did for my mother. I mean, I likely do this seeing as that is what I learned.
I will have to examine this closer. One of the main things I like about using cannabis is that it really helps me to have a look at myself. I think that for a long time I have been disconnected from myself. Very, very disconnected. Drinking definitely added to that, and cannabis seems to help me to reverse that. One of the main attractions to this plant must’ve historically been that it aids with the feeling of enlightenment of the spirit. That’s the high, if you tune into it. Sure, it makes things funny too, but also clear, like if you have had a problem you are trying to sort out and need to tap into your feelings, it can really help. It should be used in moderate doses, though. You don’t want to just be escaping everything all the time by getting so stoned instead of just high.
The trauma that surrounds us weighs so heavy on how we deeply feel about ourselves, and colours our actions, interactions, and reactions to other people. Now this situation seems to challenge me so deeply that I feel that I must release generations of trauma of all kinds. I am truly broken down now. I ask God for no more, please. I don’t mean to be selfish, I know that there is much senseless suffering in the world, and at much more importance and at greater scale, but I am hurting, and I want to do better, and I want to heal. Please, no more, for now. I know that my strength is dependent on you but at ask you to please test me no further.
I release my prayer and trust that things will turn out as they are meant to be. I have already learned why Réglisse had to go, to teach many lessons: to show us how to grieve as a family, to bring death to our doorstep and make real what had happened so far away, and to show us how lucky we are to have every moment alive. Also, maybe to brak me wide open. The third eye injury wasn’t enough, well, it definitely was enough at the time, and plenty. But lest not forget, the seizure. It was Chinese New Year, I remembered today, when I was wearing bright red leather ballet flats while walking outside on the dark gravel. Why not a little poppy coloured brightness? Why not? Seemed audacious even, on a sad day like today. But as the one bird passed over, signing sorrow on his way, along came joy with sorrow and together they would stay.
Oh and by the way, I caved and bought the jetons for the bumper cars, one ride for each. I bought twelve for ten euros and the bartender threw in a lucky thirteen for free.
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At night now in our ‘after’ hotel, we can hear the trains pass. They remind me of Lincoln’s Ghost Train, a long sad funeral train that crossed the state of Illinois, maybe even the country, after he was assassinated. The long, slow moans echo in sorrow throughout the landscape.
The trains seem their loudest at night, when there is not so much noise around. They make all sorts of sounds, long and low or fast and high, announcing their variations in speed and moods. You can hear the different meanings if you listen closely. Some seem to be calling out, on the road home. Others drift by on a soft tweet, like a tired bird at the end of the hot day. They come and go, slow and steady but stable. Predictable, not exactly like clockwork but close enough, they pass.
Sleeping is the new challenge. I am so very, very tired, but I do not want to sleep, afraid of what awaits me. Too many signs have arrived to confirm what we already know is the truth, the truth that we face when we are raw and receptive, that everything is connected, the divine is present, and we can channel the presence of our dearly departed loved ones anytime we want. This looks crazy to write, is it crazy to read as well? Once you tune into the spiritual energy that is all around, it’s hard to turn it off. I place myself and my needs at my center to remain centered, grounded in this physical life. Having this experience has been an intense spiritual and emotional reckoning. This reminds me of a book that was featured on Amanpour and Friends last night, by V, the author formerly known as Eve Ensler. The book charts her journey of reckoning with the memory of her father, through her own personal history, and created a change in her so strong that she changed her name to V, feeling alien to her former self, when she identified as Eve.
I am on my own personal journey, too, but for me it is back to Susannah. Since leaving the US in 2010 I went back to using my name, Susannah, instead of Suzi. Wait, it was even before that; perhaps it was when I moved to DC I started to switch back, or earlier even – in LE. You see, Suzi was a nickname that I gave myself when I was much younger, maybe junior high is when I started to introduce my self as Suzi, as I though it was a much cooler, funner name than Susannah. Maybe it was eight grade, when I realised that there was another choice out there, the punk choice, though in that time the term that was used was ‘alternative’. This term was a catch-all for the post-punk kids who wanted nothing to do with the established order of things. They saw through the bullshit of playing along to get ahead, a view that I shared. They were the skaters, as most of them skated; I did not. In retrospect, I have seen them with a new perspective, many of them were from difficult homes, where forging an outsider identity would have been a form of escape, and self acceptance. As we got older, through high school, friend groups began to broaden, across formerly strict lines, divided by class, neighbourhood, IQ, and race. Now us kids seemed a little bit more enlightened about seeing each other as equals, facing the same struggles as young people finding their ways in the world. Everyone seemed to be suffering in their own ways, clawing their way to the top of some imaginary pyramid, constructed by the pressure to be the best, at something, and the goal of being the ultimate success story.
I grew up in the country with no paved surfaces outside so I never learned to skate, whether on a board or skates. Learning to ride a bike was hard enough, I remember the feeling of balancing on my bike and a feeling of great fear, should I fall off the bike I would hit the bumpy gravel ground below and surely hurt myself. I was driven to learn by the fear of pain, that is sure.
The fast freight train passes through with a many-chorded pronouncement of a hoot. Long and strong, it must be heavy freight. The end sounds kind of panicked, perhaps someone was too close to the tracks? The long rhythmic rumble carries on. It must’ve been a long, heavy load.
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Here we are, now. The day after, the morning after the night before. In a hotel room, not far away, we have woken up to a world where our mother no longer exists in her body. She is all around, though, everywhere all at once.
This morning, for the first time, I noticed one small sea green crystal on a necklace of all pink crystals, a necklace that I found on my last trip to her house. On that last trip I actually spent a few moments on myself, instead of just staying busy in her house, doing things for her, packing her things to take to Oakland for her to have there in her care home apartment. I gave myself the pleasure of organising her jewellery, one category of her stuff that I’d left before as it wasn’t essential to the organisation of the house. Non-essential to life, but jewellery is very important, and telling. It tells the tale of a person’s life, in small doses. The pieces are like little relics from moments. This is why I like to buy jewellery on vacation, or during a special time. I feel that the object can hold the memory of the time, can act as proof of existence at a later time. I have always struggled with object permanence, and I lately have tried to understand why. Is it my insecure attachment to my mother, my father, something determined in infancy? Is it from growing up in environmental chaos, a disheveled home, surrounded by too many objects, therefore unable to discern the useful and beautiful from all the rest? I don’t know yet, but I am aware that there is something there, at the root of it all, that I have yet to discover.
Going through Mom’s jewellery was a journey through her life. There were delicate gold pieces, I assume from before she had children. On finding these, I could imagine her life before, at University, a polished young woman from Chicago, shy and full of hopefulness. What happened to her? The pieces of this story continue to reveal themselves. An old boyfriend got back in touch with her recently, what was he like? It occurs to me that we have to tell him, she’s gone. Also, I might ask him, what was she like, before? He could help me to understand the timeline of events, of secrets we never discussed, secrets that impacted everything in her, and how she was, as our mother.
I found many pieces from the years we did not speak. She loved to buy jewellery, one of the few pleasures she would afford herself in her life. I found pieces in doubles, likely meant for me and Camille. I found lovely post pins, California-themed, which I gave to my kids on my last return. There were also enough silver crosses for all the kids to each have one when they are old enough. I will give Celestine one for her first communion this spring. The boys will have them when they are baptised, or perhaps I will wait for their first communion, as well. I took the pink crystal necklace back with me to France with other bits of her jewellery that I found in my moment. The pink is a calming colour, and I have worn it around my mother lately, and prayed with it on my body. Today there is one small green crystal that I did not notice before Perhaps it is her, she changed it, I think.
Last night we sat with her for hours, holding her hands, crying on her, over her, together for the last time, the three of us. We played music she loved, music we loved, danced a little in our sorrow. Her faced changed throughout, tiny little breaths leaving bit by bit. I believe her spirit lingered there with us, and left with us as well. Her face grew more and more relaxed, more and more youthful, more at peace.
I know the memories are locked in, I cannot remember every moment now, as the grief has arrived in a new form. I know from experience that all of these little moments will come back, piece by piece, and I must write as often as I can, whenever I remember a new story.
We stayed together for more than four and a half hours and it was beautiful.
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Again, it has been a week that we have been in here. Another week that this fierce woman, such a fighter, has beat the odds. She has been given hours every day for a week. My hope is that she is able to do her work to leave this earth, in her mind, spirit, and soul. I had seen this going very differently. Not sure what I’d expected but I’m pretty sure that it didn’t involve my mother dying like this. We’ve worked so hard to give her the dignity to die in her own place, on her own terms. Yet here we are, all rooming in at the hospital, free of the imbedded comforts of home, where it’s easy to grab the book, music, or snack that you need to calm things down. For we are on a constant state of alert, and it is exhausting our nervous systems, all of them. I am not at all prepared for the shock that awaits me. My mother, my living breathing mother, who has been an enigma to me for so long, will no longer be, shortly. I am facing the The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Eyes of Someone Living. *
I think of this idea a lot. Is there enough flexibility in the sober mind to be at peace with the cognitive dissonance brought about by the idea of death? Can we be at peace with science and spirituality? This is a space in which art can help us to be. It is not this artwork, named above, of the shark suspended in the tank of formaldehyde that haunts me now, though the name itself has stayed with me for years. It is another work by Damien Hirst that comes to me when I think about life, death, and the afterlife. This work is For the Love of God *, a diamond encrusted 18th century skull which was presented in the core of Tate Modern in 2011, in the Turbine Hall, an impressive industrial structure with an open interior, 6 storeys tall. The architecture feels like that of a modern pyramid made of steel and concrete, an industrial giant, a marvel, a deity worshiping the gods of power and electricity. It’s size and cavernous shape offer the perfect placement for a black box gallery that contains the skull. The rapidly decreasing size here focuses one to confront this death mask as though looking through a zoom lens. One must confront, confront, confront. The skull seems to say, in Hirst’s sense of humour, that as much as you try to dress it up, you still can’t save yourself from the inevitability of death. No matter what power, money, richesses you possess, this is your fate. So here I am, doing the same dance, hoping that the next cigarette or tv show or song might delay the inevitable. Praying for a miracle just helps me avoid dealing with thinking about what happens next. There is a universe in which she gets up, and does a happy skeleton dance, and goes on with her life. Maybe this universe is all in my mind, it’s impossible to know.
Here we are now, in a universe where my mother has spent her last few days on morphine, a drug which I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t like. My mom wasn’t exactly a tea-totaller, but I’m sure she wouldn’t like narcotics. I realise that the tense I use when speaking, thinking about her is a mix of present and past. I’m ok with that. I know she likes psychedelics, as she made some great pot butter, which them became pot cheese, by no effort on her part, that was our go to on toast for a while last year. She was into trying MDMA, but as I didn’t follow up and she was unable to do so for herself, it seems that we have missed that boat as well. But we are in California, and there are good dispensaries everywhere, including just next door in Temescela at Root’d 510 where the medical cannabis menu is quite impressive. I will go back there today when they open to see how I might better serve my mother, and her right to die on her own terms.
A disclaimer here, I feel I must be honest and transparent. I will address this separately but for now time is limited and I must make choices and be brief. I am no longer sober, I am alcohol-free. I have been using cannabis again, sometimes smoking, vaping, and eating edibles. I have cracked under the psychic pressure of this situation to depend on it again to help me through. I am grappling with my addictive nature, addictive tendencies, and also trying to be gentle with myself. I am trying to enjoy the calming nature of the plant, the perspective and reassurance it gives to me in this situation. I am trying to balance using it to help me with the need to be present in this difficult moment, a task that alone feels like more than my body can handle. I am in the place, like my mother was last weekend before we brought her back in, via ambulance, where emotional and physical pain meet and become indistinguishable from the other. They work together to destroy all perspective, understanding, and ability to move forward. They are crippling. So for now I am again using cannabis to deal with all of this, I am trying to use it to better understand and be at peace with this, and to tap into my intuition as well. I am not sober, but I am alcohol free, and for now that is ok. I am doing the best that I can.
Notes on My Life 