Tomorrow
three years will have passed since I retired from UCSF, and perhaps it is a
good time to pause and reflect on this period.
First, though, a little catching up is necessary since I haven’t written
since February.
By
mid-January of 2016, I felt that I could no longer continue to run my life the
way I have been since I retired. This
wasn’t really a plan or a problem of my own making, it was just the way I
responded to the challenge of loving and attempting to help a daughter whose
life had become derailed by drugs.
After witnessing her cycles of rehab, relapse, disappearance, and trauma,
I was utterly exhausted. In those 20
months, I had slept through the night only twice. Otherwise, I woke up each night in a panic
attack, heart racing, mind in agony, and then awoke again in the morning with
terrifying thoughts born from this tragedy: Is she sober?
Has she fallen in with some creepy guy?
Has she disappeared? Is she still
alive? I found myself in a pit of despair
and anxiety and was heading toward a complete collapse.
To those of
you who might be reading this blog in hopes of some insight into retirement, my
posts during this time period may not be what you were expecting or hoping for. That makes two of us. My life, which was supposed to be a template
for the joyful struggle of establishing a “brand new me”, instead turned into a
struggle, full stop.
And yet, as
I have indeed changed the way I live my life, I realize that perhaps I have
done something more powerful than even I was hoping for. Let me explain.
By the
third week of January, I had enrolled in four classes – two at College of Marin
and two at California College of the Arts.
I belonged to two singing groups.
And I got sick with something that wasn’t terrible, but was painful and
left me with the inability to eat very much.
All this on top of no sleep and nightmares.
As it
happened, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to visit a friend from chorus
who does grief counseling, and she said, “I know you’ll think this is hokey,
but think about doing the 12 Steps.” She
was referring, of course, to the 12 Steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program,
which are also used for recovery of relatives of alcoholics (and addicts) in
their own recovery from this disease.
She was
right, though hokey may not have been exactly the word that described my
feeling about it. Some of the 12 Steps
involved taking a deep inventory of the wrongs you have done and then make
amends to those you have harmed. What? Why do I need to do that? I wasn’t the one
who got us into this mess, so why do I have to make amends? I haven’t done anything wrong!
But wait, I
thought, what does it matter if this isn’t my “fault”? The point is that I am in this quicksand of
despair that is powerfully sucking me down and suffocating me. I may not have made this mess, but only I can
pull myself back out. And with that, I
realized that I would need to do everything I could to question my own
choices. I realized that I indeed I had
a choice! What a concept.
Since I was
already behind in schoolwork and singing because of my illness, I decided in late January to
drop three of the classes and one of the two music groups. Then I committed myself to waking up each
morning to meditate, followed by writing in my journal, followed by reading
something inspirational. Next, I decided
to go on an anti-anxiety medication to simply start getting some sleep again,
so that I could establish a good cushion for all the work I needed to do. I already had established a relationship with
a therapist to help get through this painful period. And then, there was Alanon.
I tried to
get a bit more understanding about this 12-step business, and I found a
Buddhist perspective on the 12 Steps on the San Francisco Zen Center
website. I was blown away by their
interpretation and analysis. It made
actual sense. Step 1: have come to
believe that your life is unmanageable.
Check. Step 3: have made a
decision to turn your life over to God as you know him. Well, for me, the God part wasn’t the point,
but that word "decision" was terrifying.
You mean to say, I will make a decision to let go of my old ways, when
perhaps what I really want to do is to nurse my old grudge, to continue to feel
sorry for myself, and to remain paralyzed with fear about something that may or may not
ever happen? And once I realized that through
my resistance I was choosing to hang onto all that crap, and that another
approach might be possible, I came to appreciate that I had already made the
decision to let go.
I was quite
skeptical, despite my friend’s encouragement, but I then met a man who told me
(without my even bringing up my daughter at all) that his partner’s son was a
heroin addict and that he had spent a year and a half going to a particular Alanon
meeting in San Francisco. He said it was
transformational, so much so that he actually came to believe that everyone
should go to Alanon.
This got my
attention. In truth, when Annie first was
in rehab, the advice given to me was that I should go to six different Alanon
meetings before deciding whether it was for me.
Which I promptly and obediently did, but none of them seemed like a good
fit. So I asked someone else who seemed
to know a lot about recovery for a suggestion, and she told me to go to a
Saturday morning meeting designed specifically for parents of addicts.
The “penny
dropped”. These were my people. The room held 200 grieving parents who had
been through everything I had been through, sometimes more than I had been
asked to handle, including death of their child. Here was understanding. Here was advice. Here was encouragement. Here was love. I have gone every Saturday since then, and I
can certainly feel profound change in my attitude, in my resilience, and in my
overall ability to once more enjoy life.
