There is a
lot on my mind, and it has to do with grief – protracted, relentless, soul- and
sanity-piercing grief. Few among us who have
reached retirement age have not come face to face with human loss, and in my
particular path, dealing with loss or the threat of loss are sadly recurring
themes. These thoughts and feelings, and
my need to write about them, stem from the recent relapse of my daughter. They are heightened also by two books I just
read, which I’ll get to in a moment.
A little
background: my daughter had been clean
and sober for about a year and a half, and we were living together quite contentedly
for four months while she worked at a good job and took one college class. But in the new year, I became concerned that
she was not holding her own. Her comings
and goings became erratic, she occasionally evaded my texts and calls, she
opted not to enroll in the spring semester, and she started losing her
patience. In early February, I sat her
down and said, “I get the sense that you are not very happy, and I am
suspecting that it has to do either with a boy or drugs, or both. Do you want to tell me what is going on?”
She rolled
her eyes in that “Mom, you are such a dick” look that I have come to associate
with teenage denial of an obvious truth, so I knew, sadly, that I was onto
something. Eventually, she came clean,
revealing that in December the ultimate bad-boy drug dealer had re-appeared in
her life and that she had “engaged” with him and started back in on her toxic
assortment of drugs, including meth and heroin.
To those of you who might feel that I am betraying a trust with my
daughter in posting her personal life online, I assure you that her own posts
on numerous social media outlets tell the same story.
I was quite
calm when she told me, since I had suspected it anyway; also, she said that she
was working hard to get back on track, surely an exaggeration, but one I chose
to take as hopeful. However, the very
next day she main-lined a mix of heroin and meth – twice! – during her breaks
at work. I lost it, but I needed to take
some time, as Suzuki Roshi wrote, “to discover how to respond”.
Within the week she disappeared completely, and it was then I knew how to respond.
First,
unlike my previous numerous Annie rescues, I made the decision to simply not
track her whereabouts. I did not look
into where her texts and phone calls were going. I did not call her place of work to see if
she was still showing up. I did not look
at her FasTrak record to see if she was in San Francisco or Marin. I did not hack into her account to “find her
phone”. I did not contact any of her
friends. I did not look at her facebook
or instagram. Letting go of “need to
know” was incredibly powerful and allowed me to maintain my own calm.
Second, I
had to decide whether to let her continue to live with me. A month ago, I had hoped that allowing her to
stay at home while she tried to get back on track would at least prevent a desperate
relocation to the drug dealer’s lair.
Giving her the opportunity of a stable and safe home, as the mother of
another recovering addict counseled me, is the “least bad of a list of bad options”. But as her yoyo life continued, I had to
acknowledge that attempting to live with her was not good for me, and maybe not
good for her. She needs
to take full ownership for her choices and actions.
I am
done. I have spent 22+ years of my life
nurturing, loving, teaching, supporting, and ultimately rescuing a daughter who
now seems hell-bent on her own self-destruction. Yes, I know addiction is a disease. But I also know that she knows how to get
well and how to keep well. Two years in
rehabs and intensive therapies have given her all the tools she needs to heal,
if she chooses to do so. And as she is
covered under my health insurance, she can access any psychiatric/psychological
or de-tox assistance she needs. As one
of the many sage parents in my Alanon support group commented recently, “I
cannot love my child to wellness” and “I need to stay on my side of the street.” Another said, “Never do for your child what
he can do for himself.”
So I am now
fully letting go. I am no longer
checking in with her, or buying special foods she enjoys, or nagging her about
seeing her shrink, or reminding her that it would be a very good idea to get
that broken car window (smashed while she was out doing drugs in the
Tenderloin) fixed because we are in the midst of the rainy season.
And yet, as
those daily sores of worry start to heal, the grief is ever present. I grieve the daily pain she must feel. I grieve the loss of the person she could
have been. I grieve the loss of our
relationship. The questions for me are
no longer what to do for Annie, but rather, what to do for myself. How can I weather this grieving process?
Twenty years ago my husband, Annie's father, died. After six months, I took off
my wedding band and that had a profound effect on the healing process. No longer was I reminded of my
loss every time my hand passed before my eyes. And so, I recently set to work on putting away the many photographs I have of
Annie, most of which were taken when she was younger, as a way of simply letting go.
This
putting away of the photographs isn’t just a practical move, it is symbolic of
the larger shift that I need to undertake for my own happiness. And now to the books:
“Designing Your Life” is one of those ubiquitous
self-discovery books on the market, and I have been checking it out. About half-way through, the authors recommend keeping an activity journal, while noting whether you feel “flow” or are energized in the process. I did so, and after two weeks I realized that although my individual activities were plenty “flow”-ful, the whole thing was wretchedly depressing! I was alone about 95% of time. I was deadened into solitude – reading, doing
challenging cross-word puzzles, working on school projects – all of which were
interesting and meaningful, but the steady diet of which was simply not so
healthy for repairing a wounded heart.
I started
to wonder where the younger me had gone. I was unrecognizable even to myself! Whereas earlier I had felt joy and even
exuberance at life, I now felt shriveled up, defeated, and sad.
So I
started to think about letting go of the current me and cultivating a
“restored” me by tapping into the roots of previous happiness and meaning. I signed up for a day-long choral festival –
and went! I watched a performance of Rusalka on live-from-the-Met at a local
cinema. I went to the symphony one night
and the ballet the next. I had dinner
with friends. I joined a yoga class that
I hadn’t attended in a very long time. I
spent a little more time at school to work on projects and hang out with fellow
students. I registered for a painting class. I decided to write this blog
post. Indeed, I started to feel more
alive, and I was grateful.
The other
book that provided some insight into my grief and a way to move forward was
“The Little Paris Bookshop”. This short
novel is a story about a man who runs a bookstore on a Dutch barge in
Paris. He calls himself a literary
apothecary, doling out books to heal his customers like doses of medicine. I immediately fell in love with this
fictional character, tall, green-eyed, neatly dressed, compassionate, and
intelligent. The trouble is that he too
needs to be healed, having grieved for 21 years by the end of a
relationship. The bookseller impulsively
untethers his barge from the quai and heads south on the Seine, following canals
and rivers on a journey of discovery.
I’m not
quite ready to pull up anchor altogether, but reading about another human being
in a perpetual state of grief was impactful to me. I now appreciate
how much of my own life has been hijacked by grief.
