The Only Life I Could Save

by Katherine Ketcham

  To Ben

  the bravest soul I know

  contents

  Introduction

  1Something Happened

  2Walking the Walk

  3The Hole Inside

  4Vampire Dreams

  5Who Made You God?

  6Cielo/Inferno

  7438,000 Minutes

  8Lost

  9Kodak Moments

  10Wilderness

  11Knees to Knees

  12Help Me

  13In the Shades of Sorrow and Hope

  14Order from Chaos

  15Found

  16Coming Home

  Acknowledgments

  Recommended Reading

  Book Club Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Also by Katherine Ketcham

  About Sounds True

  Copyright

  Praise for The Only Life I Could Save

  THE JOURNEY

  By Mary Oliver

  One day you finally knew

  what you had to do, and began,

  though the voices around you

  kept shouting

  their bad advice—

  though the whole house

  began to tremble

  and you felt the old tug

  at your ankles.

  “Mend my life!”

  each voice cried.

  But you didn’t stop.

  You knew what you had to do,

  though the wind pried

  with its stiff fingers

  at the very foundations—

  though their melancholy

  was terrible.

  It was already late

  enough, and a wild night,

  and the road full of fallen

  branches and stones.

  But little by little,

  as you left their voices behind,

  the stars began to burn

  through the sheets of clouds,

  and there was a new voice,

  which you slowly

  recognized as your own,

  that kept you company

  as you strode deeper and deeper

  into the world,

  determined to do

  the only thing you could do—

  determined to save

  the only life you could save.

  introduction

  December 4, 2005

  The place is deserted when we arrive. Log cabins set in a frozen landscape, not a human being in sight. I begin to panic. Where is everyone?

  Ben stands with his long arms hanging loose at his sides, shoulders slumped forward. He shifts his weight, and the frozen ground crunches under his size thirteen Adidas sneakers. The look on his face speaks of fear. Dread. Despair.

  I don’t like this place. Where is everyone? I look around at the log cabins and imagine we’re on a movie set. The actors and directors, cameras and production crew haven’t arrived yet, maybe because it’s a Sunday. Their day off.

  Somewhere, out there, are the barns, outbuildings, and miles upon miles of split-rail fences. I remember these facts from the Internet description and photographs. A four-thousand-acre working cattle ranch with a stream running through it, surrounded by rolling hills; farther out, beyond sight, are the waterfalls, sheer rock walls, glaciers, forests, and tens of thousands of acres stretching up to the Canadian border.

  Months later, Ben tells me that Saturday and Sunday are work days at the treatment center. The boys are probably in the barns, spearing frozen cow droppings with rebar poles (“that sucked”) or riding on open-back trucks and tossing hay out to the chasing cattle (“that was fun”). But as we stand at the end of the driveway, shaking with the cold, I wonder if other parents decided to keep their boys home for Christmas. Why didn’t we do that? What kind of people drive their child to the middle of nowhere and drop him off in a desolate place with the wind howling and the temperature dropping and not a soul in sight?

  A door slams. A short, stocky man improbably dressed in a T-shirt walks toward us. He barely manages a smile. I wonder what we look like to him—this mother, father, and son standing in a ragged semicircle, waiting. Perhaps we are a familiar tableau: the boy standing apart, hands in his jean pockets, eyes on the ground; the mom fighting back tears; dad stepping forward with hand outstretched. I think about the faces we show to the world, the hiding we do behind those masks. The outside is holding together, just barely, but the inside is crumbling.

  The stocky man says the boys will be back soon. He says they were expecting us earlier. I don’t think he means to make me feel guilty, but I do. I mumble something about the long drive and the ice and the broken windshield wipers, but he doesn’t care; he shrugs his shoulders. He’s a mountain man standing there in a T-shirt, strongly muscled, tough, ruddy, preoccupied. He says his wife just fell off a horse and broke her pelvis. I look at Ben, and his face registers my thoughts. Who cares about your wife? We’re standing here in the cold in a barren empty godforsaken place, and it’s taking everything we have not to bolt, jump in the car, and drive away, all of us. Why would we give a damn about your wife?

  He shakes Ben’s hand. It feels as if the wind is blowing right through me. I am an empty shell. I plant my feet wide apart and dig in, willing myself to stand straight and tall, to be strong. I don’t like this man. I don’t like this place. I want the whole thing to blow away. There’s no softness here, no friendly faces. It’s hard. Bitter. I think about camping and waking up to the acidic taste of percolated coffee on a Coleman stove, chilled inside and out, the coffee grounds thick and chewy on my tongue.

  I want hot chocolate with marshmallows. I want soft, cozy blankets. I want smiles, sunshine, warmth. I want my son to come home to me. I want to reach out to Ben, hold him close, turn back time, and carry him away in my arms, to start all over again. I want, I want, I want.

  “Okay,” the man says, ready to move on. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of him.”

  We give Ben a hug—me first, then Pat, then me again. We walk to the car. As we drive away, I turn around in my seat to look back at Ben.

  He lifts his head and attempts a half-hearted wave. My heart feels as brittle and broken as the ice cracking beneath the tires of the car as we turn onto the highway for the long ride home.

  I start to cry. I can’t stop. I’m sobbing. Pat reaches over, takes my hand and squeezes it, but the roads are too slick, and he needs both hands on the wheel. Tears are running down his cheeks, and he wipes them off with the arm of his jacket. I look at his fingers gripping the steering wheel and think, Hold on, honey, hold on. I’m talking to myself. Hold on, honey, hold on. I feel the pieces of myself breaking apart.

  It’s three weeks before Christmas, and Ben will be in treatment for two months.

  August 2016

  On a family vacation at one of our favorite places in the world, Black Butte Ranch near Sisters, Oregon, Ben and I talk about this book. He just turned thirty and, in two months, will celebrate his ninth year of recovery.

  The early morning sunshine filters through the Ponderosa pines, creating patterns of light and shadow on the patio table. We listen for a moment to the laughter inside the rental house where Pat is starting a new jigsaw puzzle with Ben’s older sisters, Robyn and Alison. Ben and I are not fans of jigsaw puzzles; they’re too abstract and time consuming, and they make our heads hurt. Sometimes Pat saves the last piece for me—if Ben hasn’t hidden it somewhere, which he’s been known to do—and I have to turn the thing right, left, and upside down before I can figure out where it fits. Sort of the way I look at life, it seems.

  “I wouldn’t change my life,” Ben says, in a quiet, reflective tone. “I have a really good recovery and an amazing per
spective on the past. It was just a crazy kind of vortex based on the combination of you being an expert in addiction and me struggling for all those years.”

  He smiles in a thoughtful way, and as he tilts his head, the sun lights up his auburn hair to a golden copper. I was always so afraid his red hair would fade away, a fluke of his childhood. But his Scottish genes held fast.

  “Do you remember ‘the Promises’ in the Big Book of AA, Mom? ‘We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.’ I don’t regret the past, and I don’t wish it had been something different. I am who I am because of what happened. In the end, it’s a positive thing.”

  Ben and I have talked before, often, about destiny and fate and coming to terms with the fact that there is no one goal, no one future, no one pathway. I look at him, and for the thousandth time, I am so grateful he is here with me. Alive, strong (all those CrossFit muscles), scarred—the forehead scar from running into a play structure at preschool, the scar on his left hand when he broke several bones in a rugby game, the knee scar from a lacrosse injury. A deep thinker, a soul searcher, a good human being.

  He takes a deep breath. “I have just one request for the book,” he says. Sensing the hesitation in his voice, I feel a little hitch inside my heart. It feels like a cramp, like someone is squeezing my heart lightly, willing me to pay attention. I’m afraid of what he will say next. We’ve talked about the book dozens of times, and he tells me he is one hundred percent behind it; he believes it will help people. But maybe he has changed his mind. Maybe now that I am so close to finishing it, he doesn’t want the exposure. Now that his life is so together, he doesn’t want to go backward and experience all the bad stuff again. I gear myself up with the thought that I can handle it; if he does not want the book to be published, I will let it go. I’m surprised how easily that thought comes to me, after all the work of the past few years. I realize it might be because revisiting the past has been difficult for me, too. Writing this book may be the most god-awful, painful thing I have ever done.

  “Over the years you’ve talked a lot about addiction as a demon that walked into your house and threatened to destroy your family.” Ben pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts. “I need to ask you this one thing—don’t demonize addiction. Addiction is not a demon. For me, at least, it’s a spiritual malady, and understanding it at its depth requires asking questions and coming into a conversation. What was I missing? What was I seeking?

  “Drugs were a means to an end for me. I was extremely unhappy in my own skin. I was coping with the death of my best friend. I was dealing with my spiritual deficiencies and my grief, my guilt and my shame, trying to heal myself. It was only when I came to the realization that I was using drugs as a means to fill up this hole inside, to find some meaning in life, that I was able to figure things out. Philosophy, bigger ideals, the truth, and the good—that’s what allowed me to get and stay sober.”

  “The truth and the good,” I repeat. “Can you tell me more about that?”

  “Doing something right, however small it is,” he explains. “Forgiving myself for the mistakes I’ve made and continue to make. Realizing that imperfection is okay. Struggling to create a new self, to believe in myself again, to trust that I’m worth the effort.”

  The long, hard work of recovery. But the other side of recovery is addiction. Ben has his perspective on “the demon,” and I have mine. I can’t let go of that image of a monstrous force that changed him from the inside out and took him away from us for seven long, tortuous years. By personifying addiction as a hideous, loathsome entity that captured and imprisoned my son, I was able to figure out how to fight it. Seeing addiction as a demon helped me understand that it wasn’t Ben I was battling; it was his disease. Hating, loathing, detesting, hoping to destroy the addiction kept me sane, allowing me to love my child even when he seemed to hate everything in the world, including his family, including himself.

  Silence joins the slanting of sunlight on the table, and I stretch out my hand to the warmth. Arthritis, I think. I must be getting arthritis. And at that moment, a sudden insight hits me hard: Maybe the demon was never inside Ben. Maybe it is inside me, and all those years, I was fighting myself. For seven long years, I struggled to take control, to reach in and pull Ben out of the addiction’s clutches, believing that it was within my power to save him and alter the trajectory of his life. If I just do this or that. If I say the right words. If I say nothing at all. If I hold on. If I let go. If I could go back in time and relive some of the events of our lives . . . maybe things would be different. For how long did I live in those “what if” scenarios? For how long did I torture myself with wishing I could go back to revise the past?

  The demon, I realize, is not something outside me. It is the illusion of control; the belief that I can change the world for someone else; the fantasy that hope and faith, even love, are strong enough to battle fate. All those books I wrote about addiction led me to think I knew what to do—the words created a pathway before me, and all I had to do was follow them. But the words were just words, after all, and real life doesn’t follow a straight line; instead, it leads to detours, dead ends, and sheer drop-offs.

  So now, as Ben begins his fourth decade on this earth and as I approach seventy (how did that happen, I wonder), it is long past time to admit that I don’t have the ability to alter the direction of my son’s life. Only he has that power. And from there, it is not too big a leap to the understanding that this book I am writing is not about Ben and his addiction journey, nor is it about “the demon” that I lived with in my mind for all those years. This book is about the Big Know-It-All Who Realizes She Doesn’t Know a Damn Thing.

  Except this one daunting truth—the only life I can save is my own.

  1

  something happened

  1976–1999

  Addiction was handed to me, like a gift.

  Not so very long ago, those words came to me unbidden in the dark of night, startling me out of a deep sleep. It has taken decades to open my eyes to the nature of that gift, but here is the story of where it all began.

  It’s 1976, and I’m twenty-seven years old, a freelance writer with ambition that outstrips experience, and even perhaps, talent. I still can’t believe my luck at finding a part-time job at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, which pays enough to cover my food and rent, thus supporting my writing ambitions. I’m the secretary to the executive editor of the P-I, and from the moment I meet Bill Asbury, I fall in love with him. It’s not a heart-thumping crush. He’s cute but not all that attractive from the perspective of someone half his age; it is more along the lines of a heart-and-soul connection to his unbridled passion for life. He reminds me of my father, especially the way he cracks up at his own silly jokes.

  The P-I is one of the largest morning dailies (number thirty-three) in the country. Bill is the quintessential old-time journalist—fiercely protective of his writers, fearless in the face of controversy, and stubbornly committed to reporting the truth no matter what the cost. What I love most about him is his irreverent wit and his goofy smile, all wrinkles, loose joints, and twinkling eyes. When Bill laughs, his whole body laughs with him.

  On slow news days, Bill walks into my office, arms swinging, a big grin on his deeply lined face. If he’s in a particularly exuberant mood, he’ll do a little tap dance (“my five kids call it my soft-shoe shuffle,” he says with a wink), his body tilting to one side and then the other, arms splayed out to the side for balance, heels clicking on the floor, hands spread at the end with a “ta-da.” Although he has his moments of grace, Bill also has a sailor’s mouth on him and a turn-your-head-around way with stories that paints words with colors, smells, and the snap of the wind in the sails.

  He pulls up a chair, puts his feet on my desk, and tells me stories about his drinking days. I don’t know why he trusts me with these dark tales. Maybe he senses that I have no real knowledge or experience of alcoholism and therefore no scores to settle a
nd few judgments to make. Maybe he’s simply spreading the word, hoping to enlighten me about a common but unmentionable disease that came close to destroying his marriage, his reputation, and his life.

  Bill’s stories take place in a small farming town in eastern Washington, a community so far removed from Seattle (over the mountains and through the woods, deep into the farms and irrigated deserts) that just saying the name makes sophisticated urbanites laugh out loud—Walla Walla. I’d never heard of Walla Walla, and Bill and I shared some good laughs at the expense of what would one day, ironically, become my home.

  From January 1972 to August 1975, Bill was the editor of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin. He was also, during those years, a high-functioning alcoholic who never had a drink before quitting time and never missed a day of work due to boozing. But alcohol was causing considerable havoc in his life, including a painful case of gout and an enlarged liver (“You might consider cutting down on your drinking,” his doctor advised), chronic depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and heated arguments with his wife, Janet. Despite these alcohol-related problems, only Janet and a few close friends knew that Bill had a serious alcohol problem.

  One of Bill’s stories says a lot about his character, even when he was under the influence. It was an early summer evening, and Bill was driving home from a dinner meeting in Pendleton, Oregon. A state trooper stopped him on the Milton-Freewater Highway and gave him a Breathalyzer test. He blew a 0.17, plenty high enough to earn him a ride to the county jail, where he drunkenly put his arms around his police buddies and asked them to pose with him for a picture, which he offered to publish in the next day’s paper. (“They were not amused,” Bill recalls.) The next morning, he showed up early for work, hungover and filled with shame. He summoned Jo Moreland, the U-B’s police reporter; after relating the details of his arrest, Bill told her to pursue the story, holding nothing back from the truth. In the evening paper, his name appeared in the arrest column along with other drunk drivers and lawbreakers.