We keep driving. The snow is falling, the roads are slushy, the sky is gray, and we are all pretending that this is something normal to do on a Sunday—drive ten hours to an inpatient treatment center in the outback of Montana in the middle of winter.
I knit a green scarf. On long drives, I knit scarves, back and forth, back and forth. When the drive is over, I put the scarf in a bag Ben made for me when he was in preschool. Months, even years, go by, and I forget about the scarf until the next trip. I’ve kept about a dozen half-finished scarves and a few finished ones that I can’t bring myself to throw away because of all the hours invested but can’t give to anyone, even to Goodwill, because of all the holes and uneven edges.
On this trip to the middle of nowhere, I finish the entire scarf, and I don’t drop one stitch. I’m focused, keeping my mind on the needles and the yarn and the back and forth, back and forth, trying not to look out at the gray whiteness, the icy stillness, trying not to think about what has happened and what is about to happen.
Ben asks if we can stop at Pizza Hut in Kalispell. Even though we’re late because of the ice and the snow and the frozen windshield wiper fluid, we pull into the parking lot. I watch him eat four or five big slices and find myself thinking that this is a last supper of sorts, the end of our lives as we have known them.
We drive another twenty miles or so, east through Batavia and Kila, until we arrive at the turnoff to Wilderness Treatment Center. As we head down a long, twisting road, Ben asks if he can take his iPod with him. No. His cell phone? No.
“Welcome to Camp Suck Your Dick,” he says.
On the long ride home, I struggle to keep my mind focused on the copyedited chapters of a book I am writing with William Cope Moyers, son of the famous broadcast journalist Bill Moyers. Titled Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption, the book tells the story of William’s long, disastrous addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, which came perilously close to destroying everything and everyone he loved. In one scene, just before he entered treatment for the third time, he called his wife and asked her to pick him up at a crack house where he’d run out of money to buy more drugs. When they arrived home, she looked at him, “not with judgment or anger, but with something deeper, some mixture of sorrow, pity, grief, and fear.” He begged for her forgiveness.
“I’m a bad man,” he kept repeating, not in an effort to get her sympathy but from the depths of his loneliness and helplessness.
“You’re a good man, William,” she said in a voice that was deeply, desperately tired. “But you have a bad problem, and you will die if you don’t do something about it.”
Good person, bad disease. William got clean and sober. Ben can, too. William is a good, decent, honest man now that he is released from the influence of drugs. Ben will be, too. Good person, bad disease. I put down my pen, close my eyes, and keep repeating those words to myself. There is comfort there; there is hope there.
When we arrive home after midnight, a voicemail is waiting for us. It is Ben Dorrington, Ben’s primary counselor at Wilderness. We call him Ben D. I write down every word, replaying the message several times to be sure I don’t miss a thing.
“Ben is doing well,” Ben D. says. “He’s open, talking, polite, appropriate. No red flags. He has lots of resentments, but I see a lot of kids who are more resentful than Ben. He seems to like it here.”
The next day, we hear a different story. The honeymoon is over, Ben D. tells us. Ben doesn’t feel like he can get sober. He’s planning to leave. The staff will do everything they can to convince him to stay, but there are no locks on the doors, no electric fences, no gated entrances.
We have several conference calls with the two Bens. I’m writing notes as fast as the pen can travel across the paper but soon switch to my computer so I can type with my headphones on. I keep all my notes, emails, and letters in ever-thickening folders in a two-drawer oak file cabinet that sits in the corner of my bedroom closet. The paperwork comforts me—no matter what happens, I know I will not forget. I will never forget. These are the records of our unconditional love for our son and our never-ending efforts to help him. These thin papers and thick folders are proof that we tried and that we will not stop trying. Ever. No matter what.
“Everybody here is immature,” Ben says in a loud, aggressive tone of voice. “Everybody’s a crackhead. I’m bored out of my mind. I can’t stay here. These other guys aren’t like me; they’re all sticking needles in their arms.”
My heart is thumping, but I hold fast. I repeat, over and over again, that Ben needs to stay in treatment, and if he leaves, he will be on his own. This is what we’ve been told to say.
“I hate you,” Ben says, his voice a low hiss. “You put me here. This is all your fucking fault.”
Hands shaking, I give the phone to Pat, who repeats the message we’ve practiced over and over again—“You need to stay in treatment; if you decide to leave, you are on your own.” Ben D. comes back on the phone a moment later to tell us that Ben stomped out of his office and, on the way out, picked up an office chair and threw it out the door.
“He seems to have his mind made up that he is leaving tomorrow and will hitchhike to Missoula, where his sister is going to school.”
I call Alison to warn her. “What do I do if he shows up here?” she says, her voice choked with tears.
“I don’t know.” A thick blanket of despair creeps over me, cold and dense like the fog that settles over the Walla Walla valley in the winter months. “I just don’t know.”
Tuesday, December 6
“He says he’ll stay out of spite,” Ben D. says. I can hear a smile in his voice. “He says he’ll spend your $20,000 and then go smoke a bowl in your house. But he apologized for being ‘an asshole,’ in his words, yesterday.”
Ben D. may be my most favorite person in the world right now. I don’t know what he looks like, I don’t know anything about him, all I know is that I trust him and feel safe with him. I sense the depth of his empathy in the calming tone of his voice, the occasional chuckle that allows me to step back and gain a little perspective, and the way he avoids statements like “I understand what you are feeling and thinking.” Even if you’ve been through a similar situation, how can you know what another person is thinking or feeling? At some level, we are all strangers to each other. We are blindingly unknowable, even to ourselves.
At lunch with a friend I met in a yoga class, she tells me that we all need to follow the Buddhist philosophy and “stay in the pain.” I stare at her. “All of life is suffering,” she says, with a knowing smile.
I want to punch her in the nose. Here is what I want to say to her: “My experience is not your experience. My suffering is different than yours, although I do not doubt the reality or the depth of the pain you have been through. You do not know—how could you know?—about this all-consuming fear that sends shock waves through me when the phone rings early in the morning or late at night? I am in the pain! I’m in the fire—seared, scorched, burning alive!”
I don’t say any of those things. Instead, I go home, curl up with Sophie and Murphy, and let them lick my tears.
Pat writes a long nine-paragraph email to his parents, detailing our decision to send Ben to treatment and asking for their support.
This has been, and continues to be, the most difficult thing we have endured in our 28 years together. Neither of us has spent a great deal of time praying over the years, but if ever there was an issue that is worth a prayer, this is it. The decision had to be made together and with a united sense of purpose. Fortunately, we were able to do that. Ben has gone in and out, as you might expect. One day, he wants treatment in this facility; the next, he wants to be out and going to an outpatient program in Seattle (and thus establishing control over his life, which would allow the addiction to take over once again). One day, he is learning what it means to live life without alcohol and other drugs, and we see and hear the Ben we used to know. The next he despises us for sending him to this place
, and despises himself. That is not Ben talking, it is his addiction talking.
Pat’s father writes back.
Needless to say we are saddened beyond belief. More will follow but at the moment we are far too emotional and distraught to even be coherent. You both, and Ben, have our prayers. I must stop before I come totally unglued.
All our love,
Mom and Dad
This short email expressing sadness and grief is so uncharacteristic of Pat’s father, who keeps his emotions close and tight, that we both start sobbing when we read it. My father died sixteen years ago, when Ben was four; my mother died seven years ago, when Ben was twelve. They died before Ben started using drugs. I miss them so much, and I dream about them often. In my dreams, they are alive, but I am fully aware that our time together is short and soon they will be gone. In my waking hours, I wish they were still here with me, even if just to hold me close just one more time.
But I’m also grateful I don’t have to write a letter to them.
Wednesday, December 7
Ben has been in treatment for four days when Ben D. calls with good news. “We’ve had a 180-degree turn,” he says. “He’s talking about powerlessness. He knows he has no other options. He’s relating to all these guys, handing in assignments, starting to gain insight into addiction. It’s an abrupt change, but he still doesn’t think he can have fun without alcohol and other drugs.”
“It’s like we’re blind on a roller coaster,” Pat says. We laugh, and it feels so good, as if we are shaking ourselves loose inside.
But I’m afraid, it seems, of everything. I don’t want to answer the phone. When I open the mailbox, my hands shake as I sort through the mail. I’m afraid Ben D. will call and tell us Ben is on a downturn. Or maybe it will be Jody, my sister-in-law, with bad news about my brother, who is dying oh-so-slowly-and-oh-too-soon of pancreatic cancer.
Pat goes hunting with a friend, and I imagine him getting peppered with shotgun pellets as they walk back and forth on opposite sides of the field.
Pat plays poker with his regular once-a-month-or-so group, and I’m afraid to go to sleep before he gets home. We never lock the doors, but now we do.
I can’t concentrate. I get up, sit down, walk to the kitchen, look in the fridge, sigh, go back to sit on the couch. I look at the phone, afraid it will ring, willing it to ring. I remember the comments from friends and family: “He needs to learn how to control himself.” “He needs to grow up.” “Why did you let him join a fraternity?” “He should join the Army.” “He won’t stop if he doesn’t want to stop.”
Somehow, somewhere we fucked up.
Saturday, December 10
“He’s semi-defiant,” Ben D. says. “Not too bad—we expect some of that. He still wants to leave. He’s having a hard time with the level of maturity of the other boys. He says he’d work better with more intelligent people.”
“That sounds like bullshit,” I say, and to my surprise, I start laughing.
Ben D. laughs with me. “Well, there are always a couple of guys who are struggling more. He said he’s miserable here, that he can’t get sober here, that he’s just a pothead and he’s in treatment with all these coke and heroin addicts. We talked about how his drug use is pointing to the person he doesn’t want to become, and sooner or later he’ll have to start confronting this stuff. I said I know he’s fearful and that people want to avoid that because they don’t want to face themselves. He’s making eye contact with me the whole time I’m talking.”
Ben D. takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Uh-oh, I think. “At that point, he stands up and starts calling himself names, using the F-word, accusing me of not caring. He asked me how he could get kicked out of treatment, and then he said, ‘Maybe I should just kick your ass.’ I calmly asked him why he would want to do that. He called me a few more names, and then he tried to smash his fist through a window. He walked out of my office, picked up the cigarette butt can on the porch and threw it, kicked it a few times on his way back to his cabin, and then kicked open the cabin door. Then he punched himself in the face.”
“He hit himself?”
“Three times. He’s pretty bruised up. Honestly, I didn’t think it would go this far. His inner anger is more than I usually see. He is a young man with so much potential, but he hates himself so much. The anger comes out sideways, and he gets violent.”
“But why would he hit himself?” I can hardly find my voice.
“Guys with lots of potential—good athletes, good students—often beat themselves up when they do things they regret or they’re ashamed of.”
“You think he’s so full of shame that he beats himself up?” I’m shaking so violently that I turn up the heat on the thermostat. Ben is in so much pain. Can this much pain be “treated”?
“I do.”
“Is there any chance he’ll do something that will get him kicked out of treatment?” What I’m thinking is, how long can they put up with this behavior? If his anger is so out of control, if he’s throwing things, threatening to hit people, harming himself, how are they going to justify keeping him there? And if he can’t stay there, where will he go? What will we do? I picture him walking down the road in the middle of winter—it’s minus thirteen degrees in Montana—and wonder if I packed his down jacket.
“It’s pretty hard to get kicked out of the program,” Ben D. reassures me. “We understand that we’ll see a lot of anger, fear, and shame in these kids. Ben is a nice young man; he just doesn’t want to confront these personal demons. His anger is escalating rather than de-escalating. I hope and pray he gets through this.”
Demons, plural. Not just the monster of addiction but other demons too, unleashed and roaming free, wreaking havoc in his mind. The image horrifies me.
Ben D. offers us advice: “Stick to your guns, stick to what you know is best for Ben. Tell him you cannot support him unless he stays in treatment. Remember this is the chemical dependency side of Ben. We know this isn’t really who he is. And it’s life or death we’re dealing with here. We’re fully committed to him. This is a nasty, nasty disease.”
Life or death. Fight hard, Benny. Choose life.
Monday, December 12
I open up the picture files on my computer, trying to figure out which digital photos to keep and which to delete. Suddenly I feel overwhelmed and think, I can’t do this. Then I reason with myself, talking out loud: “Just do two at a time, Kath. Look at two and decide which one of the two you want to keep. Then go on to the next two. One step at a time.” I smile, then. Who ever thought this might be true, this one-step-at-a-time stuff?
Ben D. calls around noon. He says Ben did his life story, his peers took notes, and he was honest and open. This afternoon, they will do the “Knees to Knees” exercise, where the other kids sit with Ben, their knees touching, and tell him directly, honestly what they think about how he is doing in treatment.
“He’s been avoiding me because he knows he has to face his personal demons,” Ben D. says. “He doesn’t want to do that.”
I don’t blame him. At nineteen, could I have faced my “personal demons”? I don’t think I was self-aware enough to even recognize that I had personality traits that might be hurtful to myself or others. At Ben’s age, I would have had no idea what the term “personal demons” meant. I would have laughed at the whole concept.
What courage and strength Ben is being asked to pull up from some place deep inside him. Most of us go through life without ever having to look into the mirror of ourselves, removing the outer layers to expose our innards. We stuff our emotions, our fears and our shame, way down inside us, and we close ourselves up tight, resisting all efforts—even our own—to pull them forth into the light of day. It’s too painful to admit to our flaws and imperfections; if we are willing to acknowledge them, we also have to be willing to do something about them. We have to be willing to change, which we also resist with all our might, quickly closing ourselves back up again, stuffing those demons bac
k inside before stitching the seams together with unbreakable thread.
I stare out the kitchen window, my hands in the soapy dish water, and realize I am giving myself a safe distance from my feelings—perhaps my own “personal demons”—by using the universal “we.” “Get real, Kathy,” I say out loud. My demons are all wrapped up in one emotion—fear. I fear losing the people I love. I fear car crashes and airplane crashes. I fear public speaking. I fear big crowds and long lines. I fear not being honest, not being kind. I fear nuclear war.
A memory rises up, maybe because I am in the kitchen, just as I was in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. I was thirteen years old, helping my mother clean up the dishes after dinner. I remember the fear building up inside me. “Mom,” I said, finally finding the courage to put words to my thoughts. “I’m afraid of nuclear war. I’m afraid I won’t be able to grow up and have children.”
She turned to look at me, a dishtowel in her hand, eyebrows raised. “Kath,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous.”
I wonder what my mother would say about Ben. If I told her about my fears that he might die, would she say the same words. Oh Kath, don’t be ridiculous. Or she might say—I can still hear her voice—You worry too much, Katherine Elizabeth, and where does that get you?
I smile at the thought. Mom wasn’t the most affectionate person in the world—that would have been my father—but she taught us to be tough and scrappy and to take life’s bruises and scrapes in stride. But right now, I don’t feel so tough. And the fear keeps growing.
Tuesday, December 13
My friend Linda, who cuts and colors my hair, calls tonight. Her five-year-old son, Blake, was born a few months premature. Over the years, she’s told me the stories of his birth, her fears, her protectiveness, his pushing back, the speech therapists, the schools, teachers. We talk about thoughts and experiences that are close to our hearts. I tell her things I don’t tell many people, even my closest friends. I read the other day that the people who cut, color, straighten, and curl our hair are the repositories of our woes. They do their best to make us look good, while we sit in the chair and reveal what is really happening inside us, beneath the makeup and brave smiles, the “I’m fine” responses and superficial conversations.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 15