The Only Life I Could Save

by Katherine Ketcham

  Ben D. walks over and hands Tim a box of tissues. Tim offers the box to Susan, who is crying quietly next to him. Susan gives the box to Linda, who takes a handful of tissues and gives it to Steve, who is dry eyed and passes it along to Robyn, Alison, Pat, and me. For some weird reason, I think about the scene in Jaws when the giant shark leaps onto the back of the boat and one of the characters says, “I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.” In this small circle, with the tears flowing like rivers, we’re going to need a whole boatload of tissues.

  Tim is bent over with emotion, his head almost in his lap, his shoulders heaving. Susan continues to pat his hand as she introduces herself.

  “We’re here because our oldest son, Bryan, is addicted to heroin. He’s been here for eight weeks, and in five days, at the end of Family Week, we’re taking him home and putting him on a plane to an extendedcare facility in Florida. He finished his wilderness trip last week.”

  I want so much to ask Susan about the trip. The idea of Ben trekking into the mountains in the middle of a Montana winter scares me. In small groups with several counselors, each boy will spend sixteen days and nights (it would have been twenty-one days and nights if they had been in treatment during the summer months) in the million-acre-plus Bob Marshall Wilderness area. I’d never heard of the Bob Marshall Wilderness area, so I looked it up on the Internet. “One of the most completely preserved mountain ecosystems in the world,” the description goes. “The kind of wilderness most people can only imagine: rugged peaks, alpine lakes, cascading waterfalls, grassy meadows embellished with shimmering streams, a towering coniferous forest, and big river valleys.”

  Ben and the other boys will be climbing, traversing, rappelling, or whatever they’re supposed to do on those snow-covered mountains, trudging across frozen lakes and streams, camping out in the forests and river valleys or high up on some mountain peak or alpine lake. Three of those days will be a solo adventure, with each boy left alone with a tarp and a shovel to build a snow fort where they can think, reflect, work on the Twelve Steps, write in a journal, and fend for themselves.

  I pull my mind back to the circle. Bryan’s brother, Taylor, introduces himself. He wears a hoodie sweatshirt pulled over his head. He has disappeared underneath. I watch his hands, turning and twisting in his lap. He says his name, but that’s all he has to say.

  We continue around the group, telling a little bit about ourselves. We don’t say much, but the tissue box keeps making its rounds. When it’s my turn, my hands are sweaty, and my throat feels dry. But as soon as I start to talk, I experience a flood of relief. It feels so liberating to be with people who look at me with compassion and understanding, whose eyes fill with tears when I tell my story because my story is their story.

  I feel safe in this circle, at home. Then I think how strange that is, to feel at home hundreds of miles from my own home, in a room full of strangers who fate has brought together through suffering. Here, in this room, I am not afraid, and I no longer feel alone. We are fighting together for our children’s lives. We are here because we need help ourselves, and we are not afraid to admit it. We are here to help each other by telling and listening to our stories, holding nothing back.

  I hold Pat’s hand as he talks, squeezing tighter as he reaches for the tissue box. “I miss my son,” he says, his voice shaking with emotion. “I want my son back.”

  On the second day, Steve tells a story: “I was seeing a counselor, and every week, it seems, I talked about this huge rock I was trying to push up a hill. I’d get almost to the top of the hill, and then the rock would roll right back on top of me.”

  He smiles and shifts in his chair. “So, one day, I’m talking again about this Sisyphean task and how powerless I feel as I keep trying to push that thing up the hill. The counselor listens patiently, and when I’m done, she says, ‘Why don’t you walk away from the rock?’ Well, I had no idea what she meant. ‘Walk away from the mountain, walk away from the rock,’ she says again. I just keep staring at her, trying to figure out what she wants me to do. ‘Steve, the rock is your anger and shame. You keep yourself chained to it. You keep trying to push it up the mountain, and it keeps rolling back down and flattening you. You carry that boulder with you everywhere. Why not just walk away from it?’

  “Well, damn, I never thought of that,” Steve says with a self-effacing grin. “I never thought that I could just walk away from the rock. I thought I was chained to it forever.”

  He starts to laugh. A moment later, he’s laughing so hard, he’s having trouble catching his breath. Susan starts laughing, and then Tim, and Taylor, and then we’re all laughing, big belly laughs, laughter that brings tears to our eyes. We reach for the tissues and start kicking the boxes across the room, tears running down our cheeks.

  I don’t know exactly when it happened—on the first day when Tim started sobbing, on the second day when Steve told his story, or on the third “Knees to Knees” day—but a switch was thrown, a light came on, and something inside me, inside all of us, gave way. We gave in. We let go. A community was formed in that room, with the snow falling outside in monstrous Montana flakes, with the plastic chairs moving together into a tighter and tighter circle, with the tears and the laughter and the tissue boxes at our feet, ready to be booted across the room or picked up and passed to our nearest neighbor. With the stories being told and the emotions being expressed, with the listening and the talking and the silences, some sort of miracle happened. It wasn’t the miracle I expected or originally hoped for, but it was the miracle I needed, the miracle we’d all been waiting for, whether we knew it or not.

  I remember Ben D.’s words: The miracle hasn’t happened yet. I was waiting for the miracle to embrace Ben, to hold him tight and wake him up to the truth that his addiction was threatening his life. But there is more than one miracle to be discovered in this life, and I found it there, in that room, so far from home, with people I would never have met if it hadn’t been for our common story. We became a community, and in that community, we realized how we were all connected—not by being consoled, not by words intended to calm us down, not even by a pat on the hand, a hug, or words of encouragement about our courage, strength, or long-suffering commitment to our children. Rather, we were bound together by our grief and our guilt, by our shame and our soul-sickness, by our fear and our pain. What had been hidden inside for so long was brought to light, our secrets revealed. In the mirror of each other’s stories, we discovered ourselves.

  For a moment, as I think these thoughts, I step back into the pages of The Spirituality of Imperfection. I think about the section Ernie and I wrote on mutuality. It’s all coming alive now, the words are jumping off the pages we wrote so many years ago, leaping right into my heart and settling into the folds of my soul. I get it, I finally get it, the number one rule of what Ernie calls “mutuality”—we get by giving, and we give by getting.

  Our need for mutuality arises from our very flawedness and imperfection; it originates in the fact that by ourselves we are never enough. We need others to help us; we need others in order to help them. Thus, the question “Who am I?” carries within itself another, even more important question: “Where do I belong?” We find self—ourselves—only through the actual practice of locating ourselves within the community of our fellow human beings.

  Of course, of course—this is the spirituality of imperfection come into real life. Once again, I am stepping into the pages of my book. Or is the book stepping into the pages of me? I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. I realize we are all struggling with spiritual dilemmas, whether or not we call them that, and they arise from the basic awareness, perhaps the most important awareness of all: Something is wrong with me, and I can’t fix it by myself. I need help. This painful place—this place of grieving, of loss, of fear and helplessness—is being transformed by our willingness to tell our stories and, perhaps more important, to listen to other people’s stories, and in the mirror of their pain and despair, discover ourselves.<
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  In that leap of faith that allows us to expose our brokenness—our failures, imperfections, flaws, and limitations—to others (soulmates now, but strangers just hours before), we give them permission to reveal their own brokenness. In the telling of and listening to our stories, we are no longer ashamed. Like the falling snow outside the windows, shame melts into the ground, becoming part of the earth, part of the coming and going of all life.

  I look at Susan across the circle, and I realize I am looking at myself. She has bright blue eyes, while my eyes are dark brown. She is five foot seven, and I am barely five foot three. She is from West Virginia, and I am from Washington. She is ten years younger than me. But the differences between us no longer matter, for she is my twin; her story is my story, and when she speaks, I am listening to my own heart expressing its deepest truth.

  This is the miracle. We belong together because we are engaged in the same quest as we search for answers to our most anguished questions. In that journey, we reflect back to each other the meaning of our own experience. In telling the truth about myself, I discover the truth about myself. I have come to know myself in the honest, unashamed, unedited telling of my story. Like the others in the room, I let go of that vision of myself as someone who is holding it all together, who is in control. I let go, though not without some initial concern that I will be found out, that people will hide from me or laugh at me or feel superior to me. But my self-consciousness quickly fades away, because I am no longer lost. I am found. I am found within this circle of “others,” through this community of fellow human beings who are hurting and afraid but fearless when it comes to admitting our need for help and support. This is where we belong, where we “fit.” We share our stories, and as we join our stories with others who are on the same journey, we discover a story that is shared.

  We are not alone.

  Ben’s hair is cut short, almost to his scalp. He sits across from us with his hands tightly grasped together. He doesn’t smile. I look at Susan, whose eyes are filling with tears. She has heard so much about Ben, and now here he is—so close that we can touch him, yet so closed up and closed in on himself that he is beyond our reach.

  It’s his turn to tell the group his story, revealing the bulk of the iceberg that lies underneath our awareness, beneath even our ability to comprehend. A cold, deep-blue truth.

  “Remember that day,” he says, looking at me, his tone bordering on belligerence. “The day when you found the pipe?”

  “Yes.” My voice is almost a whisper.

  He looks down at his hands. The knuckles are raw and chapped from the Montana cold. They are red and then they are white as he pushes his hands together and then relaxes them. Red white red white red white.

  He starts to cry, the tears become sobs, and the knuckles stay white. “When you left that morning, I went back in the house. I found a bottle of vodka in the basement cupboard and mixed it with orange juice. I got drunk and drove to school.

  “I smoked weed every day, before school, after school. Every day.

  “Remember when you went on vacation and left me to take care of the house? You told the neighbors to check in on me, but I called them and told them not to worry if I had friends over. Just a small group of good friends, I said, no partying or anything. Well, I had parties every night you were gone.

  “I snorted cocaine with freshmen and sophomores. In your house. Kids you know, kids whose parents you know, parents who have no idea what their kids were doing that night.

  “I took pills. I smoked crack. I blacked out. One time in high school, I was in the Honda, and I was drunk and blacked out. I was driving down the middle of the road when I came out of the blackout, and a car was coming straight at me.

  “I blacked out all the time. I took prescription drugs with alcohol and blacked out. I didn’t care what drug I took—I was addicted to getting high.

  “I woke up in my own vomit more times than I can count. One time during my senior year in high school, I went to a party and brought a bag of marijuana and six-pack of beer with me. One of Dad’s students from Whitman was there. A geology major. He told me how much he liked Dad, and we drank beer together. Later, I was out puking in the yard, and he came outside to see if I was okay. One of Dad’s students—and I’m standing there puking.”

  He shakes his head, as if he is trying to dislodge the memory. He starts to cry, and then, in the next instant, he is angry. “There’s so much you don’t know. I got the dogs stoned.”

  I look at Pat. The dogs. Nessie, who died at age fourteen in October of Ben’s senior year. And Sophie. Murphy, our new puppy—did he get her stoned, too? I look at Pat and the girls, and they are staring at Ben in disbelief.

  Alison can’t help herself. “What about Sasha?” she says, her voice shaking. Sasha is her ferret.

  “Sasha, too,” Ben says. Ali bursts into tears.

  Ben and I sit on two chairs facing each other, our knees touching. The chairs are placed in the middle of the circle. All eyes are on us as we each take a turn to speak about our regrets, resentments, and affirmations.

  I look at the sheet of yellow paper with the heading “Knees to Knees.” My hands are shaking. I wish I weren’t so nervous. I wish my voice didn’t shake. I wish this was all over.

  “I have many regrets,” I begin, reading from my list. “I regret things I’ve said to you when I was angry and frustrated. I regret calling you names, saying you were lazy. Once I called you ‘useless.’ I even called you an ‘asshole.’” The tears start and won’t stop. I feel so ashamed of myself, so exposed.

  I look at the paper in my shaking hands. “I regret being so controlling at times. I regret not being a better listener. I regret not supporting you when you said you wanted to join the swim team.”

  Deep breath. “Okay. My resentments. I resent your anger. Your attitude. Your harsh words and, at other times, your unwillingness to talk to me—the way you would leave the room and slam doors, punch holes in walls, swear at us.”

  I read the next item on my list of resentments. Five fingers, five toes. I have no idea what I resent about his fingers and toes. Maybe I resent the fact that he was born with everything he needed, all his necessary parts, and yet he turned to drugs. Oh, Kathy, I think to myself. Do you blame him for using drugs? Don’t most people who get in trouble with drugs have five fingers and five toes? What’s the point?

  I skip ahead to the affirmations. “You have such a good, kind heart. There’s a sweetness about you, an openness to life, to new experiences. I love your sense of humor and the way you love to make people laugh. I love your red hair and freckles.” Ben has a disgusted look on his face, which throws me off. I shouldn’t have mentioned his red hair; he hates his red hair. Why did I write that down? I’m unnerved and quickly read through the rest of my list. “You’re so smart, you love to read, and you’re a beautiful writer. I love all those things about you.”

  I don’t know how long I spoke. Panic erased most of my memory. I do remember that both of our knees were shaking, and it seemed a struggle to keep them together.

  It’s Ben’s turn to list his resentments, regrets, and affirmations. I listen, but I do not hear him. The words do not register. Panic again, I guess, because even minutes later, I cannot remember one single thing he said.

  The only detailed record I have of the “Knees to Knees” exercise is Alison’s list. Her classes at the University of Montana start up halfway through Family Week, so she writes him a “Knees to Knees” letter that he received after he returned from his wilderness trip.

  Dear Ben,

  How ya doin’, buddy? You’re back from your trip if you are reading this, so how was it? I imagine you in a snow cave (right?) eating berries and singing Kumbaya (sp!!). Ha ha just kidding, but it’s a funny image. I’m curious to know how it is going for you—I bet you enjoyed it.

  It was so good seeing you, Ben. I was so happy to be able to spend time with you and laugh and joke like we used to do. I’m so proud that y
ou have accepted everything that is going on and decided to change things you want to before it’s too late. Life is too short. We all love you so much and want you to be happy. Ben D. asked me to do some regrets, resentments and affirmations, so that’s what I’ll do now.

  Regrets

  -I really wish we could have been closer in high school. I know you had your friends, I had mine, and we were doing different things but after what you said in group about feeling angry and the need to bully people, I feel like there is something I could have done. I’m sorry I didn’t realize how much pain you were going through. From now on I will be more attentive to your feelings, because you are like that with mine.

  -I wish I could have talked to you more about John. It seemed like you had so much anger/emotions built up that you didn’t let out because you had no one (or not very many people) to talk to. If you ever need to talk about John, Benny, please know you can talk to me. I didn’t realize that his death had such a huge impact on you (as it should of).

  Resentments

  -I resent that the time we had the most time together, when we both lived at home, when life was easier and we didn’t have as many responsibilities, you weren’t there. We will never get that time back, Benny, when we can live together as brother and sister. I think of all the things we could have done—watched movies, done stupid things, played in the snow, music videos, etc. That time of our life is somewhat gone, and lost. I know we did have good times, but the anger, arguments, fights, yelling replaced some of the happy times we could have shared. And it’s not only you, Benno. I started arguments and fights, etc. The resentment I feel is on both of our parts. I’m just glad we have our whole lives to catch up on that.