by Jessie Close
Christmas Day went well. We exchanged presents, and everyone had a good time. I should have been happy, but during the short period between Christmas and New Year’s I slipped into a funk. To steady myself, I began drinking, and on New Year’s Eve, I was rip-roaring drunk by midnight. I needed the booze to cheer me up and block out the suicidal urges that had been popping into my thoughts more frequently.
Killing myself seemed like a reasonable answer to all my problems. With death, I could finally be released from myself. I believed that if I shot myself, I would release my blood, which would, in turn, heal me. My thinking was completely illogical, but it made sense to me.
I awoke in the wee hours of the morning on January 1. Mark was sleeping soundly next to me, and I didn’t want to wake him, so I slipped off our bed quietly and made my way out into the kitchen. Mattie was asleep on the top bunk in her bedroom, and the house was quiet. I turned the knob on my kitchen door, stepping outside into the chilly black morning air. My kitchen faces the studio, but the lights inside it were dark, so I knew Calen and Sander were sleeping. I was alone. No one was aware of what I was about to do.
Being an avid outdoorsman, Mark owned several guns, including a pistol that he kept in his pickup truck. When we had started dating, I’d gotten him to promise that he would keep his guns locked up. I didn’t want Mattie to accidentally shoot herself, and I didn’t think it was smart to have loaded weapons lying around when both Mark and I were intoxicated. Mark had kept his guns secure, but I’d noticed earlier in the afternoon that he’d left a pistol on the front seat of his truck without locking it into its case behind the driver’s seat. It was what I was now after.
I was going to do it. I was going to kill myself.
As I made my way to his truck, I imagined the scenario. I would open the truck’s door and retrieve Mark’s handgun, checking to make certain it was loaded. I would raise it with my right hand and use my left hand to guide the barrel into my open mouth. I could almost feel the cold metal touching my skin and tongue. The next step would be easy. A final thought, a squeeze of the trigger, and it would be over. I would be dead. I would be healed.
When I grasped hold of the truck’s door handle, I had another vision. I could literally see the back of my head exploding as the slug from Mark’s gun ripped through my brain, spraying gray matter—like pudding—and blood onto the ground. My body would collapse.
Had my image of the future ended there, I would have been okay with it. But it hadn’t.
Mark would hear the gunshot and realize I was not in bed. In my mind, I could see him awakening Mattie as he turned on lights and called my name. Calen and Sander, both groggy, would hear the gunshot, too, and step outside. By this time, Mark would be next to the truck, looking at my lifeless body. He would see that it was his gun that I had used. I envisioned little nine-year-old Mattie staring out the kitchen window. Would she realize I was dead on the ground? What would she think? How would Calen and Sander handle my suicide?
Touching the cold handle of the pickup truck’s door snapped me back to reality. I could see Mark’s pistol on the seat, just as I remembered it, a glint of moonlight reflecting off its chrome barrel.
I reached for it but stopped when Mattie’s face unexpectedly flashed in front of my eyes. I couldn’t shake the image of her running from the kitchen, screaming hysterically as she reached my dead body. I could see tears flowing down her soft cheeks. Mattie already had been through so much. How could she possibly understand why her mother had killed herself and abandoned her?
My hand jerked back, and I slammed the truck door shut. Like Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, I had seen enough. I couldn’t do this to Mattie and Calen and Sander. They needed me. It wasn’t right. Crying, I stepped away from the truck and walked back into the Mouse House, slipping inside its kitchen as quietly as when I had left it only moments before. Instead of returning to bed with Mark, I crawled into the bottom bunk in Mattie’s bedroom. I wanted to be close to her. Lying there, I thought about how she and her brothers had saved me from myself without ever waking up. I cried myself to sleep.
The first morning of the new year brought with it a new resolve on my part. When Mark emerged from our bedroom, I told him what had happened during the morning hours. He was shocked, sad, grateful, but thankful that I hadn’t killed myself, especially with his handgun. He promised to keep it locked up in the future.
“I’m going to stop drinking,” I said. “I can’t keep doing this.”
To my surprise, Mark agreed. We both realized that alcohol had taken over our lives. What better day than New Year’s Day to start our new life of sobriety together?
Excited yet scared, we decided to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. We were going to need help to stop drinking. This was not the first time that I’d tried AA. Ten years earlier, when Tom and I had been going through our divorce, I’d attended AA meetings for a year. Although I had mouthed all the correct words at the time, I had never believed that I was an alcoholic. I told myself that my drinking was “situational,” caused by the stress of a divorce and my emerging mental illness. At least, that’s what I told myself. I’d spent twelve months sober and then, as they say in AA, “went back out.”
Bozeman was much too far for Mark and me to drive to an AA meeting, so I telephoned a friend who I knew was an AA regular. Juliana was tall, loud, and had a laugh that could skin a cat. We’d met and become friends in—where else?—a bar a few years earlier. I’d been on a date with a cowboy named Max when we stopped at the Blue Moon Saloon in a nearby town. I’d ended up on a stool next to Juliana, and we’d spent all afternoon drinking together.
When I reached Juliana, she told us where to find an AA meeting and offered to meet us there. New Year’s is an especially difficult time for recovering alcoholics, she said, so finding a meeting was easy. We settled on one that night in Ennis.
Juliana gave me a big hug after Mark and I parked outside the Madison Valley Medical Center, the Ennis hospital. We followed her downstairs into a room whose walls were lined with AA posters. The twelve steps to recovery were listed on one, the twelve traditions on another. A coffeemaker in one corner of the room offered both regular and decaf and was flanked by stacks of mismatched mugs.
I doubt many people want to attend an AA meeting for the first time. It’s embarrassing to walk into a room of strangers and admit that your life is completely out of control because of booze. I excused myself to use the bathroom, located in another corner of the room, before the meeting began, only to realize that it didn’t have a ceiling fan and that every noise that I made would be clearly heard in the room just outside the door, where everyone was taking seats at a table. I turned on the water to help cover the sound of my peeing and swept a cold, damp paper towel across my face before emerging to meet my fellow AA attendees.
There were about seven of us, including Mark and me and Juliana, and although AA is based on anonymity, in a town the size of Ennis everyone is recognizable. Juliana and I were the only women, and our meeting began—as I assume all AA meetings begin whenever someone new “darkens the AA door”—with what is called a First Step meeting. One by one, each AA member takes a moment to recall how alcohol abuse nearly destroyed his or her life. Mark and I were supposed to listen for three commonalities: denial, powerlessness, and unmanageability. The purpose of First Step stories is to make newcomers realize they are not alone and to remind AA regulars that all of us have hit bottom at some point—that we have experienced a feeling of “incomprehensible demoralization,” which is how AA describes it when you reach the end of your rope and think about wrapping it around your neck.
An old cowboy began the First Step meeting, explaining how he’d almost killed a man during a drunken rage. The cowboy’s intended victim was his wife’s new lover, which added some justification to his story, but not much. He was not a murderer, he explained, and yet alcohol had nearly led to him fatally shooting someone.
His story caused me to think about
my near suicide less than forty-eight hours earlier. What had I been thinking?
Perched around the table, I realized that my First Step story—while different—was strangely similar to everyone else’s. Like them, I’d denied my addiction and hidden it until I could no longer function. I felt tremendously guilty for all the times that I had almost let Mattie go hungry because there was hardly any food in the house and had refused to drive her to a friend’s house because I was drunk on the couch.
Mark and I left that meeting feeling resigned, sad, but also determined. I was certain I could go cold turkey because Juliana had done it. Juliana warned me that alcoholism is a physical addiction as well as a mental one, which meant I was going to feel physical withdrawal symptoms as I weaned my body away from booze. That night, Mark and I both braced for the worst, and I envisioned myself breaking out in cold sweats as my entire body trembled uncontrollably.
For some reason that didn’t happen to either of us.
Two days after that first AA meeting, both of us were craving a drink, so we decided to attend another meeting to help us stay sober. We got into our pickup truck and headed for the highway, but as we were driving to the Ennis hospital, Mark glanced at me and I looked at him, and simultaneously we both said, “Screw this.”
Instead of going to AA, we made a U-turn back to the Bear Claw and spent the rest of the evening drinking there. The next morning, guilt set in, so we decided to drive into Ennis for another AA meeting.
This time we made it to the basement room and discovered some new faces sitting at the table. Still, I already knew most of the members from our first session, including the older cowboy who’d nearly shot and killed his wife’s lover.
The man running the meeting asked, “Is there anyone here for the first time since their last drink?”
Mark and I sheepishly raised our hands.
“We need to do a First Step,” he announced.
One by one, each of the members recalled how alcohol had taken over their lives, and I got to hear that old cowboy talk again about how he had nearly killed another man during a drunken rage.
Mark and I left that meeting determined to stay sober. This time, we lasted about three days before we fell off the wagon again. When we returned to AA, I was in no mood to hear another First Step.
“I’ll admit to drinking again,” I announced. “But I don’t want to go through another First Step. I mean, this is our third time, and I already have heard your stories.”
The old cowboy stared at me, leaned forward, and said, “Well, isn’t that just too bad, missy!”
If I wanted to stay in AA, I would be required to follow the rules. No exceptions. The cowboy started his First Step story, and I heard for a third time about his and everyone else’s grim descent into addiction.
For Mark and me, the fourth time was a charm. I began keeping track of how many days had passed since my “sober day,” when I had stopped drinking. Day by day, week by week, month by month, the length of time when I could declare myself sober began to increase, and I became prouder and prouder of keeping track, saying, “It has been…” (a week, a month, a year) since my last drink.
During the ensuing weeks, I discovered that for me, the most difficult challenge was not physical withdrawal from alcohol; I never felt the delirium tremens—DTs—that I’d feared. What caused me the most distress was the reaction of my friends and fellow bar-stoolers. Nearly every event that Mark and I were involved in centered around drinking. We had built our days and relationship around a bottle and bars. I foolishly believed at first that I would be able to simply go on living my life just as I had done. That was not to be. Getting sober meant I couldn’t go barhopping with Mark or my girlfriends.
Even my own parents found my sobriety awkward. My father knew I was attending AA but said, half joking, “You won’t mind if I have a drink, will you?” He then poured himself one and put the bottle down in front of me.
Being sober wasn’t what I expected—at first it was simply awful. One night, I went outside the Mouse House, looked up at the beautiful stars, and began screaming. How am I supposed to enjoy anything in life? How am I supposed to be? I don’t know how to be without alcohol! I don’t know how to be angry or happy without it!
One evening Mattie called me into our tiny bathroom. “Mommy,” she said, looking very serious, “you were more fun when you drank.”
I was stunned. Her little face looked up at me, and I could see her chin trembling.
I said, “Oh, sweetie, I know. I know… we’ll just have to figure it out.” We gave each other hugs. “It’ll be better after a while,” I told her.
I realized that even her plea didn’t make me want to pick up a drink. AA was working.
Juliana was a big help at moments like that. She brought me a present that she had found in a store that sold secondhand books. It was a copy of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the original book published in 1952 by the founders of AA. The book had been owned by a young man who, Juliana said, had killed himself because of his addiction. Without alcohol, he felt socially isolated, like an outcast. He’d lost all his drinking buddies and ended his life.
When she handed me the book, Juliana said, “Don’t you ever forget what brought you to AA.”
I thought about Mattie, Calen, and Sander.
When I began reading the book, which opened with step 1 (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable”), I noticed its previous owner had underlined key paragraphs, including steps 8 and 9.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
The first thought in my head was about Tom and our divorce. Then my boys and Mattie and all the times when the “flu” had kept me in bed. Staying sober was going to require a lot of work on my part. I was going to have to make a lot of amends.
PART FIVE
FINDING MYSELF
It’s a curse knowing what hands tell at a glance. I rarely look to faces anymore for my first impression. Hands hold the truth—faces turn to masks too easily. Hands eliminate words.
—from my private journal
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
My world became brighter. Without booze dulling my mind, it was as if I were being reintroduced to brilliant colors and delicious aromas that had been blunted by years of alcohol abuse. Slowly, I began to feel free of my addiction, especially in the late afternoons, when in the past I would have had to have a drink to stop my hands from shaking or to prevent nausea. Mark and I attended AA meetings faithfully, and life seemed good and full of promise.
We bought a house in Bozeman so that Mattie, who had turned ten, could enroll in public schools there. Mark began working regularly at a construction job, and I resumed taking photographs and writing.
My mental illness, however, had not forgotten me. Being sober didn’t stabilize my moods. If anything, the alternating bouts of depression and mania returned unchecked and with renewed ferociousness. The only positive was that the mood stabilizer I was taking seemed to end my migraine headaches, and I was grateful to be done with that torture. When I complained about my continuing mood swings, the local psychiatrist treating me tweaked my medications, but it didn’t help. I felt as if I were a tiny boat being whipped by waves, completely at the mercy of an angry sea.
Two years after Calen checked himself into McLean Hospital, he decided to come home. The doctors wanted him to stay longer, but he was weary of the place. He landed at the Bozeman airport in March of 2002, sporting shoulder-length hair and appearing overweight. The extra pounds were a common side effect of his medication. But his appearance didn’t concern me as much as his demeanor. I felt Calen had become institutionalized. He seemed incapable of making the tiniest decision on his own and waited for me to tell him what to do and when to do it. He was afraid to leave our house, and the thought of h
im bumping into his old friends frightened him. They had rejected him and weren’t interested in giving him another chance. It was heartbreaking.
I had to get Calen involved in life, so I began taking him with me on errands. Initially, he would sit in the car and wait for me. After several weeks, he finally came into a store. He walked in, looked around briefly at the items nearest the door, then walked back out to the car. It was a victory.
Mark was good with Calen, but having a twenty-two-year-old man freshly discharged from a mental hospital living in our home soon became an issue. In addition, Mark’s two teenage daughters from his first marriage decided to move in with us. The two girls, along with Mattie (now eleven), Calen, and an assortment of dogs, all living in the same house with Mark and me became too much. My psychiatrist had warned me, saying, “No, Jessie. No, no, no!”
But whom was I going to turn away?
I loved Mark’s girls and was determined to not let my mood swings affect us one way or another. I’d just have to focus.
All of us did our best, but there were simply too many of us—a fact that Calen was the first to realize. He didn’t like commotion. He decided to move out, and he used money that he had inherited from his great-grandmother Moore to buy a one-bedroom condo. I was worried, but I told myself that living independently would help him regain his self-confidence.
It did. At first. But the transition proved too overwhelming. One evening when I went to check on him, I found Calen cowering on the kitchen floor with his back braced against the corner cupboards. He was rocking back and forth.
Judging from the empty bottles in the house, I knew he’d been drinking, and his apartment reeked of pot. Calen also told me that he’d stopped taking his medications.