At first, it was difficult for me to take in his praise. It certainly wasn’t at all how I felt about myself, but Jack was very patient with me. He spent a lot of time digging deeply into my childhood. He couldn’t get over my mother’s narcissism, and he taught me to understand her more clearly, as well as the behavioral patterns I had developed along the way.
He helped me see how I had denied the trauma and chaos that I experienced as a kid. I always rushed to say, “I’ve forgiven my parents. They did the best they could.” Even from a young age, a part of me understood that everything happens for a reason, so why place blame? But Jack helped me recognize that parts of me were still hurting from what I’d experienced. No matter how deeply I loved my mom and dad, those parts of me needed to acknowledge their pain and anger.
“You won’t heal until you accept the truth about how much they hurt you, especially your mother,” he said. I began to understand that when my mother rejected me, it hadn’t meant that I was unworthy of her love. It had been because she was hurting too. Her behavior toward me really had been about herself, not about me.
The work with Jack helped me begin to resolve some of the issues from my childhood. But I still couldn’t quite bring myself to ask Jerry for a divorce . . . not yet.
All the while, my mother had started to become frail and was diagnosed with a chronic lung disease, COPD, from smoking cigarettes throughout her life. She even had to drag an oxygen tank along wherever she went.
“I don’t think she’s going to last much longer,” my father told me.
I knew my mother was determined to die before my dad because she felt she couldn’t survive without him. “Joe, you’re not going to leave me alone!” she’d say.
The severity of her illness plunged me right back into the depths of my grief over Larry. It also took me back to my childhood, when I’d worried that she would die.
My mother was in and out of the hospital, struggling to breathe and suffering from terrible pain, but the doctors didn’t seem to know what to do for her. They kept sending her back home.
One day, my father started to cry. I’d never seen him cry like that before. “I can’t take care of her anymore. I don’t know what to do. You have to help me. Please!”
“I’m here, Dad. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. We’ll figure this out.”
In that moment, I stepped back into my official role as my mother’s caregiver and took charge. When I walked into Mom’s hospital room that day, she was so relieved and happy to see me. “Please, please, you have to take care of me, Kathe,” she pleaded. “You’re the only one who knows how to talk to the doctors and get straight answers from them.” I had been her advocate with doctors even as a child—an experience that had served me well during Larry’s illness.
“Of course, Mom,” I assured her.
“You’ve always been able to see how sick I am. You’ve always believed me. You’ve always been there for me.” It was amazing to hear this from her after so many years.
Once again, the doctor wanted to send her home despite her suffering. “We can’t find anything wrong with her,” he said.
After I complained profusely, a nurse called another doctor to examine Mom. While we were waiting for him, however, my mother fell into a coma.
After the new doctor examined her, his news was entirely different from that of the previous doctor. “Your mother probably has no more than 24 hours to live.”
Considering how much she’d been suffering, we knew instinctively that this doctor was telling the truth. We caught our breath and faced it as best we could.
Come evening, I experienced surprising closure with her. Everyone who had come to visit my mother went home for the night, except for me and Dad, and we planned to sleep in Mom’s room. Around 5 A.M., she came out of her coma and called out to me to sit next to her. We hadn’t expected her to ever wake up, but there she was, as coherent as if she’d just awakened from a short nap.
“My Kathe, sweet angel,” she said, “I have to tell you before I go that I want you to know how much I love you and appreciate you for taking care of me and for always loving me.” Then she held me like I’d wanted her to hold me throughout my whole life. “I’m sorry. Know that I love you so much. You were the mother to me, you know.” For the first time, I felt acknowledged for all I’d done for her. It made me feel proud of who I was, and my heart filled with such love for her.
Clearly, she loved me more than she’d been capable of showing when I was a child. It was just that her demons had gotten in the way of her expressing her love during most of her life.
I can’t describe the healing I experienced at hearing those words. It was the greatest gift she could have given me, and it certainly helped solidify the work I was doing with Jack.
When everyone arrived at the hospital later that morning, they were shocked to find Mom awake. She had a chance to say good-bye to all of them.
Nearly every person in my life was in that room. It was a prism of my life, and they were all the facets, reflecting back to me the person I’d been and the person I’d become. I looked around at my relatives, my brother and sister, my father, my sons . . . and Jerry. My stomach turned. He didn’t belong; he was an outsider. I realized I’d never really let him in, and staying with him wasn’t right. I didn’t want to be married anymore, even though by this time we’d been married for more than five years.
It was an epiphany that I knew would lead to more than just a divorce. It would change everything.
I’d been trying to build a life based on external factors—relationships with others, a home, and a career—thinking that these externals would bring me happiness. But now, I could see that what I’d built wasn’t controllable or sustainable. I had to stop living in the past and stop trying to control the future. I needed to start from where I was and live in the moment.
A short time later, Mom fell into a coma again and passed away. It was my birthday in 2005.
You might think that that would make me sad, but oddly, it felt right. Her death on that day is significant for me. She gave me life on the day I was born and a rebirth to begin my new life on the same day on the calendar.
We all grieved immensely, but at the same time, there was a big sense of relief because a lot of our family drama went with her. My father was even able to reconcile with his brother, who had been persona non grata while my mother was alive.
As was typical of me, I couldn’t bring myself to make the break with Jerry right away, even though I’d made the decision to tell him I wanted a divorce. By that time, we were living together mostly as friends, and we didn’t really have a marriage anymore.
The year after Mom’s death, tests showed that my hepatitis C had advanced to stage 3, and my liver would almost certainly develop cirrhosis if I didn’t get treatment right away. So began my experience with the same antiviral drugs that I had watched Larry take.
The breadbox was again filled with prescription bottles. This time, however, I didn’t keep the diagnosis from my sons. I explained to them what was happening. The treatments were difficult, and I needed them to be there for me. Larry, Jr., was already 23 by this time, and Brian was 18, so they were mostly taking care of themselves and were happy to help me as I recovered. Jerry was also helpful and supportive.
Part of the treatment involved giving myself injections in my belly every few days. This meant I had to go on business trips with the syringes in my suitcase. For days after each shot, I’d feel horrible and would go into an almost coma-like sleep state. It was difficult to keep working while on the medication, and equally difficult to pretend that everything was okay. I was nothing if not a trooper, however, and through it all, I kept this additional secret about my own illness from my co-workers. I was an expert secret-keeper, and I felt I couldn’t risk losing my job.
For nearly a year while I was on the meds, my weekends were spent asleep on the couch. Some of my hair fell out, and my skin itched. I’d feel the itching while asleep, but the inje
ctions paralyzed me. I’d fight to move and try to wake up, but I couldn’t even move my hands to scratch.
During the last month of the treatment, I developed drug-induced lupus and about 20 lesions that looked like large boils all over my body. It was difficult to walk, and my joints hurt. I did recover, but it took a couple of years to get my strength back, for the lupus to resolve, and for the lesions to go away. It took even longer for my hair to grow back completely, and I went into early menopause. All of this added to my PTSD, but in spite of it, I was determined to improve my life and put all of the turmoil behind me.
Maybe that determination is what finally gave me the courage to tell Jerry I wanted a divorce. “Where do you expect me to go?” he asked me. That’s how much he’d come to rely on me to take care of him. He did everything he could to delay the hearings, but the divorce was final after nine years of marriage.
Nine years—that’s how long I stayed with someone I didn’t really want to marry in the first place.
One of the blessings in my life after Jerry left was my father. We had grown closer after my mother’s death. “I know I wasn’t around for you during most of your life, but I’m here now,” he said. We were together nearly every day, and he gave me the emotional support I needed. I went to his house for dinner, or he came to my house and had dinner with us. We had great in-depth conversations about politics and all sorts of topics. It was then that I realized how much Larry had been like my dad.
Then Dad started having symptoms. We discovered that he had a tumor in his bladder, as well as bone cancer that had gone undiagnosed for years and spread throughout his body.
I’d been fulfilling the dream of being with my father without my mother’s interference for the first time in my life. It was like I’d gone back in time and been able to pick up where life had somehow gotten so screwed up for me in childhood. We had four years together after Mom’s death, but it felt like such a short time to enjoy our closeness. Still, I was filled with enormous gratitude for whatever time we had to love each other so fully. It was just difficult, after so much loss, to get the news that he was going to die in a matter of weeks.
Dad died the day before my mother’s birthday in 2009. I always say she called him home to celebrate with her.
By the time Dad passed away, my nest was empty. Brian was 21 years old and at college. Larry, Jr., was 26 and planning to get married! My mother was gone. My father was gone. Larry was gone. Jerry was gone. Nobody needed me. And even though the work I’d been doing for years with Jack had helped me heal to some degree, underneath it all, I still felt broken and alone.
With everyone gone, there was only one person left to “fix”—me. That’s when my focus truly turned to healing myself and finding my voice.
What I didn’t yet realize was that I’d never be able to find my voice unless and until I released my secrets. Through all the years after Larry’s death, I’d continued to hold them locked in a safe inside myself. My immediate family, Debbie, Jerry, and a few doctors were still the only people who knew. Brian had become an adult, but he still didn’t know about his father’s drug addiction or HIV.
It wasn’t until I began to dig more deeply into my healing process that I discovered how much the secrets were eating away at me inside.
CHAPTER 10
MELTING THE BARNACLES AWAY
When you grow up surrounded by dysfunction and chaos, you develop a constant longing to be loved and nurtured. So it’s common to try to capture love by taking care of others. In my case, it started with my mother and became my default practice. No surprise, then, that it happened again with both of my husbands. What I had to learn was to love myself and stop looking for someone else to do it.
I was tired of the “if only” game I played with myself. If only Larry hadn’t been an addict; if only Larry hadn’t died; if only I hadn’t married him; if only I’d had different parents; if only I’d gone to a regular college. If only I was better, smarter, and perfect, the people in my life would have loved me and not hurt me.
I still felt like I had to hide in order to be accepted, but one thing I had learned from reading spiritualism books was that the only way my life would change course was if I changed course. I finally understood that it didn’t have anything to do with the other people in my life, the house I lived in, or my work accomplishments. It was all up to me.
I began to feel frustrated in my work with Jack, however. There was still a great deal of lingering trauma from both my childhood and Larry, and I couldn’t seem to stop blaming and shaming myself.
By this time, 12 years had passed since Larry’s death. “When am I going to feel better?” I asked. “I get all of this intellectually, and I truly appreciate the growth I’ve experienced while working with you. But I want so much to move forward. I want to find a way to be happy now. How do I heal my heart? How do I stop my mind? Why am I still hurting so much after all these years?”
Jack didn’t have answers for me. Instead, he reached toward his shelf and pulled out a book called Awakening from Grief by Ramananda John E. Welshons, with a foreword by Wayne Dyer. John is a teacher, a counselor, and an expert on grief and loss. He was part of the late-1960s spiritual movement and traveled with Ram Dass and other prominent teachers. He studied with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and has practiced meditation for decades.
John’s book was life changing and read like a road map back to life. I felt as though he had reached into my soul and articulated exactly what I was feeling. Most importantly, I felt that he understood what I needed.
During my next appointment with Jack, I handed the book back to him. “Thank you so much for loaning me this book. This is the kind of therapy I need. Everything he wrote about is what I’m feeling. Please, can we do this kind of work together? Please!”
Jack opened the book and looked at John’s biography in the back. “Well, he lives right here in New Jersey. Why don’t you get in touch with him?”
When I discovered that John was facilitating an in-person meditation series, I signed up immediately. As I introduced myself to him, my eyes filled with tears. I was overwhelmed by the energy I felt from him. It was the kind of connection I’d been searching for my whole life, and I knew immediately that he held the key to mending my broken heart.
Learning meditation with John was when my journey to an open heart truly began. In private sessions with him, I told him all the things I’d been doing to try to heal. “I’m in therapy, I’m reading and studying, I’m spending time in nature, and I’m running. I’m improving a bit, but nothing’s really working to free me from the loss and grief.”
“That’s because your heart isn’t open,” John said. That’s when he described the barnacles encasing my heart.
“No, no,” I said. “When Larry died, my heart exploded into a million pieces! My heart shattered. I’m so open!”
“It might have shattered, but it didn’t open,” he responded.
With patience and kindness, John explained that the barnacles around my heart had been building since childhood like a shield of protective armor. It was a survival mechanism, but those barnacles also closed me off from my own love and from fully receiving the love of others.
It took me a while to accept that my heart was as closed as John said. He just waited patiently for me to come to my own realization about it.
To heal, I needed to dig through all the darkness and hurt I’d neatly tucked away. I was afraid to go inside, but I was more afraid to stay as I was. So with John by my side, I allowed myself to fully feel the pain and let it move through me. I no longer fought the grief. My chest throbbed as the layers over my heart slowly began to crack. I could almost feel those barnacles breaking apart and melting away. Only this time, my heart wasn’t shattering.
One of the issues John discussed with me was attachment and how it gets us into trouble. “Everybody’s gone!” I protested. “What do I have left to be attached to?”
“You’re attached to your pain, your thoughts, an
d your story,” he explained. I began to see that it’s easier to stay attached and stuck because we fear the unknown. We’re comfortable with the familiar, even if the familiar is awful. But we waste so much energy staying in miserable circumstances simply because it’s what we know. How many times in my life had I done that? How much did I deny myself because I didn’t believe I deserved more?
For years, my self-worth had depended on approval from others and career success. If I accomplished something, what were the results? Did I do it well or not? If not, it fed my self-doubt. With my self-worth so contingent upon performance, I could fall from my own grace too easily.
Even my best friend, Debbie, had tried to penetrate my self-loathing. “I don’t understand why you’re so hard on yourself. Why do you hate yourself so much? Why can’t you see the good in you? You aren’t who you’re describing.”
My sons also saw me differently from the way I saw myself. They knew what I’d been through and even wrote papers in school about how much they admired me. After all the mistakes I felt I’d made, it was amazing to discover how much the boys loved me.
Yet I still struggled to feel safe enough to come out of hiding and let my true self be seen by anyone but the people closest to me.
John helped me realize that I needed to let go of being a victim. If anybody had told me years before that I was playing the victim, I would have argued, “No! Everything that happened to me was based on my circumstances. I had no control over addiction, mental illness, or death!” But it had been my choice to take responsibility for everyone else’s life rather than to take responsibility for my own. I had to face up to the poor choices I’d made over and over out of fear rather than faith. And I had to find compassion within myself for the person I was—a person who didn’t yet have the wisdom to make better choices.
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