My dad picked me up at the airport once I flew back to the East Coast. He took me to a dual diagnosis-rehab center in a swanky facility. They diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and said that the PTSD was the underlying cause of my addiction. That was the first of three rehab stints that my father paid for. Every cent was a loan that I’ve had to pay back, and he didn’t let me forget it.
Ultimately, I am lucky. I have a family that cares about me enough to check in and worry when they haven’t heard from me in a while. I’m sure I would have died many times if I didn’t have them tethering me to this world. I care too much about them to inflict that kind of pain on them. And my life hasn’t all been a total wash: I started a couple of successful companies (sold one, lost the other) and was making very good money for a while. And I’m pretty certain I can get back to that space—where productivity feels good and I have a little more perspective on my life.
Between my son’s death, my mom’s death, the abortion, four Marine buddies who committed suicide after coming home, and the nightmares from my own days of combat, I sure have got a lot to run from. Addiction feels a little bit like being stuck in a hamster wheel.
The other day, I finally came up with a good way to explain addiction: I went to wash a dish and when I turned the faucet on, scalding-hot water came out. For the first split second that my hand was in the water, though, it was hard to tell if it was really cold water or really hot water. It takes a second, a peaceful, painless second, for your body and brain to process what’s happening to it. And I realized that for me, that’s the draw of cocaine—that first split second after doing a line when you don’t know yet if you’re really living or finally dying.
Louise, fifty
Tomorrow is the nine-year anniversary of my Will’s death. Before this weekend’s over, I’m going to sit somewhere and scream and cry and ask why and what if, even though I know better. And I’ll say, If only, too. And then I’ll put my grief away and move on with my life until next August 5. Because I have to. People don’t know how to deal with that kind of grief—the grief of a parent who has lost a child. They say things like “God had a plan,” and “It was his time to go.” I’ve been guilty of saying things like that, too. People just don’t know better. And I don’t want them to know better. I want them to be spared having to know firsthand.
I was seven months pregnant with Will when I went into premature labor. He was born three pounds and three ounces, and they told me he wouldn’t live. His lungs were filling with blood because his heart wasn’t fully developed. They told me that, to give him the slightest chance of survival, they needed to operate—open-heart surgery on a three-pound newborn. But first they wanted to try an experimental drug, a synthetic version of a hormone produced by eight-month-pregnant women that might close the hole in his heart. We gave them the okay, and they gave him the first dose and scheduled the open-heart surgery, just in case. The odds weren’t good: they gave Will a 10 percent chance of survival.
When they finally tested his heart after three doses of the drug, they saw that the hole was 100 percent closed. They tested his hearing, too: perfect. His eyesight: perfect. He came home with us a week later. The only long-term effect was that, because of the breathing tubes, Will always spoke with a slight lisp.
He grew up to be so full of life. The youngest of my four kids, he was also my only son. He was the class clown. Girls in middle school run in packs like wild dogs. At any given time, there would be ten of my daughters’ girlfriends in my house, and they all treated him like their little brother. He loved it. He was the most popular kid in school because he was so close to them. I used to tell Will, “You’re either going to grow up being one of the few men in this world who truly understands women, or you’re going to be gay. And I’m okay with either.”
Will didn’t have an easy childhood—none of my kids did. I dated John, the guy who first got me pregnant, from the time I was thirteen to when I turned seventeen. I got pregnant the first time we had sex, go figure. He got himself in trouble with the law and they locked him up. I walked away. I didn’t want anything to do with that type of lifestyle, and I raised my kids with the mind-set that if they ever ended up in trouble, call me, but don’t think I’m going to come bail you out. I’m still here; I still got your back. If you’re falling, I’m here to catch you. But I want to know what branches you tried to reach for on your way down. I want to know that you tried to help yourself.
I met Paul through a friend of John’s. Paul asked me out. I was a single teenaged mom. The baby needed a dad. So I did what I needed to do and I married him three weeks later. I walked that line of moving from place to place and living paycheck to paycheck and having another three kids, and I realized that the person I was most disappointed in was myself. But I stuck with my marriage, even when things got bad. I wasn’t a child of divorce. I didn’t believe in it. I’m kind of stubborn, I guess you could say.
After a few years, Paul started losing his mind. He put my photo on his jacket and on keychains. He’d sit out in the parking lot while I was at work, and when he thought I was being too flirtatious, he would become violent. He was deteriorating mentally, and I didn’t realize that. I mean, he was always a wild card, and when things were good, they were great. But when they were bad, they were really bad.
I remember one time he gave me a black eye because I bought a tube of hamburger meat to make for dinner that was “too fatty.” I hit him over the head with a frying pan. Eventually, though, I got tired of fighting back and started thinking maybe it would end faster if I didn’t resist. I left Paul when Will was three because I didn’t want my son to grow up to be that kind of man, and I didn’t want my daughters to think this was an okay way to be treated. I filed for divorce and was granted emergency custody until it could be finalized.
Paul came and took the kids one day. He dropped the girls off at their grandmother’s and he took off with Will. He was gone for days and wouldn’t give me my son back until I agreed to go back to him. I told him I would, but only if he let me go back to school and get my GED so that I could help him with bills. He kept his word. I went back, got my GED, and even went back to complete higher education, and I got a better job, too. He was at work the day I moved out—I took my kids and left. I bought a single-wide trailer with the money I had saved and stuck it out on my granddaddy’s land in the country.
Paul told me that he was willing to go to counseling to keep the family together. I went to the hospital with him to see if we could get him admitted because he wasn’t well emotionally. The social worker talked to him for a little while, and then she came to talk to me. This woman told me, a victim of domestic violence, that I needed to give him a second chance. So I did. He never raised his hand, hollered, or talked back to me ever again. He was doing everything he could to make the little trailer I bought nicer for us. He was trying to make it a home. But it was gone for me. I couldn’t let him back into my life, my bed. I told him, “You’ve hurt me more than I love you.”
One night, after I went to school, he put the kids to bed, and he hung himself. He was twenty-nine years old. I found him. He had a suit on the bed—I’m assuming he put it out because it was the one he wanted to be buried in. I tried to get him loose but couldn’t. I ran down to my mama’s and I busted the window in the front door to get to the phone. I called the police, and then I went back to the bedroom to get him down again, but it already seemed too late. They called it a passive hanging because he took the rope and tied it to a piece of wood on the ceiling, got on his knees, and leaned into it.
He left a note. The last line read, “When I said ‘til death do us part,’ I meant it.”
Luckily, the kids slept through it all. When they woke up, they assumed there was a car wreck. I let them believe it for three days until I had some time to sit down and explain what had happened to each one of them, to the extent that they could understand.
I spent the next five years on my own, fixing all the things that were wrong with
me, that had led me to the situation I was in. I fixed the things that made me weak and made it so that I couldn’t be so easily exploited by someone. And when Dave, an old friend, asked me to marry him for the second time, I wizened up and told him yes. He wore me down. He’s been my best friend for twenty-seven years. We started dating in February, and I married him in March. You’d think I would have learned to not marry someone so soon. But this time it was right. I married someone who, instead of planting me to the ground, gave me wings. He’s the light at the end of the tunnel. And he was an amazing father to my children.
So… Will. I guess I’ve been avoiding talking about the day he died.
* * *
He poked his head into my room and told me he was going to run to the store to get some snacks. I was lying down reading. I hadn’t been feeling good. He asked if I wanted anything from the store, and I told him no and that I had a bad case of the blues. He said, “I love you,” and he left. I went to the laundry room to get a load done, and then I thought to ask him to get a Diet Coke. I followed him out and I saw him by his car, and I could hear him and Dave laughing. And I said to myself, Never mind, I won’t interrupt them. So I saw him get in his car, and I waved to him as he drove off.
A woman was stopped in the left lane, and she didn’t have her blinker on. To keep from hitting her, Will had swerved and overcorrected. He went into oncoming traffic. The car flipped three times and the airbag didn’t deploy. He hit his head against the driver’s window, and the seat belt cut off his oxygen. They medevaced him, but between the loss of oxygen (he went without for eleven minutes), and hitting his head on the window, they weren’t sure what caused him to be brain-dead.
August 5 was a Wednesday. At the hospital, I would not let them declare him dead. Although he was brain-dead, the only thing that was wrong with him when you looked at him was the bruise from the seat belt. You couldn’t even tell that he’d been in a wreck. I made them do testing. Flashlight in the eye. Needle in the feet. I watched it. I wanted to make sure that there was no reaction. And there was none.
So they got the trauma team ready and notified the organ transplant people. Will had wanted to be an organ donor because Dave has kidney issues and is on a transplant list. They sent in a rep to talk to us and kept him alive until the recipients could be gathered. On Friday morning, they took him down to harvest his organs and we finally left the hospital. We never left his side from the time of the wreck until he went in for the surgery. I couldn’t leave him. I was there from his very first heartbeat until his last.
What was so amazing about this child was that when I had him, I was in a bad marriage and in a bad place, twenty years old, three other kids. I thought long and hard about an abortion. And I couldn’t do it. When he was born like he was, with all the things that were wrong with him, I prayed to God I’d done the right thing. And to this day, nine years after his death, there has been no rejection of his organs. Every single organ he donated is alive.
I’m in touch with one of the recipients. His name is Tim, and he is from Mississippi. He got one of Will’s kidneys. He is an amazingly nice person. Tim got to meet his grandson because of Will. Every year at Christmastime, we decorate our tree and we call it Will’s tree. And every year, like clockwork, Tim sends me a Christmas ornament. And I buy a special ornament, too, so I can still get a gift for my child.
Will’s liver went to a Cantonese lady in Atlanta—she wrote me a letter. His heart is with an RN from North Carolina. His lung is in a Vietnam vet. His other kidney went to a little boy named Eli, who was born with medical problems, so his mom put him in foster care. The lady who wrote me about Eli told me that after he got a kidney and started getting better, he got adopted, and today is a perfect and happy little boy. She sent me a picture of him—and he’s posing in this strange position with his feet spread and his arms up in the air. I have a photo of Will in the same exact pose. Who knows what this little boy will go on to accomplish. His story changed because he got Will’s kidney.
The parts of my son that are still here, the parts that I felt grow in my tummy, have got no quit. The heart they said was never going to work is still going; the lungs are still going. And I got to be a part of that amazing story. As long as there’s a part of him in this world, his story continues.
Aaron, fifties
That first moment of wakefulness in the hospital, I will always remember with dread. I opened my left eye first; my right one held out, rooted down and refusing to see the astringent room. As soon as my body awoke, I felt a sharp pain and braced as it spread through me like a sea of fire. It slowly started dawning on me—where I was, and why—but before I could think, I pumped my PCA, a little button that sent anesthetics into my bloodstream, and felt my body relax back into the bed. The white sheets enveloped me, and I drifted to sleep.
I couldn’t have been out for longer than a few hours when I heard muffled voices over the distinctive sound of the wound vac. Of all the unpleasantness of war and its side effects, my least favorite was the wound vac: a vacuum cleaner that sucks dead tissue from the wound in order to promote healing. They had come around to clean out what was left of my right leg—they amputated it below the knee and took half of my left foot—and I kept my eyes shut even though I was wide awake and in full panic. The stench of rotting flesh traveled up to my nose, and I was instinctively ashamed that my body had produced such a smell. It all came back to me in an instant: the explosion, the dull static in my ears, and then nothingness. In the past week, I’d been on Vicodin, morphine, and Dilaudid, but no cocktail of narcotics took away the dull ache that I felt in both my legs. I wasn’t sure anymore if I was imagining it, or if it had always felt like that. I pumped my PCA again.
Over the next few months, when I did the balance exercises during physical therapy, there’d be moments that I’d forget what had happened. I’d walk around the cones my therapist had set up on the floor, and for a second I’d feel my fleshy feet hit the ground as they always did, when I was young, when I played sports, when I was normal and whole, before the war. But when I looked down, I saw the metal contraptions that had replaced much of my legs. I would chuckle to myself because I immediately felt wobbly again and went back to feeling as if I were walking on stilts. The brain can play cruel tricks.
I was alone a lot, but not really. I was in the VA, and I went to a military amputee clinic, too, so I was surrounded by people who had been through war and lost a part of themselves, just like I had. But we were all in our own little worlds. People injured in war don’t want to be reminded; they don’t want to talk about it. They just want to move on. But they all have that look—they look intently at the nothingness in front of their eyes, their brains probably projecting some horror that only they had seen. At night, they’d jump and scream and wake up sweating and crying for their mothers. It was like we were children again.
After almost two years, they let me go home. My wife awkwardly helped me into the back of the van, and I thought I smelled booze on her. She had changed while I was gone—her eyes seemed sunken deeper into their sockets, her hands seemed colder, and she went rigid every time I touched her. I knew she was drinking again, and I knew she was seeing other men. Her excuses, her erratic “work schedule”—none of it made sense. Plus, I could just sense it.
The drive home was excruciating—I sweat through my shirt and dug my nails into the palms of my hands until they both bled. Every slight honk, every sudden stop, every churn of the engine would bring me back to that day, that exact moment, when our vehicle was blown feet into the air—and then minutes afterward, when I awoke.
I tried shutting it out—tried telling myself that I wasn’t there anymore, that I was safe, and that I was finally home. But home was so different from how I had imagined it when I was away. I’d imagined warm yellows and soft pinks. I’d imagined the sunlight seeping through our kitchen blinds. I’d imagined my daughters and my wife—their voices ricocheting sweetly through the house like a wind chime.
&nbs
p; But everything was gray. When I shut my eyes, I couldn’t stop the landscape of the barren desert from projecting itself inside my head and into my mind’s eye. I couldn’t stop the ringing in my ears. I couldn’t stop the images in my head from popping up over and over again, like a broken video game.
“Well, I’ve settled your stuff in the basement,” she said when we got home. I instinctively knew that she wanted me out of the way, that the simple sight of me disturbed her, disgusted her, and frightened her. I was the fly in her ointment. I knew because I’d felt the same way about myself for two years: that the sight of me was enough to ruin anyone’s day.
That’s kind of how it happens—how veterans end up forgotten, underserved, or homeless. Our mental struggles aren’t understood well. We have trouble adjusting when we’re back. Our families, through no fault of their own, don’t get what we’ve been through. There’s a gap between how things were and how things are, and not a lot of people know how to bridge it, how to make it okay. So we’re pushed aside. We’re not prioritized. And we internalize that; we learn how to get out of the way, how to stop being inconvenient. It feels like we’ve given what was needed and now, well, now we’re not needed anymore. We’re on our own. And that’s a hard pill to swallow.
“You’ll have some stairs to climb in the morning but that oughta help you with your exercises,” she said over her shoulder as she reached into the freezer for the handle of vodka.
I remember making my way down the stairs wordlessly and collapsing onto the gray couch, surveying the room. Odd remnants of my years of service—spare uniforms and boots, my bag, a blanket—were all crumpled up in the corner of the room next to a portable fridge. They looked so insignificant, so unimpressive—the sum of it all, right there. No respect. I had this weird feeling of loss, like I was mourning someone. Except I didn’t know who.
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