It’s all choppy and messy and nonlinear. One emotion doesn’t flow neatly into another; it hits me suddenly, like morning sickness, and can’t be pushed down. The only way to make it stop is to vomit up the feeling—to feel it deeply and loudly. I cry and cry and cry. Then I’m suddenly making a joke: “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d fucking kill him.” And everyone laughs.
It comes and goes and comes and goes. You don’t pass one stage, scratch it off the list, and graduate onto the next. It’s not compartmentalized like the chart suggests. It’s circuitous and never-ending. Joan Didion said it better: “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
“Sudden apprehension” is pretty much the theme of daily life, once the perpetual sobbing subsides. No one (besides Joan Didion) talks about that. You hear about anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance, but never about the crippling anxiety. I’m already prone to anxiety, but it reaches a fever pitch after the initial shock wears off.
Once we get back to Houston, I begin to displace all my sorrow on anxiety over Iris’s health. Every time I call her name, and she doesn’t immediately turn around, I decide she’s lost the rest of her hearing. Every time she gets a diaper rash, I assume it’s the measles. I worry about everything, really. I worry when Mike walks the dog at night or when I drive with the baby in the car. I worry that something bad is lurking behind every corner or ready to fall from the sky. I worry, worry, worry. Even though I’m going to therapy two, sometimes three, times a week, I’m either sad or gearing up for the next shitstorm. It’s exhausting. I just want to sleep. That’s all I want to do. If I’m asleep, I can’t worry or cry or think about how my only brother is dead. Plus, you are alive in my dreams. In my dreams, everything is as it was.
Here is what I am supposed to do:
I am supposed to tell funny stories about when we were kids at your rehearsal dinner.
I am supposed to look into your baby’s eyes and see you reflected in them.
I am supposed to grow old with you by my side.
Here is what I am not supposed to do:
I am not supposed to tell funny stories at your funeral about when we were kids.
I am not supposed to sit on the ground, peering into a giant hole at a casket we chose for you from a brochure.
I am not supposed to wonder what you look like in there, wearing your favorite pajama pants and Phish T-shirt, holding a set of drumsticks.
The permanence of death is unbearable. I can’t fix it. I can’t make it better. I am powerless—the thing you could never quite accept. My inner victim is loud and self-pitying. Why did my brother have to be a drug addict? Why did he have to die? Why do I have to live life from this point forward without him? Why is all of this happening to me?
It all blurs together and feels like a punishment for some transgression in a past life. I feel like that tragic family that people reference in conversations to feel better about themselves.
It all feels so unfair.
• • •
I was five years old when Mom informed me that life wasn’t fair. You were there. I saw the scene just the other day in an old home movie. In the wake of your death, I’ve been watching lots of them. It’s a masochistic exercise. The ones in which you’re a little baby, cooing and kicking your feet, laughing wildly when someone says Boo! are especially painful. The one where I wore a white tutu and married you and your friend Andrea in our living room when you were five years old is also a tearjerker.
Most of them are hilarious. Like the mock interview you did in the fifth grade with your best friend Ryan that quickly devolved into you taking off your clothes and mooning the camera. Or your ten-year-old karaoke birthday party, where you performed Mariah Carey’s “Hero” at the top of your lungs. Or that Hanukkah when you got your favorite Michelangelo Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume set, complete with nunchakus. On the tape, Dad calls you Michael and you quickly correct him in your tiny three-year-old voice: “Michelangelo!”
“Oh sorry, Michelangelo,” Dad says.
There are piles of DVDs with which to torture myself. Mom has gone to great lengths over the years to organize them. It borders on mental illness. They’re all labeled and dated neatly in black Sharpie. She’s a former second-grade teacher, so her penmanship is Pinterest-worthy.
In this one home movie, you’re two; I’m five. Dad is recording, as usual. Mom chimes in regularly off-camera. You’re standing in the breakfast room of our old house on Yarwell, shaggy-haired and tiny, holding a big, red plastic bat in one hand and an inflated pink ball with stars all over it in the other.
“Okay,” Dad says as he focuses the camera on you. “You’re on TV now. Harris, you ready to play ball?”
I take the bat out of your hands and stand inches in front of you.
“Give him the bat, Stephanie,” Dad demands.
I hold my ground. “No!”
“Let him have it first, then you’re next,” Mom says as she takes it out of my hands and gives it back to you.
I scream as if someone has set me on fire, then cry and collapse, face down, into the couch.
No one seems to care.
“Harris, you ready to play ball?” Dad asks. “Let’s play ball!”
Within moments, I am on my feet and creeping back into the shot.
“Move, Stephanie. Stephanie. Move.” Mom demands, audibly annoyed.
“Ready, Harris?” Dad is still trying to get you in the zone. He doesn’t yet know that you will never really be into it, that a couple years later, when he’s coaching your Little League team, you will pick flowers in the outfield during baseball games like Ferdinand the Bull.
“Me!” you shout. “My bah!”
By this point, I have taken the bat again and am standing right behind you, ready to swing hard into your head.
“Harris, move,” Mom says. “She’s gonna hit you with that bat.”
You turn toward me and reach for the bat that I hold high over my head, so you can’t reach it. (It’s really the only time in my life this tactic worked for me. As an adult, I stand at barely five feet.) You scream in frustration and scratch my upper arm.
“Ow!” I shout and drop the bat. I swat you back on the arm.
You are unfazed. Rather, you grab the fallen bat, run right up to the camera, and smile. You are proud of yourself for getting the bat and winning a round. Dad finally throws the ball to you. You swing.
“Pway bah!” you say with enthusiasm.
“That’s not fair,” I whine.
“Nobody said life is fair, Stephanie,” Mom says. “You’ll learn that soon enough.”
06
One Month
Even time moves differently now.
It used to be measured in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Now, it’s measured before you died and after. It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time. It feels like I want to burn something to the ground and do nothing forever.
Going back to work is terrifying. I don’t know how I will form words, much less inspire the gifted and talented youth of America where you and I once went to high school together. It’s a demanding and rewarding job that’s often emotionally draining and requires me to be fully present. But I’m not. I also don’t give a shit about theater anymore. Or anything, for that matter.
I carry one of your sobriety chips in my pocket that whole first week back. It reads:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
An impossible task.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, I feel like some sort of alien—seemingly human and going through the motions but from another galaxy altogether and unfa
miliar with the ways of this world. And no one here can win. I feel angry when people don’t acknowledge the situation, and I feel angry when they inevitably say the wrong thing. How are you? feels like an act of violence.
Social media continues to be a sharp and swift form of torture. So many new babies, engagement announcements, and wedding photos. So many people living perfect, unscathed little lives. As ambivalent as I was about your death being a trending topic, I remember how empty I felt when everyone seemed to forget about you a week or so later and went back to bitching about traffic, sharing YouTube videos, and posting photos of their dinners. Nothing makes the pain worse than seeing that everyone else is able to move on. I think: People are the worst. And then I think how you would tell me they mean well. And they do. They really do.
They bring food.
They call to check in.
They keep calling when I don’t respond.
They send beautiful, thoughtful cards and messages.
They donate money to your scholarship fund.
They offer to help with Iris and groceries and life in general.
They let me take my time returning to the fold.
They shower me with love.
It helps.
07
Before
June 2013
After our wedding, my new husband and I barreled headfirst into real life. Engaged in December, married in March, and pregnant in May. I took the pregnancy test after drinking six shots of sake at a work happy hour. Aside from the guilt I felt about drinking while pregnant and the sheer shock that it happened so fast, the news was glorious.
The last week in June, I chaperoned an annual school trip with my high school students. I was taking them to a thespian festival at the University of Nebraska. It was right at the end of my first trimester, which meant I couldn’t tell anyone yet why I was exhausted, cranky, starving, and in a tizzy about the X-ray machine at the airport. I also had a notably bad summer cold and spent my downtime lying on a stone mattress in a tiny dorm room, Googling articles about the side effects of Sudafed on fetuses.
In the midst of my internet-forum binge, Harris called to tell me he broke up with his girlfriend. I was deeply confused. We all thought she was the One. He thought she was the One. They seemed to be a perfect fit, especially in juxtaposition to the last two serious relationships. Not because he chose terrible partners. Quite the opposite. The women he dated were stellar. It’s just that Harris had a pattern of falling head over heels in love then eventually losing interest and calling it off; then once she moved on, he’d regain interest and beg her to come back only to lose interest again or be cheated on because she was over it; and then, fueled by jealousy and rage, he would want her back more than ever before. The cycle was maddening.
But it wasn’t like that with Sarah. With her, it all seemed effortless and meant to be. She quickly became part of the family. When we’d spent Thanksgiving at Harris’s house in LA six months earlier, she’d made homemade chopped liver and helped my mom in the kitchen. She was easygoing and funny and weird in a good way and notably pleasant to be around. She looked at him with such adoration. I remember when he first told me about her in Vegas while we were on a family vacation the previous summer. She was the first thing that came out of his mouth when he saw me at the hotel check-in counter. I don’t even think he said hello before diving into details about this amazing girl he’d met at a party the night before. Yet here he was a year later telling me the “spark was gone.” He was too young to be tethered to one person. He wanted to explore his options and see what else was out there.
I assumed this meant she was getting in the way of his drug use. Even though he was a twenty-eight-year-old boy-man living in a saturated land of beautiful people, it was such a sudden and unexpected change of heart that no other explanation made sense.
I asked about the pills. He said he had been going to some outpatient detox place and was taking Suboxone. Their breakup had nothing to do with the pills; he just viewed her as a friend now; the passion was gone, fucking blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t believe a word he said. Ever since he told me he was an addict and forced me to stay quiet about it, I felt like someone had hijacked my brother and replaced him with a secret evil-twin version. He’d been lying about his drug habit for who knows how long before he told me. What else was he lying about? And who the fuck tells his sister he’s a drug addict three days before her wedding? An asshole. My real brother wasn’t an asshole. This guy was an asshole.
A week or so later, I got a desperate email from the girlfriend/ex-girlfriend. Not quite sure where they stood at this point:
If someone doesn’t step in now, he’s going to die. This is very very serious now and can’t wait any longer. Please help him and maybe tell your mom and dad. He doesn’t tell people the real truth and severity of it. It is deadly serious now. I’m so sorry but he is doing himself in and I had to share this with you.
Not exactly subtle. At this point, I was three months pregnant, and the stress was a room with no air. Between Harris’s secret and the baby I was carrying, there wasn’t any room left inside of my body. Something had to come out. She literally said he was “going to die.” How could I live with myself if she was right? I had to tell my parents. This is how I justified my betrayal.
It finally happened at my parents’ annual Fourth of July party. My best friend, Chloe, was there, and she kept insisting that I tell them. And I wanted to, I really did, but I was terrified of losing his trust. Later that night, after all the other guests had gone home, Chloe and I were lying on the couch in food comas, whispering about the Harris situation. My mom pried like she did when we were ten years old, giggling in the backseat of her minivan: “What’s going on over there, girls?” Chloe and I made eye contact, and her eyes said it again: You have to tell them.
“Ugh, I have to tell you something terrible,” I blurted out.
“What? What’s the matter?” my mom asked, concerned.
Their faces froze. This isn’t a sentence you want to hear from your pregnant daughter.
“Harris is a drug addict. He told me right before the wedding and made me swear I wouldn’t tell you and told me he was gonna handle it, but I keep getting these panicked emails from Sarah, and she’s really worried about him, and I don’t know what to do. I’m worried he’s gonna do something stupid or kill himself or something fucked up and you have to help.”
I could see them instantly sucked into quicksand, although they managed to remain relatively calm. No tears or hysterics. They absorbed the information and tried to formulate a plan. Coincidentally, they were visiting Harris in LA in a few weeks and, given the weight of this news, they decided a face-to-face conversation with him would be most effective. They’d figure out what needed to be done. Action steps. Crisis/solution. The problem would be solved.
“Steph, take it off your plate,” my mom said. “We will handle this.”
This felt like telling my feet to stop swelling. Impossible.
• • •
Life with an addict means constantly revising the script. The story is always changing—and quickly. A few days after the panic-stricken Fourth of July emails, we got an unexpected update from Sarah:
I just wanted to let you know that Harris is being very sweet and loving again, and he’s decided to get some help to get clean. He has an appointment with a great Dr. tomorrow to discuss doing an outpatient program. It’ll help him to have a professional get him the right supplements he needs, and to help him come off easily I think. I can keep you updated but I just wanted you to know that he’s being so good now and I think everything is going to be fine.
So, good news? Temporary good news? Death was off the table? Off the table for now? It was difficult to keep the story straight across multiple state lines. He was in therapy, then he was out. He was doing an outpatient program, then he wasn�
��t. He was on Suboxone, then he was off. He was back with his girlfriend, then they broke up. Then they were just friends. Then they were full-blown enemies. He obsessed over her regardless. He was a very obsessive human being in general. In fairness, so am I. Perhaps it’s genetic.
During this time, I tried to temper my tone, to stay calm and supportive, to mask much of my frustration. For one, he didn’t know that Sarah was sending us updates, and I didn’t want to betray my source. And two, he was acting so erratic that I didn’t want to cause more stress and push him further over the edge.
My mom and I constantly compared notes:
Have you heard from Harris this week?
Did Harris text you today?
Any word from Harris?
Any further communication from Harris?
Harris anxiety became a defining characteristic of our family dynamic. Mostly, we were in the dark and disconnected from his day to day. Plus, having a demanding job was a great front for his addiction. Work was always the perfect excuse for not responding to my texts for days, for why he’d been out of touch, for why he seemed extra prickly.
Despite the false alarm from Sarah that Harris was on the mend, their relationship continued to deteriorate over the next several months and, eventually, seemed just as dysfunctional as the others. The making up and breaking up reached a boiling point in late November, when Harris sent her a series of exceptionally bleak emails that said stuff like, “I was sober and I did it with hopes of us being together again, and now I’m a suicidal junkie and it’s your fault.” And: “When I die, which is hopefully soon from pills (I tried last night but woke up somehow), it’s entirely your fault.” And: “You look my parents in the eye at the funeral and tell them all i asked was to talk to you and you refused.” And: “Actually picture what you would feel like and how you could’ve prevented it. Remember this moment.” And: “I loved you.”
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 5