by Jennie Garth
This craziness went on for nine days—nine days. It went on until Lola reached the breaking point and she became downright hostile and noncompliant, and so, frankly, untreatable. Here she was, five years old, unable to sleep or rest at all because she would panic and freak out every time anyone opened the door of her hospital room, fearing she would be stuck with a giant needle, or be forced to give more blood, or be hooked up to some scary-looking machine. And who could blame her? After a week and a half, the geniuses who were looking after her were no closer to a diagnosis, and our little girl was not getting any better.
So we made the decision to bring her home. It was Christmastime, and we would be damned if our baby was going to spend the holidays sick and in a hospital, surrounded by people who just didn’t seem to give a shit about her. Instead, we found a doctor who specializes in juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and she immediately and correctly diagnosed Lola with Still’s disease. Her treatment began immediately, and the new doctor put her on the right combination of steroids and anti-inflammatory agents so that the acute episode she was suffering (which typically lasts for a couple of months) could run its course.
Thank God we did this. Still’s is an extremely rare disease (it affects only one in a million people, mostly children), and if it’s not treated aggressively and early, there can be all sorts of long-term damage to a child’s joints and internal organs. No one knows for sure what causes it, but research does point to an invasive microbe as the likely culprit, something, say, that you might pick up on a tropical island. Other theories are that it is an autoimmune disease that can, if not treated early and properly, become chronic. In the end, the way of it doesn’t matter, because Lola—all of us—lucked out: She suffered a terrible, acute case of Still’s, but she’s one of the lucky few who, thank God, recovered completely.
Now if only I were so lucky.
RACING THE CLOCK
We rolled into the New Year of 2008 with things looking up in our household: Lola was feeling better and the girls were all thriving in school. But things up at the ranch weren’t going so well. My dad was really deteriorating and was receiving dialysis now. My sister Wendy and my mom were with him ’round the clock and taking really good, loving care of him, but he needed nursing assistance now, too. I was bouncing between the ranch and home in LA, trying to be there for everybody.
We always did something fun with the girls for their spring break, and this year would be no exception. LEGOLAND, down near San Diego, was the draw, and while Peter and the girls excitedly planned our trip, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe this year, we ought to just stay home.
As winter turned into spring, my dad’s health really hit the skids. He suffered a serious bout of congestive heart failure and wound up in the hospital over Easter. His blood pressure was so dangerously low that he was in a kind of woozy state that left him weakened and rambling. Between all that, and the now daily dialysis, I just didn’t want to leave him. But I also didn’t want to let the kids and Peter down.
What to do?
I decided to stay the course and go south with my family. Before we packed up and left for San Diego, I came up to Santa Barbara, where my dad was hospitalized, to give him a hug and bring him some treats. My dad loved candy, and he always got a kick out of it when I’d smuggle some into the hospital for him. But not this time. Instead, when I handed him a Snickers bar, his favorite, he shook his head and said, “Nuts equal losers.” I laughed and asked what he meant and he said he didn’t want the nurses to see him with nuts in his teeth. This struck me as incredibly sad and I didn’t know what to say, so I just kissed him and left the candy bar on his bedside table.
My mom was there, too, and I hugged her close. She’d taken such good care of my father all those years; in fact, she had kept him alive by keeping track of all of his medications and advocating hard for him when his doctors weren’t communicating with one another, or when they weren’t listening to what he or my mother said. She really had loved him through sickness and in health, and this is something I will always admire about her.
Before I left that day, I did what I always did: I filled his water glass, kissed him, and then I made sure he was all tucked in, the thin, ugly green hospital blankets tucked neat and comfy around him. I took extra care arranging them around his feet, which were long and skinny and stuck straight up to the skies. Then I gently squeezed his toes, which was my way of saying, “Love you, Dad!” Before I left, I stopped at the door, looked him right in the eyes, and said, “I’ll see you when I get back; you’ll be here, right?” He knew I was scared. “I’ll be here” was what he said. But the look in his eyes told me that he was scared, too.
I went back down to LA and we packed up and headed south for our LEGOLAND vacation. We checked into our hotel, had a great night together, and then we went to bed. But when I woke up that first morning on vacation, I was achy and feverish and felt like I had the flu. I just couldn’t find the energy to get up and play, so Peter took the girls off to the beach so I could rest. I slept almost all day, and when I woke late in the afternoon, I checked in with my mom. She’d made my dad his favorite steak dinner and had brought it into the hospital. He’d loved it, she said. I went to bed that night feeling better and less nervous about my dad’s status.
Before the sun rose, the phone rang. I sat bolt upright, knowing in my bones that this was the call I’d been dreading all my life. It was my mom. Dad was very sick again and he was asking for me. I could hear what sounded like a struggle, and I asked my mother what was going on. “It’s your father. He wants to talk to you, but he’s not making any sense, honey,” she said. There was more rustling and then my dad was on the phone, but whatever he was saying was unintelligible. I tried to make out the garbled words and it sounded like he was saying something about my girls and protecting them. Then my mom took the phone back and said quietly that she was sure the time was near and that I should come back as soon as possible.
I woke Peter, and before I knew it I was having a full-blown panic attack. How would I get to my dad? We were two hundred miles away, which meant about a four-hour drive. While I paced around, crying, Peter tracked down a rental car, and within an hour I had kissed him and the girls good-bye and sped off. I was crying so hard that I could hardly see, so I just followed the signs that said, “North.”
I drove as fast as I could in those dark hours, and I stopped only once, to pee. I wish now that I hadn’t. I managed to make it to Santa Barbara in about three hours, and I pulled into the hospital parking lot and just parked and ran. I flew through the automatic doors and ran to an elevator, and jumped on just as the doors were closing. There was only one other person in that elevator, and it was my sister Wendy. There I was, sweaty and panting, and there was Wendy, looking down at the floor, not talking. I tried to catch my breath, and when the elevator opened, I looked at Wendy and then ran. But I was stopped outside the door to my dad’s room by a strange man and woman—and my mom. “Where’s Dad?” I blurted out. My mom said, “These people wanted to talk to you in that room over there first,” and she gently turned me toward an open door. “Okay. Let’s go!” I said, and I was led into a tiny room, asked to take a seat, and then my mom and Wendy crowded into the room with us. Then the strange woman shut the door and everyone just stared at me, except Wendy, who stared at the floor. Then they told me my dad was dead. I had missed him by twelve minutes.
My body convulsed and coiled up. I sprang up from that chair like a wild animal. Sounds came up from somewhere inside me that rattled everyone, including me, and those two strangers tried to hold on to me, but that just caused me to fly to the door and bolt from that shitty little room. I tore down the hall and instinctively found the room where my father’s body was. There he was, under that same disgusting green blanket, and I noticed his feet were all wrong: One was still pointing up, but the other had fallen over sideways. That was when I lost it completely. I threw myself across my dad’s solid body and clung to him, just like I had as
a child. It was the place where I felt the safest, the place I had always yearned for, the place I long for as I write this now. I was wailing and I couldn’t stop. I didn’t stop until, after a long while, the nurses came and gave me a powerful sedative.
I woke up later in his bed, up at the ranch, in a horrible, horrible haze. My friend Ed was there with me, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding my hand. He didn’t say much; he just cried with me and then left me to sleep. I wanted to sleep forever.
Something shifted then for me. Some place of mistrust and distrust broke open and it caused me to turn inward, to close myself off—even from the people I loved best.
This, I was to learn, is what grief can do.
A LITTLE BIT . . . DEVASTATED
A couple of years ago, on the cusp of turning forty, I found myself feeling—despite being knee-deep in raising my kids, and fully immersed in what I thought was a pretty solid, normal-ups-and-downs kind of marriage—alone in ways that really confused me. I mean, I was married to a man I loved, and together we had built a beautiful family. I was able to be at home with our three beautiful daughters, yet still able to work when I felt I wanted or needed to. My life—by any reasonable measure—was blessed and rich beyond belief. I had financial security, a beautiful home in LA, a ranch up in the Santa Ynez Valley. In other words, I had it all. And I felt like I had it all. But I couldn’t shake the feeling of being alone in the midst of all of that bounty. I still wasn’t able to break out of the shock of losing my father. There I was, walking, talking, and living my day-to-day life, but what I wasn’t doing was feeling. I was shut down and locked out of my own life. Trapped in a bubble, with everything and everyone around me at arm’s length. At least, that was how it felt. And I didn’t know what to do about it.
My husband was away a lot then, working across the country on location on a film project that he’d written, was producing, and was starring in. I was thrilled for him that he was taking his career to the next level, but I was also, I can see now, feeling a bit resentful and itchy in ways that I couldn’t quite identify. I wanted something, needed something, but I had no way of accessing what that was, of finding a way to articulate what had me pinned down. I needed to reach out—badly—but because I had no idea what I needed to ask for, I did the opposite.
All I know is that I felt like I was waiting: waiting for him to come home, waiting for him to be free to join me in the day-to-day of our family life, waiting for the next job to be lined up that would take him far away from us again. I was always waiting for . . . something that I didn’t want to happen.
And in a weird way, by waiting for it, I was making space for it.
Something was shifting. The ground beneath me was beginning to crack and crumble so imperceptibly that I just didn’t know it was happening. But like an animal that senses a thunderstorm on the breeze, I intuitively knew that I needed to duck and take cover.
I packed up my kids and moved us up to the ranch, telling myself this was the chance, while they were still very young, to have them live out of the city and close to their grandma. I thought it would allow them to experience a simpler kind of life, like the one I’d had when I was a kid, one without all the hustle and distractions that are LA. At the ranch, they’d be able to ride horses, feed the chickens, and live in a town where everybody smiled and waved, rather than flipping you the bird or throwing water bottles at your car when you accidentally pulled out in front of them. It would be good for them, I thought, and it would be good for me, too. We’d simply relocate our small tribe and spend some serious quality time with one another. I thought that being up at the ranch would give me the space I needed to wrangle this awful restlessness to the ground.
But of course this wasn’t the full truth. Peter and I had been struggling for some time, and I didn’t know what to do but take myself out of the situation. I was angry, I was hurt, but I didn’t know at what, exactly. All I knew was that I was being consumed by pain and I had no idea how to connect with him without all of the pent-up wounds muddling my efforts. It was frustrating. And crushing, and I honestly believed that if I had some space—if we had some space—things would sort themselves out.
Peter agreed to this, mostly, I think, because he wanted me to be happy, and he felt that if this would bring me back to myself, then perhaps we would be able to heal our relationship. We had, during the course of our marriage, talked about building our own place up there, so we went ahead and bought another fifteen acres up in the Valley (as the Santa Ynez Valley is known by locals) and we decided that we’d build an eco-friendly family ranch on it. We had ambitious building plans drawn up, and then we thought, Why don’t we create a show around building our “green” dream home? Peter began working on a pitch and sent it out to the networks. In no time at all, the Country Music Television network (CMT) scooped it up.
But then it happened.
The ground that had been cracking and shifting finally split open and pretty much swallowed me whole: Peter came home, and told me that he didn’t think he wanted to be married to me any longer, and he thought it best that we separate so that we could get a better sense of where we stood with each other.
This was not something I consciously expected; in fact, I’d say that I didn’t even allow myself to entertain the idea that my husband may have reached the end of his rope, too. I understand, now, how frustrated he was at how unreachable I’d become, but at the time, conceding that we’d reached a possibly unbridgeable break in our marriage was not something I was prepared for, psychologically or emotionally. I was still in the fugue state brought on by the loss of my father, and though I knew it was my responsibility to figure out how to break through it, I just hadn’t been able to. Now, with this news, I was nearly undone.
We had been together, then, for seventeen years. Of course, our life together had not been perfect: Being married is hard; being young parents is harder. Being married to an actor (for both of us) is even harder still. We’d certainly spent our fair share of time on the couches of therapists during our nearly two decades together, but for me, dealing with the problems but having the secure feeling that we were in it together was what made it work and what made it worthwhile. As long as we were both in there, thrashing through things, it was going to work out. Whenever we figured out how to push ourselves up and over an impasse, whenever one or the other of us relented just enough for there to be some breathing room, we’d find ourselves in a better place. But for some time now, I had not been able to do that heavy lifting. I wasn’t up for thrashing through anything. I had become a shadow of myself and, without feeling like I had any control over it, I had been fading farther and farther away from him. And now Peter was no longer up for the fight, either. But how do you fight with someone who has become a ghost of herself? I wanted things to be different. I wanted to be different. But here we were. I was devastated by the news that he was no longer in love with me.
In the midst of this marital crisis, we had CMT to contend with. We had signed a contract with them, and rather than our just canceling it outright, somehow or other the project morphed into being about me, a mom on her own with her three daughters on a working ranch.
I was in a complete haze with no sense of which way was up, no facility to make any kind of life decision, so I turned to Mr. Showbiz and asked what he thought we ought to do.
“Maybe it’s a good idea. It will keep you busy. Keep you distracted. Keep you grounded while you figure all this out.”
Before you get any suspicious ideas about Mr. Showbiz’s intentions, let me just say that he was as stunned as I was by this turn of events; he was so fond of both Peter and me, and he knew me well enough to know that this loss could really do me in, so his intentions in this regard were only good. He was—we all were—scrambling to figure out how to keep things afloat, to keep me from completely going under the waves, and this show was the life ring that was closest at hand.
Mr. Showbiz knows me well, and so he understood that the show must go on.
I did what I tend to do when I don’t know what I should do: I defaulted into my people-pleaser mode and became the “trouper,” the pro, and I said okay.
As hard as it is to believe—for both you and me—I agreed to have the first days of my life after having been left by my husband filmed for a television show. This was not, I must say, the best decision I’ve made. But at the time, I just couldn’t even muster the strength to say no.
In truth, I knew next to nothing about the mechanics of making a reality television show. The upshot is that you have strange people in your life—and by in your life I mean in your bathroom, in your bedroom (for real), and in every nook and cranny of your private space for days and weeks on end. It’s not, on the face of it, the most therapeutic kind of project to take on, but we will eventually get to all of that.
Agreeing to do the show meant that I would have to process all of this (and, as you know by now, I’m not always the quickest to react or recover) in front of a film crew first, and then in front of a pretty big TV audience. I’d forgotten that I don’t really possess the ability to hide my emotions or even edit them before they come bursting forth. In other words, though I’m a pretty good actress, I am, in my private life, straightforward—even, some would say, to a fault; I’m not one to bullshit, not one to pull any punches. There would be no hiding behind a character this time: It would be me at my lowest.