When he got home that night, I asked him why, as a lawyer now, he still had to pull an all-nighter. I assumed those happened only in law school, a rite of passage. Peter, exhausted, said no, they happened whenever something needed to get done and there was no other way to get it done. “You’re kidding,” I said. “You’re going to have to spend all night sometimes in your office, the same as you did in the law school library? I can’t believe that. I thought that was over.”
Peter was exasperated. “Over?” he said. “No, Eilene, it’s never over.” I knew that after working nearly thirty-two hours straight he was mentally and physically fried. But I didn’t understand why an attorney, an adult man, would sleep overnight on his office floor. Didn’t Peter have any control over his schedule? Didn’t they know he had a daughter? A wife? A home?
Peter looked at me. “I’m a first-year associate, Eilene. This is what I have to do. What did you think it was going to be like?” he asked.
“Not like this,” I said.
“Well, get used to it,” he snapped, “because this is the way it is.”
* * *
—
TO COPE WITH THE long hours and intense stress—as well as the resulting depression and anxiety—many lawyers turn to alcohol and, increasingly, to drugs. In April 2018, I posted a query on TopLawSchools.com, a popular collection of forums for law students and attorneys, asking if they would discuss, anonymously and candidly, their experience with drug use and/or abuse in the legal profession. (Despite its name, TLS receives thousands of posts from practicing lawyers.) I chose this route because it had proven impossible to get a lawyer to go on record talking about drug use.
The 2016 ABA/Hazelden Betty Ford study of alcohol and drug use in the legal profession surveyed nearly 13,000 practicing attorneys in 19 states but only 3,400 answered the questions about drug use. I wondered why 75 percent of attorneys skipped over that section. Patrick Krill, the study’s lead author, told me it certainly wasn’t because 75 percent of lawyers don’t use drugs. “I believe they were afraid to answer,” he said. Since people posting comments on the TLS site do not reveal their names nor the firms for which they work—instead identifying as “anonymous user” or creating a handle for themselves—their comments are often brutally honest.
Lawyers responding to my TLS query wrote that opioids and coke are often used to make hangovers bearable, that they and many of their colleagues use Adderall for focus (not prescribed for them). There is a lot of marijuana use and drinking. Underlying it all, one commenter wrote, is the addiction to work. “Everything else is just derivative of that. Of course, some people have underlying substance abuse problems. In the end though, firm life is the addiction. You are a total slave to the work.”
Kevin Chandler, director of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s Legal Professionals Program in Center City, Minnesota, tells me about a client he spoke with recently, a female partner in a large law firm who also has three small children. “She was very put-together, very professional. And she said, ‘I broke into three of my neighbors’ houses looking for opioid pills.’ Many of these lawyers start with prescription drugs, and at first take them as prescribed. But I think the profession is so stressful that they start using them for relief—opioids, Ambien, cocaine, Adderall, Xanax. We see it all.”
There were certainly things about legal work that Peter liked, mostly the intellectual challenge it provided. There were always interesting problems to solve and he was good at it. But he felt that the example set for him by the partners he admired, and in whose steps he longed to follow, was that life outside of work—like family and personal time, social and emotional connections, spirituality—would have to be put aside. So that’s what Peter did too. And over the years he became more negative and combative than I had ever seen him. Research from psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, founder of the field of positive psychology and director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, shows that emotions like anger, jealousy, and anxiety serve a role for lawyers—they narrow the social and cognitive environment, which helps them maintain an unwavering drive to win.
“The legal field encourages antagonism in ways other fields don’t,” wrote one lawyer on TopLawSchools.com. “Lawyers are expected to be argumentative about everything, so it’s not seen as weird if a guy is willing to rip someone to shreds over a typo. And it’s expected that lawyers will rip each other to shreds to show a company that their firm is the best one to get the job done. So all the games and undermining/one-upping is seen as part of the sport.”
A big contributor to Peter’s growing negativity was his wait to become a partner. After nine years as an associate working sixty to eighty hours a week, he was counting on being elected a member (his firm calls its equity partners members), but in November 2006 was told that wouldn’t happen until the following year. Peter was furious and resentful about the decision to delay his promotion. He felt he had given the profession everything he had for nearly a decade, and now he was being asked to wait another year to become a partner. This kind of thing was—and is—happening in many other firms too, both because of post-recession economic realities and because, in most large law firms, wealth is concentrated at the top, among the most senior partners.
Although Peter was given a vague reason for his delayed promotion—someone was up for promotion ahead of him, and that would fill the San Diego office’s quota for new members that year—sometimes the reason is very clear. Sarah, an attorney who had spent seven years working her way toward an equity partnership at a prestigious Am Law 100 firm (the top 100 law firms in the U.S., as ranked by American Lawyer magazine) in Southern California, knew why she had been passed over. About five years earlier she became pregnant with her son, and after she shared this news with her colleagues, a female partner took her aside to speak to her privately. This partner told Sarah a story about a friend’s abortion, saying it was “no big deal” and then asking if Sarah’s husband would be upset if Sarah did the same thing.
“I was shocked,” Sarah tells me. “I said, ‘Well, this pregnancy was planned, we are in our thirties, married, own a home and have jobs, so yes, I think my husband would find it strange if I had an abortion.’ And this partner said, ‘Well, that’s disappointing—my husband believes in a woman’s right to choose.’ I answered that we were pro-choice too, and our choice was to keep the baby.” Sarah had a son and two years later, a daughter, at a point in her career when she could have been promoted but wasn’t. Sarah says the partner who had suggested an abortion “told me multiple times that I would not be accepted into the partnership because I took ‘too many leaves.’ I took two maternity leaves.” Her story illustrates the intense competition among associates aspiring to a shrinking number of equity partnerships at big firms.
Between 2008 and 2012, the legal profession experienced layoffs, salary decreases, and hiring freezes. Firms still hire new attorneys, but the number being promoted to equity partner is shrinking, thanks to the creation of a new class of partner, the “non-equity” or “income” partner. (Since equity is an ownership interest in a business, partners without equity aren’t really partners because they don’t own a piece of the firm.)
Every night in 2006, Peter came home from work livid, would eat his dinner and complain about his clients, his colleagues, and the firm’s management. How much of his unhappiness was due to ten years in the profession, the delayed partnership, or other factors like genetics or his specific brain chemistry is impossible to know. Long before becoming an attorney he described himself as a “glass-half-empty kind of guy.” I remember the day our daughter, Anna, was born and the obstetrician handed her warm little body to me. Peter, watching, wiping tears from his eyes, said, “Well, we’ll be lucky if she’s not pregnant and a drug addict at fifteen.” Both the obstetrician and I gasped.
Peter looked at the doctor and me, embarrassed. “No, no, I don’t want any of t
hose things for her, of course not,” he explained. “I’m just being realistic.” But that wasn’t realistic, it was pessimistic. In almost every undertaking pessimism is considered maladaptive, but not in the law, writes psychologist Martin Seligman. There is little upside to this, aside from winning cases. Lawyers’ pessimism and disenchantment leaves them in poor health, wrote Seligman. “They are at much greater risk than the general population for depression, heart disease, alcoholism, and illegal drug use.”
■ THIRTEEN
White-Collar Pill Popping
THE HANDFUL OF PEOPLE who knew the truth about Peter’s drug abuse and death in 2015 were stunned because of the height from which he fell, and that his power and wealth did not protect him. They figured it was a one-off, that in the mortality statistics that have come to define the addiction epidemic in this country, Peter’s death was an outlier.
But it wasn’t. It is part of a much bigger societal problem and it certainly wasn’t a one-off for me. It remains the most significant and tragic event of my life, upending everything, including my identity and my orientation to the world.
After probate concluded in November 2016 and my son was off to college, I sold my house and moved back to the place I was born—New York City—to get some distance from San Diego and all it represented. I wanted to begin my life again. So much of it up until that point had been determined by Peter’s choices about his career, how and where he wanted to live and, in many ways, who he wanted to be. I went along with those choices not because I believed they were right for me but because I was afraid of the alternative, of any alternative. The big decisions in my life up until Peter’s death were made from a place of fear, and that place was deep within my own psyche. I was afraid of people I loved leaving me or not loving me back, of them not liking me, afraid of not being able to manage on my own, afraid to make decisions I believed would almost certainly be bad ones, of raising kids the wrong way, of sounding stupid when I spoke, of not having the earning power to support myself. I didn’t have much faith in my ability to make my own choices; I usually assumed they would be wrong.
Peter’s death forced me to take a long, hard look at my life. I had spent the last twenty-five years seeking his approval and validation. I needed him to tell me or show me I mattered, that I was smart, a good mother, writer, wife, human being—you name it, I needed him to make it feel true. But how could he? How could Peter acknowledge how hard I worked when he was so incredibly overworked himself, and thought that no one felt more isolated and stressed than he did? In his mind, I think, to even recognize that I also worked hard, that I, too, was exhausted and stressed and lonely, would have taken some of his power away.
After we divorced, Peter was still the barometer by which I judged my own forward movement. My goal changed from getting him to acknowledge my importance in our life to proving that I didn’t need him. I wanted, so badly, to make him see that I could find love and success and happiness on my own and in my own way. Once he died I couldn’t operate that way anymore. I felt completely unmoored.
What was the point, then, of everything? What were my goals now? Where would I get my motivation? It had been anger pushing me forward, anger that enabled me to do things I hadn’t believed I could—and that Peter hadn’t believed I would—like finalize a divorce, date again, create a financial plan for my future, refinance my mortgage, expand my freelance business. The year Peter died, I finally reached my annual income goal of $70,000—the minimum amount I calculated I would need to live in San Diego without alimony and child support. And it was anger, once again, that helped me put aside my grief and plow ahead with all the tasks involved in settling Peter’s estate and cleaning up the messes he left behind.
A couple of years before Peter’s death, I started meditating regularly at a Zen Buddhist center. I had become more self-reflective, both to cope with all the changes in my life after divorce and as a way to understand what went wrong in my marriage and move beyond that to something better. My efforts got derailed, however, by the chaos of Peter’s life and its effect on mine and those of our children. But after his death, in the two years I spent tying up the loose ends of his life, I also grabbed hold of my own loose ends and tried to figure out how to tie those up, too.
I did a lot of EMDR therapy—watching that little spot of light travel back and forth across a screen—and I wrote. I wrote down everything I was seeing and feeling, and tried to make sense of it on the page, which is the way I tend to process the world around me. I cried a lot. I spent time hiking alone, walking the beach near what used to be Peter’s house, thinking. I leaned heavily on my friends for support and understanding. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously defined five stages of grief, but mine hasn’t followed such an organized trajectory. Instead I feel many things—anger, relief, sadness, disbelief, fear, anxiety—mixed together in different combinations at different times. I can be relieved at the peacefulness in my life without Peter and at the same time miss him, especially when one of our children reaches a new milestone—our son’s high school graduation, our daughter’s twenty-first birthday.
Yet as the anger I felt after Peter’s death abates, I feel, as strange as it might sound, as if there is more space inside me. Without him physically in my life anymore, I’m not always playing defense. I no longer have to brace myself for whatever intellectual condescension or financial bullying or irrational behavior he is going to sling my way. Instead, my head fills with memories and reflection and a deep sadness. Every time I’m out hiking in the woods, marveling at how beautiful it is, I also think of Peter, of how much he would like it. I had never gone camping until I met him, never hiked a mountain trail. I spent ten years trying to learn to ski because Peter enjoyed it so much. He used to ski halfway down a mountain and stop, go a bit off trail and light a cigarette, enjoying a smoke while taking in the view. He loved the wilderness, especially the woods of upstate New York.
I was driving in that direction recently, on a cold, rainy autumn day. The air was heavy and misty, the trees hanging on to their last few leaves. I stopped at a gas station and saw, across the barely paved road, a couple of double-wide trailer homes. I got out of the car to pump gas and smelled cigarette smoke; a classic rock station was playing Guns N’ Roses. After I paid, I sat in the driver’s seat crying. God I miss him, I thought. I miss that time. I miss the smells and sounds. But I think what I miss most is something Peter and I had so little of—a loving, mutually supportive, I’ve-got-your-back-and-you’ve-got-mine kind of relationship. The opportunity for that existed back then, in our early years together, along with our naivete about all the ways things could and would go wrong. Our future had loomed large and thrilling to us, and it would be a long time before we knew anything about the complications of life as a married couple, as parents, as people in midlife, mid-career, midstream.
Perhaps the most profound thing to happen to me since Peter’s death, the result of both finding his body and cleaning out his house, was understanding and accepting that death would eventually be my fate too. Not in the same way, but I am, indeed, going to die at some point. For the first time in my life I am coming to terms with my own mortal existence, part and parcel of what it means to be human. It’s a fact I suspect most of us rarely acknowledge.
It seems to me that many of us spend more time and energy thinking about things we want or the things we want to buy, than how we want to live and die. I remember the day I held an estate sale at Peter’s house and sold almost all his furniture in four hours—about $35,000 worth for $7,500. The furniture and art and special silverware he had carefully chosen so that the interior of the house reflected his tastes as much as the outside wound up in someone’s U-Haul. Some of it I couldn’t even give away. No one would take the frosted glass and chrome computer table, or the full-length gold-leaf mirror that leaned against his bedroom wall. When I sold Peter’s beloved dining table, the one crafted from a thick, contiguous piece of partially split wo
od, it brought to life the saying “You can’t take it with you.” Peter had marveled at that giant slab, cracks and dark whorls and all, held together with iron crossbars for stability. After he died, this $7,000 table sold for $450 to someone who could disassemble it and had a truck big enough to accommodate it. The iron base was so heavy, no one else was willing to try to get it down the stairs.
During those months of inventorying, cleaning, and selling, I found myself thinking a lot about the trajectory of my own life. Did I want to continue living the way I had been? Was my work still meaningful to me? I used to look at journalism as a kind of calling, a way to be of service by bringing stories of consequence into the public eye. But if I was honest, my journalism wasn’t really doing much of that. I had become a reporter who made a living largely by writing about entrepreneurship, start-ups, and new technology. I came to feel I was just adding to the existing noise in American culture about success, innovation, productivity, and efficiency.
After my marriage ended I became a volunteer at the Monarch School, a K–12 school for homeless children near the Mexican border, and it made me feel more committed than ever to trying to help others, especially the disenfranchised. I had already begun, years before Peter’s death, to write more stories about social and political issues, like profiles of Marines seriously injured in the Iraq War and new treatments for their post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual assault on college campuses and the subsequent rise of campus feminism. It was the kind of writing I had always been drawn to and found truly gratifying.
Just as I was starting to understand all this about myself, I was also working hard to process the experience of Peter’s death. And that meant coming to terms with how acutely disturbing it was to me that he died alone. This fact came up all the time in EMDR therapy and it haunted my dreams—literally. While sleeping, I would see Peter at the end of his life, in pain, sick to his stomach, vomiting. In my dreams he is doubled over, unable to see clearly, stumbling about trying to find a place to lie down. I’m a bystander, watching but not able to reach him. All around me are the things, oddly enough, I don’t remember seeing but now know were there—the flattened boxes, the discarded opened mail, the mouse habitat in pieces everywhere. When I’m dreaming, my mind remembers all the things it can’t remember when I’m conscious. And then I wake up holding on to the bits and pieces. It is one of the reasons I put so much effort into reconstructing the last hours of Peter’s life—trying to prove to myself that he was too high to feel anything, or that he died suddenly, his heart just stopping, with no time to be afraid or think about what was happening or feel regret over what he was losing or had left unsaid.
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