Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife (41 page)

“I’ve got to go, Bren,” she said, cocking her head to one side and putting on a sad face. “I promised Ryan I’d read him stories at nine o’clock and here it is nine thirty.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, thanks for coming.” Asshole.

Sara approached me. “Was that Kelly?” she asked.

“Yep,” I said.

She gave me a knowing smile. “It looks like Henry wet his pants,” she said.

I shot a quick look over at Henry, but the table he was standing behind obscured his crotch.

“He’s making excuses about spilling on himself, but I don’t know how anyone could have spilled on themselves in that precise way,” Sara said.

When I got home, Charlie was watching
Saturday Night Live.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“There were a few rocky moments, but overall it was great,” I said and filled him in on the details. I went upstairs, changed into my pajamas, and crawled into bed feeling grateful and happy.

[Sunday, February 8]

I’m forty. Charlie and the boys made me breakfast in bed and sang “Happy Birthday.” Max gave me a special writing pen and a hardcover journal. I got up and went to a yoga class.

On my way back home, I began thinking about my party and my interesting, beautiful friends. Deidre was ankle bracelet free and off house arrest. Vivian was blissing out in yoga poses momentarily forgetting about her messed-up daughter. Darcy was smiling and laughing, something she doesn’t do a lot of anymore. Liv, my rock-solid friend throughout my first year sober, was contorting herself into bizarre shapes even though she hated yoga. Kelly was, well, Kelly. And poor Eve, I pictured her passed out on her mattress.

Charlie had flooded our backyard last week, turning it into an ice rink, and Max was skating. I put on my skates, and Max and I practiced hockey stops. “Let’s see who can spray more ice,” Max challenged. He won. Charlie appeared with a picnic tray and set down lunch. Max and I sat on a snowbank next to the ice and ate sandwiches and drank hot chocolate. It was a glorious sunny day. The sky was brilliant blue. The snow was glittering like diamonds. I hugged Max and kissed him. Then I sent up a prayer and thanked God for my life.

[Monday, June 18 (four-and-a-half years sober)]

The phone rang at one in the morning. I opened my eyes and lay in the dark listening to it ring before Charlie picked it up from his bedside table.

“It’s your mother,” he said, passing me the receiver.

I knew what she was going to say.

“Your father died,” my mother whispered.

“I’m coming over.”

I reached over Charlie and hung up the phone. A dull ache crawled into my heart and expanded, becoming painful. Tears ran down my cheeks and I started sobbing. Charlie periodically rubbed my back.

An hour later, I slid into my car and drove away feeling numb.

My father began moving slowly last summer, mindfully, like a man who hurt. My mother began driving him to his doctor appointments. “How do I get to the doctor’s office?” she asked the first time she drove.

“Dad knows,” I said. “He knows the Loop like a cartographer.”

“He doesn’t remember.”

My dad’s doctors found a tumor in his brain that fall. The tumor was removed, but tiny flecks of cancer remained spattered throughout his gray matter. When my dad recovered enough, his brain was radiated. My father shuffled into my sister’s house on Thanksgiving looking like dead man walking.

I made my dad an appointment with an acupuncturist and Qigong master. My father teetered into Dr. Deng’s office, his skin gray, eyes hooded. Deng rubbed his hands together and pressed his palms to my father’s body. He poked my dad full of needles. He turned the lights off and played a meditation tape. My father would have called this voodoo bullshit if he weren’t so sick. When Deng flicked the lights back on, my father’s cheeks were pink and his eyes had the old mischievous spark. For the next few months, my dad visited Deng three times a week. And during that time I became obsessed with death.

I wanted to convince myself that there was life after death, but I feared I was just deceiving myself. I watched the movie
21 Grams,
which claims that at the moment of death, the body loses twenty-one grams of weight, the weight of the soul. It made me feel better until my friend, Tad, told me it was a crock of shit.

“Google Duncan MacDougall,” he said. “The idea for that movie was based on his research. He weighed dying people and reported that their bodies lost weight when their souls left, but his research was bad and he was discredited.”

I googled MacDougall, an early twentieth-century physician who weighed six people dying of tuberculosis. MacDougall placed his patients’ beds on an industrial scale that was gram sensitive and observed and recorded weight loss—twenty-one grams being the average—when they died. But because he observed only six patients, their weight loss varied, and the exact moment of death was (and still is) difficult to determine, his research was tossed out.

“Life is a slimy sucking eddy of despair with false moments of hope in an ever-darkening universe,” played in my head. My childhood friend, Carolyn, recited that line a lot after she got knocked up and had a baby at seventeen. I began thinking about drinking all the time. I may have laid in bed with a vodka bottle if my kids weren’t forcing me to get up. And since I had to get up, I began going to meetings at seven in the morning. No one hits meetings at seven in the morning unless they’re desperate to get their shit together. And day after day my addict peers screwed my depressed head on a little straighter.

My friend, Tracy, began having a close-friends meeting at her house once a month and, one night in February, I let fly that I doubted there was life after death and I didn’t think God existed. “Life feels like too much work sometimes,” I said. “I’d be fine if it ended.” Afterward, Tanya pulled me aside.

“You need to get the book
Closer to the Light
by Melvin Morse,” she told me. Morse, an emergency room doctor, had documented the near-death experiences of children. The kids all had similar out-of-body experiences, and it gave me a lot of hope.

A package arrived from Tanya a few days later containing
Embraced by the Light
by Betty Eadie, another book about near-death experience. I re-googled MacDougall. I decided that just because his work wasn’t up to scientific snuff, it didn’t mean he wasn’t onto something. I found it interesting that no scientist since has attempted to reconduct his research, and I suspected it was because, as Morse said in
Closer to the Light,
his colleagues thought he was a whack job.

I walked into a health food store and asked for supplements to combat depression.

“Vitamin D,” the clerk said. “The only way you get vitamin D naturally is from the sun, and you’re not getting any in February.” I began popping large doses of vitamin D.

Maybe it was the vitamin D, maybe it was because I’d regained hope, maybe it was a combination of the two, but whatever, I emerged from my black hole with a vengeance and made a reservation to camp at the Grand Canyon in the summer.

Van and I had taken rock-climbing classes, and I was certified to belay. I decided my family should climb while we were in the canyon, so that spring I began searching the Internet for pre-canyon climbs at Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin. I called a guide, told him what I wanted to do, and he started laughing.

“I’m sorry I’m laughing,” he said, “It’s just that I’m in Arizona right now, and I’m about to pick up a Girl Scout troop from your town and take them into the canyon tomorrow. Wild, huh? You know, I’m thinking I’d like to take my girlfriend here this summer. If you want, I’ll work out a really nice deal for you. It would just be me and my girlfriend and your family. Usually, I take large groups. I’ll call one of my guides and have him email you pictures. We’ll hike into Havasu, an Indian reservation at the west end of the canyon, not the national park. I’ve hiked all over the world, and Havasu is one of my top two places.”

I looked at one gorgeous photo after another of waterfalls, crystal-clear pools, canyon walls, and lush foliage, and booked the trip. I also booked a weekend climb at Devil’s Lake. I shut my computer down and went to my parents’ house. My father was complaining about his expensive thrice-weekly acupuncture and Qigong appointments that insurance didn’t cover.

“You have something better to spend your money on?” I asked him. “You walked into Deng’s office looking like a zombie and now you’re doing great, considering.”

“I asked Deng, ‘Where are you going on vacation with all the money I’m paying you?’” my dad said. “He started laughing. Little bastard is always laughing. Laughing all the way to the bank. I told him I was cutting my visits down to twice a week, and he didn’t like that. Told me it wasn’t a good idea. Not a good idea for him.”

My father cut his visits down to once a week soon after that. Maybe the cancer was just running its course, maybe it had to do with cutting down on acupuncture and Qigong, but my father dropped weight, became unable to walk without assistance, and was in pain all the time. He stopped seeing Deng altogether.

I’d been regularly taking my father out for lunch and car rides, and one warm day in early May, I helped my dad into my car, opened the sunroof, and drove him to the harbor so he could see his boat. His friends had taken his boat out of dry dock and put it in the water so he could try to sell it. We stopped at the bait shop. I helped my dad out of the car, and he put his arm around my shoulders and we slowly walked in. The man behind the tackle counter looked up and went back to checking inventory. “Larry,” my dad said. The man looked at my father blankly. “It’s me, Jerry.” Shocked recognition swept onto the man’s face.

“Jerry,” he said. “I knew you had cancer last summer but … you look like shit. Here, let me get you a chair.”

Larry pulled two chairs out and we sat next to the tackle counter. My dad and Larry chatted briefly, and Larry watched sadly as my father and I limped out the door. We drove to the harbor, and I pulled my car up next to the iron security gate that opened to the pier where my dad’s boat was docked.

“I want to get on my boat,” my father said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You can barely lift your feet. How are you going to climb in?”

“Fine,” my dad growled. “I won’t get on my fucking boat.”

I felt guilty, like maybe I should get him on one more time. I began trying to think of ways to get him on his damn boat without us toppling into the water when a friend of his appeared at his window.

“Jerry,” Hal said solemnly. “They told me I have prostate cancer, too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” my dad said. “Do they think you can beat it?”

Hal shrugged forlornly.

“I’m very sorry,” my dad said. “Look at me.” Neither of them said anything for a moment. “You’re going to have to move, Hal,” my father said. “I’m going to be sick.” My dad opened the car door and vomited on the pavement.

“Bye, Jerry,” Hal said and slumped away.

“Let’s go,” my father whispered, wiping his lips.

My father wasn’t up for car rides soon after that. I began taking him outside to sit in his backyard, but by the end of May, he couldn’t do that either. My mother hired hospice, and a hospice worker put a hospital bed in the middle of my parents’ living room. Two days later, my father was unable to get out of bed. I emailed Todd, the climbing guide, and told him I was probably going to have to cancel our trips. Devil’s Lake was days away, Havasu two weeks away. But my dad was still hanging in there when Devil’s Lake rolled around, so we went. I showed my dad pictures of our camping trip when we got back and brought the kids to visit him. Now that my kids were out of school for the summer, I was bringing them to see my dad every day. My mom would often take Max and Van to play miniature golf, and I’d exercise my dad’s legs and arms and feed him Jell-O. My dad was heavily medicated, and sometimes he was lucid, sometimes not.

“I’m going to cancel our trip to the Grand Canyon,” I told my sister one afternoon when we were both sitting in my parents’ kitchen. It was June fifteenth and we were scheduled to leave for the canyon in six days.

“I don’t think you should,” Paula said. “A hospice musician was just here playing guitar and singing for Dad. She said she’d seen people like Dad hang on for a month or more.”

“Really?” I said, looking through the kitchen door at the back of my father’s hospital bed and the crown of his bald head. “Dad just asked me, ‘How long am I going to be stuck like this? You don’t know what I’m going through.’”

I told my dad to ditch his sick body when he was ready. I reminded him of the near-death-experience books I’d read and told him about. “Most people didn’t want to return to their bodies,” I said. “They went someplace really good.” My dad closed his eyes and smiled.

My father and I had discussed what I’d come to believe about life after death many times out of earshot of my mother.

“You’ll sleep in the ground until Jesus comes,” my mother routinely told my father, sticking to her Adventist views. “I’m not afraid of dying because I won’t know anything. The next thing I’ll see is Jesus.”