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Today, daily newspaper column deadlines stared me in the face, and I typed on the computer furiously, trying to reign in my splintered, hurtling thoughts — to make sense of chaos. Of all the losses and disappointments.

Faith had lost custody of our little Maddie three years previously. Drugs had stolen our beautiful, intelligent daughter's life.

And ours.

It was still hard to forgive her for — through rotten choices — losing our Maddie. I still shook my head and wondered
, how did it happen?
How can something so exquisite turn so ugly?

Today, with Priss, my faithful sister, en route — again — to collect Faith and give both my daughter and me some respite from each other, I clung to my writing deadline as a drowning woman to a floating log. I breathed deeply and counted the minutes until rescue.

“Mom,” Faith drawled tiredly, passing my desk as she headed back to the front porch to stroke her incessant smoking habit, “would you please,
please,
put me on some coffee? I'm so tired this morning.”

And every other morning.
I was still shaking from her hateful response to me earlier, and she was already over it

The mean thought poised there, quivering, then flapping like a matador's red cape. I remembered that I hadn't attended church for the past two Sundays and guilt began to gnaw at me. So I marched to the kitchen, measured out water and coffee into the two-cup pot and slammed it onto the glass-topped stove. I gave up on my column for the moment.

I wasn't fit to be creative.

I still trembled from Faith's earlier hateful response to me. She had the nerve to ask me to —

I resented that. Deeply.

Still grinding my teeth together, I went to the shaded front porch to settle into one of our rocking chairs and watch for Priss' little white Honda Civic. Even though she had two adult children of her own and knew of my daughter's indiscretions and failures, she loved Faith totally.

Through the best and worst of behavior, Priss never gave up on her niece. And when things at our house got too stormy, Faith would call her Aunt Priss to come get her. She'd only be gone for a day or two, but our respite from each other was like a warm blanket in a raging ice storm.

It gave us all a turn of thoughts. New perspective.

Faith joined me on the porch after going in to fill her Starbucks coffee cup, adding lots of cream and sweetener, leaving the kitchen counter strewn with it.

“I'm sorry, Mama,” she said. “I didn't sleep but about three hours last night. Couldn't relax. But I shouldn't have taken it out on you.”

Moments like this, when she truly apologized, reminded me that Faith was salvageable.

“I'm sorry, too. I know you're at your worst in the mornings. I shouldn't get in your face.”

“It'll still be good for me to go over to Aunt Priss' for a couple of days. We need some time apart. Don't you agree?”

“Yes. We do.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too, honey.”

“Did you ask Dad about the new coffee pot? He locked it up in the closet.” She rolled her eyes and took a long,
gut-filling drag on her Newport 100s. She referred to our bedroom closet that Dan had combination-locked to protect our valuables from disappearing. Everything from jewelry to checkbooks to cameras now stacked the shelves and Faith didn't need an explanation as to “why.”

“Not yet.” I averted my gaze from her death-wish gesture. She sat there, thirty pounds overweight, bedraggled and reeking of nicotine. Limp as a noodle. But that wasn't what bothered me. That could be remedied in time. It was her passionate obsession to do herself in.

Somehow. Someday. An icy feeling of dread oozed through me.

Faith had only last week stayed on the phone convincing a salesman to replace two gourmet coffee pots whose handles had malfunctioned and broken off. The company had shipped the two packages to her this week. Proudly, she'd shown Dan. Her hopes that her father would celebrate her skill and share with her had died when he locked up the spare.

“But I'll need it when I move out,” she told me, nearly crying with misery, an echo of my words to Dan.
“She'll need it when she moves out.”

“Hah.” His humorless huff of dismay reflected in his eyes. “She's not going to move out.” He cut an agonizing look at me. “
Ever
.”

This, he would say to her face if the subject arose. I knew because he had done so. Dan believed that he, as the wage earner, was entitled to say what was on his mind. He also meant the words as a challenge to Faith, to shock her into enough anger to make her try to prove him wrong.

That's what would work for him.

But Faith was not him. Nor me, for that matter. She was her own person. One of the most complex people I'd ever known. And if there was truly a magic solution for this situation, we had not found it.

I tried to help him see that his negative feedback could backfire and become a self-fulfilling prophecy for Faith. If he kept telling her that she could not pull herself up, wasn't it possible she would begin to believe it?

At least, that's how it might have worked for me in my relationship with my parents. Their words could render either life or death to me. Fortunately, I was never tested with the darker possibilities.

Now, Faith's own hopelessness reached out to me. I'd never seen her so desperate. Her father's taking the coffee pot and locking it up sent a message to her that pulled the ground from underneath her feet.

And then it hit me. She has nothing. She's totally out of control of her life. And this seemingly insignificant situation is uncommonly earth-shattering to her. She doesn't have that father's consoling gentleness that undergirds in the darkest of emotional storms.

“I'll talk to him,” I'd earlier promised because Faith, by now, was beginning to realize that a discussion with her father — concerning Faith — could evolve into an open vat of pit vipers.

“I paid for the first pot and don't owe Faith a darned thing,” was his tart reply when I'd mentioned it to him.

The old familiar impasse. How I despised it. How I prayed for a mercy-tsunami to flood our house and hearts. So far that had not happened.

But I hoped Dan would change his mind. This current stance was totally out of character for him, who was, as
a rule, the most generous person I know. But it seemed that with Faith, he was always acting on principle.

Or anger. I could not, most of the time, tell the difference. After all, Faith's anger gene came from somewhere other than from me. I had no comprehension of that vicious arena.

Thing was, I knew Dan prayed about his decisions. He daily read his Bible and conceded that the Psalms and Proverbs spoke to him about his responsibility to hold Faith accountable for her actions. I agreed that she be held accountable, but at the same time, the New Testament spoke of mercy and forgiving “seven times seventy.”

Even there, Dan and I had different perceptions. Thing was, neither of us were absolutely wrong.

I told Priss one day, “I'm convinced that somewhere in the middle a solution will arise.” She agreed.

Today, Faith lit another cigarette and took two long drags and exhaled though her nose.

“It's difficult to watch you killing yourself.” The words slid from me like an ocean wave's foaming emission.

“Will you please stop telling me all I'm doing wrong?” she snapped, her swollen eyes set straight ahead. “I feel like
crap.
All I have left to live for is Maddie.” She sat for a few moments, eyes dully staring into middle space.

“Honestly, Mom,” she murmured sluggishly, “I truly am tempted to go sign myself into some mental rehab. I don't know what to do. I've dreamed of ways to kill myself. I thought that when I got off drugs, things would change. But they haven't.”

The unspoken words hung there between us. Where will funds come from for another rehab?

In the next heartbeat, guilt pummeled me. Why did it always have to be about money?

Because
, reasoning took over, as vulgar as it sounds,
money makes the world go round.

Movies and television intervention shows make it all seem so simple. They don't tell us it costs thousands of dollars to dwell and receive treatment in those hallowed rehab walls and even with outpatient treatment, drug costs eat families alive. Most cannot afford it.

Faith knew Dan and I carried no insurance on her. She'd lost hers in the divorce. I had spent all my savings, pitiful though they were, on getting her legal counsel for the misdemeanors she'd committed while on drugs. Each of my Social Security checks — gone before it settled in the bank. Dan had spent thousands on drug rehab. I had even borrowed thousands of dollars to fund the last straggling court and counsel costs.

And it wasn't over yet.

But undergirding it all was this fear in my gut. Would Faith be able to pull herself up and out of this dark place she still occupied?

“In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family's story embodies its hope and despair.”

— Auguste Napier

 

 

I felt the storm brewing. Tasted it. When Faith came home from Priss', she went immediately up to her room and locked herself in.

“I'm worried about her,” Priss said as she was leaving. “She's not herself. Angel has never been so — despondent, Deede. Not with me.” She kissed my cheek and left.

Faith didn't come out for dinner. When I knocked at her door, she called. “Go away.”

“Are you okay?”

Silence.

“Faith?”

“Please, leave me alone.”

I left, aggravated with her temperamental funk. Dan had a long day at the job so I jumped in the car and visited Mom. When I came back home late in the afternoon, I noted that no ashes littered the front porch.

Unusual.

I went inside. The house was silent.

“Faith?” I called. Not a sound.

Something pulled me up the stairs and to Faith's door. I knocked.

I could hear a pin drop.

“Faith?” I called. Silence roared.

An eerie feeling seized me. The premonition brand.

“Faith?” I screamed.

With shaking fingers I tried the door. It was locked securely. I ran downstairs for a paper clip and straightened it as I climbed the steps two at a time. My fingers trembled so violently that I could hardly insert the metal tip and press the trap. It finally clicked.

I hit the door and it flew open. I didn't see her at first because she kept her room so dark, draping blankets over the windows. When I did, I gasped.

Faith lay sprawled on the floor, face down. The ceiling fan lay next to her, it's propeller across her hip. Around her neck and tied to the fan's base was a rope. Even in the moment's horror, I recognized it from Dan's workshop out back.

“Oh my God,” I moaned, hysteria flailing its way through me. I dropped to my knees and felt her arm. It was cold. I pushed the fan aside and gently turned her over.

“Faith?” My voice quavered, sounded unreal to my ears.

I closed my eyes tightly, took a deep gulp of air to ward off fainting. Everything wanted to go dark on me. My hands tingled, and I flexed my fingers to do what I had to do. Everything else about me was numb.

Except my accelerating heart, galloping away like a herd of wild buffalo.

I saw a bruise on Faith's forehead and gently touched it. Her skin felt icy, clammy. Her eyes were closed. I could
see a tiny white glimmer between the lids. Then I leaned in close to detect breathing. I couldn't tell so I nudged down the rope and checked her neck for a pulse, again fighting the darkness that threatened to overcome me any moment. It was suffocating. I blinked back the black spots, forced air into my lungs and pushed on.

My cold fingers probed desperately.
Please, dear God!

Then I felt it, a faint, faint rhythm. I nearly collapsed with relief.

“Hang in there, baby. Mama's gonna get help,” I groaned, now sobbing.

I dialed 911 and then Dan. “Come quick,” I rasped. “Faith tried to kill herself.”

Words cannot describe the horror of those next hours. Dan, ashen with shock, drove the two of us behind the ambulance to the hospital. Priss and Lexie arrived about the time we did in the ER, along with their supporting spouses. Even Chloe came along, appearing extremely concerned. Faith looked so vulnerable and pathetic with the oxygen mask shrouding her pale face.