This is not my usual comic ranting. I’m so lucky to have a
friend like Jillsmo who lets me spew all over her blog. I would spew all over
her blog, but my family, which is to say my husband’s family, reads my blog.
Sometimes. And while none of this is anything I haven’t said in their presence
and to their faces, I don’t think they need any reminders of sad facts right
now. “Too soon?” as they say. Yes, too soon. Probably it will always be too
soon to ever have this story told in a public setting, but while I’m
considerate enough of their feelings not to post this on my own blog where they
or people they know might see it, I still think it’s worthwhile to get it out
here. Maybe it will help someone, somewhere, who is or who has experienced
something similar. Maybe it will encourage someone to get help. At the very
least I know it will help me, because sharing pain always results in a fabulous
outpouring of support from my interweb friends. You guys are the best, and
Jillsmo is the bestest of the best.
Urgent message received from my 13-year-old nephew:
LITTLE MMIGGG JOEEE CALLL MEEE ITSSS IMPORTANTTTTT
Little Mig Joe is what he and his brother call me. That’s
kind of a long story and not relevant right now.
I figured it had to be IMPORTANTTTTT. I also had two missed
calls from him and in fact, had my phone in my hand to call him back when I got
that text. He never calls me, unless he wants something. Because he’s thirteen,
and that’s how thirteen-year-olds are, mostly too busy for their Little Mig Jo.
Nephew: Is Big
Joe there? [That’s what he and his brother call my husband, part of that same
not relevant story.]
Me: Yeah,
what’s up?
Nephew: Okay,
can you put me on speaker? Are you sitting down? Y’all need to be sitting down.
I could tell from his voice that this was not bad news he
was preparing me for. I have not heard that child so jubilantly excited
in—well, it makes me sad to think how long it’s been.
He won the golf tournament. Actually it was more of a skills
contest than an actual tournament. He’s been going to a clinic at the country
club where all the men in my husband’s family play golf. Big golfers, my
husband’s brother and daddy are. My husband, too, although he doesn’t get to
play nearly as much as they do. He’s the one who got nephew interested in golf
and we bought him his first set of real clubs a couple of Christmases ago. That
may have been the last time I saw the kid so excited.
Anyway, nephew won over all, out of I don’t know how many
kids. Usually there’s thirty or forty participating in the program. He got a
trophy and a medal and I don’t know what all else. He is very proud of himself,
and deservedly so. He shows some real promise, we think.
I’ve been awake all night thinking about him, and his
brother. And their mother. My husband’s sister. My once upon a time best
friend. She died in February. Died on her 43rd birthday, in fact.
I’ve been thinking it should have been her he was so thrilled to be telling
about his victory. Ideally, she should have been there to witness it. That,
however, would be quite unlikely to happen even if she were still alive.
And I’m just more pissed at her than ever. Pissed at the way
she threw her fucking life away with both hands, traded her children for her
habit, lost everything but her insatiable need for drugs and attention.
Her death wasn’t a surprise to anybody, but at the same time
it wasn’t really expected. I mean, who expects a 43-year-old woman who doesn’t
have cancer to die? We had been telling each other for years that we would not
be surprised when we got the call that she had been found in a ditch somewhere.
At least it didn’t happen like that, for the boys’ sake. Well, maybe for the
rest of the family’s sake, too. She died in a hospital. She didn’t go into the
hospital to die. It seemed to be just another of her many, many routine
check-ins. I’ve never been able to decide if she had Munchausen’s
or if being sick was just one more way to get drugs. Maybe it was a combination
of the two. I’m not a psychiatrist, nor do I play one on TV. To my knowledge,
Munchausen’s was never one of her diagnoses or even addressed by any of the
various MDs, shrinks, therapists, etc. she encountered over the years. In the
beginning she wasn’t even sick. She admitted once in rehab (I was there,
participating in “family counseling”) that she had begun faking headaches at
age sixteen to get Demerol shots.
Rehab didn’t take, obviously. None of them. Neither did NA, which I dragged her to. Literally. Like, I
shoved her in my car and drove her to the church where the meetings were held,
marched her into the room and grabbed her when she tried to run right back out.
I sat beside her and held her hand while she stammered out, “I’m Claire, and
I’m an addict,” for the first time, just as I had sat and held her hand during
the births of those two boys. She grew to like NA quite a lot, and the men who
attended the meetings even more. She was easily the most attractive woman there
and she enjoyed the attention and where better to find new drug sources? Most
of the people there were court ordered and not truly committed to “recovery”
any more than she was.
When she was younger, her drug of choice was anything goes.
After she had children, she pretty much stuck to prescription pills. Easier to
hide an addiction, and in her mind it was a more respectable and excusable type
of addiction, I’m sure, except for when she was stealing pills from other
people. People like my husband. There was a time she had even half way persuaded
me to believe he was eating the shit ton of drugs that was disappearing from
his supply at such an alarming rate. He was very, very sick, and I was working
all the time and how could I be sure? And when I caught her in the act of
stealing, saw her with his drugs in her hand with my own two eyes, she still
insisted it wasn’t the way it seemed. Drug addicts are talented liars, and she
was one of the best.
She was very convincing when she regaled doctors about her
chronic pain. She always had oxycontin, xanax, valium, Percocet, hydrocodon,
fentanyl. . . For a while she used her teeth as a way to get pain pills, but
then she ran out of teeth. Thirty-two years old and wearing dentures for the
sake of getting high. Or low, rather. She spent most of her days passed out. I
don’t know what she was so desperately trying to escape from by checking out of
her life like that. After one of her rehab stays, she announced that she had
discovered “recovered” memories and proceeded to name every male member of the
family and as having molested her as a child. Her sister exclaimed indignantly,
“Well, what was wrong with me??? No one ever molested me!” We dismissed this as
more of her outrageous fantasy. We’re not the kind of people to make light of
child molestation, but seriously, there was never a time that it could have
happened. She also told everyone my husband hit her. He never did, but he
should have.
I might have been able to forgive her all that, even for
making me doubt my husband, for the horrendous pain he suffered when he had to
be without his medicine between prescriptions because she had stolen vast
quantities of it, but I could never forgive her for what she did to her
children. She left their father when they were two years old and six weeks old.
That was the probably the best thing she ever did for them. We fixed up the
cabin on our property and she and the babies moved into it. And then we raised
those boys for the next four years as our own while she disappeared for days on
end and was unconscious when she was around. I don’t even remember the event the
made us force her into rehab the first time. She was dating a loser she met in
NA and they were talking about getting married. That and the fact that he had
finally finished school and felt like being a father motivated her ex to sue
for custody of the kids, after virtually ignoring them for four years. She let
them go rather than let him air her dirty laundry in court. I don’t know what
she thought we didn’t already know, or suspect. If I could reach into her grave
and bring her back to life and choke her to death all over again for that, I
would. My babies! It was just like one of those goddamn Lifetime movies, crying
all over the place and them clinging to us and screaming and their so-called
father wrenching them away. We consulted a lawyer and were advised that as aunt
and uncle, we had no standing to get custody ourselves. Our only route would be
to get CPS involved, attempt to
have both parents deemed unfit (which they undoubtedly were, but you never know
what the idiots in charge of these things are going to decide) and then they
would go into the foster system! We decided the devil we knew was better than
the devil we didn’t.
She still had regular visitation back then, which meant we
had regular visitation, since she could rarely be bothered to care for them
when it was her time to have them. They continued to be at our house every
weekend for the next couple of years and she still lived at our address, until
one night, for some reason, she had Nephew with her for the evening. Older
Nephew was spending the night with his cousin, I think. Anyway, around ten that
night our dogs started barking and charging at the front door and the next
thing we knew Nephew was running naked into our bedroom, sobbing and screaming
that he couldn’t find his mama.
He was five at the time. He was terrified of the dark, and
he had run NAKED from her house at the far end of our property to our house,
through brambles and brush and howling dogs in the pitch dark and he was
hysterical. It took everything in me not to be hysterical with rage. I put him
in some underwear and a T-shirt while Husband went to investigate.
Husband returned shaking with rage of his own. He found his
sister in one of the bedrooms passed out in the floor. I guess I should briefly
explain at this time she was living in the trailer house my husband’s parents
had moved onto our land and lived in for a while. Anyway, she and Nephew were
in the master bedroom watching a movie. She told him she would go to his room
to get his pajamas while he got undressed. She went to the other end of the
trailer and fell out in the floor. When she didn’t return, he called for her.
She didn’t respond, he went looking for her. Because the lights were out and
the way the room turns away from the door, he didn’t see her on the floor in
front of the closet when he looked in his room. And naturally he lost his shit.
We all lost our shit that night. We kicked her out and I
never willingly spoke to her again. She really became dead to me that night.
She cried and begged and pleaded and I would not even look at her. I was done.
I’m still done. It caused some awkwardness in the family, to be sure. We had to
at times be in the same room at family gatherings. She always made a point of
speaking to me and I always made a point of not acknowledging it. She never did
get it. Her mother would report to me that Claire would say to her she didn’t
understand why I was still mad at her. I wasn’t mad. I was just done, done with
her lies, done with her thieving, done with her drama, done with her damage.
It was hard on the boys. We talked about it. I never bad
mouthed their mother to them. She was their mother, after all. She loved them
as best she could, even though she wasn’t capable of much. But I didn’t lie or
dismiss their questions, either. It was easier for her to keep her “problem”
hidden from them when they were younger and she wasted no opportunity in
painting me as the bad guy, but as they got older, they figured it out. I knew
they would. In the months before she died, there were a few bad episodes when
she was staying with them at their dad’s house while he worked. She hit Older
Nephew in the face with a hair dryer. She pulled all their clothes out of the
closet and threw them in the bathtub. She didn’t recognize them when they tried
to talk to her. She ran around in the yard in her nightgown and bare feet in
the snow. That time they called us. We went over and Husband called 911. They
got to see her fight two policemen as they wrestled her to a stretcher and
strapped her down.
For the last several years her preferred complaint for
hospitalization and acquiring drugs was bladder infection. Who the fuck gets
hospitalized for a damn bladder infection? I suspect early on she was doing
things to make herself get an infection, and because she never took medication
as it was prescribed (eat all the pain pills, chase them with a couple of the
antibiotic ones), she developed a highly resistant bacteria, and because she
was in and out of the hospital so much, she contracted MRSA. This last
time she was in the hospital, she had gone in for fluids and IV antibiotics.
She was lucid and ambulatory and all that. Someone came in to take her vitals
on a routine check in the wee hours of the morning and found her barely
breathing on the floor. There were pills scattered all around her. They put her
in ICU where they hooked her up to a vent to keep her breathing, but the EEG
showed there was no brain activity. Her parents (her dad, mostly. He’s been
pretty much in denial about her for years) discussed what to do for a day and
agreed it was best to let her go.
That brain
damaged, ravaged corpse was once a beautiful, brilliant, hilarious woman. She
was once a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother. She was once my best friend.
Drugs are bad, kids. Well, drugs can be okay. But if you
feel the desperate need to abuse them the way she did, you’re fucked up and you
need to stop that shit. It breaks my heart that she apparently never thought
she was worthwhile enough to stop for, but it makes me mad as hell that she
didn’t think her kids were.
