About a year before Steph died, I joined a group for codependents — and addicts of all stripes. It was called “Celebrate Recovery” and was held at a local church, which I also joined in a misguided need for belonging. I’ve never truly stopped believing in a higher power, but church has always been an issue for me as an adult. My ex-husband scoffed at the idea of me going to church. A lapsed Catholic and avowed atheist, he didn’t hesitate to point out to me that if I thought I was going to heaven, I could think again. After all, I was gay. Am gay. It was cruel, but I think in his own way, he was trying to tell me that the church hadn’t changed, even if I had wished for it to.
But the recovery group seemed like a perfect idea. I was at a loss as to how to help Steph. And I was so checked out of my marriage that I didn’t see my husband’s drinking problem. I just knew that he was angry all the time, and I figured it was my fault because he took it out on me. He took it out on her, too. Secretly, he was taking it out on himself. He was deeply unhappy, and I know that he wanted something I just couldn’t give him. A friend pointed out one time that in all my pictures from those last years of my marriage, I never smiled. Even if I tried to, the smile never went to my eyes. When I started looking at all those pictures, I saw that she was right. How sad was that? Yet I was trying so hard to fit into what everyone wanted me to be. That’s why it sets me off now when anyone calls being gay a “choice.” No, it’s not a choice. You don’t choose this. We would all choose an easier life if we could. I was married for twenty-seven years and was with him for three years before that. All that time, I was struggling with trying to fit this very square peg into a very round hole.
Had I followed my own words from high school – “I never want to get married. I’m over men.” – then what might my life have been? No matter. I didn’t, and I somehow found everything I ever wanted anyway. My kids were my whole life. Did I fail them? Yes, at times. But did I love them? Do I love them? No question. Absolutely.
But Steph was lost, so lost. It was the mental illness. It was the drinking. It was her carelessness with pills. She was in a car accident during her community college years. Someone T-boned her car and left her with lingering back pain. That’s how the pills started. But the drinking started in high school, something I found out much later from the girl who was her best friend. I found out that her first boyfriend got her started, and her addictive personality took over from there. Of course, Paul and I had drinks from time to time with friends or when out at dinner, but she never saw us drunk. Though I drank pretty heavily when I was on business travel, it didn’t stick with me, and I never did that at home. My father was an alcoholic, though, and it turns out my husband was, too. I’ll never know how much he drank around the kids when I was on travel, and I’m too afraid to ask. Addiction destroys families. I needed to find a way out of all those learned behaviors from growing up around people who abused substances.
So I joined the recovery group, and the church. I took it seriously. I went to the group meetings before the Sunday service. I got a sponsor. I worked the steps. I learned to “detach with love.” (Oof, that’s one that haunted me for years after Steph died. Did I do it right? Did I detach too much?)
I thought these women in the group (the men had their own group) were my friends. In a way, they were, but I didn’t realize that their friendship was dependent on me being who they needed me to be.
Through my work in recovery, I learned to draw a line in the sand with my daughter. I got up the nerve to tell her, after she drank her way through Thanksgiving dinner in 2008, that she wasn’t welcome for Christmas unless she stayed sober while at our house. I was prepared for her to tell me to fuck off, and for her to not show up. But to my surprise, she called the week before Christmas and said she would come to dinner with us and would open presents with us and would refrain from drinking that day. In the pictures I took at dinner, she never looked up at the camera. She never smiled. But oh, she was beautiful anyway. Alabaster skin. Glossy black hair. Rouged lips. She could have been Snow White.
I knew that when she left, she would go get hammered, but I was grateful that we got to spend some time with her while she was sober. I asked her to get help. I told her we would figure out a way to get her into rehab, if she wanted that. She didn’t. I told her that one of my friends from my own recovery group was also in AA and could take her to a meeting. She declined. So I wished her a merry Christmas and said goodbye.
On New Year’s Eve, though, she showed up at the door. She said she was ready to get sober. It felt like the miracle I’d been praying for. She asked if I could give her my friend’s number, and I did so, happily. I knew that the local group was having a sober New Year’s Eve party. To my delight, my friend offered to pick Steph up and take her to the party. Later I learned that Steph had helped set up. She started going to a meeting every morning and making the coffee before everyone else arrived. She made herself known and made herself useful. Her years as a barista made her very popular around the coffee station, but her sweetness made her loved. She had her 90-day chip in her purse the day she died. She had just received it a few days before. Her last accomplishment.
For the funeral, my friends, including the one who had taken Steph to her first meeting, rallied around me. We held the memorial service at the church. My husband was in shock. I was in shock. We always knew this was a possibility, but that doesn’t prepare you. Parents of children who suffer from substance abuse will always say they know that someday the knock might come at the door or the phone might ring with the news that their child has died. We all think that prepares us. We all think we’re braced for the worst. But that’s a lie we tell ourselves and others. There is no bracing for this impact. There is no preparation that steels you to the reality when it hits. And there is no saving someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
While we were at the memorial service, one of my friends from group arranged for her husband, who was the manager of the local Macaroni Grill, to cater the gathering at our house. We came home from church, bleak and unable to speak much, to a house filled with my friends and Sean’s friends. The kitchen and the table were covered with trays of food, paper plates, plasticware, and napkins. Bottles of sparkling water were in the refrigerator. I was surprised and grateful. Afterward, I offered to pay, but my friend and her husband would not hear of it.
I was doubly sad when she later distanced herself from me. You see, I came out in group the month after Stephanie died. I said, “I’m tired of hiding. I want to live my life, so I need to be real so that I can get healthy. I’m gay.”
The room went silent. Some of the women stared. Some looked down at their laps. No one else wanted to share a story after that. I had effectively shut down the meeting. The group leader led us in a long prayer that each contributed to. My sponsor said little during the prayer, during the church service, or afterward. The chill was so profound that I pulled back. I continued to work on my own recovery, but soon I left for what was supposed to be a two-week trip to the mountains, and I didn’t come back. That was me, broken.
My sponsor and the friend whose husband catered the gathering after the funeral each called me several times after I left. They were trying to talk some sense into me. They thought I could go home and repair my marriage. What they didn’t know is that my husband had already started dating the woman he would eventually marry. He hated me. There was no repairing the marriage; that much he had made clear. And I was living in a split reality. I’d never known such a strange feeling, and I secretly wondered if I had gone crazy.
I guess in a way I had. I still can’t believe I drove away from my son when he needed me.
But that was a very long time ago. Nearly fifteen years. I’ve come a long way since then and have found a life I enjoy. I can’t go so far as to say I love my life, because I’m still striving to get to that, but I can say I enjoy it. Being single suits me, and now that I’m repairing my diet and my lifestyle (speaking only of health here, because being gay is not a lifestyle, to be clear), I feel hopeful for the first time in a long time. My mind is clearer. My body feels better than it has in many years.
After Steph died, first I lost weight, and then I regained it and reached the heaviest I’ve ever been. I yo-yo dieted for a while. Up. Down. Up again. And then I got cancer, and I went through a brutal 14 months of treatment, followed by trying to regain my strength. It has been harder to regain my mental strength and energy than I thought it would be. It’s been hard to find any hope in me that the cancer is really gone, because it was very bad.
This year I didn’t make any real resolutions for the new year, but after watching a documentary, “You Are What You Eat”, about a scientific study of twins, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try changing my diet. My COPD was worse, some heart tests were worse, and my weight was creeping toward 200 again. I had no energy, and generally, Friday afternoons were very hard for me to get through at work. I was often napping after work (if not at lunchtime), and then going to bed by 8 o’clock, sometimes earlier. I felt as though I couldn’t do the basics of life anymore. I was having my groceries delivered and was rarely cooking a meal for myself. I needed the convenience foods. I’d stopped making sure I was getting vegetables with my evening meal. I would sometimes consume a couple of bags of Dove chocolate per week. I was drinking sodas daily, for the caffeine and for the sugar boost. My energy just wasn’t there.
I went through many medical tests, trying to figure out what was wrong. I felt horrible. I could barely get off the couch. Some days the Apple Watch only recorded about 500 steps. That’s a far cry from the 2-mile walks I used to take with my dog.
The doctors kept offering more and more medication. All they really found in all the blood tests was a B12 deficiency, an A1C value that was climbing, inflammation that was climbing, lipids that were climbing, and a blood pressure that was poorly controlled (the main reason for the worsening heart). I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, as they say. All the energy I had was being put toward work, and yet some days I felt foggy and so very tired. By the end of 2023, I was grouchy, angry, and just ready for retirement. But if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t sure I would even have the energy in retirement to write my books, which is what I have set as my goal. Every Saturday, and sometimes Sunday, too, I needed at least one nap, after sleeping in and going to bed early. I can’t really express how sick I was. Everything felt like too much, because my body felt like it was dying.
What could it hurt to try something different? What could it hurt to start treating myself the way I would have treated one of my kids? Steph was a vegetarian and sometimes a vegan. She drove me a little nuts with it sometimes, but I joined her in that way of eating for a time. I just never connected the dots that I was doing better then, not because of age but because of diet.
So now I’ve started feeding myself properly again, and though it’s only been a few weeks, I feel so much better. I didn’t need a nap this week except for Tuesday after work, because I had a serious allergic reaction to cashews, now that I’ve added some nuts back into my diet. I’ve loved cashews all my life, but I hadn’t had any in awhile. They’re off the list now. I am on a course of steroids and have an Epi-pen for emergencies. But other than that blip, I feel like I did in my 40s. My blood pressure was normal at the last doctor’s appointment on Thursday. I’m not having heart palpitations.
And I don’t think this is what they call, in the recovery rooms, a “pink cloud.” I think my body is actually on the road to recovery. I had to take charge of my own health, because modern medicine was getting me nowhere.
Last week at the grocery store (yep, doing my own shopping again), I was in the checkout line behind a man with a very full cart. I got the feeling he was buying for a family, not just because of the amount of food in the cart but because there were lots of individual snacks like you might pack into a lunchbox. What I didn’t see were any fruits or vegetables – not fresh, not frozen. It was package after package of processed, nutritionless junk. A dozen 2-liter bottles of Sun Drop, Hostess Sno-Balls, Lance crackers, beef jerky, frozen chicken nuggets, ice cream, and so on. The Sun Drop bottles were the only green thing in the cart. Oh, and several gallons of milk. I’m noticing things like that now.
I thought about how poorly I had been eating since I moved here. All the wrong choices. Fast food for dinner sometimes because I was tired or harried and just needed to put something in my stomach. But it never satisfied me. Oh sure, it would fill my stomach, give me indigestion, and fool me into thinking I was getting the protein I needed. I kept eating, though, because I guess my body was trying to get me to put something in my mouth that it could use. What my eating habits were really doing was clogging my arteries, wrecking my microbiome, slowing my digestive tract, and leaving me bloated and feeling like my time was running out.
I’ve decided I deserve better than that. I’m taking care of me now. Making amends to myself. Often, in recovery, we forget that we owe amends to ourself as well as to any others we think we’ve harmed. I’ve harmed myself. A lot.
As a bonus, my son has decided to do this with me. He hasn’t quite felt the energy boost yet, but then again, I don’t think his health was quite as far gone as mine. We met for lunch today. Our first Asian restaurant choice wasn’t open for lunch, so we drove to another one. We ordered vegetarian gyoza and tofu-based entrees. I’ll have enough left for dinner tonight, and I have even more leftovers from cooking dinner last night for us. He’s a plate cleaner. No leftovers for him. Yet, despite the fact he consumes more calories (he’s much bigger than I am), he’s losing weight, as am I. He has always liked vegetables and fruit, because he grew up eating them, unlike so many of our youth. He’s not picky.
I’m very happy he’s doing this. I’m able to make some amends to him, too, by modeling healthier behavior. And long after I’m gone, I hope he’ll continue to care for himself. I’d like to know that something I did mattered to both of us.
My recovery continues.
Namaste, Jude
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