There is a place where I put the things of which I cannot make sense. It’s where I might find the moment long ago when Swenny chuckled behind me as I put our beautiful dog to rest, or the early morning hours before my mom died, leaving me without another chance to say goodbye. It’s where I might find the lovely mind of my niece interrupted by seizures, or the storm that laid my favorite willow tree across the lagoon it once shaded.
It’s where I might find the before and after of alcoholism, because while living this story, I missed the forward, and the afterward is escaping me. Almost three years removed from Swenny’s last drink, I have yet to come to terms with it. I have drinking dreams. I search for bottles. I think about exit strategies. And I resent that I feel unjustified in any of it.
How do I get from then to now? From a period defined by the chaos of alcoholism to one that is so still it’s hard to move?
Because I don’t know, I keep returning to then. It was a time well-worn and while it was difficult, I miss it. It was predictable, and it was measured. Mostly in costs for which I became adept at budgeting, knowing the currencies I could use for payment. Like time spent together, and time spent apart. In moves made together, and in those that took us apart. In the fraying of our family, and in the worry for Swenny’s livelihood and for his life.
With nothing on which to spend my worry, I find myself saving it for when my nightmares come true. To the day when the door behind which I keep the things I can’t face opens to reveal Swenny, holding a bottle of vodka and shaking the stillness to which I am becoming accustomed. Even testing the limits of happiness to see how far I can go before the inevitability of it all returns me to then.
In the last year, happiness has seemed limitless. For a week in Vieques, Puerto Rico, Swenny and I spent slow mornings walking alongside wild horses, retreating from the sun under picture-perfect palm trees, walking through muddied trails to a black sand beach that we didn’t have to share, and stargazing from kayaks in the middle of a bioluminescent bay.
Within a day of landing home, he began work as a substance abuse counselor, a job with a brutal start time but with satisfaction that makes his 3:30 a.m. alarm tolerable. Home brought concerts, ferris wheel rides, river cruises, movies, and every season of NYPD Blue, the everyday of now a welcome relief from the reality we lived for the thirty years prior.
We visited London, where we fell back so our kids could lead the way, but with Swenny ensuring I made it to the Royal Ballet. And the kids and me, on a day trip to Oxford, falling behind him as he traced the steps his grandfather took 100 years ago while a Rhodes Scholar. In Paris, when the kids explored without us, we experienced the City of Lights from the bridges above the Seine, reminded that no matter where in the world we are, we are.
Even in the beautiful moments that Swenny’s sobriety has made and continues to make possible, I struggle to trust in their continuum. Recovery is precarious, and for it to be real, for it to be sustainable, I need to do my part. I need to allow the nightmares that haunt me to become the dreams that call me.
Oh, you know I’m still afraid. I’m still crazy and I’m still scared. ~ Florence & The Machine
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