Lessons in Lesions

More than one thing can be true at once. Days can be long and years can be short. Loss can be filling, and abundance not enough. Rain can fall from a sunny sky, and tulips can blossom in a spring snow. Swenny can celebrate thirty-eight months of sobriety and still get liver cancer.

Because there is harmony in contradiction, we can want no one to know, and then tell everyone: Swenny has cancer. It was found early, and his prognosis is hopeful. His sobriety awards him treatment options that would have otherwise been unavailable, including possibly a liver transplant.

While he endures testing and treatment, I scour for information about primary liver cancer, Child Pugh scores, interventional radiation, and the difference between the portal vein, the superior mesenteric vein, and the power of a thrombosis to change everything. What I haven’t found in my research, though, is a story like ours, where a girl meets a boy, and they live happily ever after, having saved the best for last.

Merci

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

Never Endings

I’m not sure if I escaped alcoholism, or if it escaped me. Last week, Swenny marked his second year of sobriety. The bottles have disappeared and his shaking hands have stilled. We have settled back into life together, but with a standard of politeness unusual for a married couple of 31 years.

He has found in his recovery an acceptance for what is; an acceptance that I only ever found in his drinking. I am in anticipation of a relapse, and search for bottles that I know I will not find. Old habits die hard because for so long, the only certainty I had was that we would never be where we are today.

Swenny is sober, and I am in denial. I have yet to lend myself to his amends, and when that feels unfair, I draw from the grace I have earned for the time I need to get within earshot of what he will say. For now, I am satisfied with knowing what he might say.
He outpaces me in his recovery, but stays within reach. When he sees my doubts, he raises them like a seasoned player in a game of cards in which every hand has been played. When he hears me rummaging in the cabinets for bottles, he lets me, knowing the evidence of his continued sobriety will speak for itself. When we get in the car, he takes the wheel. When we clean, he vacuums, and when we walk the dog, he holds the leash.

Little things matter, but big things matter more. When my Mom entered hospice care last summer, he spent his Tuesdays off with her. In her final weeks, they talked about golfing and gardening, pizza, weather, and me. Up until the very end, she shared my suspicions about the state of his recovery, and spent her worry remembering conversations they never had about the detriment of his alcoholism to our family. She died believing that she had told him of the hurt his drinking had caused, and of her heartache about the diminishment of our marriage as a result.

In reality, she was his staunchest supporter, believing that he had it within himself to stop. She waivered, though, about whether he would, struggling at times to believe me when I told her that he had.

Proof sometimes comes too late. She died on a Saturday morning, alone while we were at home preparing to visit. He shared their final Tuesday together with our daughter, being present for their last goodbye before the festivities of a friend’s wedding took her for the remainder of the week. He gave the rest of his Tuesday to my sister and me, the rightful owners of what time our mom had left.

A week and a day later, on a perfect August morning, I sat graveside with her casket in front of me and my dad’s 11-year-old cremains in my lap. The weight of what was felt heavier than whatever was to come. Because next to me stood Swenny. Sober Swenny.

moons and junes and ferris wheels, the dizzy dancing way that you feel. as every fairy tale comes real ~ both sides now

The Company We Keep

There is a knowing when we are in the company of someone like us. Someone who loves or has loved a person with alcoholism. In a room filled with indistinct chatter, we make sense. At least to one another. Without subtitles, without translation, and without explanation, there is meaning in our midst.

At first, though, we stand alone, with a secret too overwhelming to share, and too heavy to keep. So we parcel it. Word-by-word, page-by-page, and essay-by-essay. Before long, our room is full of people for whom the story we tell is so familiar it needs no forward. And so without preface, they accept it – and us.

I deliberately did not cast far with Swenny and Cher. It was initially intended for an audience of one: it was intended for me. After sharing it with a few close friends and colleagues, I heard from their friends and colleagues about their experiences loving someone with alcoholism. With surprise, I reached thousands of strangers, leaders in recovery, and an actress well-known for her own struggles with addiction. Readers from Estonia, Nigeria, France, and Tanzania had me wondering about their stories, and which hashtag reeled them.

They reached me, too. Some stayed for the duration: through three home addresses, through one high school and two college graduations, through jobs lost, and through jobs gained. Through a failed separation that split the difference on the most recent five of thirty wedding anniversaries. Through a diagnosis of cirrhosis that took eighteen months of worsening symptoms before presenting as the bottom Swenny needed to turn his stops and starts of sobriety into something more lasting: a full year without drinking.

Sobriety is fleeting. I know this having written too often about it, hurriedly and in preparation for its end. Recovery, though, feels different. It deserves to be written about slowly and with the time allowed by its permanence.

But not today.

Today is for knowing when to move on, with gratitude for this community of writers and readers with a language that is ours alone, and with an accent that only we understand. We know why we stay, and never question when we don’t. We share our happy endings, even when they are imagined and seemingly out of reach. We share our losses, risking renewed hurt in knowing that on any given day, someone is reading about them for the first time.

I hope they find here what they are looking for: a story like theirs with an ending they can live with. I hope they know, too, that the community they have found is broken, but beautiful. Because while loving an alcoholic is not easy, no one does it better than us.

Swenny and Cher

Unintoxicated

This has remained untouched for so long that it feels like time to bid it adieu. Swenny and I have come to the soft landing for which I have long wrote, but for which I had all but lost hope. And which I have hesitated to acknowledge.

Sobriety can be fleeting; a lesson I learned the hard way. Along with knowing that all it takes to relapse is a moment of believing that it couldn’t happen. At least not again. And when statistics show that only one in ten people with alcoholism ever achieve long term recovery, confidence becomes an enabler of believing that your alcoholic is the one. Being bold enough to say so out loud only invites relapses that worsen in their severity and consequences, placing recovery further and further out of reach.

Still, I am here. In a state of believing, that is becoming one of certainty, that it is finally over. Swenny is sober. In less than a month, he will celebrate one year. Next, he will celebrate two. Then three, four and someday five. Eventually, his sober anniversaries will be counted in decades not years. Along the way, the attendees of his twice weekly 12-step meetings will come and go as they seek their own happy endings. Steadfast members like him will hold space for the new guys who bring stories all their own, nodding with appreciation for arcs that parralel theirs, indistinguishable sans the timestamps, places, and players in the memories they are missing.

I used to come here to line with words the path I wanted us to follow. Too often, though, I’d find us off course, only to reset, discouraged. So when I lost my words, I stopped. Swenny found them, and is now leading the way without misstep. When I wasn’t ready to hear his amends, he found new ways to make them. Not with words, but with his complete and unintoxicated presence. And when I needed space, he gave that instead.

One evening, though, he sought me. I was lying down after a long day, and when he found me, he laid next to me and asked, “What have I missed?”

This year’s love had better last. I’ve been waiting on my own too long. ~ David Gray

And then

And then he came home. Two-and-a-half years after leaving to work on his sobriety, Swenny is back.

His clothes are put away, and his car is parked in the driveway. The food he brings home doesn’t fit with mine, and our morning routines sometimes collide. After almost 30 years of marriage, we are like strangers. We have yet to share a hug, and the three words that once came easily have not echoed from the walls of the house we now share.

Is it because of a lack of, or a longing for? Has the meaning of those seven letters and three spaces gotten lost in the chaos of the past few years? Or is it because for some things, there is no translation?

Just before Swenny moved home, summer became unexpectedly harrowing. Life started to consume us in a way that alcoholism alone once did. Just as I was putting to rest the logistics of moving my Mom into an assisted living community more than a year ago, Swenny became sick as a result of his cirrhosis. Ascites built, and then drained to any and all places between his abdomen and feet. He missed work, and test after test could not prescribe relief. We continued with plans for a vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine, a 25-hour drive from home, and when he became sick on our first night away, I questioned whether to continue. While he slept, I drove and considered what to do if his ascites were infected, or the strain from their weight turned a pull into a tear. We kept going, and our destination on a North Atlantic bay dotted with lobster boats was the perfect antidote to the worry I was borrowing. Worry about advanced liver disease and the complications that seem either ever-present or always threatening. Within the quietness of our estrangement we laughed over a dinner of blueberry pie and caught up on rocks jutting into Jordan Pond. In the evening, we walked forever on a sandbar that welcomed us like a mat at the home of a low tide, allowing us to catch a sunset far from the shoreline of the morning.

The Monday after we returned home, I started a new job. By that Wednesday, we received a text from our daughter who, while vacationing with friends in Maine, fell hiking and broke her leg. Healing, surgery, and more healing has her staying at home until she can bear weight. Our son moved to a new city to begin graduate school and my Mom’s dementia worsened. Throughout, though, Swenny has remained committed to his sobriety. He attends meetings, works with his sponsor and keeps in touch with his former housemates. While he works on the the Twelve Steps, I try to make space for his recovery. The best I can do, though, is to hold it…for him and for Step 9.

I am not ready for his amends. When he asks me why, all I can do is shake my head from unknowing to no. As much as alcoholism persists, recovery laps. Back and forth like an ocean tide, it reveals what drinking tried to drown. Our marriage, our family, his conscience. Until I can hear his amends as more than words that form an apology to clear his mind, I’ll hold space for the moment when I can shape them into the translation that is still lost at sea.

Storytime

I know my good fortune in being married to an alcoholic who is non-violent, high-functioning and without repercussions of a criminal record. I have been told by people who know him best that Swenny is a good person. I have also been told by well-meaning outsiders that it would be easier if he were not, because then I could go.

If that was my goal, though, I would never have come here. To the place where I have written to make sense of something about which I could make none. To face something from which I had always looked away, and to pull toward me a life that I had been watching from a distance.

Here, my life as someone who loves a person with alcoholism has played out. I have chronicled relapses and enablement with essays as a measure of how much we could take and remain. Even after alcoholism made its grip permanent with cirrhosis complete with complications, ours has remained a story about drinking.

Now, though, it has the potential to be about recovery. Swenny has been sober for more than three months, and is looking back to see what he has missed. In order to move forward, I am filling in the blanks. Those conversations are difficult. And necessary.

He recently opened one by noting how bad things could have been. People he has met in recovery have stories that are so harrowing, it’s a wonder that they are here to tell them. When he shakes his head with an air of relief and superiority that those stories aren’t his, I bring him into ours.

Four houses ago, when we were a family kept busy by school, sports and work, I would fall into bed after our kids but before Swenny. Night after night, I would hear him walk down into the basement. Over time, I would hear him rummaging in our air returns. Then nothing. Never once did I hear him come back upstairs, so in the middle of the night, I would go looking for him. There he would be, asleep in a bucket chair with a glass of lemonade, kept cool by the temperature of the room, next to him. He would drink vodka from the bottle, return it to the vent, chase it with Crystal Light and pass out. Every night.

When I told him this story, he asked why I never woke him up. “I tried,” I said. “But couldn’t.”

I have hundreds of stories like this. And the time is right for him to hear them. Because even though our pain wasn’t inflicted by one or more catastrophic events, but instead by a series of small though serious occasions, the wound still weeps.

I remember shots without a chaser

Man Overboard: Blink-182

Five Days in February

For five days recently, Swenny and I lived together. A Valentine’s Eve fall left him with a boxer’s break to his left hand. Upon discharge from the emergency room, he was provided with a list of over-the-counter pain meds to take, and a prescription for oxycodone. His cirrhosis limits his over-the-counter options, so he took a Tylenol and returned to his sober house late Saturday night after sharing with me an 11:30 p.m. dinner eaten hurriedly, the time of his curfew long past. Out of respect for his sober house mates and rules of living there, he left the oxycodone prescription unfilled.

By Sunday, his pain was extreme. After discussing it with the operator of the house where he is living, he decided to take a temporary leave to allow the pain medication he needed, understanding that he could return after it was out of his system. Needing a place to stay, he came home.

For five days, we played house. We became reacquainted. With each other and with our comings; our goings. With morning routines and nighttime rituals. He has an electric gum cleaner and likes the heat up high. He makes a perfectly strong cup of coffee and delivers it to my bedside table. I let him sleep while I shoveled, and recommended books from our shelves. When I arrived home after work at night, he had dinner waiting.

Throughout his stay, Swenny maintained his commitment to daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He made time to call his younger brother and father to share about his disease and his decision to move to a sober living facility. One night, we talked about his addiction and its affect on us and our family. I reminded him of the people who remain on his side while he considers how best to respond to the well-intended messages that he has so far left unanswered.

By Wednesday, we resembled a couple. For two years, his side of the bed has been empty. The sheets have stayed tightly tucked; the pillows perfectly stacked. When he asked four days in if I would like company upstairs, I said, of course, yes. While the dog took his rightful place between us, I realized that having the warmth of another person – my person – sleeping next to me was something that I missed more than I knew. When he announced the next morning that he was returning to his sober house, I was sorry. Sorry to see him go. And sorry that he had to.

But he did…

Because our house is still held in place by chance, strengthened only by his determination and my belief that what we had for a working week was more than house play. It was about possibility more than pretending.

For five days in February, we were a rendering: of a couple, of a marriage. Of what could still be.

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” ~ C.S. Lewis

Everything in Between

Alcoholism is made of extremes. Its highs and lows are well-documented, and of what its stories are made. Its tales, though, are in the everyday. Between the fallout of wavering expectations and evitable consequences, life goes on.

For Swenny and me, the cost of alcoholism has been significant. We have lost friends, and of others we let go. Family members are unsure about how to spend time with us, and us with them. Even within our family of four, years of wear-and-tear have left us threadbare.

With peaks that have become ever less distinguishable from valleys, our range of movement has become limited. Each ultimatum has left us with fewer steps to take, and with nowhere else to go. Somehow, though, we have found room to take the stakes higher. And are now living in the aftermath of the latest ultimatum: a collection of final offers in a decade-long negotiation that has found us here.

It was almost two years ago when Swenny and I sat together at a sober house being told that he could not move in until he sought recovery. His physical condition, combined with a positive breathalyzer taken during a tour, confirmed that he needed more help than they could provide. We discussed a course of action in which he would be welcome there that included twenty-eight days at an inpatient rehabilitation center. Swenny considered this carefully. As I pushed for him to go – to do the hard work of recovery that he hadn’t yet – he pushed back, finding a friend in recovery to stay with while he worked on his sobriety.

Despite trying, he continued to drink. Since living apart wasn’t consequence enough, I filed for separation in a gesture intended to catch his attention. In answer, he continued to drink. In what was becoming a battle of wills, fate delivered the next blow: a diagnosis of advanced liver disease. To cope, he continued to drink. As scopes and scans measured time, he continued to drink. As our date of separation approached, he continued to drink. Cirrhotic ascites upped the ante, and he continued to drink.

Given a list of recovery programs by his doctor in August, he continued to drink, procrastinating any move to ensure that day-to-day he would be present. For getaways, birthdays, and walks with the dog. For our son’s graduation and Christmas Day.

His insistence on the everyday, though, has been costly. Five months have been spent further damaging his liver. And our already precarious marriage by denying that he is drinking, even as his carefully procured alcohol waits for him on ice in his closet a block away. Our separation continuing indefinitely; our life’s equity somehow still intact.

And while the joy of the everyday is undeniable, it doesn’t compare to what’s possible when the highs and lows are allowed to arc in the direction of hope. Building each day toward a story worth telling.

Tomorrow, Swenny is following that arc. With a grand gesture of his own, he is moving to a sober house. Neither a peak nor a valley, it is simply necessary. A decision he arrived to alone. A step toward recovery. And a chance to recapture everything in between.

I just want you to know that this is me trying. At least I’m trying. ~ Taylor Swift

Quieting

Christmas fell away quickly. The house emptied of my children and Swenny, and the blanket of presents beneath the tree went with them. Without errands to run and gifts to wrap, my attention took me home. It is disquieting to be here alone, especially after spending two days functioning as a family with only one front door.

Aloneness, though, is what I need most. Not as a state of being, but as a place to be. Where I am unreachable except by my own expectations. Where I am closed away from responsibility for the assumptions of others about what would make my life good. Where I don’t need another disappointment to confirm the importance of my own happiness. Where I can let go of my share in Swenny’s alcoholism.

For a moment today, I had time to spend. So I silenced my calls and shut my eyes. I woke up wanting to make room for something else.

Even in the quietest moments I wish I knew what I had to do. ~ Supertramp