The musical prophet Jennifer Love Hewitt once posed the question, “How do I deal?” I apologize for the random reference, but I have a mental glitch which forces me to remember every terrible song ever released by a television star. I also have alcoholism which means, sorry J-Love, that when it comes to “dealing,” my strategy is simple: I don’t.
I’ve spent my 40-something years on the planet trying my damnedest to avoid life’s unsavory moments. For example, I once got in a car accident and then immediately took a nap instead of dealing with the literal wreckage right in front of me. Normally, I would just take handfuls of drugs and buckets of booze to obliterate reality. For years, I tried to drink away the death of my favorite grandfather who died in 1997. Then when I got sober in 2009, his death (and a mountain of other things) were still there and they still hurt like hell. Then when his wife, my grandmother, died last month, I had to do the unthinkable: I had to deal.
After 15 years in Los Angeles, where I bottomed out and then got sober, I left and found myself living in the Denver neighborhood where I grew up. Thanks to extensive exorcisms on my past, I’d gotten over my childhood stuff. Not because I’m some emotionally evolved guru but because I needed to if I wanted to figure out why my life was a booze drenched disaster. The bonus of living here in 2016 is that I get to see my childhood with fresh eyes and with an acceptance I never thought possible when I was bitching about how terrible my past was in LA dive bars. Another bonus? My grandmother lived right up the street.
This ninja-level organizer who had eight children, 10 rotating weekly social commitments and dozens of friends was a saving grace when I was growing up a block away in an alcoholic home. Sensing everything wasn’t okay on the ranch, she and my grandfather often took me and my siblings on trips to the mountains, to McDonalds for Happy Meals or to look at Christmas lights. Their mission was one filled with seemingly simple gestures aimed to reinforce the idea that our lives might be crazy but we were always loved.
Now sober and middle-aged, I welcomed the opportunity to hang out with my grandmother and help her with simple stuff: checking emails, transcribing her writings and anything digital that might be exhausting for an 89-year-old. I was no in way trying to be a saint or win some kind of “Greatest Grandkid” award. I just considered it a tiny way to repay for her all that she’d done. Plus, she was hilarious and I liked spending time with her.
Over the last year, I watched her become increasingly frail. I had more than one tear-filled conversation with my husband about how I thought our time with Grandma was ticking away. When she died on October 8th, I entered uncharted territory as a grown up, sober person without the cocaine and tequila force-field to protect me from death and all of the crazy ass stuff it brings with it.
Weird. That’s the only word I can describe death with. Sorry, I’m not freaking Elisabeth Kübler-Ross but “weird” really covers the whole experience. The act of dying itself is weird. She had this very lovely farewell where she got to say goodbye in her home for a week before checking out of the hotel permanently, but the whole thing was surreal and—yes—weird. People popping in at all hours to say goodbye to Grandma but to also tell me about some obscure story from my childhood or to explain how they knew her and my massive Catholic family. The weirdness just trickled down. Getting somebody to pick up the body? Weird. The random stuff people bring over to eat? Weird. My nights of erratic sleep filled with dreams about ghosts? Weird. The conversations you have with neighbors about your grandmother dying? Weird and sometimes funny, like the one I had with my 90-year old landlord, who has known my grandmother since the 1980s. He’s a sweet man who is also incredibly hard of hearing, so our conversations usually consist of what can best be described as friendly yelling. He called me after she’d been on her deathbed for several days. “Your grandmother is dying!” he shouted. “Yes. I know. Thanks for calling,” I shouted back. My husband and I laughed at how horrible it would have been if this was actually how the news was broken to me.
The weirdness was compacted by the fact that I was present for all of it. Somehow, I rolled with every one of the weird, touching and WTF punches without picking up a drink. Still, I drank and used drugs for 20 years so I’d be failing at this whole rigorous honesty thing if I said it didn’t cross my mind. Look, “the obsession has been removed” as the kids say in meetings, but I’m also systematically to my core an addict. The reality is I’m going to think about drinking or doing drugs. Not all of the time (and now, not without playing the tape through on how disastrous it would be), but it’s going to come up.
I took a walk outside a couple of days after she died and noticed empty wine bottles, clearly enjoyed by a family member of mine who didn’t win the alcoholic lottery like I had. For two seconds, I sighed and thought, “Must be nice.” Then I remembered that me drinking wine was never nice or the classy, stemware on the French Riviera experience. My drinking was more of the two dollar Trader Joe’s bottle on my porch under a veil of regret and bitterness variety. I also thought smoking looked pretty damned fantastic—to return to my chain-smoking, smack-talking Bette Davis roots in a time of personal despair seemed like a romantic notion. But I never wanted just one cigarette, I want to smoke all of them. Just go ahead and back that truck filled with Parliaments into the driveway and let me have at it. And just like that, the romance of being able to “take the edge off” with a few drinks or a couple of cigarettes disappears. Plus, this “edge” that we’re all trying desperately to take off is kind of amazing.
Even though I knew she was dying, my heart was unequivocally broken. I had lost my neighbor, cheerleader, my grandmother and my friend who was desperately in love with my husband and thrilled that I found sobriety. It was a kind of hurt I hadn’t felt in my nearly eight years sober, and frankly, it sucked. I cried so much—and am not entirely out of the crying woods just yet. I kept texting sober friends and saying, “I don’t know how I’m getting through this.” To which they’d reply, “But you are” or “Honey, I’m praying for you.” It was devastating and beautiful, too.
I’m broken, but I’ve also never felt as loved and supported as I have in the last few months. The thing about the weirdness, sadness and laughter is that all of it feels appropriate. It feels like I’m facing something difficult without chemicals to hide behind. It feels authentic. It feels like, for the first time in my life, I’m dealing with it.
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