My friend and intrepid traveling companion Brett Caraway wrote this piece about alcoholism during our journey up to Canada. It is the product of his path to understanding over the past year, and has also been the subject of many of our long talks over the past few months. Every bit of what Brett wrote here resonated deeply with me. These are the subjects I have been grappling with understanding every single day. If you want to truly understand where my heart and mind are at right now, please take a moment to read further.

My Thoughts on Alcoholism and Surrender

“The drinks don’t taste the same anymore. I used to enjoy long island iced tea. Then it was whiskey. Later on, it was gin and tonic. More recently, it has been rum and coke. But try as I may I just don’t enjoy them like I used to. Although I have never had a problem with drinking myself, I have had my life shattered by alcoholics on two occasions now. Unsurprisingly, my patience for the monotonous, unremarkable, and morose conduct of those who drink excessively is in short supply. Still, part of me struggles to understand the disease of alcoholism which drives some individuals to drink uncontrollably, often hurting the ones they love, subverting their own potential, putting innocents in jeopardy, and destroying their own lives in the process. I drink very seldom these days. Yet I can’t help grappling with alcoholism every time I take a drink. Drinking will never be the same for me.

“If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.”
― Bill Hicks

Not too long ago I was having a conversation with my good friend Ron. We were trying to figure out those traits in people which are deal-breakers for us. That is to say ― what characteristics are essentially unpardonable? We settled on just one ― unrestricted cowardice. I am no champion. Like most humans, I am full of fear and insecurity. However, one may be bold despite one’s fears. Bravery and fear coexist. As a part of my own healing process I have strived to confront and understand not only alcoholism but my own shortcomings, neuroses, and fears. With the help of a very astute therapist and a core group of healthy and spiritually perceptive friends I have faced the trauma in my life with conviction. Healing is a social process which requires community in one form or another.

Curiously, alcoholism seems to transform the drinker into a gutless bag of bones incapable of confronting the reality of the disease. The alcoholic insists that the root of their unhappiness lies in circumstances and people having little to do with their own ruinous pattern of drinking. Nonetheless, cowardice is not the exclusive purview of the alcoholic. There is always a network of enablers surrounding the alcoholic who are all too willing to facilitate their destructive behavior.

“There’a a phrase, ‘the elephant in the living room’, which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, ‘How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn’t you see the elephant in the living room?’ ― And it’s so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; ‘I’m sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn’t know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.’ There comes an aha-moment for some folks ― the lucky ones ― when they suddenly recognize the difference.”
― Stephen King

What kind of person would enable an alcoholic? Well, me for one. I have bought and served drinks for the alcoholics in my life on a regular basis. So this commentary does not come from a condescending or judgmental place. This is introspection for me ― not proselytizing.

So again, what kind of person would enable an alcoholic? As far as I can tell there are three types of enablers: other alcoholics, vultures, and the clueless. These are not mutually exclusive categories. Other alcoholics is pretty self-explanatory. Misery loves company and it’s best to surround yourself with those who are either in similar circumstances as you, or worse off than you. In doing so the alcoholic does not feel compelled to cast a critical gaze inward. As the individual drinker is subsumed by alcoholism surrounding themselves with other alcoholics is simply the path of least resistance for the disease. Vultures are those opportunistic and wretched cowards who, lacking all honor and strength of character, are willing to exploit the addiction of others to get what they want. Simply put, they are human trash and require no further elaboration here.

Clueless enablers deserve special consideration because they often seem to surround the alcoholic in greater numbers and are not uniformly malicious in their intent. They are friends and family; they are spouses and life partners; they are bosses and co-workers; they are people who toast to your happiness and throw parties for you; they are people at the margins of your circle of friends and at the center. Sometimes these people lack sufficient information to understand the full extent of the drinking problem for the individual. Alcoholics are incredibly adept at subterfuge. They may never take a single drink in front of select groups of friends, family, and aquaintances.

Still, sometimes the clueless are not really clueless at all and may be in denial. Like the alcoholic, they choose not to face reality because to do so would be terrifying. The idea that your own child or spouse could be an alcoholic is paralyzing. Therefore, many people join the alcoholic in denial. This was me for most of my adult life. Never again.

If someone you love has a drinking problem, first recognize that the drinker’s behavior has an impact on you. Get yourself to an Al-Anon meeting (distinct from AA, Al-Anon provides support for those affected by someone else’s alcoholism ― it’s free and there are meetings everywhere). Know that you are not alone. Know that you are not crazy. Those people who tell you that you are blowing things out of proportion are nothing more than enablers of one sort or another. If you are able, find yourself a counselor or therapist with a solid background in addiction. The important concept here is surrender. You can not and will not change the behavior of the alcoholic. It’s totally beyond your control.

Circumstances will vary, but no matter what, you will have to learn the art of detaching with love. Moreover, it is imperative that you understand you will not achieve genuine healing by going it alone. Just like the alcoholic, you will need help. This is what surrender means in the context of dealing with another person’s alcoholism.

“The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”
― Alcoholics Anonymous, The Big Book

Surrender for the alcoholic is likewise crucial. The first step to recovery is to admit the problem and to annihilate all vestiges of denial. I’ll just cut through the bullshit for the sake of brevity:

If you feel like you need alcohol to unwind, relax, or have a good time; if you drink until you are “buzzed” on a nearly daily/nightly basis; if you hide your drinking from certain people; if you have blacked out or had your memory impaired from drinking on numerous occasions; if people in your life have expressed concern about your drinking; if a therapist or other professional has expressed concern about your drinking; or if drinking has caused problems in your relationships with others ― guess what? You have a drinking problem. I’m sorry, but tough shit. Life dealt you a shitty fucking hand. But no amount of denial is going to change that. All of your excuses are just attempts to mask your unwillingness to face up to the problem and your fears. It’s not that you are misunderstood or that other people are overreacting. Sorry, but you are not so nuanced and complex that you are misunderstood by those that love you. In fact, with every drink you take, you become increasingly and depressingly simple. Nor is your drinking simply a preferred way of socializing. For you, it’s not a choice at all. So dispense with the excuses. This is not fucking rocket surgery. Yes it sucks, but stand up dammit. Get yourself to an AA meeting. No matter how much you may wish it, you will never be a normal drinker. You will never solve your problem on your own. Let me repeat that. You will never be a normal drinker. You will never solve your problem on your own. Let that sink in. It’s a bitter pill but it’s better than running from the truth all your life.

“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

I write this with a stern yet loving heart because I know way too many alcoholics and people who have been devastated by other people’s drinking. In many respects, alcoholics can be some of the best people you’ll ever meet. Yet their cowardice condemns them to a life of banality at best and tragedy at worst. And to the consternation of those of us who care about them, alcoholics persist in a stubborn state of bootstrapping, insisting that they are in no need of help. In doing so, excellence is transformed into mediocrity, missteps into catastrophe. All that is extraordinary about the individual is betrayed. And the ensuing damage is seldom constrained to the individual drinker. Alcoholism affects everyone.

These thoughts pass through my mind every time I am in the presence of alcohol now.

Try as I may, the drinks just don’t taste the same.

― Brett Caraway

Twenty-six years ago today, my mother died. She died of cancer, in her parent’s home in Lone Grove, Texas.
A year ago today, I was writing about her, and her deep love of Hank Williams, in the kitchen of the house where my fiancé and I had planned to have our wedding reception. He and I and my future mother and father-in-law had toasted with glasses of champagne in front of the huge old fireplace in a grand room hung with dozens of mounted deer heads and horns. I thought that in that moment, I had my life laid out before me, unfurling in one gilded shining path – so certain, so gleaming: I had found the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, the man I wanted to have a family with, grow old with, be buried next to. I had found family within his family, as had he with mine. I was so sure that all of this was destined, somehow – was written in the book of life, our names side by side. What a terrible shock to find myself today, so far from home, far from him – our future together torn apart, our roads diverged. Everything has changed now. The champagne glasses shattered, the venues cancelled, the wedding called off. That dream has died. I am still alive. My orbit’s changed, and I’m reeling, spinning through air, untethered. Free, and yet so very lost.

Today, instead, I am traveling. Driving for the first time out on country highways, between wide swathes of tall pines creaking with the weight of their heavy cloaks of vine. Long, lonesome roads that are so familiar to me. I gazed out at these same landscapes as a child. My hands clench the wheel at ten and two, white knuckled as I sidle around the big trucks, honking at crows picking apart something dead in the road. I sing loud along to the saddest country songs, songs of lost love, of broken hearts, of old loves. I feel those songs in my bones. Hank’s voice, ponderous and slow, a lead weight in a dark river, splitting me in half with all that heavy truth. Loved and lost. Alone and forsaken. His lyrics draw us out like a silver cord, leading us through the trees to the place where he rests, waiting. I made this trip before, a long time ago. I was too small then, to know what it would mean to me later. Our first, last and only family vacation. I am a woman grown now, and I look in the mirror today and wonder what my mother would think if she saw me now. I think she’d approve. I know I’ve worked hard to get to where I am – a place where I can be present with my emotions, my heart open, brave and awake and always reaching… To me, that’s
real strength, real progress. Even through the heartbreak, the long train of losses that has sliced such essential chunks out of my life, I’ve found a way to make something bloom in the empty spaces. I sowed seeds in those gaps, and I’ve dug deep and gleaned whatever I could from the ashes. Even so, on days like this, my mouth is still filled with those bitter cinders: the double 8 death date looms heavy on me. Double eights are said to be lucky, to bring double happiness, joy in marriage. If only.

I think about Hank’s broken heart, about why he and Audrey split up. Did their love really endure despite all that? I hate to say it, but I’ve come to understand that love isn’t really enough. I wish I could still cling to Amor Vincit Omnia, but in truth, “Love Conquers All” is a vast oversimplification of what it really takes to make a relationship work. I think about this piece my friend Elaine wrote recently: The Silent Pain of Boys and Men – and how hard it is for most men in our society to find ways to express their sadness, their fear, their anger. Men with broken hearts, indeed. Even though Hank had the gift of song, the ability to write his pain out in lyrics – it didn’t prevent him from dying of a whiskey and morphine induced heart attack alone in the back of a Cadillac on a dark backroad. He and Audrey can rest side by side, together into eternity – but the truth is, he was married to another woman when he died. Audrey paid her off with $30,000 dollars to claim the right to this plot, the right to be known as “Hank’s Widow”. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe that they loved each other more than they had ever loved anyone – but it wasn’t enough to make her stay, or make him get sober, or make them find away to work it out. I’m sorry, but being reunited in death just doesn’t feel like a happy ending to me. It feels like a fucking tragedy, because it is.

Someday beyond the blue…

I gathered up the graveyard posies, just like I did when I was 6. Wandering between the graves, reading the names and dates and whistling along with the mockingbirds, the mourning doves cooing in the glossy magnolias. The air was gentle around me, a haze hung in the air, cradling me in a humid hug – a slow breeze rustling my sunset dress as I sang songs to my mama, to Hank and Audrey and all the rest of the dear departed. Cicadas thrummed the air in a copper-winged chorus. I remembered being here, sitting on this bench with my dad. Being so happy and so sad, just like I am today. The eternal return, looping back in on itself, trying to fit the pieces back together, trying to find what was lost. Every year I write another link in the chain, compose a response to another riddle, but this year, my path leads to who knows where, and who knows who will walk beside me, hold my hand. I know we all die alone, but dammit – I want to sit on that old porch in rocking chairs at the tail end of my golden years and still be telling stories with someone I love.

I want to say there’s no room in my heart for the blues, but in truth – there’s plenty of room left there, in the huge hole where my partner used to live. When I eventually make my way home, he will have removed all his belongings and moved out of the house we bought together. I can’t imagine what coming home to that will be like. I don’t want to. I’m a wolf that mates for life, and right now, I can’t imagine falling in love again, finding another wolf as true as the one that’s left me howling high on this hill. It’s like the horror at having one of your adult teeth knocked out – knowing another won’t grow back in its place, your tongue going back and back to the place where it used to be. That sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, realizing that what you’ve lost can never be replaced except by artificial means.

I wish I could believe these lyrics could apply to my sweetheart and I,
but it’s just not where I’m at, nor can I imagine getting to this place of
peace with it all anytime soon. Also, I don’t believe for a goddamn instant
that Hank ever truly felt this blithe and nonchalant about losing Audrey:
“There’s no room in my heart for the blues
Love is satisfied to either win or lose
Darling if our pathway parts let there be no broken hearts
There’s no room in my heart for the blues
There’s no room in my life for a sigh
We’ll be strong enough to face our last goodbye
Darling if our romance ends let us part as best of friends
There’s no room in my heart for the blues
There’s no room in my memory for tears
We’ll let bygones be forgotten souvenirs
If your hungry heart forgets, let there be no sad regrets
There’s no room in my heart for the blues
There’s no room in my life for a sigh
We’ll be strong enough to face our last goodbye
Darling if our romance ends let us be as best of friends
There’s no room in my heart for the blues”

What is there to do now, but keep walking? I try and keep my head up, keep my eyes trained on the horizon. I write it all out here. I sing my heart out, and pound the steering wheel with my fist. I cry in the middle of the night, alone in a bed too big for just one. I cry into my dog’s fur. I cry on our front porch. I know I’ll cry on rollercoasters, and on airplanes and in bathroom stalls. I try not to cry when I open wedding invitations addressed to both of us, but I do anyway. I’m crying now, as I write this.

Here is where we sat, my dad and I. I had a good long talk with him, the other night – about this trip, about my mom, about spirituality. I’m so lucky to have him – so lucky to be born to the parents I was born to, despite having to lose one. I know that if my mother had lived, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I’d be someone else. I bought myself a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things – (the compiled letters from her Dear Sugar column) recently, and cried over nearly every single chapter. When I first started reading Dear Sugar, I didn’t know that her mother had died – somehow I missed those letters, but reading about her experience makes me feel such a kinship to her. I have found that the motherless tend to gravitate to one another. What she wrote here resonated with me so much:
“The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.”
This is the truth.

I’m getting real tired of hearing that “Time heals all wounds”. That’s another goddamn lie. I wish it were true, I really do – but the real truth is, I waited years and years thinking the pain of losing my mother would go away on its own. I lied to my therapists, telling them I was fine – I must’ve either been a good little liar, or else they were just content to let me go on being fucked up and collect their payment, because no child who loses a parent is “fine”. Losing a parent, or a spouse, or a child, or a sibling, or really anyone that you love immensely is not a wound that heals in time. It’s like having your hand chopped off.

Sure, eventually, after the stump has been cauterized and some scar tissue grows over, you may learn how to dress yourself and comb your hair again. You may even get fitted for a prosthetic. But you’ll never have that hand again. You have to learn how to survive without it, and you can – but in the middle of the night, even years later, it will ache. It will ache and ache and ache, and nothing will ever bring it back. That’s what death is. That’s what losing someone you love is like. People who try and say anything different either haven’t ever lost a hand, or they’re trying to make themselves feel better. I’m not saying you can’t find joy and peace and acceptance in time – but just that some things are not replaceable. People are not replaceable – at least not for me.

Another thing – if you break your nose, or your leg, and don’t treat it immediately, sure – it’ll heal up, but you’ll be left with a crooked nose, or a bad limp that will have to be re-broken and set properly one day. A wound left to fester will burst later. You can’t just leave these things to time – you have to air them out, wash ’em good and stitch them proper – or else you’ll be dealing with that shit for years to come. I should know – I hobbled around on busted legs for so, so long. Resetting them has been a bitch – but I can walk now. And we have to keep walking this road, keep walking even when all we want to do is just lay down in the dirt and pray for it to end soon. So it helps to have strong legs.

We have lots of reasons for not dealing with grief in the moment – work, or school, or being “too busy”, shame, fear, consuming anger, or just good old compartmentalization – but it’s never too late to do the work, to find ways to say goodbye, to honor your dead, your lost ones. From that work comes not only healing, but other things. Bright things. Magical and true and shining things that come in the dark and cradle your broken legs and the stump where your hand used to be and sing you songs. I promise.

This is how I’ve been doing my work over the past few years:
FAMILY VACATION – HANK WILLIAMS’ GRAVE
STAR-CROSSED TROUBADOURS
Foxes in the Rain
Triumvirate Lemniscate
Gustav + Mama – August 8th