… are not so fucking entertaining when it’s your own child. Your own severely verbally limited four-year-old who is puking and crying, who can’t tell you if it hurts or not or where or how much, who knows the words for how she feels but can’t get them out, who has an almost impossible time even confirming or denying the words you try to supply for her.
Just saying.
So is my favorite song. So is my favorite songwriter. That has to be good, right?
“This sucks.”
A little inspiration for the masses.
You know, I’m sadder right now than I can ever remember being before.
Two days ago, according to the staff at the treatment center, my brother was an imminent suicide risk and in serious methadone withdrawal, because opiates are not allowed at the clinic. They exacerbate depression, which in turn can worsen physical symptoms, like the blinding headaches he’s had since he was fifteen. No one will believe him when he says he has tried every other pain therapy available. Methadone was his last resort – a choice between debilitating pain and paralyzing depression isn’t much of a choice. But he agreed to detox there, try to get the depression controlled, resisted the urge to check himself out and kill himself, went to group meetings, bought into the program. When the pain got bad they told my mom they would get a court order if he tried to leave. Two days ago.
Today his insurance is up. And he is out the door.
If a group of trained professionals had intentionally set out to drive someone to suicide, they could not have done it more effectively or cruelly.
Reinforcements are on the way, but communications will likely be down for the weekend. It’s expected, it’s planned for, I’ll be okay. Damn it all to hell.
*************
This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.
White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god, —
Maybe next year, when I’m richer—
Carved beads and a lotus pod. . . .
And all this time
Death beating the door in.
ESVM
Feel free to become a substance abuser, though. In fact, if you are an adult with serious psychiatric problems, do the best you can to become addicted to something as soon as possible: crack, meth, heroin, anything… because there are five million treatment centers for adult junkies (or “recreational drug users” – how jolly) but not one damn place except the warehouse of a state hospital for a suicidal thirty-five-year-old man who is not actually pointing a loaded gun at his head at five-minute intervals.
We don’t really know each other as adults. We never had the chance. But this is something I believe: love which imposes obligations is not love. If I love you, it’s because I choose to. You don’t have to succeed, to get well, even to go on living in order for me to love you. It’s not up to you.
I am proud of you for simply having survived this long.
What I did yesterday was what I wanted, not what you wanted me to do. I had to. It’s who I am. Later on, I was thinking,”What if it were some other disease? What if you spent every day of your life in excruciating pain because of something like cancer? What if the prognosis were incredibly grim and you just got too tired to struggle any longer?” I would have been helping you, not stopping you. I don’t know what that means.
If you decide you want to fight, I’ll be there. I hope you do. If some time in the future you decide to stop fighting, I’ll be sad, but I’ll understand. Better than you think.
You said to me yesterday, “I’ve failed at this, too.” You were wrong, in fact. That’s why they brought you to this place – it has the trauma center. Your execution was perfectly lethal, except for a lack of sufficient time. Blame me for that.
And he thumped me on the knee, and almost smiled.
It sounds portentous and worse, overly dramatic, which is why no one has ever heard me say it. Tonight I told my husband.
“I knew it would be me.”
“What?”
“Opening the door on him.”
Pause. “How long have you been thinking that?”
“Since I was about twenty.”
In my everyday, rational mind, I was afraid it was a gun. I checked the street name and house number as I drove up, in case the police had to come again. When he answered me from inside the bathroom, I thought, “Pills – he’s overdosed. But he’s conscious.” He claimed he couldn’t get up; his mother-in-law, who lives with them and had been in her bedroom two closed doors away, found me a skeleton key.
I learned today that a well-rehearsed nightmare may form an arc of hypnotic deja vú over a completely unique experience; that portents are not always wrong; that the picture in your subconscious, rational or not, may be the one that comes true. And when the paramedics and police had gone, I realized that the devil of memory is truly in the details your dreams can never supply.
Your brother can take the methadone overdose with a drink from Whataburger. The orange and white striped cup will lie innocuously on its side on the toilet cover, next to the bottle and the blade and a blue box of Cottonelle wipes.
Like any other large pool of liquid, blood dries from the outside in. Though you may have imagined it as sticky, it is much, much more slippery than water, and finding a dry place to brace your feet is a matter of necessity, not distaste.
You may know a great deal about many things, but recognizing the physical signs of fatal blood loss and estimating the amount already gone is the province of experts. This ignorance is suddenly appalling.
When you pick up the towels he was sitting on and feel their weight, mentally adding that heaviness to the largely-untouched lake on the floor, you remember that the cuts, in the seconds before you got them wrapped up and started pressing, were deep and pink and no longer bleeding.
For some reason, the clotted edges make you slightly nauseated, though the dried spatters and liquid do not.
The grout is stained much brighter than you might have expected.
And by “spent” I mean,”finished with the insane merry-go-round that is participating in my brother’s life on his terms.” Those terms include, but are not limited to:
So guess who’s mad at me right now? Even my mother’s sorrow can’t make me care enough to get upset.
I spent several hours today in the presence of the single most hopeless, despairing human being I have ever known. He is also one of the people on the Short List; one of the people I would lie for, run into a fire for, kill for. This is the worst he has ever been, and I have known him since he was born, so I know.
He is married to a woman equally sick, in precisely the most deadly way possible for the both of them.
Several years ago, during one of their blowups, he stayed with us. The day after his arrival, my mother called me long distance from Arkansas, catching me on the way home from work. She told me that he was in my living room with a gun, high on pain meds. I called the police and met them there.
That day was better than this day.
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