Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [126]
Because of our past together, it was considered ethically inappropriate for me to work with Alice in group therapy, but at one point Chris called me in to tell me that Alice still had a lot of anger as a result of our relationship. They needed to address this in order for her to move on and had come to the conclusion that it would be beneficial for her to confront me with these feelings. They warned me that it could be quite a traumatic experience, but there would be a counselor present, and I felt I could handle it. When the day came, she ranted at me for about an hour without stopping, regurgitating all the scenarios from our fractured past with absolute clarity. It was terrifying to realize the damage I had done to this poor girl, but I had to stay silent and just absorb it. It was a humbling experience, and at times I could hardly believe the things she said that I had done. It was as if she were talking about somebody else. The saddest part for me was knowing that she had held on to all this poisonous stuff for over twenty years in order to fuel her need for oblivion.
Alice stayed in the Priory for the entire course of treatment, and on a couple of occasions I bumped into her and asked how she was doing. “It’s going great,” she would say, so I was fairly hopeful. I knew it would take a long time once she got out of the clinic, and that she would have to find some employment or activity in order to regain her self-esteem, but the fact that she had stayed put was, in itself, a fantastic achievement. Next, I heard that she had gone into a halfway house in Bournemouth, a facility I’d visited once and remembered as being a really good place, so I was confident that she was making progress and anticipated that she would soon be on the road to a full and complete recovery.
I went off on tour to America, and the next time I saw Alice was at my grandmother’s funeral. Though Rose had been ill for some years with emphysema, it was cancer that took her in the end. Her death, just before Christmas 1994, was a great blow to me. She had always been the one constant figure in my life, encouraging me in all my endeavors and loving me unconditionally to the very end. Her house was always a refuge, and at weekends, when I was home, it had become a tradition to go there for delicious Sunday lunches. Until my drinking kept us apart, we had had a wonderful life and some very funny times together. All in all, up until that point, she had been the single most influential person in my life.
In the last few years, encouraged by Chris in my counseling sessions, I had spent a lot more time with both Rose and my mother in the hope that we could heal the wounds that had for so long prevailed in our collective relationship. My mother in particular was quite sick and had become fairly dependent on prescription drugs. She became very jealous, even of me, which made life very complicated. At one point she and Rose had a dreadful rivalry going in which they would use my visits against one another. So when it came to calling on them, I would have to take turns as to who I would see first: one week my mother, the next week my grandmother, and so on. It was exhausting, and so when Rose died, as much as I really missed her and grieved for her, I found a certain relief in that I didn’t have to play that awful game anymore.
Four months after Rose’s death I heard that Alice had also died. She had checked herself out of the Bournemouth halfway house and moved into a studio apartment, where at some point she had injected herself with a massive dose of heroin. The postmortem also revealed that she had been drinking heavily. She died alone, and her body was not discovered