Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [48]
Though I did protect myself; did, out of some raw instinct toward self-preservation, push my friend away.
Is this what death always does, push us toward a kind of brink of reality, so we have to stand face to face with ourselves, all our histories up front, simultaneous, newly intensified? Lynda’s drinking brought back fear and anger at seeing someone I love obscured by booze, and my own desire to run away. Suddenly I had, again, to determine boundaries, create limits in order not to be overwhelmed.
(Other old issues resurface, too: talking to my father on the phone forces me to look at our distance, the unreality of my life to him, and I feel invisible, unseen. I’m aware again of how the central fact of my life isn’t one which church or state cares to recognize; who sees what has happened to us?)
Just as I always tried to protect Lynda, I want to spare her still, and her husband, and her family, but I want also the actual dimensions of my friend’s illness, which seemed to deepen its hold, in the weeks after Wally’s death. Suffice to say I’d hear about the pills and prescriptions, about things slipping out of her control, about her going to meetings drunk or high, weeping about Wally in the street.
I couldn’t see her at all, at first, and so our next meeting was at the memorial service, a week after Wally died. She seemed a fragile surface constructed above an abyss, held together by wires, fragmented, as if her energies were split apart, some fracture setting the self at odds with the self.
Later, we meet for lunch, but it seems strained, all the old spontaneity gone. She works so hard to convince me she’s taking care of herself that it doesn’t ring true; she doesn’t want to be sober, she wants to seem okay. So there’s an unreality about our talk, and I don’t think she actually hears me. We have that sort of AA conversation in which we each report on our condition, state our problems, but it never feels like a real exchange; it feels as though Lynda’s holding on by the skin of her teeth, desperate to convince herself or me she’s going to be all right. It rankles me, then, that I never really get to tell her the story of Wally’s death, of how it felt; she never really seems to listen.
What can I do? I’m powerless, everyone’s powerless in the face of her addiction. I encourage a friend in recovery to try to intervene. I try to think how I can see her at all, when I feel completely porous, when I think there’s so little of me and that so fragile. She leaves a note in my mailbox, written on the back of an envelope I have still: Please don’t hold my addictions against me.
I’m worried about her, but I know Lynda’s a survivor. She’s made it through so much already, lived through such difficulty that, of course, she’ll get through this, though I’ve never seen her spinning so fast, sinking so badly. It’s going to pass, I think, she’s going to hit some bottom and then pull herself up.
She falls in the shower and cuts her head; Michael gets her to the hospital for stitches, and on the way home she stops at the pharmacy in town which must be one of the few places in America where you can buy both painkillers and beer. Then Michael and my AA friend succeed in getting her to rehab, so I think that’ll be the turning point: she’ll be back now, in her strength again. But sobriety hasn’t really been her choice; she isn’t ready. She stays a few days and then she’s back as if nothing’s happened.
I think, What I’ve done for years, when my friends fucked themselves up with chemicals, is guard myself, run away. Do I have to hide