Ours To Unfold

The winter has always been very dark here.

The sky stays gray or deep gray, sends down snow or rain or stinging sleet that freezes on the roads in a sheet of black ice that does not gleam and does not shine. Cars slide and spin out on the highway; people slip on the asphalt, fall hard on their knees. When they stand up again, they look down at the ground in a wary sort of way and every step they take thereafter is hesitant and untrusting. 

On the first morning of the New Year, my sister and I go for a walk through the old neighborhood, through the old streets. Above us, the sky is dreary and full of geese flying in every direction, calling out to one another in a lost and frenzied sort of way. There is no grace or cohesion in their movements. Just dark, messy waves of flapping wings rippling through the foggy gray sky.

It’s hard to speak, to make our jaws and lips move in air as cold as this. My sister and I talk slowly, as though we are learning a new language, wrapping our mouths around the shape of unfamiliar words.

We are talking about grief and how to handle it. It’s something my sister and her AA sponsor have been talking about for several days.

He says grief is like a wave and I should just stop, she says, I should stop and let that wave crash in and wash over me. To just feel it instead of always fighting it.

He’s an old timer, almost 70. He’s over 30 years sober and he knows a few things about grief.

My sister talks in a low voice and every word leaves her mouth in a small cloud of cigarette smoke mixed with frozen breath. I listen to her and I listen to the thin ice cracking and crunching under our feet.

---

Later on that very day, in a strange coincidence, her sponsor dies. He closes his eyes and does not open them again. It was peaceful for him and a shock for everyone else. He was not sick and he was not in any kind of pain. He just fell asleep and did not wake up again.

My sister took this incredibly hard. Losing a sponsor is almost like losing a parent.

I sit with her afterwards and she tells me about the funeral arrangements. She tells me about cleaning out his house and having to figure out what to do with his dogs. She says: I keep talking to him in my head. I keep expecting him to answer me. She closes her eyes. She says: I keep asking him: What do you want me to do? What am I supposed to do? Show me what to do.

She opens her eyes and stares into the palms of her empty hands. Her voice breaks and she stops speaking. Her eyes look very lost.

The wave will recede eventually, is what my sister’s sponsor told her the morning before he died. But before it can recede, it has to break. And when that wave finally breaks over you. That. That hurts like hell.

And it does. It hurts like hell and I am watching one of those waves crash over my sister and she looks very lost. It is a look I know well. She looks like she did years ago, before she got sober.

Somewhere deep inside my chest, an old fear begins to stir. Because. She looks like she did before.

Before

Trying to reason with an addict is like trying to blow out a light bulb. ~Anne Lamott

Before my sister could get sober she had to hit rock bottom. Before she hit rock bottom, she had to fall. And fall. And fall.

And that. That was a very long, messy drop.  

During that time, I tried to reason with her. I had many, many talks with her about her heavy drinking. They did not go well. They went like this:

Our Talks (Part One)

Me: I think you’re an alcoholic.

Her: Do I look like some old bum passed out in a gutter?

Me: That’s not what alcoholics look like. Not always.

Her: What do they look like, then?

Me: They look like you. They look exactly like you.

Our Talks (Part Two)

Me: It runs in our family. Down both sides. Alcoholics everywhere.

Her: We are not our family. We are not them. Don’t you say that.

Our Talks (Part Three)

Me: You need to spend more time with your kids. I’m raising them pretty much by myself. It’s almost like I’m a single mom.

Her: They’re better off with you anyway.

Me: Don’t you say that.

Her: Too late.

Our Talks (Part Four)

Me: (To an empty room): Oh, but we are them. We are just like them. We are everyone who came before us.

Our Talks (Part Five)

Me: (…)

Her: (…)

That was our last talk before she left. She walked out of the house and down the length of the driveway to her car parked on the street. She did not turn around and she did not say goodbye. She did not return that night and she did not return in the morning. She was just gone. She was gone for a long time.

Let Me Keep This

It wasn’t so different, really. When she was gone. I took care of the kids, as I had always done. I worried for her, as I had always done. My heart hurt and hurt and hurt. And I ignored it. I pushed that ache aside, as I had always done.

Every morning I would sit on the porch with my little nephew. He was very small then. We would sit there together and watch the morning unfold. I would think about my sister. Her scratchy voice. Her eyes. How very lost she looked before she left. I thought about her a lot. I would send out silent messages to her, hoping she would hear them through the atmosphere. Please come home. I had not seen or spoken to her for quite some time. But I still hoped that she would somehow be able to hear my thoughts, no matter how much space, how much silence was between us. I would concentrate very hard. Please come home.

My nephew would sit with me on the porch and put his head on my shoulder. He would say: Tell me a story. And I would make up some silly story for him. Some story about a cat or a dog or a hamster. He would laugh and laugh. He has a great laugh. A really great one. Deep and raspy.  So much like my sister’s laugh. I would tell him stories and at the same time, I sent silent messages out to her. You are missing all of this. You are missing so much.

In all of that darkness, there was this tiny bit of light: my nephew sitting with me on the porch. And this is the small piece I want to always remember. Take the rest, but let me just keep this:  his little head leaning heavy on my shoulder. The porch beneath us and the seasons changing above us. Thunder rumbling through the spring rain clouds. His head on my shoulder. The summer flowers blooming in the gardens. His head on my shoulder. Laughing at my stories. The leaves turning from green to yellow. His laughter pulsing through my arm.  The yellow leaves falling and falling. The first snows of autumn drifting through the orange glow of every early morning streetlight. Flocks of blackbirds clinging to bare tree branches like clusters of very dark leaves. The air growing colder, the sunlight fading and fading.

Don’t let this fade, though. Let me keep this. His head on my shoulder. His laughter.

Fog. And More Fog.

It ended in a hospital. That is where it ended.

Or.

That is where I thought it had ended.

It was late autumn, right on the cusp of winter, and I sat with my sister in her hospital room watching the gray sky turn grayer. I held her hand and we watched the fog roll in. The fog was very thick that year. It swallowed all the light. It swallowed all the sounds.

We didn’t say anything to each other. I held her hand and we just sat there watching the fog droop low over the blinking traffic lights and the sagging telephone wires. I looked over to her and I thought: This is your rock bottom. Right here. You will not drink again. I held her hand and I hoped she understood these words I could not say out loud. I couldn’t say much out loud then. I was completely drained. I just had nothing left to give. Not even my voice. My hope was that she would hear me anyway, despite the heavy silence between us. My wish was that she could hear all of my unspoken words: You’ve lost everything. You cannot sink lower than this.

But she did. She did sink lower.

She got out of the hospital and she fell again. One last time.

She left our town that night for a bigger city.

She was gone again and I did what I had always done: I waited for her. I stood at the window and watched the fog roll in over the streets. I stood there and I waited for her to come back home.

It wasn’t her fault. It really wasn’t. It’s in her blood. Alcoholism is an awful disease and we have no control over it. We really have no power over these things. These things that we inherit from all the generations that were alive before we were alive. We have no power over the blood that runs through our veins.

We Are Them

They were Dust Bowl sharecroppers during the worst drought in our region’s history. My great grandparents. Their life here on the prairies was nothing more than one very long, drawn-out fight. They fought the barren land, the knots of tumbleweeds, the endless, endless wind that created dust storms so thick they blocked out the sun. It never stopped. The dust. They fought it every day.  Dust seeped in through every tiny gap in the house, through the windowsills and the roof. It trickled down the walls like blood. They used shovels to scoop out all the dirt from their rooms.

I cannot blame my great grandfather for drinking as heavily as he did. Every seed he tried to plant turned to dust. He had nothing and he was afraid. His hands were empty and he didn’t know what to do.

He made his own liquor most of the time, but every weekend he and my great grandmother would leave the prairies. They would get in their truck and drive into town.

Every weekend was the same. My great grandfather would park the truck and go into the bar. My great grandmother would sit in the passenger seat and wait for him to come back out. She did not leave the truck. She sat on the passenger seat and she watched the bar and she waited for my great grandfather to finish drinking.

And that was a very long wait.

She did not move from her spot in the truck. She waited as the day turned into the night. She waited until the dark night turned into the darker night. She waited for him to finish drinking. She waited for him to come spilling out of the bar.

The Story We Inherit

The final night that my sister left, I stood at the window and waited for her to come back home. I stared out the window and I watched for the headlights of her car. I did not wish and I did not hope. For anything. I just stood at the glass watching the empty street. I waited for my sister and I thought of my great grandmother.

What happened to my great grandmother was this: her heart broke. Figuratively. And literally.

Decades later, when she was very old and having chest pains, the doctor took an X-ray of her heart and he found that it had lost much of its muscle mass and had broken into countless little bits. Just tiny fragments of a heart. And what the doctor said was this: I’ve never seen this before. And he said: This is not possible. And he said: She should not be alive. But she was. Very much so alive.

It is possible to keep living with a broken heart. She knew this and I know this. It is possible. It is very, very hard. But it is possible.

I stared out the window and I waited for my sister and I thought of my great grandmother and her heart that held so much weight it crushed in on itself and I thought about how her blood was my blood and I looked out at a dark and empty street and I spoke to my great grandmother in my head and what I said was this: What should I do? Tell me what to do.

I paced the halls and checked on my sleeping niece and nephew. I put my hand on their foreheads. They were so small, then. I listened to the sound of their breathing. I went back to the window.

It was dawn when she finally came back home.  I saw two beams of light drifting through the fog and I exhaled long and deep.

She pulled into the driveway and shut off her engine. She didn’t move for a while. She stayed in her car and stared at the windshield. Then she leaned her forehead against the steering wheel. I felt so bad for her. I know what it is to feel that low. To feel that empty. When she finally left her car, I watched her make her way slowly along the icy driveway. She moved carefully, but she slipped anyway. In instinct I reached my arms out to catch her, even though I was nowhere near her. Still, from the other side of the window, my arms were outstretched as if I could break her fall.

She didn’t, though. She did not fall. She steadied herself and stood upright again.

I didn’t move or speak when she walked through the door; I just kept standing in front of the window. She came over to me and put her arm through my arm. We stood intertwined like that for a long time. And I don’t think I have ever loved my sister more than in that moment.  We had lost so much. Everything had fallen apart and everything had gone wrong. We were two very broken people, my sister and I, but we fit perfectly together. Like fragments of glass in a mosaic. Because we have the same blood. Because we come from the same story; a story full of grief that we inherited from those who came before us. A story that we carry on, because it belongs to us now. It’s ours to unfold. We come from the dust, she and I. We come from dust and empty fields and empty hands. We come from broken minds and broken hearts. We come from those who fell. And now we fall. It never really ends. We just keep falling. And her arms are forever intertwined with mine.

Alright, she said. Alright. I am an alcoholic. I am. But I don’t know what to do.

And for once, I did know what to do. I had memorized the schedule of every single Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in our town, just in case my sister ever decided to go.

For once, I knew what to do.

How We Unfold It

My sister has had clear eyes for years, now.  But sometimes, that lost look flickers back through them. 

It flickers back now, as we sit together and talk about her sponsor’s funeral. She stares into her empty hands. She closes her eyes and her voice breaks. I can see that wave crashing in over her.

She does not fight it, though. She does exactly what her sponsor told her to do, right before he died.

Stop. Stop fighting everything all the time.

I hug my sister and I feel her head against my shoulder. She cries very, very hard.

The story we inherited belongs to us now. It’s ours to unfold. And this is how we unfold it. This is what we do: we let the waves come. We do not run from them and we do not fight them. This is how we unfold the story. We stop. We hold on to each other. We let the grief crash in and break over us. Years and years of grief. Over and over again. We do not fight the waves and we do not drown. We just let them come. We let the waves come, so we can let them go.

And they break and they recede and they wash the hurt away. Little by little, they take away the ache. One after another after another.

We let the waves come. And it hurts like hell. But they wash it all away. They really do.

We let the waves come. Then we let the waves go. 

And they wash everything away.