The Year Mom was Dying
Episode One: The Flower that Needed Water

Before I get into it, I need to tell you who my mother actually was, because everything that follows is going to make her sound like a diagnosis instead of a person, and she was never that.

My mother, Chrys, was an incredibly smart, compassionate, funny person. She was giving and loving. She was so proud of us—proud in the specific, effusive, slightly embarrassing way that makes a kid roll their eyes at fourteen and then miss it unbearably once it’s gone. But it was never gone.

She was also, for the later years of my life, very, very frail and breakable, in the most literal sense those words can carry. I’ll lay out her full medical history somewhere else in this project, in the kind of detail it actually deserves, but for now you need the shorthand: Since the early 1990s, she had over two dozen joint replacements. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Arthritis. Ankylosing spondylitis. A fused lumbar spine. A fused cervical spine, fused all the way to the skull. At least one replaced femur. She spent a summer with her knees outside of her body to get rid of an infection that had taken over the prosthetics. She had been legitimately, chronically, unrelentingly suffering since the mid-1990s. Decades. Not a bad year. Decades.

She was a wife to my father, a mother to my brother and me, a mother-in-law to my sister-in-law, and a grandmother to two glorious grandchildren who she loved more than anything in this world. She was a daughter and daughter-in-law, a sister and an aunt. An art teacher. A special education teacher. A person with her master’s degree. A lover of James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkel and music she couldn’t sing. She was compassionate and liberal. Political. Smiling. My brother wrote a beautiful obituary and eulogy, but I couldn’t sort through my feelings for her when she died two years ago to contribute anything more than a death announcement. I was devastated by everything that had finally ended...not the least of which was my mother’s life.

It’s worth pausing on the actual math here, because the timing is almost too on-the-nose to be believed. Her first knee replacement happened before 1994, which means her chronic pain treatment was already underway right as Purdue Pharma was getting ready to launch OxyContin in 1996—the single drug most responsible for detonating America’s prescription opioid epidemic. Before OxyContin, doctors treating a body like hers had older, blunter tools: Percocet, Vicodin, MS Contin, opioids that were, at least officially, reserved for surgical recovery or cancer pain, prescribed short-term and watched. Then Purdue, owned and run by the Sackler family, spent the back half of the 1990s and into the 2000s convincing an entire generation of physicians that chronic, non-cancer pain—the exact kind my mother had, in spades, from a body that kept needing to be rebuilt joint by joint—deserved long-term opioid treatment too, and that the addiction risk had been wildly overstated all along.

That messaging worked. It worked so well it eventually cost Purdue billions of dollars in settlements and turned the Sackler name into a punchline and a docudrama, but not before it worked on the doctors treating my mother. She wasn’t some outlier who stumbled onto a fringe drug. She was, chronologically, almost a perfect match for the exact demographic Purdue built its sales strategy around: A legitimate, sympathetic, chronic pain patient, precisely the kind of person their reps were telling doctors to stop undertreating. By the time anyone in my family was willing to say the word addiction out loud about her, the industry that had built the on-ramp was already twenty years into the project.

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How Did We Not Know?

After Rachel left, I called my parents. Finally. I knew I had to, because this wasn’t something I could mention later in life in an off-handed way. I remember sitting with Grendel, surrounded by bottles and butts, calling them, and telling them that I’d gone to the emergency room for my drinking. I don’t think I said that I thought I was dying, because I don’t think I trusted them to be able to handle the nuance of a panic or anxiety attack. But they got the message. I had a drinking problem. And I didn’t need them to come to the Twin Cities to help me with anything.

They told me they’d had no idea I was grappling with it. That confirmed something I’d already decided without quite admitting it to myself: I wasn’t going to call them until after it had happened, not during. Because yes. They fucking knew.

I hear it quite a bit: How could people not know how bad my drinking was, how could they not know I needed help like I did? But how do you learn about such things? When something happens that causes a reaction or a result. Consequences. And being drunk sometimes doesn’t quite hit the same red flag as what landed me in the emergency room thinking I was dying. That was what I figured was my ultimate consequence: Death.

Consequences are key to people addressing their substance use disorders. Natural ones, specifically—the kind nobody has to manufacture. It’s the idea that people get better when they run out of room to hide. The DUI. The spouse who leaves. The liver panel that comes back wrong. The job that actually, finally, ends due to their performance or lack of. That people stop inviting them to events and they stop answering calls. It’s reality.

I got sober without ever really having a consequence that would lead people to say I need to be in treatment. Not the kind you can point to. At least not one anybody else could see. And, this is crucial, one of the reasons some couldn’t see it, namely my parents, was because my mom had her own addictions. She had been an alcoholic in my school years. But what I didn’t necessarily know at the time was that she had an opioid use disorder (OUD). I’ll get to that more later.

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The Day I Was Dying

Baked into the notion that I’m always wrong is that I know better. I should know better. And I should have known better. And yes. I knew better. Of course I did. But I did it anyway. How could I not know that I could become an alcoholic? I’d been shepherding my mother’s alcoholism for years. I knew it “runs in families.”

Then, when I got old enough, I knew I loved being drunk.

Just throw it onto the pile of all my wrongs: I ate past the point of being full; I drank past the point of being drunk; I kept going beyond the possibility of understanding what I was doing or of having memories of what I did. I got blotto.

God, I loved being drunk, even with the hangovers that always followed. For the record, I also love the smell of permanent markers. Driving behind diesel trucks with bad exhaust systems so I can take in the fumes. Lawnmowers that leave plumes of stink. Scratching my itches. Picking my scabs. There’s something to all of it. It’s a little more extreme and over the top. It’s a greater intensity of the senses. Each of them is good. And I want good. And then I want more.

As my friend Eram said, “Every chip in the bag tastes good until the last one.” And every drop of the drink is good until the last one, too.

I remember how it finally sank in that I was an alcoholic. It’s when I heard it described as being an obsession and a compulsion. Being an obsession means that I couldn’t replace the thought of it with another thought. I would be thinking about when I was going to drink, what I was going to drink, how much I was going to drink, how I was going to pay for what I’d drink, how I’d hide my drinking, and how I’d drink as long as I could...what I’d eat so I could pad my stomach and drink more. I’d ruminate over it and plan my drinking until I had the drink in my hand.

And then after the obsession came the compulsion. I wouldn’t be able to stop. My compulsion meant that the only way I could stop drinking was if I ran out of alcohol, passed out, or died.

I thought I was finally dying on September 18, 2009.

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Read the previous entry to Fat & Drunk here: Prologue

Wrong

In our bedroom, we have a La-Z-Boy chair that not only reclines but also swivels and rocks. I love it. I’m in it. I’m sitting next to the open window listening to the birds. And then a dog barks in the distance. So Griffin barks. He growls and huffs and trots off to the front door to bark at whatever’s out there doing the same to its owners. But I have to stop him because my dad’s asleep in the lower level of the house. I have to stop him because it’s wrong for him to bark. It’s wrong for him to make noise. It’s wrong to wake up my dad. If Dan were home, it’d be wrong to disrupt him, too. And because I let it happen, I’m wrong. I should have shut the door to the bedroom. I should have closed the window. So, instead, I fetch him from the front door and shepherd him back to the bedroom where I shut the door. We’ll do this at least five times today.

On my way back to the bedroom, I see the detritus on the carpet—stuff he’s dragged in from outdoors. Pieces of leaves, shells from sunflower seeds. I shouldn’t keep buying the birdseed with the sunflower seeds because the birds scatter them everywhere, then Griffin lies in them, and then the big Great Pyrenees and Anatolian shepherd mix trails them through the house like confetti. Or nature’s glitter. But I did buy them and now it’s all over the place. I’ll have to send the robotic vacuum through the house to erase my mess.

As I sit down again to get back to work, I’m leaning a little to the right. Somehow, my chair seems to be breaking a little bit. I thought I’d bought one with a higher weight limit, like it might be indestructible, but I guess I might be wrecking this one, too. Like so many chairs before it. I shift my weight to try to burden the left side of the chair. We’ll see how long I can make this work. I’m sure the ergonomics are gold-star, but I can’t bear to wreck another chair.

So I settle in, take a gulp from my coffee with oat milk, and reach into the bag I’ve placed on the side table. It’s from the chocolate shop in one of the little towns on the river that I’ve loved for a long time, St. Croix Chocolate Company. I bought the chocolates yesterday while I was taking Dad for a drive.

Of course I bought them. I was stressed. And of course I’m trying to lose weight, so I’ve fucked it up now. As if the moment is in the past, it’s so certain. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s done.

I take out a chocolate—one of my favorites, with a peanut butter center—and feel the relief as I put it in my mouth. Sometimes, I barely taste them, but the fact that they exist, I have them, and I just ate one brings all the relief I apparently needed.

Not great for the weight loss, though. There is no relief in that. So, I’ll do as I usually do. What I’ve done for the past four decades. I’ll eat them steadily until they’re gone and the temptation is out of my proximity. Then I’ll feel a different kind of relief, one that makes me a worthwhile person. A person who’s living a life worth living. Someone who’s no longer wrong . . . because I ate the wrong. It’s gone.

Except it’s still here. Always.

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Prologue

The last time I was in this place, I’d been cleaning up my father’s blood. I’m in our family cabin near Brainerd, Minnesota. It’s been my refuge my whole life. It’s also a holder of history.

Our family cabin is a place where life happens. Though I’ve moved many times, after my parents’ many moves, this building has been a constant. Built by my great grandparents in the 1950s, it is shared between their descendants in what could be the only peaceful sharing of a family cabin in the history of cabins. We are all so fortunate. Three family branches have split the time by thirds for decades, from Thursday to Thursday, spring to fall. The only expenses are for upkeep and taxes. It is my inheritance. And I’ve joked that it’s my dowry...you just have to share it with dozens of other people.

If this were a preview for a television or streaming show, we’d see a little white structure on little hill in Minnesota set on the edge of the woods on a white sand-ringed lake. While sped-up people walk in and out of it with luggage, fishing gear, swim floaties, groceries, and dogs, we’d see the building get a coat of white paint that has stayed to this day. We’d watch it expand once with the addition of a porch and indoor bathroom, once with a new deck, and once with a boardwalk and steps down to the beach. Other than that, it gets a new green roof, a ramp for accessibility, and then a few structures are built around it. Those buildings are major parts of other family members’ stories, not so much mine, though I appreciate them.

The people in the preview, though, change in all the ways that people generally do. We get older, bigger, smaller, and less able. We change our clothing, our sizes, our companions. There are more of us, there are fewer of us. Each time the sped-up footage shows a winter that covers the cabin in snow, it’s followed by a group of family members opening up the building, putting out the dock, getting the boat lift into the water, and eventually putting the pontoon on the lift. Some years, the people repair and clean up the damage wrought by winter when the lake has turned to ice and then pushed at the sandy shore. Such shoreline damage is nothing compared to what the summer storms can do, though.

Then, just like that, the cabin does its job and hosts us as a temporary home for the summer before the sped-up people reverse the process and button the whole thing up again.

I have loved this little building my whole life which, at 49 years old, is the longest relationship I’ve had, short of family members. I guess it is a family member. It’s where I want my ashes to be sprinkled when I die. Let me be specific: Dump my ashes in the marsh out back, not in the lake. Nobody needs to swim in my cremains.

In the preview, there’s a lot of busy-ness at the cabin, but we don’t see what’s happening inside. We see what we can, what’s visible, but we have no access to what’s going on in that little building. So, like this project that I’m calling a serialized memoir, I’m going to invite you inside. Not much of it will involve the cabin because not much of the cabin even involves the cabin. It’s about the people, the relationships, the world it exists in.

We’ll zoom in on me, my family, my life. Somewhere in the late 1970s, I’m carried into the cabin as a baby by my parents. For years, they brought me...then I brought them. Then I only brought my dad. At this point, though, he’s tagged out of the trips. It’s just too much for his routine-reliant brain to handle since the onset of vascular dementia.

Now, as I’m looking around for traces of blood that we might not have gotten out of the carpet, I remember the scene from last fall. His last trip here. It was dramatic. It was even more dramatic than when he sliced himself on the propeller of the boat’s motor while swimming past it. Then, knowing he tends to faint at the sight of his own blood, I only had to worry about him seeing red and going under the water. I draped his arm in a bath towel, got him to my Tiguan, and took him to the urgent care in Baxter. Mom stayed with my first dog, Grendel, at the cabin. It was just easier this way, which is a prevalent theme in my life.

This time, at least a decade later, Dad was bleeding because he fainted before even seeing his own blood. He just did it. He turned too quickly as he was talking to me and sometimes that’s all it takes. Down he went like a felled tree. Such a thud in such a hollow and small structure. His face landed on the coffee cup he was holding in his hand. His lips were both cut in half—a continuous gash split each lip on the perpendicular. The gore was incredible. And the number of first responders who showed up on a holiday weekend was impressive. Also remarkable was our dog Griffin’s instinct to stay out of the way (and the blood) while my partner, Dan, and I recounted what happened to the EMTs. It was a surprisingly peaceful scene. Something that could have been painted by Michelangelo. Or Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.

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