Pat responds:
Dude, respond to my (many) emails like I’m your father.
Half an hour later, Ben sends another message:
Sorry dad, I do have other commitments, like the shitload of schoolwork I do every day, frat stuff, a girlfriend who I really like, and a social life. I’m getting fucked in my English class, and I haven’t checked my email in 2 weeks so just understand if I can’t sit down and write back all the time.
Later that afternoon, Pat forwards the emails to me with this note:
I give up. I don’t know what to do. I have written him letters over the past two years about his choices in both friends and activities. In return, I have gotten lies and false promises. I sat with him twice in Pioneer Park, trying to help him understand what it means to take responsibility. I looked him in the eye after one of those talks, which was the result of us finding a bunch of paraphernalia in his (our) car and listened to him as he said, “I’m done with all that.” I have written him emails with the tone of a father who wants to know what his son is up to, asking for nothing more than letting us know whether or not he is alive and still in school. For my thoughts, efforts, and love, I get these responses. Oh well. At some point in his life, he will understand why I have done those things.
We call our friend Stan, a professor in UW’s geology department, and ask him to check up on Ben. Ben tells Stan that he hates his classes (they’re “horse,” he says, which is apparently short for horseshit). So they look through the course catalog, selecting classes he can take next quarter. Ben says he’s really interested in landscaping. Maybe art. Possibly geology.
Then—silence. A week passes with our phone calls and emails unanswered. Finally, on a Saturday early in November, six weeks into the quarter, Ben calls.
“I’m lost.” He’s sobbing. “I can’t remember anything.”
“Lost? Where are you?”
“I’ll call you back,” he says and hangs up.
When he calls back a few minutes later, his voice is low, his words choked off by tears. “I lost my backpack, I don’t know where I left it. It has all my homework in it, everything. I lost everything.”
I take a deep breath and put my hand on my heart, willing it to slow down. I ask the obvious questions—Where were you? What were you doing? Is there anyone who might be able to help you remember?
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I’ve got to go.” He hangs up. I dial his number several times, but he doesn’t answer.
He calls back that night. “I fell,” he says.
“You fell?” I am reduced to repetitive comments and questions.
“On the bridge. Going to the football game.” Staccato sentences. “I was running across the bridge. I slipped and fell.”
Ben is talking in a monotone now, slow, emotionless. He tells me he fell, twice. A woman on the bridge saw him hit the concrete, identified herself as a nurse, and told his fraternity brothers to take him to the hospital. I ask if he went to the hospital, and he says no, he blacked out. He came back to consciousness in the middle of the UW stadium, covered in mud from the falls. People were staring at him. His fraternity brothers kept asking if he was okay. A friend from Walla Walla took him back to her sorority.
“Something is wrong. I can’t remember anything.”
“Go to the hospital, Ben. You need to see a doctor.” I feel desperate.
“I’m not going to a hospital here,” he says. “I need to come home.”
Q comes home with him the next weekend, but it’s clear their relationship is falling apart. He’s brusque and dismissive with her. She tries to hug him, and he pushes her away. One night, he leaves her at home with us while he goes out with his friends. He complains of headaches, difficulty concentrating, exhaustion, trouble sleeping, and a general feeling of being “lost” and confused. He’s irritable as hell. After much pleading, he agrees to go to the emergency room. The CT scan is clean, but the diagnosis is “severe concussion with post-concussive disorder.” I research the diagnosis on the Mayo Clinic website:
Post-concussion syndrome is a complex disorder in which various symptoms—such as headaches and dizziness—last for weeks and sometimes months after the injury that caused the concussion.
Concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury, usually occurring after a blow to the head. Loss of consciousness isn’t required for a diagnosis of concussion or post-concussion syndrome. In fact, the risk of post-concussion syndrome doesn’t appear to be associated with the severity of the initial injury.
In most people, post-concussion syndrome symptoms occur within the first seven to 10 days and go away within three months, though they can persist for a year or more.
I keep focusing on the term traumatic brain injury and the fact that symptoms can last for weeks or months and may persist for a year or more. If Ben fell twice and hit his head hard both times, does that double how long the symptoms will last? Does it make a “mild” concussion a moderate or severe brain injury?
Before he leaves, Ben has a confession to make. “I used with my friends this weekend,” he says with no emotion in his voice. “I know I’m addicted. I know I can’t control it.”
I’m confused about how I should feel, what I should think. For the first time, he admits he is addicted and has lost control. Did using with his friends while he left his girlfriend home to watch TV with us fill him with shame and lead him to the realization that he is addicted and out of control? Or did he use with his friends, knowing that he couldn’t control his drug use and just not giving a damn? Maybe he’s offering us a throwaway statement, trying to divert our attention and make us think he’s learned something from this experience, while fully intending to go back to his old ways. But he’s scared; I can see it in his eyes.
We ask him what we can do to help. He says he doesn’t need us anymore. He has his friends back in Seattle who will help him. “If I didn’t have my friends,” he says, “I’d shoot myself.”
When Ben leaves, Pat breaks down. “I’ve never in my life experienced the kind of sadness I’m feeling right now.” He puts his head in his hands and cries. “I am beyond anger and frustration. All I want is my son back.”
Holding him tight, I feel hollow inside. I hear the blood rushing in my head, a whooshing sound as if I am holding my hands over my ears, as if I am under water. All I can hear is that internal roar, and I panic. I can’t breathe. I am sinking, drowning, lost.
A childhood memory comes back to me. I’m five or six years old, and we’re at a family picnic at Echo Lake Park. I wander away and walk up a pathway into the trees. I feel brave and happy, and I keep walking, maybe I am even singing—I used to love to sing. But when I stop and look down the hill, all I can see is smoke. Indians! I panic and keep walking up and up and up. It’s getting dark, and the trees are big and scary. I start crying. I can’t see through my tears.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Two men are kneeling down next to me. I tell them about the Indians and how all I can see is smoke and I don’t know where to find my family.
“Don’t you worry,” they say. “There are no Indians here. We’ll help you find your family.” One of the men puts me on his shoulders, and they sing and laugh as we walk back down the hill. I feel safe with them.
“There they are!” I yell. The man lifts me off his shoulders and sets me safely down on the ground. I start crying again and run up to my mother, hugging her knees.
“What’s wrong, Kath?” she says with a little laugh. She didn’t even know I was gone.
Get a grip, Kathy. Pull yourself together. Stop whimpering. Get strong. Be brave. I can feel my hands reaching down, pulling myself up, out of the dark place, onto a different path. Get moving. Do something.
I send emails. I write letters. I make phone calls. I turn to the experts I know, people I have worked with over the years, professionals whose advice I trust completely. My friends Jeff and Debra Jay, both highly respected clinical interventionists, respond to my email within hours. I ask if
I should make an appointment with a psychiatrist. They advise that I should only do so if the psychiatrist is extremely experienced in addiction, meaning he or she has had a close relationship with a treatment facility. I agree with them—a psychiatrist or psychotherapist who doesn’t have experience with addiction is likely to focus solely on Ben’s irritability, anger, impulsivity, anxiety, and depression and arrive at a psychiatric diagnosis that calls for antidepressants or antipsychotics. Over the years, Ben’s doctors prescribed three different kinds of antidepressants. But after trying each one for a few weeks, he would refuse to take them, insisting they made him feel even worse, agitated, irritable, out of control, “crazy.” I wonder now, after hours and days and weeks of research on the Internet, if Ben’s reaction to the antidepressants might have been a red flag signaling that he might have a mild form of bipolar disorder. Research report after research report shows that antidepressants can trigger or intensify both manic and depressive symptoms, even leading to psychosis and suicidal ideation.
The problem is that we can’t get an accurate diagnosis because the drugs Ben is using—marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, and, I suspect, others as well—are exacerbating or even perhaps causing whatever mental health problems he might have. The most skilled psychiatrist in the world can’t accurately diagnose a mental health problem when a brain is poisoned by drugs. It is important to eliminate the drugs, give the brain time to clear (weeks, perhaps months), and then go to an addiction medicine specialist/psychiatrist for a diagnosis.
Jeff Jay emails with suggestions of several treatment centers he respects—Wilderness Treatment Center in Marion, Montana, is at the top of his list. The minute I get Jeff’s email, I give him a call. We talk for a long time as I sit on our front steps, watching the sunset. I take a roll of toilet paper out with me because as hard as I try, as much as I bite my lip and take deep breaths, I can’t stop crying.
“You can only support Ben in his recovery, not in his addiction.” Jeff’s voice is low and calm, soothing. “And it’s his addiction that is calling the shots now. He thinks he can control it, but it’s controlling him.”
“I know.” I wad up a bunch of toilet paper and wipe the tears off my face.
“You need to let go.”
“Let go?” How many times had I said those words, written those words? But in this context, on the receiving end of the advice, I can’t make sense of them. “Jeff, what do those words mean? How does a parent let go of a child?”
“Let him fall. Let him fail. Don’t try to protect him.”
“But he’s had two bad falls. He hit his head. He’s not thinking right. He feels lost.” I think about Ben wandering around Seattle streets, dizzy, confused. “He might get hit by a bus. He might die.”
“Kathy, life is unpredictable.” Jeff is choosing his words carefully. “Ben might get hit by a bus no matter what you do. How much control do you really have?”
He might get hit by a bus. He might die. I nod my head, unable to speak. I imagine Ben, drunk, walking across a busy street. It’s dark outside and rainy. It’s cold, so bitterly cold. I want to yell, to scream, but he can’t hear me; he is too far away. I hear the brakes squealing, and I see him lying on the ground, as if he were sleeping. The sobs come up from deep inside me, waves of fear and despair, swelling and breaking, never ending.
I can’t control whether Ben lives or dies. I want to throw out a net, to pull him close. My fear extends to Robyn and Alison. How far can I throw the net? What can I do to protect them? I hear Jeff’s words in my mind, repeating them over and over—let go let go let go let go. I know then that I do not have the power to save Ben, to save any of them. Once upon a time, I lived under the illusion that I could keep them safe. Now I know the truth.
I call the treatment centers Debra and Jeff suggest, fill an entire notebook with handwritten notes, spend hours comparing costs and programs. Should we send him to Sundown M Ranch in Yakima, Washington, just two hours from Walla Walla? I love Sundown—we’ve sent dozens of detention youth to the adolescent program there, and I’m close friends with the executive director, Scott Munson.
“One thing to remember,” Scott says, “is that no amount of knowledge you have about this disease can change the pain it causes.” Those words strike me as so wise, I type them into an email and send them to myself.
Sundown, it turns out, may not work out for Ben because, at nineteen, he’s too old for the adolescent program. Although the adult program is a possibility, it only lasts twenty-one days.
Scott agrees with Jeff and Debra that Ben, like most adolescents with serious drug problems, needs months in treatment, not weeks, and that Wilderness Treatment Center may be our best option. Pat and I get on the phone and set things up. Wilderness has a “bed” for Ben, and our insurance will cover about half the cost. We can’t decide if we should let Ben finish the quarter—just five more weeks—and plan an intervention in mid-December. But then he’d be in treatment over Christmas, and we can’t imagine Christmas without all of us together. And what happens after treatment? Ben can’t go back to UW, because all the triggers to use are ready and waiting for him, and he can’t come back to Walla Walla for the same reasons.
“Okay, okay,” we laugh uneasily. “We’re skipping ahead of ourselves.” Stay focused. Be in the present. One step at a time.
Thanksgiving is in less than two weeks. We’ll be celebrating in Seattle with my brother, Mike; my sisters, Debbie and Billy; and their children. We’ll have fun. It will be a great time. Then we can decide. Then we will know what to do.
9
kodak moments
November 2005
Sometimes I wonder what we were thinking, bringing our drug-addicted nineteen-year-old son into my sister’s home with a dozen relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—all watching, waiting, wondering why we didn’t “do something.” They didn’t speak the words, but I knew what they were thinking in the looks they shared—those quick-don’t-get-caught side glances. I knew by the sudden intake of breath, the jaw drops (and quick recoveries), the raised eyebrows, pained expressions, rapid-fire shifts in conversations.
Better left unsaid was the rule. I knew all this because I felt it in my gut—the pain, the shame, the fear and the frustration, the desire to scream I don’t know what to do! Help me!, the tears burning behind my eyelids, the sick sense of helplessness. My fear-turned-anger-turned-heartsickness told me the story of their unspoken judgments and the words already spoken, in the past when his problems were not so obvious, not so serious.
“He needs to toughen up.”
“You need to let go.”
“He’s too sensitive.”
“You overprotect him.”
“He’s just experimenting.”
“You worry too much.”
“He just needs to grow up and learn how to deal with his emotions.”
“I thought you were going to let him fall on his face and learn from his mistakes.”
These and all the other bits of I-want-to-be-helpful thoughts and advice offered with sincerity and tender hearts make me want to shake people by the shoulders and scream, “You can’t begin to know what this feels like. Let me change places with you for just one minute, just one fucking minute. You can stand in my shoes, watch your child imploding before your eyes, and feel trapped in this absolute, terrifying hell of helplessness.”
Tell me, please—how does a parent watch a child falling apart before her very eyes and not want to cry out to the heavens to make it stop. MAKE IT STOP! If only Ben had some other disease. I remember when he was a freshman and sophomore in high school, when we weren’t sure yet what was wrong—maybe we should have known, maybe we should have reached out for help sooner, maybe we should have paid more attention, listened more, taken away more, done more—hoping it was anything but addiction. Maybe it’s thyroid disease, we thought. Maybe it’s simple depression or anxiety and he’ll feel better after seeing a counselor or taking antidepressant drugs. Maybe it’s the dis-ease of a
dolescence and it will pass in a few months or possibly years. Maybe it’s something that time or a pill will cure, something that we can journey through together as a family, as a team.
A year or two before Ben’s troubles began, a probation officer asked me to meet with a seventeen-year-old and his parents. The boy was a meth addict—thin, frail, with dyed blonde hair and black roots. He sat at the end of the table in the small conference room of the Juvenile Justice Center, his hands and feet shackled, his orange jumpsuit baggy and ridiculously bright in that beige-walled room, staring at the table, refusing to lift his head to look at his mother and father.
The room was just big enough for a table and six chairs. He sat at one end, and the mother and father sat across from me. They tried to talk to him, they gave it all they had—tears, threats, pleas, expressions of deep and unconditional love. After fifteen or twenty minutes of calm, composed talking, I felt as if a switch had been thrown. I saw it in the mother’s face, her grief metamorphosed within seconds into the fiercest sort of anger, a fiery fury sparked by too many scenes like this, too many futile arguments, too much love met by hateful stares.
“I wish you still had leukemia,” she said in a low voice. His head jerked up then, and he looked at her, his mouth dropped open. I could imagine her thoughts, Oh good, now I have your attention, and she repeated the words with even more emotion. “I wish you still had leukemia because at least then we were fighting it together.”
“What the hell . . . ?” He looked utterly baffled.
“Do you remember?” she continued, because at least now he was looking at her, at least now she had an emotional response, at least now she could see some remnant of the son she used to know. “You were five years old, and I would read you stories. We would cry together and hold on to each other. I was always there with you, and you were always there with me. We went together to all the appointments. We fought it together, and we won. Remember? I was with you the whole time—I never would have left you—and you needed me, you wanted me there. Remember?”
The Only Life I Could Save Page 13
