But the moment had passed and he stared back at the table, his mouth a solid line of fury, his eyes narrowed, his whole body screaming the words, Get me the hell out of here.
He left the room without looking at them, his shackles clanging, a detention officer next to him with his hand tightly gripped on the boy’s elbow. When the door closed behind them, she fell apart.
“Why do you put up with him?” My sister Debbie is upset. We’re sitting in her kitchen, holding tight to our coffee cups, just the two of us. It’s raining—a soft, almost soundless Seattle rain. Tiny translucent raindrops shimmy down windows that look out on the green grass and a dark forest of trees. One glance at the look on her face—lips pursed, eyes filled with concern—and I know she’s had it with Ben’s behavior, his sullen silences, abusive language, and endless disrespect. I know, too, that she’s worried about me, but her concern is filtered through my tormented mind as impatience edged with anger. What I hear in her question is: “What is wrong with you? Why don’t you put your foot down? He’s destroying your family. You have to do something. What are you waiting for?”
Whether or not those judgments exist, I perceive them because they are the questions I ask myself every moment of every day. I don’t have any answer to the question of what is wrong with me. I don’t know why or how to put my foot down, and I wonder how putting a foot down can help someone who puts his fists through walls. I know we have to do something, and treatment seems to be the answer, but I can’t imagine he’ll go willingly. I don’t know how to drag him to Montana, kicking and screaming. We’re waiting for the right moment. Will it ever come?
I go back to the question of why I put up with him, and I have a simple answer. He’s my son. I love him. I can’t abandon him. He’s sick; he has a disease. I feel the anger boiling up and the almost irrepressible urge to throw her a back-at-you question. “What would you do, Deb? Tell me what you would do if you had a sick-unto-death child who rebuffs every suggestion, who argues with everything we say, who tells me that I’m the problem, who speaks to his father with contempt—his kind, gentle father who waged his own battle with addiction and has been sober now for twenty years? Tell me, please, what would you do?”
Sure, I can shout at Ben, and we can yell at each other until we are hoarse, but I’ve done that, and I can’t do it anymore. I am beaten up, a bloody pulp of a mother who used to be so strong and sure of herself, who knew right from wrong and good from bad, who now walks around in circles of fear and dread, a weak, miserable, terrified shadow of the person she used to be. But I don’t have time or energy to think about myself, because my mind is focused on Ben, and my greatest terror of all is that he will die. I know too much about drug addiction. I want to shout at everyone who looks at me with pity or confusion or downright disgust: “This boy is sick with a chronic, progressive, deadly disease. He is not in control of his behavior. Beneath all that horrid awful shitty stuff he is saying and doing is my son, my Ben, my loving, sensitive boy. How do I reach him? Help me with that. Show me how.”
I start to cry, and Debbie pats my hand with infinite kindness. “Let’s do something,” she says softly. “We can go to the bookstore, get a good, long novel, spend the day reading.” I nod my head and look longingly at the fireplace. “Can we make a fire while we read?” She smiles and gives me a hug. “Of course we can make a fire. We can build the biggest fire you want.” We laugh, then, because it’s a gas fireplace. It, too, has its limits.
Pat is outside on the front steps, arguing with Ben.
“All I want is a fucking video game,” Ben practically spits the words in Pat’s face.
“I think that’s a bad idea,” Pat says, staying calm. “You’ve had enough distractions.”
“What kind of distractions?” Ben’s face is red with frustration and fury.
“Whatever distractions have resulted in you not being able to pass your classes.”
“My classes? What the fuck do my classes have to do with this? It’s Thanksgiving vacation, and all I want is a fucking video game.” He glares at Pat and puts his hand out. “Give me some money.”
“I have five bucks. If you want it, you can have it.” Five dollars isn’t going to buy a video game or a bag of weed. Ben snatches the bill as if Pat had stolen it from him.
“You need to start showing some respect, Ben.” Pat’s jaw muscles clench in sudden anger. “Christmas is coming up, and if you can’t be respectful to me, Mom, and your sisters, you are not welcome in our house.” We’ve been practicing that line, or variations of it, for the past two weeks, but it sounds so harsh and unloving now that he’s said it; I want to take it back and tell Ben that he is always welcome at our house, because it’s his house, too. I bite my tongue.
“Fuck you! I don’t want to go to your fucking house anyway.” And with that parting line, he takes off down the street.
Debbie gives Pat a hug as his eyes fill with tears. “We’re going to the bookstore. Do you want to go with us?” she asks, patting his back. He nods his head, and I bet I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it, too—Get me the hell out of here. Put me in a different world. Take me away from all of this.
We drive slowly down the perfectly manicured street with the expensive four-, five-, and six-bedroom houses, each sitting back prettily on half an acre, surrounded by shapely evergreen trees, a perfect little haven of suburbia. (But what’s behind those windows? What dramas are taking place inside? I always wonder.) Then, we see Ben walking ahead of us, moving fast, head down.
“Should I stop?” Debbie asks.
I look at Pat in the back seat. “I don’t care,” he shrugs his shoulders. Ben keeps walking as we drive slowly alongside him.
Pat and Debbie roll down their windows. “We’re going to the bookstore,” Pat says. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Fuck off,” Ben says without lifting his head.
A sharp intake of breath as Debbie’s shoulders stiffen. She looks at me and then leans out her window. “What did you say, Ben?”
“I told my dad to fuck off.” Years later, Ben tells me he still remembers the look on Debbie’s face at that moment.
“Just keep driving,” I tell her. I look back at him as we pull away. That’s our boy walking down the street. But he is not our boy, he is someone else, and we don’t know how to save him, how to bring him back, how to hate or love or despise or detest him enough to wrest him free from this thing that has captured him, imprisoned him, taken him away from us. Can we control his mouth, his tongue, his thoughts, his actions? Should we try? From those questions, it’s a quick and dirty leap to wondering again where we went wrong. I look at Pat, and the misery on his face matches mine. We are connected by confusion, misery, and tears, when once upon a time we were bonded by joy, laughter, and faith in an ordered world.
That night at the kitchen table, eating leftover turkey and mashed potatoes, I bring out my camera. I feel cheerful for some reason. I adore my family, and here we are together—my sisters, one of my brothers, our spouses, almost all of our children. Sure, Robyn is working in San Diego, and my brother, John, and his family are back in New Jersey. But the rest of us are here, at this long, crowded table, and I want to capture the moment. The camera is a great hiding place, a shield between me and the real world. It collects smiles and arms around shoulders for years to come, and it allows us to look back with the distance of time and say, “See, it really wasn’t all that bad.” Maybe one day we will say, with the gift of erased memory, “Look how happy we were!”
I click the shutter and look at the image in the LCD panel. Ben is scowling.
“Can you smile, Ben?” Just one smile, I am pleading with him in my mind. Just one smile to erase some of the past two days. Just one stupid little smile. That’s all I want. My kids know this about me—I am always taking just one more photo, just one more, trying to capture everyone at their best. It’s an impossible goal, but I am always asking them to let me take one more, hoping to get the perfect
shot.
I hit the delete button to erase the image of Ben glowering at me. I want a good picture, a happy picture that I can send out to people for our Christmas card, an image that says, “See what a great family we have?” The first picture speaks the truth, and I don’t want the truth. I am afraid of the truth, sick to death of the truth.
Ben shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “I’m done.”
“Come on honey, just one more.” I raise the camera to take another shot.
“Fuck you.”
Silence.
I look across the table at Alison, at his cousins Jesse, Jay, Will, Todd, Mac, Emily, Katie. Bits of a second pass, tiny pieces, miniscule moments. We are all holding our breath, waiting. Alison’s eyes flood with tears. Debbie told me later that Ben’s anger was so over the top, so beyond anything she had ever witnessed, that she wanted to slap him and knock some sense into him.
My sister Billy leans forward from her chair at the other end of the table. “You owe your mother an apology,” she says in a calm, low voice.
“Fuck you, Billy,” Ben says, pushing back from the table, loudly scraping the chair legs against the wood floor. He stands up, all six-plus feet of him, and slowly raises his middle finger at the table. Then he walks to the front door, slamming it behind him. Hard.
We look at each other, stunned. Then we look down at our plates. In seconds, the conversation starts up again, stilted at first, but gaining in momentum as we pretend what just happened hadn’t happened.
Later that night, I knock on Ben’s bedroom door. I am angry, and it feels good to be mad. It feels powerful and righteous. I deserve this anger. I own it.
“What the hell is going on?” I say. That’s not what I intended to say, but the anger is speaking for me.
“What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on with you?” he says. We speak in loud voices as if the volume can communicate the depth of our mutual despair. I don’t mean to, but I slam the bedroom door on my way out.
Debbie hears the whole thing. “You need to talk to him,” she says, pulling me into her bedroom and shutting the door. “You need to help him.”
“I know.”
Debbie has tears in her eyes. “I need to tell you something. This afternoon, before dinner, Ben walked by my office. He was making a beeline for the front door, and he was just sobbing. I jumped up and asked him to come in and talk to me. He looked so beaten, his shoulders slumped. Oh, God, Kath, such sadness in him.”
Debbie sighs deeply and reaches for my hand. “He told me his drug use is much worse than anyone thinks—he’s using cocaine, hallucinogens, pills. Every day, multiple times a day. He’s failing his classes. He’s scared. I think he wants help.”
Cocaine? Pills? I stare at her. I can’t breathe. I didn’t know. How did I not know?
“This is so hard,” Deb says, putting her arm around me and pulling me close. “I just want you to know that he was sobbing the whole time, his head in his hands. Before he left, he said, ‘I don’t know how my family will ever forgive me.’”
Forgive. Forgiveness. Oh, Ben, I forgive you. Do you forgive me? Do you forgive yourself? Can I forgive myself so that, in time, I can experience your forgiveness? I remember the passage from The Spirituality of Imperfection where Ernie and I write about forgiveness. I can’t remember the exact words, but the point is that forgiveness involves a spiritual shift, a turnaround in perspective, where blaming others falls away and we begin to accept responsibility for who we are—imperfect, flawed, broken, torn to pieces. Forgiveness comes, is discovered, when we are able to let go of the feeling of resentment and the vision of ourselves as victims. Only then can we know that we have been forgiven. It is that experience of being forgiven that pulls us out of a self-centered focus on our own pain and allows us to forgive others.
Forgiveness is more than a two-way street. It’s a circle, a cycle that goes on and on and on, beginning with forgiveness of self and moving outward in ever-expanding circles to the experience of forgiving others. The circle is unbroken when, through experience and the gift of forgiveness, we have embedded within ourselves the understanding that what unites us, one to another, is not our strengths and our successes but our weaknesses and our failures.
Years later, Ben sends me a story within a story within a story that he has written.
I think Willa Cather said it perfectly—that there are only two or three human stories. The small variations in these stories are as numerous as the number of people who have lived throughout the course of human history, but the archetypes and general threads running through the stories are similar.
I’ve lived out two of those stories. In the first, the prodigal son, in his subconscious search for enlightenment, neglects what matters most, imbibes a deadly poison disguised as an elixir of life, nearly loses everything, and encounters depths so low that non-existence seems the only solution.
In the second version, the prodigal son, having reached the deepest depths of despair, looks up at the surface and paddles blindly toward it, with the hopes of encountering the faint light glowing miles above him. He changes, using what he has learned along the way, and becomes a true hero in the eyes of those around him, although in his own eyes his mistakes are unforgiveable.
Ah, Ben, I want to call out to him across the years. There is a third story, and you will live that one as well. The prodigal son reaches the surface and begins a new life, knowing he is not a hero at all but merely a human being who, like all other human beings, is flawed and imperfect. And so, he is finally able to forgive himself.
I walk down the hallway to Pat, who is sitting on the edge of our bed, his head in his hands. “I’m going to talk to Ben. I’m going to talk about treatment. Do you want to go with me?”
“I’m not sure that would be a good idea,” Pat says. “I’m afraid he would feel ganged up on. And I might lose my temper. I’m afraid of what I might say.”
“I’m afraid, too,” I say, bursting into tears.
Pat puts his arms around me. “Let’s practice,” he says. We go over the words, repeating them, creating little scripts I can carry around in my brain. I’m worried about your health. I’m here to listen. I want to help.
I remember what my friend Debra Jay, the clinical interventionist, once told me: “I often say to families, memorize a few lines and use the broken record technique, repeating the same line again and again. If Ben uses the blame game to get you off track, respond with the words, ‘That may be true, but today we’re talking about how drugs are hurting you and hurting our family.’”
I also remember the advice another friend—Joyce Sundin, also an intervention specialist—gave me months earlier: “Use simple phrases, such as ‘That sounds really painful.’ Depending on the situation, you might follow that up with, ‘Would you like it to be different?’ Don’t get caught up in the drama or try to bail him out or offer the wise sage stuff that so many parents try. Remember, the pain comes from natural causes when the person is allowed to experience the fallout from their drug-affected choices. Pain is the motivator or springboard to a different place.”
And I remember a scene from the TV series Boston Legal. I replayed it several times, writing down the words, memorizing them. Denny is feeling sorry for himself and lashes out at his friend Allen for not being on his side. “You can accuse me of many things,” Allen says in a soft, loving voice. “But not being on your side isn’t one of them. I’m afraid for you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
And I remember that while it is important to speak with compassion and kindness, pleading with Ben on the basis of love is not a good strategy. Right now, he doesn’t love himself. He is hurting. He is in the deepest imaginable kind of pain. Speak to the pain, Kathy. Speak to the pain.
I walk to Ben’s bedroom, knock and open the door without waiting for a response. He’s sitting on his bed, his head in his hands. He looks up at me; in his eyes, I see despair.
I sit down next to him and reach for his hand. He lets
me take it.
“You need help, Ben,” I say, my eyes filling with tears. “You are not yourself. Something is wrong.”
He starts to cry. I hold on tight to his hand. He takes a deep breath, ragged with emotion. “Okay,” he says. One word.
I struggle with all my might to keep my tone even. “Will you go to treatment?”
“Yes.” He’s sobbing now, shoulders heaving. “I need help.”
I put my arms around him, and we hold on to each other for a long time. He’s here, I think. He’s still here. I lost him, but right now, in this moment, he is back with me, flesh and blood and bone.
10
wilderness
December 2005–January 2006
From: Kathy Ketcham
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 8:41 AM
To: Benjamin Patrick Spencer
Subject: I love you
Dear Benny:
I just want to say how much I love you.
And how incredibly proud I am of you. How brave I think you are and how much courage you have.
I just love you so much.
Mom
From: Benjamin Patrick Spencer
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 4:10 PM
To: Kathy Ketcham
Subject: Re: I love you
Mom—
i appreciate the email but i would also appreciate if we could stop talking about rehab. Im not looking forward to it, i just want a week where I can still be ben and not worry about that shit.
On Sunday, December 4, we drive to Wilderness Treatment Center. Ben is in the back seat, staring out the window at the frozen landscape. The windshield wiper fluid freezes up somewhere around Spokane, forcing us to stop every ten miles or so. We are driving blind, looking out at the frozen cracked world with a sense of terrified wonder, as if its stark beauty will swallow us whole.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 14
