Every morning during that week at the Oregon coast, I get up at 5:00 a.m. The dogs are still sleeping at the foot of the bed. I tiptoe out, make a cup of coffee, and snuggle up on the couch with pillows, blankets, and Martin Buber’s slim volume, I and Thou—originally published in German in 1923 (Ich und Du). Ernie suggested I read Buber for the shame book we are working on. This is my second read. The first time, almost forty years ago in my freshman year in college, I approached the book from a different perspective—as a required text for a college course. Reading it now, I understand Buber in a whole new way.
The sky is dark, and I can hear the waves in the distance. I am content. Actually, this is different from contentment—this sense of peace and serenity—for I am here with a good book, a cup of strong coffee, Pat and the puppies asleep down the hall, the day just barely begun. This is my imperfectly perfect life. I accept and embrace it. I am beyond grateful for it.
I reach for a pen to underline the passages that I am hoping will shed light on the shame experience. I don’t get very far, just a page or two, before I begin to suspect that Ernie guided me to this book not for our book but for me and Ben, for the I and Thou of the title. The translator, Walter Kaufmann, chose to replace Thou with You. But as I read, I realize that something—some mystery, some sense of the sacred—is lost in the translation. I find myself replacing You with Thou. I say “Thou” out loud, whispering to preserve the silence and solitude. The word evokes a sense of the impenetrable mysteries of life. I draw an extra blanket around me.
The book is just over a hundred pages long, but I take hours to read a few pages, underlining sentences and bracketing whole paragraphs, placing stars and checkmarks next to my favorite passages, creating a list of topics with page numbers on the front flyleaf that ends up filling both the front and back of the page.
It seems like random chance when I come across this passage: “I contemplate a tree.” My eyes open wide. According to Buber, we can look at this tree as movement; we can assign it to a species; we can divide the whole into parts that exist outside ourselves. But (and I can imagine this bearded man with his gentle brown eyes depicted on the cover of the book holding up a finger of caution), when we divide the tree into parts, it remains an object. Only when “will and grace are joined” and “drawn into a relation” does “the tree cease to be an It.” The relation is reciprocal—it gives, it takes, it gives back. “Will” requires pursuit; “grace” requires the willingness to receive.
Wow, I think, maybe that is life wrapped up in six words: Pursuit and the willingness to receive.
“A coincidence,” it has been said, “is a small miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous.” Just hours ago, walking the beach, we came across a large piece of wood surrounded by a circle in the sand. I saw a tree, an It, but Pat, contemplating the same structure, perceived something of a miracle. He entered into a relationship with the tree, and through his words and his insights, I also began to experience a sense of connection. Perhaps it is fair to say, as Buber wrote, that will and grace were joined in those moments when we were drawn into a relationship with the tree branch, standing before it in awe and wonder, aware of its uniqueness, seeing it not as an object but as a part of our world and ourselves, a seamless joining of the observed and the observer.
The tree branch was once an “It” that became a “Thou.” Speaking “Thou” to the branch and its near-perfect circle with my whole being, asking for nothing and holding nothing back, the tree and I became one. “It” became something whole, infused with meaning, and the more I stood in awe of the branch and its circle—the more I came into relationship with them—the more they asked of me.
I am willing to receive.
Returning home to Walla Walla, I notice that I am not thinking about Ben in the same way. For all those years, I considered addiction an “It,” an object, a thing that separated me from my son. I imagined Ben being taken over by a demon, held captive, imprisoned. So, I felt compelled to do battle with it, trying to reach in and grab the real living thing that was my child, hoping to rescue him from the monstrous force that was consuming him. But in hating the addiction, in trying to crack its ribs and rip out its heart, I was separating myself from my son. For his addiction was and is part of him—not a tumor or an organ to be cut out, but part of who he is, body, mind, and spirit.
I say “Thou” to his addiction, for it is his disease, and he is my son, whom I love with all my heart. I do not wish for a different child. I love him just as he is, for who he is, for all his flaws and limitations. I love him with my imperfect heart in which there are no longer massive spaces for hatred and enmity, for bitter words and shameful secrets.
Ben did not change—I changed. And as my wise friend Joyce reminds me over and over: “We can’t change other people, Kathy. We can only change ourselves. And in doing so, we change everything.”
15
found
2005–Present
How do you stay clean and sober?”
“I go to meetings,” he says.
“I’m wondering if there is something more, some need inside you that compels you to go to those meetings.”
He shifts in his chair and shoots me an annoyed look. “What are you asking me? What do you want from me?”
“I want to know how you maintain your recovery.”
“I told you—I go to meetings.”
“What else?” I am pushing him, but he needs to dig deeper. There’s something powerful underneath the surface, a force more formidable than his addiction, giving him the strength and courage to keep moving forward rather than getting stuck or slowly slipping backward.
He jumps up, angrily pushing his chair back, and starts pacing around the room. I know what is going through his mind—leave me alone!—but I have to keep pushing. We are getting close. I can hear it in the way he is breathing—shallow, rapid breaths. I can see it in the set of his jaw and the flashing anger in his eyes every time he looks at me.
Suddenly he stops and stares at the side table where he left his cell phone. He picks up the phone with a look of stunned relief on his face, as if he had just found something he’d lost a long time ago.
“You want to know how I stay sober? I email the dead.” His hands are shaking as he scrolls through his emails to Paul F., John K., and Mike R. He holds up the phone to show me the messages that bounce back to him with the words “undeliverable,” “user unknown,” “fatal error.”
“I email the dead,” he says, tears in his eyes, his voice softened to a near whisper. “And they remind me that when we are gone, we can’t hear the cries for help any more than we can reach out to touch and be touched by the people we love. I feel the emptiness, and I am reminded once again that recovery is my life.”
He looks at me beseechingly, hoping he has given me what I need. Then he says, simply, “I want to live.”
That scene created the ending for the book I wrote with William Cope Moyers. William’s stunning insight took my breath away. At that moment, I knew we had the perfect conclusion to his memoir. I couldn’t know then, two years before Ben’s recovery began, that the dead would also accompany my son on his journey.
Just before midnight on a clear, cold October night during his sophomore year in college, Ben has what he calls an epiphany. He’s been drinking and drugging with his friends, but an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and helplessness (what he later calls a “crisis of faith”) moves him to leave the party. Walking home, he looks up at the night sky and suddenly—miraculously, it might seem—he is overcome with a sense of how small and insignificant he is in relation to the vast and immeasurable universe.
“I realized I was powerless and that it was time to accept that fact,” he remembers. “That was my surrender.”
Ben did not drink or use the next day. Or the next. He hung on through weeks of withdrawal symptoms—tremors so severe, he had trouble holding a pen in his hand; intense, almost overpowering cravings; recurring bouts of anxiety and
depression; crushing loneliness. His friends didn’t understand the sudden change in his behavior, but for the most part, they left him alone. During those first few months of sobriety, he spent most nights at home. In between classes, he would visit Pat in his office. They would talk, and Ben would often stay for a few hours to study or write in his journal, with his father working nearby. Ben went to AA meetings at the church near campus and spent hours talking to counselors. Lacrosse practices and games filled his afternoon hours, and a new girlfriend occupied his evenings and weekends.
He stayed sober for a month. Three months. Six months. A year. Two years. Despite life’s normal frustrations and uncertainties—a night when a drunken friend threw beer on him, a grade on a paper he felt he didn’t deserve, a disagreement with his girlfriend—he stayed clean and sober. With time, he became stronger, healthier, happier, more confident. He graduated with a double major and honors in religion, titling his honors thesis, “Show Me How to See Things the Way You Do: Existentialism in Faith, Philosophy, and Film.” The purpose of existentialism, he wrote in his thesis, “is not to dissolve all ambiguity and doubt in the world . . . [but] to suggest a way to live with uncertainty and to form meaning in spite of apparent meaninglessness.”
“I wasn’t sure at first that I could make it through all the ups and downs without something to numb the pain,” he told me. “But then I get a glimpse of the beauty in the world and realize the hurt and heartache are worth it. I am never going back. I will never ever make the mistake of trying to numb whatever pain I have in life.”
“Chase away the demons,” singer and poet Joni Mitchell says, “and they will take the angels with them.”
As I write these words in 2017, Ben is ten years clean and sober. I think he would agree with me, though this is my interpretation not his, that his recovery is guided by two people who walk with him wherever he goes. John Quaresma stands on one side. Almost exactly ten years after John died, Ben wrote a letter to John’s sister, Whitney.
I guess I should start off by saying that I think about John all the time. After he passed away, I really struggled. For about 7 years, I got really wrapped up in heavy drug and alcohol use. I just felt so pissed off at the world. I loved your brother because he stood up for me and made me feel loved.
A lot of the work I did in treatment with my counselor was trying to cope with John’s death, but I just couldn’t accept it. And then I relapsed. Again and again. I just felt so empty without him.
On October 15, 2007, everything changed. I decided on that night that I was finished feeling sorry for myself. John never put up with my whining, and I feel that on that night, he reached out to me in some capacity. Part of the reason I decided to get sober is because I know that’s what John would have wanted for me.
I can see John’s shy smile as he walks with Ben wherever he goes. I imagine him playfully elbowing Ben in the ribs, reminding him that life is short, no matter how you look at it. I watch as he puts his arm around Ben’s shoulder and whispers, “Benny and the Jetts,” and I picture Ben’s smile as he remembers.
Standing by Ben’s other shoulder is Gary D’Agostino. Dag, as we called him, was in charge of the boiler room of Whitman College’s physical plant where Ben worked for the two summers before his freshman and sophomore years. Something clicked between Ben and Dag as they worked side by side in the physical plant. Dag taught Ben how to do an honest day’s work. He showed Ben how to work with his hands, to care about his work, to ask questions and try problem solving if he didn’t know how to do something. If Ben slipped up and made a mistake, Dag told him he’d better be honest about it, but he would never hold it against him. Dag demanded that Ben put any and all excuses aside and work his tail off to complete a project that he could take pride in. Bullshitting isn’t going to cut it, he said, and if Ben wanted trust, he was going to have to earn it.
“He showed me how to have the courage to stand up for what I believed in. He taught me to be honorable.” And then Ben adds, simply, “He saved my life.”
Dag died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on February 22, 2016, almost six years after Ben graduated from Whitman. They stayed in close touch through those years, talking on the phone frequently and even writing a blog together. Ben’s great regret is that Dag couldn’t be the best man at his wedding. But Dag was there in spirit, walking down the aisle with him.
Life sure has its way of taking us where it wants us to go. Once upon a time, I read a story that compares our lives to the underside of an Oriental carpet. I love the image. For most of our moments on earth, our only view of that rug is from the underside. All we can see are the knots and tangles, the broken threads and dull colors, the seemingly aimless, meaningless patterns that appear to begin and end nowhere in particular, with no overarching theme or master thread to pull everything together. But every so often—perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime—we are given the rare opportunity to rise up and look down upon the rug. For just a few, fleeting seconds, we can see the brilliance of the colors, the integrity of the design, the intricacy of the individual threads weaving in and out to create a complex, magnificent whole. And the meaning becomes clear, if just for that briefest of moments.
I wish for a longer look so I can make sense of certain parts of my life. I wonder, for example, what drew me to addiction all those years ago. Why did such a dark subject attract me and then continue to draw me forward, even when I resisted and longed for an easier, more light-hearted path through life? Looking back, with the elevation of age and hindsight, I am curious to see if I can tease out the knots, find the loops and threads that connect to each other so strongly and securely, so I can spin a story that helps me understand the why and wherefore of it all.
A sense of a mystery waiting to be unraveled adds to my fascination. Did my books pave the way for my life? Did the past predict the future? Or could it be that the magnetic force that drove me to write book after book about a subject with which I had no experience was some unearned God-like gift, offering me the strength and courage I needed to face the dark days ahead?
Perhaps it is all chance, as Pat would say. I think he is probably right. But as I imagine the elaborate swirling patterns of my life, I discern a design. The sparkling gold and silver threads of my family and all those I love and have loved shine most brightly. But something draws my eye, some master thread that links all the other strands together. I put my glasses on (why not?) to take a closer look. Thicker and stronger than the other strands, this thread is also more muted, less showy. It does not call attention to itself. Of course, I know what it is. This unifying filament, humble and unbreakable, is spirituality.
As I write these words, I find myself wanting to back away from this line of thought—spirituality has so many distorted, even negative connotations—but Ernie, bless his soul, is encouraging me. I, too, am guided by the dead. He is asking me to offer another image, perhaps a simpler one, to help convey the meaning of spirituality in our lives. Okay, Ernie, I answer him, I’ll use one of your stories.
Many years ago, Ernie gave a presentation on spirituality at the Renewal Center at Hazelden, one of the oldest and most renowned centers for the treatment of alcoholism and other chemical dependencies. Spirituality, Ernie explained to his audience, is pervasive, touching all of our lives, all of our surfaces, all of our depths—physical, mental, and spiritual. Only if we live it, think it, feel it, and practice it in our lives will we come to understand what it is.
During his talk, Ernie was momentarily stumped by a question from the audience. “Can you give us an image that might help us visualize what you mean by spirituality?” For several long moments, Ernie stared at the massive stone fireplace, searching his mind for a description that would help bring the concept of spirituality to life. His vision settled on the multi-colored rocks illuminated by the late afternoon sunlight streaming into the room. Perhaps their warmth and beauty would serve as an image of the spiritual.
Then, in one of those strange gestalt s
witches, his vision refocused and he saw not the individual stones but the bland, gray, pebbly “stuff” that held all those stones together. That was “the spiritual,” the substance that holds everything together to create a structure of strength and integrity.
“Spirituality is like that mortar in the fireplace,” Ernie said, breaking the silence. “Just as the mortar makes the chimney a chimney, allowing it to stand up straight and tall, beautiful in its wholeness, ‘the spiritual’ is what makes us wholly human. It holds our experiences together, shapes them into a whole, gives them meaning, allows them—and us—to be whole. Without the spiritual we are somehow not ‘all there.’”
Later, over coffee, one of the workshop participants said he had always imagined spirituality as something unique and spectacular, like angels or saints, something perfect and maybe even beyond human understanding. Running his fingers along the simple, unassuming surface of the mortar, he said, “If my life, my experiences are like a big pile of loose rocks, this plain, old, ordinary stuff is what I want—what I need—to hold everything together.”
Stones and mortar—that’s the kind of spirituality I need, too. Nothing fancy. No promises of ascending to great heights. Just plain old earthy stuff to remind me that nothing lasts forever. In geologic time, after all, even massive boulders are ground down into dust. But we do have these moments of beauty, of insight, of awe and wonder, and as so many wise men and women counsel, the trick is to stay in the moment, in the here and now. That’s not easy for me, with my restless, impulsive nature, but I am learning. I try to remind myself, every day, of writer/poet Jorge Luis Borges’s words: “A day does not pass when we are not, for an instant, in paradise.”
Right now, what are those instants? I look out the window. A dog is barking. The sky is gray. The roses are not quite ready to bloom—but almost. Wasps are flying in and out of the little tunnels under the roof tiles. I don’t like wasps. The dog keeps barking.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 22
