Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  In the early days of our marriage, we traveled together a lot; we took long road trips and made plans for the future. Before we went to bed each night, we would discuss the places we wanted to explore. We hoped to buy a house in New Orleans and eventually retire there.

  I tried to make her happy at all costs, thinking that if I gave her everything she’d ever wanted, she wouldn’t need to drink anymore. I saw her need to drink as my personal failure as a husband. We paid for world-class rehab facilities—but every trip ended the same way, with an eventual relapse. Maybe she made it a few days, maybe a few months. But she always relapsed. And it only got worse. It started to consume everything.

  I felt like a zombie. I didn’t have any feelings other than pain. I was grieving for the loss of the life I thought we would have together. I would look at our stack of postcards and feel like our dreams and plans—which had once seemed so real and reachable—had become fantasies. I was an emotional slave to her, and I couldn’t see where she ended and I began. When she was happy, I was happy. When she felt sad, I felt sad. We talked about divorce, but I wasn’t ready to give up on her.

  I spent countless restless nights making sure that she didn’t get sick and asphyxiate. I remember all the times she would wake up in the middle of the night to drink in order to keep her body from going into withdrawal. I became obsessed with making her eat. Her body had started rejecting solid food altogether, favoring alcohol. This is when it first hit me that she was suffering from a disease: I realized that her brain considered withdrawal a bigger threat than lack of food. She was quite tall, my wife—around five foot nine. Toward the end of her life, when her disease was at its worst, she weighed only 110 pounds. It changed how I looked at her; I could no longer blame her. It’s like blaming someone for having cancer; she couldn’t help that she was sick.

  Once, we went out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary. I had put so much time and effort into picking out the restaurant and making the arrangements. I was hoping to recapture the early days of our marriage and that feeling of love and wanderlust that we’d once shared. We both ordered food, and she ordered wine, too. She was drinking quickly and was in bad shape by the time the food arrived. Before the server even had a chance to put the food down, she asked him to take it back and put it in a doggie bag. She said she didn’t have an appetite. So we sat in silence, and I ate alone. She just drank.

  I started going to Al-Anon meetings at first because I wanted to hear stories from family members who had succeeded in getting their loved ones clean. I know now that I went for the wrong reason. I was supposed to go for me, but I went for her. When I told her I was going that first night, she asked if she could go with me. She was drunk, and I was unaware that she might trigger some of the other participants. I hoped they would tell her how to get clean, so I said she could. When we got there and it was my turn to introduce myself, all I could say was “Hi, I’m Henry,” and then I broke down crying. She got up and walked out. The next day, she told me she’d decided to check herself into a ninety-day rehab facility.

  I can’t tell you how hopeful I felt that night. I danced around our living room after she’d gone to sleep, crying tears of happiness and relief. I thought that perhaps we’d had a breakthrough, that since she was the one who had decided to check herself in this time, things would be different. It would stick. I drove her to the airport the next day—she’d picked one on a beach in Florida. I hoped that the reminder of swimming in the ocean, which she loved, would give her something to stay clean for—would give her the boost she needed to thrive on her sobriety.

  The ninety days felt unbearably long. I put myself on a diet and stopped drinking, too. I started working out and taking care of my mental health. I did it to mirror the wellness that she was building in rehab. I wanted to be able to keep up with her once she was better. During my thousand-mile drive to pick her up, I felt giddy with excitement. I imagined someone different—fuller-figured, healthy, happy again. I’d planned a scenic ten-night trip home along the ocean, and I played out our adventures in my mind’s eye, smiling to myself, pressing down the gas whenever I thought of seeing her.

  When I went to the front desk to pick her up, they put me in a waiting room and you’d have thought I was waiting for a life-or-death verdict. She finally came out, and she looked radiant. She gave me a hug, and we made our way to the car. I told her about the trip I’d planned, and she just lit up—she couldn’t wait to get there. And she was good; she was really good for about a day or two. But as we started to drive back up the coast, she started souring. Uncharacteristically, she picked fights with me. She insisted I drop her off at the side of the road one time, and I spent about an hour convincing her to get back in. When we got to our hotel for the night, she almost got a separate room. And that’s how it started up again. By the time we were back home, she’d mentally relapsed. She’d had a seizure that first night in rehab after refusing withdrawal medication. At this point, it was obvious that it had changed her personality. She was no longer herself. She got mean.

  In a few weeks, she was drinking alcoholically again, despite daily AA meetings and an intensive outpatient program. I took it upon myself to detox her. I found something online that suggested starting out the alcoholic at their original dose—which for her was four or five bottles of red wine a day—and then slowly easing them down to none. So the first day I gave her twenty five-ounce glasses at specific times. I would wake her up in the middle of the night and give her the glass of wine like she was taking medication. The next day, I gave her nineteen, and the next eighteen, until she eventually got down to nothing.

  She lasted one week.

  Because of her repeated relapses, my family had started distancing themselves from me. John, my son from a previous marriage, resented me for ignoring my family. When John’s wife gave birth to a baby boy, my first grandchild, they told me that they didn’t want my wife around the boy—that she wouldn’t be considered his grandmother. I had done my best to keep her addiction a secret, but it seemed that everyone knew. When my wife found out about John’s decision to lock her out of the baby’s life, she became angrier and more resentful. Detached from her family and mine, she took out her frustration on her only lifeline—me. And I was already buckling under the weight of my double life. I would write letters to advice columns asking for help—but I never sent them.

  My wife became increasingly isolated. She often refused to talk to me at all and spent all day crying and drinking in our room. She’d completely lost her zest for life. She had given up. She started writing me Post-it notes and putting them everywhere. Depending on the day she was having, I found anything from small declarations of love or scribbled memories of better days, to painful accusations or running shopping lists. I’d find them on the fridge, in the pantry, in my closet, in my gym bag, inside my shoes… everywhere. And that’s how we communicated.

  One night, I was getting ready for bed when I heard a crash from the living room. She had fallen and hurt her shoulder. We went to the emergency room, where the doctors informed me that both her blood oxygen and blood pressure were very low. After rehydrating her by early the next morning, the doctors decided to discharge her. When we got home, she ate and wanted to rest. I went to an Al-Anon meeting and got back a couple of hours later. She had been on the phone with her friends and family.

  “I’ve been making amends,” she told me with a smile. We sat down on our porch, and we talked about things—about life and her illness. She seemed like her old self. I was very emotional because she was so lucid and present, and the conversation was no longer about if she was sick—we’d both finally acknowledged that—it was about how to get her better.

  She told me she was too tired to walk, so I put her in a rolling chair and pushed her to the bedroom. Then she asked me to help her into our bed. I started turning down the bed, and when I turned around she was breathing erratically and she had passed out. I gave her mouth-to-mouth and called the ambulance. When I got to the h
ospital, the doctors told me it didn’t look good. They put her on life support, and she passed away the next morning.

  It happened so quickly, and strangely enough, although her death was years in the making, I still wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t prepared.

  So who am I now? For so many years, my existence was tied to hers. I was her caretaker, and that was the predominant part of my identity. And when she died, I lost myself. I spent days in my house, in my bathrobe, depressed. I still do. It’s been almost a year, and I’m struggling to do even the most basic things—to settle her estate, to execute her will, to sell or donate her things. There are days when I can barely get out of bed—just totally wasted days. I have so little structure left that it’s easy to just spiral down into depression.

  Her loss has been a gradual unveiling. I still can’t talk to anyone who doesn’t know what has happened. It’s too much pressure—you know?—to act normal when you’re grieving. I just can’t do it. I can’t pretend that my whole world hasn’t fallen apart.

  But she’s everywhere, still. I recently had to go through the bottles she used to carry water (alcohol?) to work—I threw out or donated scores of reusable water bottles. After she died, I was standing in front of the closet, trying to pick out a jacket to go someplace. I’m not a formal-wear guy, you know. I prefer jeans and a button-down. As I slid my hand in the sleeve to put the jacket on, I felt the faint crumple of some paper, and then I saw a Post-it zigzag to the floor. I almost didn’t want to look at it. I was afraid it would be an unpleasant reminder.

  It said, I love you.

  Patrick, late forties

  I come from a very conservative Episcopalian family, the youngest of four raised in a small town in New Hampshire. My parents were tough, distant. We were well-off so I never went without, but we didn’t hug or tell each other “I love you.” I guess, in that sense, I did go without. We were raised with discipline and the pursuit of excellence in our blood. The problem was, I didn’t know where I fit in in the world. I craved belonging. When I saw a Marines recruitment poster one day, that was it. I was in.

  I graduated from USMC recruit training in June 1990. I was twenty years old. They sent me overseas from August 1990 to June 1991 for the Gulf War. I was stationed on the USS Tripoli, which was hit by a mine. Then I was stationed on the ground in Okinawa for six months, then in Mogadishu. I was there for the Battle of Mogadishu. Before I was stationed there, I didn’t even know where Somalia was.

  Mogadishu was the beginning of the end for me. A part of me died there. I lost my religion. I believed that if there was a God, this place would not exist. Our main reason for being there was to help the UN bring food to the people—people dying of starvation. There were bodies all over the place, little kids, man. Babies. I joined the Marines to get out of New Hampshire, to see the world. But seeing the way that people lived there ignited such a dissonance in me, such internal turmoil. I always knew that I came from money. We had a nice house, food on the table, a place to sleep. We lived in the best country in the world. Somalia, on the other hand, wasn’t far off from those infomercials that try to get you to donate money to a child in need—distended bellies, naked babies, no food, no water. I’d had a blessed life that I really hadn’t appreciated.

  We got embroiled in the worst US battle since Vietnam. Aidid, the warlord responsible for the death of his people, told Somalis that we were there to convert them to Christianity. So they fought us hard. I am not a violent person, but people conform to their environment. Shooting a gun, when I think back on it, was a very surreal experience. I was more afraid of shooting someone than I was of getting shot. People who have seen combat understand this. I was afraid that killing would break something, rewire me or something. And it really does—something changes, forever.

  * * *

  I stayed in the Marines for another few years. In 1994, I was twenty-four. I had come home from combat to being a civilian in the real world. I had nothing. Well, that’s not true. I had PTSD, and I was scared for the first time. My roommate told me that I was yelling and talking in my sleep. What you have to do when you’re overseas is so instilled in you that you never think about it. But when you come back, you have all the time in the world, so you get to thinking and dreaming. And pretty soon, you can’t get away from what you’ve seen and what you’ve done. I was living in Arlington, Virginia, when I tried cocaine for the first time. And I realized, “I don’t ever want to not feel like this again.”

  A couple of years later, one of my sisters decided to move to Chicago, and I followed her there. We’d always been close, and I needed someone who cared for me—someone important to keep me around; plus, there was nothing left for me in Virginia. In Chicago, I was bouncing at a nightclub and doing coke very casually, on and off. When I met Maria at the club one night, it was a second chance at it all. My responsibility to her kept me sane. We became great friends first, and then we started dating and got engaged about two and a half years in. While we were engaged, she got pregnant. Her father was Irish Catholic and very religious, but a shotgun wedding was out of the question—the timing wouldn’t have worked—so her mother convinced her to get an abortion. After that, the relationship fizzled.

  It was a difficult breakup. Not nasty, just protracted. She battled depression for eight months after the abortion and was very codependent. Her parents supported her. One day, I just packed up and left. I couldn’t do it anymore. It was too dark—between my own issues, our loss, her depression, I was starting to feel like it was getting to be too much to handle without losing my mind. I just needed to go, to detach.

  I googled her about a year ago and found out that her dad died. I almost sent flowers, and I’ve wanted to write, many times, to apologize for walking away. She’s the only person I’ve ever loved. If I could do it over again, I would have stayed.

  * * *

  I’d been involved with a woman once before I met Maria, in between the Gulf and Somalia. Samantha was in an abusive relationship and she left him for me. She got pregnant. When I got deployed to Somalia, she went back to her ex, who was a violent dude. Our little boy, Ben, died of SIDS when he was four months old. I found out when I got back. Jill, the girl who’d introduced me to Sam, told me about what had happened—that they had investigated but couldn’t prove anything. I thought about reaching out to Sam, but it was easier to just walk away. I don’t know if I walked away because I never wanted a kid to begin with, so letting go was easy, or because I was afraid of what would happen to her if her ex found out that the baby wasn’t his.

  After leaving Maria, I supported myself with odd jobs and stayed mostly clean. In the early 2000s, things fell apart. My mother was diagnosed with cancer and died soon after. I was in NYC when the planes hit the towers—I was actually in the lobby of the second building. I think the emotional weight of my mother’s diagnosis, along with the close call in New York, sent me over the edge and I started using again. At the time, I was working as a headhunter for a health-care company, but they fired me because of my cocaine issue and gave me six months’ salary as part of the severance package.

  * * *

  The package was a good chunk of money, so I didn’t leave my apartment for weeks. I started out at about half an ounce and worked my way up to an ounce and a half of cocaine a week. I just sat on my couch, watching TV footage of kids being sent abroad for the Second Gulf War and the fear and rage resurfaced, but multiplied threefold—worse than I’ve ever experienced. I was in tears, shaking, afraid of what the soldiers would have to come back to, angry for them.

  Getting high meant having a chance to detach from everything that happened, or at least to put a little distance between myself and the memories. With every hit I took—the abortion, Ben dying, my mom dying, 9/11—I floated a little further and further away. And eventually I realized I just didn’t really want to come back.

  I went on a pretty bad binge one day, and I was feeling really ill, so I decided that I was going to try to sweat it out. I fill
ed my tub up with hot water. I lowered myself into it, and I swear it felt like I was having a heart attack. I got tunnel vision, I couldn’t breathe, and my chest felt tight. I crawled out of the tub and dragged myself on the floor to the corded phone in my living room. I called my sister and I told her, “I think I’m dying.” And I wasn’t afraid at all. It’s just that I’d seen the pain my father went through when my mother died, and I was apprehensive about his ability to survive me. My brother-in-law called an ambulance, and I made it through, but my addiction just got worse. I disappeared for months and went on weeklong cocaine binges. I was afraid to sleep because of the nightmares. My poor sister was losing her mind with worry.

  After a couple of months of trying to track me down, she finally found an address for me and called the police to do a wellness check. They approached the apartment and noted that there was a smell coming from inside. They communicated as much to her, assuming that what they were smelling was my decomposing body. When they finally got the keys to the door and entered the apartment, they saw my fish tank in a state of complete decay. After that, my sister insisted that I move to Florida so that she could keep an eye on me, but I pulled even further away. I ended up in California for a job, living like I had a death wish. I got myself arrested on purpose, because behind bars was the only place I felt safe from myself. I called my sister—it was actually her birthday that day, what a present—and she sent a lawyer to bail me out.