Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

by Brenda Wilhelmson

  I made my dad an appointment with an acupuncturist and Qigong master. My father teetered into Dr. Deng’s office, his skin gray, eyes hooded. Deng rubbed his hands together and pressed his palms to my father’s body. He poked my dad full of needles. He turned the lights off and played a meditation tape. My father would have called this voodoo bullshit if he weren’t so sick. When Deng flicked the lights back on, my father’s cheeks were pink and his eyes had the old mischievous spark. For the next few months, my dad visited Deng three times a week. And during that time I became obsessed with death.

  I wanted to convince myself that there was life after death, but I feared I was just deceiving myself. I watched the movie 21 Grams, which claims that at the moment of death, the body loses twenty-one grams of weight, the weight of the soul. It made me feel better until my friend, Tad, told me it was a crock of shit.

  “Google Duncan MacDougall,” he said. “The idea for that movie was based on his research. He weighed dying people and reported that their bodies lost weight when their souls left, but his research was bad and he was discredited.”

  I googled MacDougall, an early twentieth-century physician who weighed six people dying of tuberculosis. MacDougall placed his patients’ beds on an industrial scale that was gram sensitive and observed and recorded weight loss—twenty-one grams being the average—when they died. But because he observed only six patients, their weight loss varied, and the exact moment of death was (and still is) difficult to determine, his research was tossed out.

  “Life is a slimy sucking eddy of despair with false moments of hope in an ever-darkening universe,” played in my head. My childhood friend, Carolyn, recited that line a lot after she got knocked up and had a baby at seventeen. I began thinking about drinking all the time. I may have laid in bed with a vodka bottle if my kids weren’t forcing me to get up. And since I had to get up, I began going to meetings at seven in the morning. No one hits meetings at seven in the morning unless they’re desperate to get their shit together. And day after day my addict peers screwed my depressed head on a little straighter.

  My friend, Tracy, began having a close-friends meeting at her house once a month and, one night in February, I let fly that I doubted there was life after death and I didn’t think God existed. “Life feels like too much work sometimes,” I said. “I’d be fine if it ended.” Afterward, Tanya pulled me aside.

  “You need to get the book Closer to the Light by Melvin Morse,” she told me. Morse, an emergency room doctor, had documented the near-death experiences of children. The kids all had similar out-of-body experiences, and it gave me a lot of hope.

  A package arrived from Tanya a few days later containing Embraced by the Light by Betty Eadie, another book about near-death experience. I re-googled MacDougall. I decided that just because his work wasn’t up to scientific snuff, it didn’t mean he wasn’t onto something. I found it interesting that no scientist since has attempted to reconduct his research, and I suspected it was because, as Morse said in Closer to the Light, his colleagues thought he was a whack job.

  I walked into a health food store and asked for supplements to combat depression.

  “Vitamin D,” the clerk said. “The only way you get vitamin D naturally is from the sun, and you’re not getting any in February.” I began popping large doses of vitamin D.

  Maybe it was the vitamin D, maybe it was because I’d regained hope, maybe it was a combination of the two, but whatever, I emerged from my black hole with a vengeance and made a reservation to camp at the Grand Canyon in the summer.

  Van and I had taken rock-climbing classes, and I was certified to belay. I decided my family should climb while we were in the canyon, so that spring I began searching the Internet for pre-canyon climbs at Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin. I called a guide, told him what I wanted to do, and he started laughing.

  “I’m sorry I’m laughing,” he said, “It’s just that I’m in Arizona right now, and I’m about to pick up a Girl Scout troop from your town and take them into the canyon tomorrow. Wild, huh? You know, I’m thinking I’d like to take my girlfriend here this summer. If you want, I’ll work out a really nice deal for you. It would just be me and my girlfriend and your family. Usually, I take large groups. I’ll call one of my guides and have him email you pictures. We’ll hike into Havasu, an Indian reservation at the west end of the canyon, not the national park. I’ve hiked all over the world, and Havasu is one of my top two places.”

  I looked at one gorgeous photo after another of waterfalls, crystal-clear pools, canyon walls, and lush foliage, and booked the trip. I also booked a weekend climb at Devil’s Lake. I shut my computer down and went to my parents’ house. My father was complaining about his expensive thrice-weekly acupuncture and Qigong appointments that insurance didn’t cover.

  “You have something better to spend your money on?” I asked him. “You walked into Deng’s office looking like a zombie and now you’re doing great, considering.”

  “I asked Deng, ‘Where are you going on vacation with all the money I’m paying you?’” my dad said. “He started laughing. Little bastard is always laughing. Laughing all the way to the bank. I told him I was cutting my visits down to twice a week, and he didn’t like that. Told me it wasn’t a good idea. Not a good idea for him.”

  My father cut his visits down to once a week soon after that. Maybe the cancer was just running its course, maybe it had to do with cutting down on acupuncture and Qigong, but my father dropped weight, became unable to walk without assistance, and was in pain all the time. He stopped seeing Deng altogether.

  I’d been regularly taking my father out for lunch and car rides, and one warm day in early May, I helped my dad into my car, opened the sunroof, and drove him to the harbor so he could see his boat. His friends had taken his boat out of dry dock and put it in the water so he could try to sell it. We stopped at the bait shop. I helped my dad out of the car, and he put his arm around my shoulders and we slowly walked in. The man behind the tackle counter looked up and went back to checking inventory. “Larry,” my dad said. The man looked at my father blankly. “It’s me, Jerry.” Shocked recognition swept onto the man’s face.

  “Jerry,” he said. “I knew you had cancer last summer but … you look like shit. Here, let me get you a chair.”

  Larry pulled two chairs out and we sat next to the tackle counter. My dad and Larry chatted briefly, and Larry watched sadly as my father and I limped out the door. We drove to the harbor, and I pulled my car up next to the iron security gate that opened to the pier where my dad’s boat was docked.

  “I want to get on my boat,” my father said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You can barely lift your feet. How are you going to climb in?”

  “Fine,” my dad growled. “I won’t get on my fucking boat.”

  I felt guilty, like maybe I should get him on one more time. I began trying to think of ways to get him on his damn boat without us toppling into the water when a friend of his appeared at his window.

  “Jerry,” Hal said solemnly. “They told me I have prostate cancer, too.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” my dad said. “Do they think you can beat it?”

  Hal shrugged forlornly.

  “I’m very sorry,” my dad said. “Look at me.” Neither of them said anything for a moment. “You’re going to have to move, Hal,” my father said. “I’m going to be sick.” My dad opened the car door and vomited on the pavement.

  “Bye, Jerry,” Hal said and slumped away.

  “Let’s go,” my father whispered, wiping his lips.

  My father wasn’t up for car rides soon after that. I began taking him outside to sit in his backyard, but by the end of May, he couldn’t do that either. My mother hired hospice, and a hospice worker put a hospital bed in the middle of my parents’ living room. Two days later, my father was unable to get out of bed. I emailed Todd, the climbing guide, and told him I was probably going to have to cancel our trips. Devil’s Lake was days away, H
avasu two weeks away. But my dad was still hanging in there when Devil’s Lake rolled around, so we went. I showed my dad pictures of our camping trip when we got back and brought the kids to visit him. Now that my kids were out of school for the summer, I was bringing them to see my dad every day. My mom would often take Max and Van to play miniature golf, and I’d exercise my dad’s legs and arms and feed him Jell-O. My dad was heavily medicated, and sometimes he was lucid, sometimes not.

  “I’m going to cancel our trip to the Grand Canyon,” I told my sister one afternoon when we were both sitting in my parents’ kitchen. It was June fifteenth and we were scheduled to leave for the canyon in six days.

  “I don’t think you should,” Paula said. “A hospice musician was just here playing guitar and singing for Dad. She said she’d seen people like Dad hang on for a month or more.”

  “Really?” I said, looking through the kitchen door at the back of my father’s hospital bed and the crown of his bald head. “Dad just asked me, ‘How long am I going to be stuck like this? You don’t know what I’m going through.’”

  I told my dad to ditch his sick body when he was ready. I reminded him of the near-death-experience books I’d read and told him about. “Most people didn’t want to return to their bodies,” I said. “They went someplace really good.” My dad closed his eyes and smiled.

  My father and I had discussed what I’d come to believe about life after death many times out of earshot of my mother.

  “You’ll sleep in the ground until Jesus comes,” my mother routinely told my father, sticking to her Adventist views. “I’m not afraid of dying because I won’t know anything. The next thing I’ll see is Jesus.”

  Rotting in the ground for years was little comfort to my father. He liked my thoughts on death a lot better.

  “You should go on your trip,” Paula said. “You can keep in touch until you start hiking down. If you need to turn around and fly home, that’s what you’ll do.”

  The pastor from my mother’s church anointed my father’s head with oil the next day. It was Saturday, the day before Father’s Day. The kids and I showed up shortly after the pastor left.

  “Paula and her kids are coming to see you tomorrow,” I told my dad. Noises were agitating him now, and I knew four children would be hard on him. “Would it be too much if we all came?”

  “I think so,” my dad said.

  “Then we won’t come,” I told him.

  It was the last time I saw him alive.

  I sent up a prayer as I drove to my parents’ house in the dark. “If you could let me feel something, anything, to let me know my dad is out there, I’d appreciate it,” I whispered. I whizzed down the empty road, slowed down as I approached the red light at the entrance ramp to the highway, then stepped on the gas and blew off the light. I started laughing. My father would have sped through the light, too. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I felt a presence in the passenger’s seat next to me. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  I pulled in front of my parents’ house behind a huge white van. I walked in the house and hugged my mother. She introduced me to a social worker who had just signed my father’s death certificate.

  “Two men from the funeral home are here,” my mom said. “They’re outside in that van. I asked them to wait until you got here.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” the social worker said and walked out of the living room into the kitchen.

  I walked over to my father’s gaunt ivory-colored body. One skinny arm was partially raised. His mouth was slightly open. His eyes were visible through thin slits. I felt no connection to his body at all. He had left it.

  The social worker asked my mother if she should ask the guys from the funeral home to come in, and my mother said yes. The social worker suggested that my mother and I go into the kitchen so we wouldn’t see my father’s body being bagged and hauled out. After everyone left, my mother and I sifted through my father’s belongings until the funeral home opened. At lunch, my sister joined us and helped select flowers, then I went home and Paula stayed with my mother. I sent a few emails asking friends to pass on information about my father’s funeral and went to bed.

  [Tuesday, June 19]

  My cousin and old drinking buddy, Mike, flew in from California. He put his stuff in Max’s bedroom, and we sat outside on my deck with a bottle of tequila, a container of orange juice, and a bucket of ice. Mike poured himself a drink, and I licked my lips as he drank it. I wanted one bad. I grabbed the orange juice and poured seltzer water in it and had that instead. By the time Mike was on his eighth drink, I was hugely happy I wasn’t messed up like him. I kissed him on the cheek and went to bed, but Mike stayed up and drank.

  [Wednesday, June 20]

  My family met at the funeral home an hour before the wake started. We sat in the parlor with my father’s body and Mike, gripping a rocks glass filled with ice and bourbon, made frequent trips to the Lincoln Town Car he’d rented to freshen his drink. Fuck it, I thought. I sat next to Mike and started to tell him I wanted to go out to his car when two guys from my 7:00 a.m. recovery meeting walked in. One of them was Kent, my new sponsor.

  Kent had become my sponsor when my relationship with Sara got weird. I had started writing Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife and Sara didn’t like it. She had asked me to write her bipolar/alcoholic story. I started teaching yoga and she didn’t like that either. “We don’t do things without checking with our sponsors first,” she told me.

  Not wanting a puppet master but feeling conflicted, I went out to lunch with Playboy Pete and asked him what he thought.

  “When you don’t know what to do, do nothing,” Pete said.

  “Really?”

  “Turn your problem over to your higher power and do nothing until the answer comes.”

  “Cool,” I said. “I like that.”

  A week later, I told Sara I felt disconnected from her and needed to find a new sponsor.

  “Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “I’m sorry to hear that. But, well, I think you need to do what you need to do. I wish you well. You know you can still call me if you want to.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been great in so many ways.”

  My relationship ended with Vivian after I told her I was going to teach yoga, too. Vivian wanted to be a yoga teacher as well and was in a training program. I hadn’t entered a formal training program yet, but I’d been practicing for years, been encouraged to teach by fellow yogis, and was presented with the opportunity to teach. I invited Vivian to dinner at the Indian restaurant she, Darcy, and I had eaten at to pick her brain about liability insurance. I sat at a table and waited for her for twenty minutes, then called to see if she was coming.

  “I’m almost there,” she snapped. “If you’re hungry, eat without me.”

  When Vivian showed up, she threw her bag on the floor, slammed down on her chair, pulled a three-ringed binder out, and shoved it across the table at me. She opened it to the section on insurance, and I started jotting information into a notebook.

  “That notebook is too nice,” she said, snatching the notebook from me and pushing it down the table. She dug around in her backpack. “Write on this,” she said, thrusting a dented piece of loose-leaf notebook paper at me.

  My phone rang. It was Charlie calling to tell me that Sturgis, my sweet old senile dog, had wandered out of the yard and couldn’t be found.

  “I have to go,” I told Vivian, grabbing my stuff, slapping a wad of cash on the table, and bolting. I drove around my neighborhood looking for Sturgis. I called the police, and they told me a veterinary clinic near my house had picked him up and put him in a kennel for the night.

  Vivian called the next day to apologize for her bipolar behavior and ask about my dog, whom I sadly had to put down months after that. I accepted her apology but was done with Vivian. Had we been lifelong friends, I would have put up with her crap. I felt bad, but we hadn’t been friends long enough for me to do that. I ran into Vivian only onc
e after. We were at a meeting and she pulled me aside. She told me she left her husband and had moved in with a psychic who was a much older gay woman.

  “I’m done with men,” Vivian said. “I think I’m a lesbian.” Then she told me her daughter, Nancy, was still using.

  When I asked Kent to be my sponsor, he said, “Hmm, I’m going to have to ask my sponsor about this.” A day later, Kent said yes. It’s unorthodox for a woman to ask a man to be her sponsor, but Kent was the sanest, most spiritual person I knew. When Kent walked into my father’s wake with Ethan, a recovering crack addict who liked hookers, my heart sank. There went my drink. But the next second I was flooded with gratitude. They’d saved me. I got up and gave both of them a big hug.

  Kat walked in. My friends from book club arrived with the exception of Kelly. Joel had left Kelly for another woman and, after many miserable months, Kelly started dating. She was in Napa Valley with her new boyfriend. More of my girlfriends showed up. Deidre, who still couldn’t stay sober, gave me a big bear hug. The place was packed and I was relieved I wasn’t drunk. I caught sight of Hope and Audrey, who were talking to Mike. Audrey had divorced Nehemiah and moved back to Chicago. When she saw me looking at her, she walked over. “Your cousin is really messed up,” she whispered. Audrey partied with Mike and me when we were much younger, and she and Mike had gotten intimate once. Mike was propping himself up against a wall and swaying. Liv, Reed, and Seth walked in. Seth, who’d gone to my parents’ north woods cabin with us two summers in a row, glanced at my dad in his coffin. Liv teared up and Reed kissed my cheek.

  When the last of the 300-plus guests left, I told Charlie I was going to drive Mike and his rental car back to our house. At home, Mike cracked open a new bottle of bourbon.

  [Thursday, June 21]

  “I hear you’re leaving for the Grand Canyon tomorrow,” my cousin Peter said at my father’s after-funeral lunch.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I’m glad to be getting out of here. We’re looking forward to it.”