by Delilah
Sometimes memories or dysfunctional people who have a hold on our heart are like the sandbag that pulled the balloon precariously downward and nearly caused it to crash. And yet, even knowing our lives may depend upon it, letting go can be the hardest thing in the world to do. I have said in the past I never let go of anything that didn’t have claw marks all over it…
If you walk through my farmhouse or my sister’s home, you will notice knickknacks, framed prints, furniture from a bygone era. We aren’t exactly collectors of antiques as much as we are collectors of things that remind us of our parents and grandparents. Because we lost our folks when we were still young adults, we tend to cling to anything that our family members once cherished. It doesn’t matter if the thing was actually theirs or not—it only needs to resemble something that Mom would have had on a shelf in our family home or Grandma would have displayed in her kitchen, and we snatch it up from a garage sale or thrift store and carry it home to add to our growing piles of mothball-scented memories.
It doesn’t stop with furniture and artwork on display in our living rooms; it spreads like English ivy to our kitchen cupboards, with embroidered linens, cast-iron skillets, milk-glass salt and pepper shakers, to our closets chock-full of antique hats, cat-eye glasses, rhinestone costume jewelry, vintage jackets and skirts that are over fifty years old. Even our gardens are living museums, with tea roses transplanted from Grandma’s garden and fig trees and four-leaf clovers from Mom’s backyard. Neither my sister nor I could ever live in a contemporary house with bare walls or minimalistic style; we could not release all of the memorabilia and relics we have hoarded like squirrels’ nuts over the years.
Even harder for me is letting go of people I love but who are hurtful and destructive. I have heard at various twelve-step meetings I’ve attended that being in a relationship with an active addict is like being in a cage with a lion. As beautiful as the great cat is, you enter the cage knowing that at any moment, that beautiful creature can rip your head off your shoulders in an instant. Being in a relationship with someone who is an active addict—whether their addiction is to alcohol and drugs or behaviors like pornography or gambling—is putting yourself at risk of being ripped apart. Because someone who is an active addict can’t really have a relationship with you; they can only use you to further their addiction.
And like the antique roosters that line my kitchen shelves, I seem to collect addicts and alcoholics aplenty. Husbands one and two, a few boyfriends, a drummer in a rock band, girlfriends from every town I’ve ever lived in, neighbors and nannies, and sadly a few of my grown children…
I was in my late twenties before I found my way to a room filled with other adults who loved people who loved alcohol. What a life-changing experience that was! Sitting with my peers, hearing my story told over and over, in different voices from different perspectives, but always the same outcome. Loving someone who loves booze more than they love themselves or others is hell. Loving someone who loves meth or crack or heroin more than they love themselves, more than they love life, more than they love the feel of their mama’s hands on their feverish forehead, more than they love the sound of their baby’s laughter, is worse than hell. Knowing the only way to survive is to walk away and pray they find their way back to sanity before they find their way to the grave is the hardest thing in the world to do. Especially when the one you must walk away from is one that you felt flutter to life in your belly, or one whose hand you held before the judge signed the adoption papers, whom you held at night when the storm raged outside, making sure they felt safe and secure in your loving embrace. To let go and let God watch over them as the storm of addiction batters them to and fro is to trust in a future that is not promised. But to try to fix, heal, control, or direct is as pointless as trying to yell at the wind to stop blowing or the waves to stop crashing.
There is a beautiful woman with curly, flaming-red hair and a lopsided smile I became friends with when my last-born biological son was a few weeks old. Her teenage son and mine were friends; she and her small family lived with her mother-in-law, a few houses down the street from ours. When my twelve-year-old son mentioned that Delilah on the radio was his mom, Tina (not her real name) didn’t believe him. My son is black, and Tina knew from the publicity I had done that Delilah on the radio was a tall blonde. She argued with my son and said, “Delilah can’t be your mom—she’s white.”
Laughing, my son said, “Yes, yes, she is my mom,” and dragged Tina down to my house to meet me.
It was love at first sight; our friendship was instant and filled with laughter. As the months and years went by, our sister-like bond grew—our kids played together, we both went through difficult divorces. Tina found herself without a place to live. I had purchased a little house next to mine for my in-laws to move into when they retired, and since that was a while off, I made it available to Tina and her sons. The closer our friendship grew, the more I was troubled by my friend’s bouts of drinking wine. Many nights she’d call me when I’d get off the air, her speech slurred and her laughter raucous. After a few years of living in my little house next to me, her older boy, who was developing his own addictions, had kicked in bedroom doors, broken the walls in several places, and smoked in my house. I was angry and frustrated. Tina left the house without holding him accountable and without apologies, and although our friendship was strained, we made it through that.
Fast-forward eight years to several more attempts at rescuing Tina and her sons from bad decisions, and many, many fights over the empty bottles of wine that piled up, the bills that went unpaid, and the chaos that followed her everywhere. In addition to red wine, her attraction to dysfunctional partners was insanely destructive. At one point, one of her partners refused to let my kids come and visit Tina’s kids because they left footprints on the floors and fingerprints on her granite countertops.
We had been friends for years, gone on vacations together, and talked at least once a day, and she allowed her controlling lover to dictate the parameters of our relationship.
My frustration came to a head one day when she called to say she thought she had been poisoned, that two entire days were missing in her memory. I rushed to her house and drove her to the hospital. It was a Sunday afternoon. My red-haired friend seemed very lucid and coherent but couldn’t remember anything from Friday afternoon on. At the hospital the police were called to begin an investigation into who had poisoned her. While we were waiting for the police to begin their questions, the doctor on duty came in the exam room and asked to speak with me privately. He pulled me out to the hall to tell me my friend’s blood alcohol level was more than three times the legal limit. The doctor, obviously angry and annoyed, said she had not been poisoned—she had blacked out and lost memory from her drunkenness. And yet she showed no signs of obvious intoxication, no slurring, no stumbling, nothing to indicate she was out-of-her-mind drunk.
The trip home was a nightmare, and I hate to confess how badly I lost my temper and how inappropriately I behaved. I wanted to beat Tina and leave her stranded on the side of the road.
A few more years, a few more heartbreaks, and I realized the only thing I could do was let go. Not that I had any choice—she quit answering my calls and avoided me like the plague when she moved in with yet another crazy lover. I had to realize she wanted her booze and her freaky lovers more than she wanted a real relationship, more than she wanted to save her own life. Letting go isn’t easy; I miss her every day and wonder why alcoholism can overwhelm and control such a funny, smart, incredible person to such a destructive degree, but it does.
Addiction is a cunning and baffling demon. It lies, it steals. It kills. It is no respecter of persons. It is not picky or prejudiced; it kills the brilliant and the slow-minded, the religious and the atheist, rich and poor, young and old.
I heard a famous female writer who had gotten sober say, “People said I abused alcohol. I never abused alcohol. I abused my family, my friends, myself, but never my alcohol… alcoh
ol was all I cared about.”
It’s hard when you love someone completely, a spouse or a child, a parent or a best friend, to watch them destroy their body and their mind with drugs, alcohol, gambling, eating disorders, promiscuity, or sex addictions. Harder yet is letting go and letting God rescue or heal them. For some of us, we will let our wallets be stolen as well as our peace of mind, our houses assaulted as well as our bodies or our hearts before we finally admit we are powerless to stop the addict.
If I probed into your life over the phone, as is my job at night, chances are you would reveal to me, intentionally or not, something you need to let go of. If it’s not something presently in your life, it was there in the past, or you’ll have it in the future, I have no doubt. Life happens to all of us—wounds, hurt, and grievances… to live fully means we must let go.
For my dad, it was letting go of his secret life, the half siblings he hid from us. I believe that’s the pain he wanted to sip away in the evenings and that kept him in a fog of depression. I heard a saying once—“You’re only as sick as your secrets”—and how true it was for him. If he had let go of that secret, meaning brought his hidden family together with his current one, things might have been different, probably better, maybe worse. But at least the grip of that secret wouldn’t have held him hostage for so long.
For me, it’s letting go of the need to fix my friend Tina, as well as dozens of other people I love. From past husbands and lovers to adult children and friends, I have to let go of the need to rescue and trust that God will walk with them down the path that I cannot.
For others, it’s letting go of anger and resentment, and offering forgiveness. My father couldn’t admit he was wrong about turning his back to me, was too prideful to say he was sorry, too prideful to realize I would’ve embraced him in a heartbeat. And I believe it was ultimately the weight of the burdens he carried that crushed such a strong man far too young.
What are you holding on to that’s making your soul sick with anger, depression, sadness, anxiety? You’ll recognize it as the thing that’s always there in the back of your mind, barring you from living a free and happy existence. If only that person were better, or if that issue was resolved, or if that memory didn’t keep sneaking in… the enormous weight would be lifted. Maybe it’s time to “let go and let God.” Offer up prayers about that thing that weighs so heavily on you, and ask God to take it from here.
In the end, I’m not in your shoes and I can’t make a judgment for you, but I’ve talked with enough people over the past forty years, perfect strangers, who’ve all had something in common—they have some form of sandbag they need to cut loose before they can soar. Ask God how to proceed in letting something go, offload the weight, and let him carry it going forward.
“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28
CHAPTER 7:
AN EMPOWERED HEART
I’ve always been my parents’ daughter, unable to spend a hundred dollars on a blouse that could be sewn at home for five dollars, unwilling to buy furniture from a showroom when I can find a great couch at Goodwill for fifty dollars. Mom could take a well-worn dress from the thrift store or a garage sale, a scrap of fabric from the local dime store, add rickrack or lace and salvaged buttons from a vintage frock, and create a gorgeous dress for a prom or a wedding. Like Cinderella and the mice sewing ribbons onto a dress in the attic, Mom was able to create absolute beauty out of scraps. She sewed curtains, pillows, and bedspreads; she once decorated an entire room using a set of floral sheets from JCPenney. She and Dad never once owned a new car, never stayed in a four-star hotel, never shopped at Nordstrom or Macy’s. They lived a simple life and enjoyed simple pleasures.
Mom would hear the neighbors had bagged a deer during hunting season, and she’d show up at their door with a huge metal tub and ask for the bones when the buck was butchered. She’d bring the bones home, put them in a pot of water on the stove and boil them for hours, adding salt, pepper, and garlic for taste, and then can the broth in quart jars. During the wet winter months she’d open a jar of soup stock and add a bag of noodles and some veggies, and we would have delicious, hot soup for dinner. She let nothing go to waste.
Dad was equally resourceful. He thought it was foolish to pay the $2.50 a week to have Hahn’s Garbage Service pick up our trash. Instead he’d put the garbage can in the back of the truck and drive to the city dump. The dump had a section where people could leave household items and building materials that could be salvaged or reused. Washing machines that no longer spun the clothes, boats with holes in the bottom, bikes with flat tires and busted seats… this was the real reason for Dad’s dump runs. Treasures waiting to be salvaged! Dad would throw a bike in the back of the truck, bring it home, and show me and my brother how to straighten the wheel and add new spokes, how to oil the chain and take out a link if it was too loose. How to take a seat apart so Mom could reupholster it, and how to hang it from the rafters with thin wire to spray paint it candy-apple red. We would add decals, streamers on the handle grips, and a piece of plastic in the spokes to make it sound like a motor! I had no clue Dad was picking through others’ trash, and there was no shame in our secondhand clothes or treasures.
My work ethic and commitment to excellence are all from my dad, as is my belief that going into debt limits your options in life. From him I learned that frugality and treading lightly on our environment has nothing to do with politics but more to do with the philosophy of “waste not, want not.”
The only people more frugal than my parents were my grandparents.
My grandma McGowne washed her tinfoil from the Christmas turkey. She reused it. More than once. She washed out freezer bags that were filled with berries, hanging them with a plastic clothespin over her sink to dry and use again. And again. And again. Grandma had a drawer full of rubber bands, a tin can full of buttons, a freezer full of meat and berries, and a box full of worms to use as fishing bait. The dinner scraps went to Zip the golden lab; what he couldn’t eat went to the worm box. She wasted nothing.
My sister, DeAnna, is the repurposing queen. Her entire house is decorated with repurposed furniture, salvaged frames, handmade curtains, mosaic stepping-stones, and beach glass. She took a welding class and fashioned her own veranda, bathroom fixtures, and yard art. Her talent knows no bounds, but unfortunately her small yard does have its limits and there’s barely any room left for her found treasures.
My brother Tim rebuilds cars and trucks, remodels houses, and can pour cement like a pro. He can weld anything and build a boat or sand rail using leftover parts from a motor home, empty oil barrels, and a wrecked Volkswagen. His home is amazing—every inch was designed and built by him and his wife. Using salvaged materials and clever repurposing, it is a work of art.
To this day, I can’t drive by a piece of furniture left by the side of the road, I have to stop and inspect it, decide if it is worth the effort to sand and stain and repurpose. Luckily, I have acres on which to store old washing machines that may one day be repaired, old bikes that need a can of candy apple–red paint and a new seat, and old baker’s racks that can be turned into potting tables for my gardens. I repurpose used bed frames and turn them into benches to place in the forests and fields of my farm; I salvage lawn tools and turn them into garden art; old wine bottles become hummingbird feeders. When we butcher a cow, I boil the bones.
Most of my 1907 farmhouse was remodeled using salvaged materials from the Habitat for Humanity resale shops and scrap yards. My living room floor was a high school basketball court for over seventy years. My bathroom sinks and cast-iron tub are from a Seattle hotel that was built in the 1800s. When it was converted to modern condos, the old fixtures, faucets, sinks, and lights were ripped out and recycled. I think I bought half of the old hotel! But all that thriftiness was magnified by a million when I came face-to-face with the reality of the world.
“Live simply that others may simply live” became my life’s mo
tto, my mantra, after my first trip to Africa.
I have taken no fewer than twenty associates with me on various trips to West Africa, and a few have processed the reality of life and death in a similar way; yet few seem to have been impacted like I was and inspired to change their lives.
When you stand looking at a child’s lifeless body, dead for lack of twelve dollars’ worth of malaria medications, or simply for want of clean water, when you see a young boy, eight or nine years old, working in a rock quarry in the punishing sun just to earn a dollar for the pile of rocks he chips using a crude metal hammer, when you go to the country’s premier hospital and witness two or three babies lying in one crib, no sheets or bedding, no clean needles for the doctors to administer an IV, you realize very quickly how different life in a developing nation is.
When I see a friend pull up in a new Tesla that carries an $80,000 price tag, or when I talk to another broadcaster who spends $2,000 a night for a hotel room in Vegas, I honestly feel a wrenching in my gut. It’s the same physical sensation I used to experience when I would go to the Buruli Ulcer Clinic in Ghana and see the patients with limbs that were eaten away by a disease similar to leprosy. I’d have to excuse myself and go to the latrine to throw up when I’d see the young children with their flesh eaten away, lying on sheetless beds, eyes glazed from the pain.
Eight years later, I barely flinch when I visit the clinic in Ghana. Point Hope has provided bandages, wound care, nutritional support, a physical therapist, medical supplies, books, toys, and clothes for those battling this baffling tropical disease. I’m there to visit patients who have been admitted for six months or more and meet the latest arrivals diagnosed with this dreaded disease that has no known cause, and sadly, is rarely diagnosed in time to cure before limbs are badly affected. It takes many months, sometimes years, once the progression has stopped, for the ulcers to heal.
