I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free. General warnings are in place: this book address grief, mourning, self-harm, anger, poverty, and pet death, all in the context of becoming an adult orphan in my twenties. You can still buy the book if you would like (doing so helps support my writing!).
While I was a full-time caretaker, I snuck out at night once or twice a week after putting my charges to bed and went clubbing. This was in the early to mid-1990s, and the club scene was full of alt-rock and new wave and, after 1:00 a.m., rave. It was a dance nirvana and I was a disciple. I still enjoy dancing even though I never actually studied it very much. My joy is in letting loose to the music, feeling the beat and moving my body freely. It was the only “me” time I really had, because if either parent was awake, I was on duty and that always came first. They might have figured out I was not home during those late, late nights but if so, they never mentioned it (and my mother was the kind who would mention it, just to prove that she knew what was going on). I rarely drank alcohol and I never did drugs or casual sex, I just danced. It was all I really had that was mine.
After Mother died I became a little more flagrant with my clubbing. Poppa did not actually care, and even encouraged me to go out, which was a surprise to me and one of the many aspects about him that I learned during that time after Mother’s death.
I also started doing drugs.
This is not a sordid tale of weed and cocaine and heroin and youthful folly, though that would have fit the late ’90s zeitgeist. This is about the drugs left on Mother’s bedside table.
To back track a bit: Mother’s primary doctor was a nice guy, a small-town family physician who was not very used to having his patients die on him, unless they were of advanced age. He adored my mother (she had that effect on people, as my parents were nothing if not charismatic) and refused to give up on her, even to the very last when her own oncologist said that she was one step away from death. The primary doctor was the reason we had to fight to get a comatose woman off life support despite having a living will, a DNR order, and complete power of attorney on file. He was also the reason we did not qualify for Hospice.
Hospice has very specific standards about when they can swoop in and help a family, and the primary qualification is that someone must be on their deathbed, literally. They provide palliative care, not treatment, and since their resources are limited they have to hold that line very firmly. Since her primary physician refused to accept that Mother had less than six months to live (which was our local hospice’s primary requirement), Poppa and I did not qualify for help. I asked anyway. No, more accurately: I begged for help. We could not afford to hire nurses, Poppa was suffering from his major stroke a few months prior, and I was just this side of a nervous breakdown. I can think of maybe three times in my life I cried on the phone, and that was one of them. Our desperate straits did not matter. In the end, Hospice could not help us, even if the individual Hospice representatives I talked to (cried at) wanted to.
The result is that when Mother’s condition became critical, she was at home, in bed, with just me and Poppa for company. She was taken to the hospital by ambulance where she died a few days later. Her drugs, however, did not go anywhere. I think I signed something at the hospital saying that I had properly disposed of them. I’m not sure. In any case, it was one hell of a loophole.
Typically when a critically ill patient dies, it is standard operating procedure for the nurses (at the hospital) or the registered caretakers (Hospice workers) to nab the controlled substances. There is often a deadly host of pain killers and assorted toxins in the bottles next to a deceased person’s bed, and so I do not have an ethical or moral argument against the practice. There is no sound medical reason for anyone to keep those meds once the person for whom they were prescribed is dead.
That does not mean I was unwilling to take advantage of the situation. I knew her drugs intimately, as I had been the one forcing them down her throat for over a year. The prescriptions changed sometimes but I always knew what was what, and I had no problem throwing away the high-powered antibiotics and exotic cancer-related pills. The pain meds, though — I knew exactly what to do with them. I even knew which ones to take on a full stomach and how to measure the doses of the codeine-laced cough syrup.
I like to think it says something for me that I took roughly a month’s worth of painkillers and stretched them out over six months, and that once they were gone I did not try to obtain any more from any source. What that says is that I am very fucking lucky not to have an addictive personality.
I also delved into the world of really casual sex. This might disturb some people more than the drugs, I guess, because there is heavy cultural baggage that goes along with sex. I do not mean to offend anyone, but I have to be honest in describing my lifestyle choice in that time period as “slutty”. I essentially had sex with strangers at least once a week, usually in their car or home. I still had Poppa back at the house and I was not actually dating so there was no way in Hell I was bringing any of my tricks home.
I do not think it was a behavior based on how I really wanted to live my life. I did not even lose my virginity until I was twenty and I think I had sex in college about five times, total. Every person is different and I am not judging myself or anyone for their choices, I am bringing this up to illustrate how out of sync I was with my own basic personality, and how that made me obliviously self-destructive. In our society negative habits and behaviors can masquerade as “lifestyle choices”, which is how I labeled them in justification. Of course a true lifestyle choice is carefully considered, explored thoroughly, and reflected upon. That was too much for me to even contemplate. I just ran with away.
As I wrote earlier, I think that losing a parent (much less all of them) during the young adult stage of life throws you out of sync with your peers in some very fundamental ways. Every solid, long-term friend I had at that time was in the post-college, career-managing, and dating/marrying/reproducing stage of life. The people I knew who were not living that life were the fellow misfits I met at the clubs (although I do mean “misfit” as a true endearment). I had tried dating a couple of times, playing up the “I want to get to know you” angle but it was a disaster because the people I liked were living the life I had lost. It was not an insurmountable difference, of course, but it hurt and I felt so very, very worthless.
Personally I am very sex-positive and I do not consider having sex with lots of people wrong in any way, if that is what you want to do. My problem was that at the time, I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Not because I particularly desired the people I had sex with, or because it was an experience I wanted to explore, but because I felt disempowered and worthless and lonely.
Between the sex and the drugs, the first six months after mother’s death are mostly lost time for me. I’m fortunate that I was living with Poppa, as that stability (however high a price it cost) kept me from spiraling out of control in every direction.
After Poppa died, though, my last anchor was gone. I fortunately had no convenient access to drugs I was willing to take*. I did start drinking more regularly, and more heavily, but then I met Mike. He was a club kid too, and a nice guy, and I think I just wanted someone in my life I could revolve around without too much sacrifice. He became my anchor in lieu of my parents and while we were never in love and it was more a marriage of friendship and convenience, we lasted nearly fourteen years as a couple.
Personally the behavior — sex, drugs, marriage — looks disjointed in retrospect, but there was a certain emotional constant in my attempt to distract myself. My defiance took the form of clinging to habits and objects and ideas from Before as proof that the tragic changes in my life had not destroyed me. My denial actualized itself through finding ways to not acknowledge anything important out of fear that I had nothing left. Those distractions were, in some ways, opposing forces, and that conflicting energy had the effect of creating an emotional perpetual motion machine that kept me flopping in circles like a flat tire for nearly ten years.
* I have always had a genuine fear of “recreational drugs” like cocaine, LSD and heroine, and I saw brilliant lives and minds ruined by them at college in some pretty spectacular ways which did nothing to increase their allure. There was always pot but the last thing I ever wanted was to make myself more stupid, which in my observation is marijuana’s main purpose. That pretty much left ecstasy, but I knew from fellow clubbers that the street quality was dicey and dared not try it. It was less a concern about legal consequences than a terror that I would somehow damage my brain, which is about the only thing I had going for me, lacking both money and looks!
