You’ve got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen,” Anne Lamott wrote. “They don’t even talk about it in the Bible, he was apparently so awful.
I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function. – KURT COBAIN, in his suicide note.
The room has Nic’s smell – not the sweet childhood smell he once had, but a cloying odor of incense and marijuana, cigarettes and aftershave, possibly a trace of ammonia or formaldehyde, the residual odor of burning meth. Smells like teen spirit.
I well up with tears for it. For all of it. On the one hand: the uncertain future. The possibility of another hemorrhage. The chance that my children will be killed in a car accident. The chance that Nic will relapse. A million other catastrophes. On the other: compassion and love. For my parents and family. For my friends. For Karen. For my children. I may feel more fragile and vulnerable, but I experience more consciousness.
It took my near death, however, to comprehend that his fate – and Jasper’s and Daisy’s – is separate from mine. I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.
Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
And yet every time I think I can’t take any more, I do.
Sometimes, it strikes me that life goes on, but it does, inexorably.
It must be like a soldier in a trench during a bombing raid. I’ve shut down every nonessential emotion – worry, fear – concentrating every neuron in my new brain on the moment in order to stay alive.
I am a sucker to contemplate opening to the idea of healing.
Of course I still want to believe him. I don’t think it’s simply that I am gullible, but I cannot fathom the implications of his behavior. When change takes place gradually, it’s difficult to comprehend its meaning.
He is brilliant and wonderful and charismatic and loving when he’s not using, but like every addict I have ever heard of, he becomes a stranger when he is, distant and foolish and self-destructive and broken and dangerous.
Misery is too self-absorbed to want much company.
We are connected to our children no matter what. They are interwoven into each cell and inseparable from every neuron. They supersede our consciousness, dwell in our every hollow and cavity and recess with our most primitive instincts, deeper even than our identities, deeper even than our selves.
I can try to forgive myself, whether or not she forgives me, because I was a child, but some things you just live with because you cannot go backward.
Their deaths didn’t seem to apply to us, maybe because their deaths, like their lives, were exercises in excess. In some ways they were simply living out the music. “I’m wasted,” sang the Who. “I hope I die before I get old.” And “Why don’t you all just f-f-f-f-fade away.
In the car, however, I see a stranger. And yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately.
I longed for someone to scrape out every remnant of Nic from my brain and scrape out the knowledge of what was lost and scrape out the worry and not only my anguish but his and the burning inside like I might scrape out the seeds and juicy pulp of an overripe melon, leaving no trace of the rotted flesh.
I am grateful now to have it all – even the worry and the pain.
Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid – terrified – to lose Nic, but I have lost him. In the past, I tried to imagine the unimaginable and I tried to imagine bearing the unbearable. I imagined losing Nic by overdose or accident, but now I comprehend that I have already lost him. Today, at least, he is lost.
Maybe parents feel for every child.