Making Amends

Five years ago when John went to rehab the first time, I wrote a piece for my own emotional release about what it was like to live in a sea of deception. Compared to what I would eventually discover, I knew virtually nothing back then. But the black undercurrents and shadowy half-truths were pulling me down.

I'm revealing this piece now as a means of contrasting the way my life is these days. For all the ugliness of the past few years, my head has reached the surface again and I can breathe.

It's called "Little Cat Feet" with apologies to poet Carl Sandburg, whose three words I borrowed from a famous poem he wrote about fog:

"My husband's rage creeps in on little cat feet.

There is no warning, then suddenly his eyes are cold, green-tinged and defiant. His masked anger slinks into seemingly innocuous conversations, and I prick my ears. I know his claws will come out, and they will draw blood.

He is not the kind of drunk who staggers, slurs his words, or pisses in his pants. I would prefer that, because then I would know what I was dealing with. He is the kind of sneaky drunk with no outward signs, except for the eyes and the anger and the claws. When I finally figure it out, it's too late. I am what's for dinner.

Alcohol turns him into a demon who hides in the shadows, and then pounces. He says the worst things he can think of. It's as though the poison inside him has to come out, so he throws it all up on me, like half-digested, putrid rat stew.

"You are the worst wife in the world. You are the most self-centered person alive. The kids and I all hate you-- we talk about it. You have no friends, do you know that? Nobody likes you. You are the reason I drink-- it's your fault. I can't stand you. You are ruining my life. I will do exactly what I want, and you can't stop me."

When I won't engage him, he follows me around, running up the stairs after me so he can puke up the rat stew.

He humiliates me in public, making thinly-veiled references to my ugliness or stupidity, and flirting with other women right in front of me. When we arrive, his eyes will narrow and become challenging, and he will give me the unmistakable signal that I am supposed to act like I don't know him. He will disappear, and I will see him caressing another woman's bare back in her evening gown, as though he is her lover. He will sit close to another woman in conversation, sometimes caressing her thigh. Other women get charismatic John, the one who could charm the lace-trimmed panties off a lesbian. I get the half-digested rat stew.

The dark sinew of his deception bothers me the most. It makes me feel sick inside. I feel like I am drowning. I would rather hear, 'I just drank an entire fifth of Grey Goose,' then the elaborate stories of how he has been sober for seven months, he is making friends in AA, he convinced over friends not to drink, he goes to AA meetings weekly. I would rather hear, 'I find myself attracted to other women, because I need to feel good about myself again,' then to uncover the text messages, e-mails, red roses sent to another woman on Valentine's Day.

I feel, for all the world, like he has put me out for the trash. My soul and my love have been murdered, and blood-soaked limbs are sticking out of the dumpster for all to see.

My husband's rage creeps in on little cat's feet."

It is a small miracle that John isn't that man anymore. The switch didn't flip the minute he stopped drinking. He was still justifying for far too long-- I am convinced that people can justify any kind of behavior they want in order to live with themselves. That is why history's greatest villains were convinced in their own minds that they were victims.

His booze-soaked, toxic brain took time to recover, and those old patterns of thinking didn't disappear overnight. All the medications he had to take for the liver transplant didn't help. But over time, I am seeing more and more of the old John. All the rage, passive-aggresiveness, blame, manipulation and lying is gone. There is peace in our home now.

Last week he gave me a written amends, something strongly suggested by AA. It isn't just a simple apology, but a careful reflection on what happened and why. In AA, alcoholics are taught that they can't just hide behind a label of alcoholism and expect all will be forgiven. They still have to take full responsibility for their alcoholic behavior, and understand they may never be forgiven. Making amends is as much for their own recovery as it is for the people they hurt.

I had been waiting for a written amends for five years, since John first went to rehab. I got one a few Thanksgivings ago, but he was drunk when he tossed it on the dining room table, and he later caused a huge angry scene. So that amends became something he would have to make another amends for.

I can laugh a little now when I think of it: hours after throwing the amends at me, I saw him frantically pawing through a drawer. "Have you been going through my stuff?" he angrily accused me, his voice rising and his eyes narrowing. "You moved everything, didn't you? You are going to be sorry, because you really wanted the thing I am looking for. You have wanted it for a long time." It suddenly dawned on me what he was talking about. "Do you mean the amends, John? You gave that to me hours ago-- don't you remember?" I wanted to add, dramatically and sarcastically, "It was everything I hoped for and more, my love. It makes up for everything, it explains everything, and now let us ride into the sunset together on your steed as white as snow."

After all my waiting, I had given up most of my expectations. When I was still enmeshed in the insanity of living with an alcoholic, I didn't know where he ended and I began. When someone asked how I was, I began talking about John and all the chaos. I was not used to focusing on myself, because I was too overwhelmed with his problems. I had recurring dreams that I was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to IV's on both sides. He was a vampire and I was sucked dry.

Like Elliot separating from ET, I had to learn to detach and emotionally distance myself from John, in order to retain any semblance of sanity. I had to learn to release my expectations of what love and a family were supposed to be like. It was actually a healthier way of loving someone who didn't love himself. I had to learn that fear is the opposite of love, and that all my fears for him were not helping either of us.

So when he finally gave me the written amends I had been waiting for all those years, it was a little anticlimactic. I wasn't full of anxious anticipation, expecting one confessional letter to heal many years of grievous wounds. I had been healing little by little, all along.

"I want you to know how hurt I am over what I did," he wrote. "The shame I feel is unbearable. I can't believe I did things to hurt the nicest, most sincere and loving person I have ever met." He said he will making a living amends to me for the rest of his life, and that he knows he is the luckiest man on earth that his family stuck by him.

"I love you with all my heart and I will be honest and forthright and try to live my remaining days with integrity, honesty and love," he wrote.

A long time ago, those words would have moved me to tears and filled me with unrealistic hope. The little cat's feet of my husband's creeping rage is gone, but I am not the same woman I was. I am many things at once: damaged, traumatized, skeptical. I can still feel every throbbing scar on my heart. But I am also healthier, wiser and stronger in many ways.

Today, this woman accepts a long-awaited amends gratefully but cautiously and says inwardly, "We shall see. We shall see."

Insta-Jerk

My forte was focusing on the funny side, even when life was difficult, enormously annoying or sad. Laughing at myself made everything bearable. I honestly didn't think there was anything I couldn't make into a joke. I would tell stories about things that happened to me, and people would laugh until they cried, all the while shaking their heads and secretly being very glad they weren't me.

Then an avalanche hit me and sorely tested my approach to life. For two years, I couldn't find much to laugh about, and that is when most people realized they actually didn't want to hang out with me anymore.

In fits and starts, I am beginning to focus on the funny again. And one of the biggest sources of amusement for me is the world of drunks. Fearlessly flying right into the face of demons is very healing for me at the moment.

John and I routinely spend Saturday nights at AA speaker meetings now, where I am the perfect audience member. I become as immersed in the re-telling of their lives as I do in a good movie: I laugh, I cry, it becomes a part of me. Afterwards, I am usually the one who makes a fool of myself trying to talk to the speaker, with tears copiously streaming out of my eyes as they back slowly away from me. "Oh my GOD," I wail, "You lost custody of your daughter? But that is so UNFAIR! How do you stand it? How can you go on?"

Mostly though, the speakers are hilarious. I have come to realize that most recovering alcoholics could make a career out of stand-up comedy. Last Saturday night, in an attempt to re-cap the true stories of his drinking days, a former boozer made a list of the Top 20 ways to tell you are an alcoholic. Because we are old, we could only remember a few of them:

1. You piss on the head of the captain of the football team.

2. You trade your girlfriend for booze.

3. You are given a choice between sex and alcohol, and you choose alcohol.

4. You find yourself performing a field sobriety test in a church parking lot after side-swiping a deacon's car one Sunday morning while attempting to retrieve your car from the place you parked it the night before. The whole congregation is watching.

5. Your home gets 10 miles to the gallon.

6. You wake up in an easy chair in the house of a complete stranger, and you hear the guy's six-year-old son ask, "Daddy, who is that man?"

John was a different kind of alcoholic than most. He never staggered, vomited, slurred his words, or missed a day of work because of drinking. Instead, his personality changed. He turned almost instantly into a jerk, like one of those miniature plastic toys that become life-sized when immersed in water. He was the Insta-Jerk: just add alcohol.

But most people had no idea he was drunk. He was highly functioning, just like his alcoholic father before him, almost right up to the day he quite suddenly lost his liver. Seldom do John and I ever hear a story from an alcoholic that echoes our experience, which just proves there are all kinds of drunks.

After the AA speaker's meeting, John and I added a few more to that Top 20 list from our own experience. It is still in progress, so it's currently only a Top 10, but here goes:

7. You leave your wife at a neighborhood party and walk home, but halfway there you decide to take a nap on the hood of a stranger's parked car.

8. You call your early-rising 7-year-old daughter from work to ask her to please hide empty booze bottles from Mommy.

9. You discover you can climb on a toilet, find a six-inch space between the ceiling and the top of a cabinet, lay down a towel to muffle the sound of a bottle, and hastily take "maintenance" swigs of vodka all day long with no one the wiser.

10. When your wife cleans up the garage and finds hundreds of wine corks in a hidden corner, you deny drinking in secret and explain earnestly you had been saving them up for many years in order to make a wreath. Yes, a wreath-- because you are actually a male version of Martha Stewart.

Now that the liver transplant is behind us and John's brain is recovering more every day, we can even laugh about those times pre-transplant when his brain swelled from the ammonia in his system. He may have been near death, but now they have become funny memories on par with the time he stole his parent's car as a teenager or our 4-year-old son solemnly announced that his philosophy of life was "Milk." Maybe it's sick, but this is our reality now. We just have to go with it.

The first time he went into a brain coma, I followed the ambulance to the ER and arrived in time to see a technician dutifully recording his answers to all their questions. "Excuse me," I asked. "Don't you realize he is saying "yes" to EVERYTHING? Watch this."

"John," I said tenderly, "Do you know who I am?"

"Yes," he answered crisply and carefully, with eyes that clearly conveyed nobody was home.

"What is my name?" I asked.

"Tulalip," he said emphatically.

I was an Indian casino.

At that, the staff finally stopped writing down his answers.

The next time it happened, I woke him to take him to a doctor's appointment, but realized within several seconds he did not know who he was. It took me forever to put on his clothes, because he kept taking them off again, batting my hands away when I tried to slide a sweatshirt over his head. I briefly wondered if I would have to take him to the hospital naked. I finally got him sitting down, only to turn my back and find he was wandering off again, a dazed look his eyes. I fed him his crucial liquid medicine, and with a funny face he spit it out like a one-year-old. Yet he was an affable lunatic: every question I asked was answered with an amiable, "SURE!"

At one point, I caught him gently cradling a shell-shaped soap dish from the kids' bathroom, holding it furtively close to his chest like the shell soaps were precious treasure he was on a secret mission to protect. I returned it, and the next thing I knew he was cradling it again. I found those shell-shaped soaps in the far reaches of the house the next day, as though he were laying a Hansel and Gretel trail to retrieve his lost mind.

Getting him into the car to the hospital proved impossible. John could not remember how to sit on the car seat, and instead perched on the running board. I was not strong enough to haul him up, and finally gave up to call his business partner to help me. That was a mistake, because in his frustration the guy kept yelling irritably at me and the dog. I wanted to say, "Do you have any IDEA of what I have already been through this morning, and how surreal it is to take care of a man who stomped on my heart? And you think it is appropriate to YELL at me?" Sadie, easily the most enthusiastic mutt on the face of the earth, would not stop jumping up and licking Dan's face while we were trying to maneuver John into the car. I thought Dan would blow a gasket when Sadie jumped in the backseat of his car, lay down next to John's awkwardly hunched body, and refused to move. "Where are we going today?" her goofy, tongue-lolling face seemed to say. "Dog Park?" In spite of myself, I found my body shaking with laughter, as Dan seethed beside me. It was like an episode of Lucy, gone horribly horribly wrong.

I followed Dan and John to the hospital. Probably to punish me because I had failed at getting John into my car alone, Dan huffily insisted that HE would drive him, and I was clearly not invited to ride along. Banished to my own empty car, midway I suddenly realized I had had the prescense of mind in all the melee to shove John's ID into my pocket, but that I hadn't remembered to give it to Dan when plans changed and he became the driver. I called Dan to warn him he would have to wait for me a second to check John in, and I had to listen to a barrage of abuse from Dan about how unbelievably stupid I was. Sean called, and I tearfully vented on the insane events of the morning. "I am going to call Dan up and tell him not to talk to my Mom that way," Sean said protectively, all blow and bluster.

Nurses told me John would be out of it for a long time because of the astronomically high amounts of ammonia in his bloodstream, so after spending all day in the hospital with someone who didn't even recognize me, I forced myself to get a good night's rest and walk Sadie before heading for the hospital the next day. When I walked in his room, John looked at me with a blank expression and asked slowly, "Who are you?" I hung my head in disappointment. It was going to be another long day.

"Could your name possibly be...Tulalip?" he asked with a gleam in his eye. That's when I knew his brain had returned from its vacation.

The night John got the liver transplant, I drove him to the hospital and stayed up with him all night, waiting in a quiet pre-op room until the surgery. We were forced to wait for hours, and I didn't know whether he would survive the surgery, so finally I pushed aside all my anger about the terrible things he had done to me in his addiction, and crawled next to him on the gurney. I spooned him, thought about the good memories we had shared over the years, and asked quietly," Do you think we should plan your funeral?"

"WHAT?" he bellowed. I was perfectly serious, and it didn't seem to me an odd question to ask on the brink of a very serious operation. I am a bottom-line girl, and I already knew that if John died, his funeral would be tricky business. Attendees would be of decidedly mixed camps: 1. His alcoholic friends 2. People who had no clue of the deep wounds his deception had caused (including his children) 3. My friends, who had lived through all the agony with me and might well be celebrating his demise. How on earth would a single service satisfy them all?

So, pressed together there in the half-light of a cavernous, sterile hospital room at 3 a.m., two people who had already been through hell together talked about a funeral. He wanted Sting's "Amazing Grace." I wanted Johnny Cash's "Burning Ring of Fire." He worried no one would come. I had an answer for that one that made him groan and me collapse into a paroxysm of giggles. After years of walking on eggshells because of the insane disease of alcoholism, it felt so good to release, even if the humor was as black as it gets.

Now, we sit in restaurants and recall what happened in detail, and laugh hard about the absurdity of it all. "Oh my God, when you carried the shell around," I gasp, barely able to breathe. "Tulalip," he blurts out in mirth, his eyes streaming with tears. People around us have no idea that we are reliving the dark comedy of our lives, trying to make sense of it.

And trying desperately to heal.