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.
Love it.
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