To My Brother (L)

Dear John,

I’m sitting in bed, sipping Baileys and thinking about you. I always think of you when I have Baileys and it’s near Christmas. Remember that Christmas? I was in college, I think you might have been in your last year at WPI. We were home on break, sitting on your bed in the House in Warren (aka the Munckin’s house). The house was new to us, it felt like we had rented an old farmhouse for the holidays. You brought home a bottle of Baileys in that special can; I’d never had any. You told me it was the quintessential Christmas drink, taught me how to fill the ice first. We drank from short glasses, sipping with the Christmas lights I’d put up for you illuminating our hands as we raised them. We talked about Christmas memories, memories, dreams. I don’t remember the specifics. If it was a movie scene the conversation would be indistinct, the camera panning our faces lit by the glow of green, red, blue, yellow—more serious than laughing, a quietness around us, zooming out to the snow blanketing the house. If it was a movie, I’d put in a fireplace, the flames softly dancing, warming our feet. My memory has that cozy, peaceful feel to it.

This is possibly my favorite adult Christmas memory and one of my favorites of you. We were drinking not to get drunk, we’d done that plenty, that’s not the job of Baileys. Its job is to mull over the savory sweetness of the season. We were equals, you spoke to me as an adult, no age gap between us. We were equals, the same family, the same bittersweet yearning Christmas ignites within us—to feel, to absorb, to have that spark of life Christmas used to give our family once a year. There was no party after, no friends coming over, no childhood jobs to do, no homework—there was nothing, but you and me and that bottle of Baileys. We’d found a new adult way to celebrate Christmas together; I had your undivided attention, just for that quiet dark night.

The Phoenix (L)

1
When G was three and started to have nightmares, I was confused, distraught. I assumed nightmares only came from a childhood full of waking ones. How could she whose life had thus far been filled with love, calm, sweetness have nightmares? I didn’t want her to be like me, afraid to sleep until she was 12. I screened her television (some “Care Bear” episodes didn’t even make the cut), I hadn’t yelled at her (yet), her father was only quiet and kind to her (then), her little sister (still) sweet and yielding, how could she have nightmares?

When she first exhibited signs of anxiety, I recognized the beast and cursed myself for passing it along. I felt prepared to take on what no one in my childhood had even acknowledged they needed to. When it began to disrupt her life, I took her to therapy. For years, I’d brush her hair from her face, I’d tell her it was normal. I’d hold her and tell her what worked for me. She’d curl into me and say how good it was to talk to someone who understood.

During the first week of this September, when a homeopathic doctor (who had been seeing G) told me G had been secretly, frequently harboring suicidal thoughts (since June), but he thought that with help, she would be okay. I picked my stomach up from the floor and nodded. I asked should I be afraid? He said no, I breathed. I asked should I tell her it’s normal? He said, no. Just listen, say, tell me more. I nodded. She’s 12.

Later that night, I asked her, I listened when she told me more. Hearing the words from her mouth, in her voice, just an octave or two from what it was when she was a laughing little girl with ringlets...I could no longer nod. I could no longer breathe. She showed me how it started, reluctantly, sadly, little scars and scratches hidden on her wrist under her collection of animal shaped elastic bracelets. Once the thought planted itself in her beautiful little mind, it blossomed like a infestation. Like a fear? I asked. No, she paused her eyes large, sweet, young, bursting, like a hope, she confessed. Her face the same expectant pleading as when she told me of her first crush on a boy.

This is what devastation tastes like—three words, the crunch of three short syllables slicing the roof of my soul, shattering my illusions that this is just a cry for attention, this is a phase—like not wanting to do homework, hating your parents, and skinny jeans. Make me a promise, I say. She shakes her head no, I can’t, she whispers. I want to say, promise me you’ll never do it, promise me promise me promise me. Fear is roaring inside me so loud, the flaming lion engulfing me. I say, promise you’ll always talk to me, promise you’ll tell me how you’re feeling. For hours it seems we are like this on my bed, my hands running through her hair, her head on my chest, where she used to nestle as a cooing baby. Me trying to convince her we can get past this place, she trying to convince me that dying is her sweetest salvation. Early on she whispers, I don’t think I could do it. It’s not that I am not grateful for those words, they keep my legs moving through daily functions. But I have only discovered this dark thought on her brain, I am destroyed first by her desire.

She asks me questions, I try to answer honestly, then later urgently saying anything I think will keep her alive, she shakes her head, the things she says, oh the things she says with her sweet voice, with her body, with her eyes. We are both wet with weeping using a bath towel between us to wipe and go on. Time is eclipsed by my lack of being able to breathe, every orifice so swollen with salt. I begin to wonder how we will ever leave this room.

I recall the video of when she was two when both Chris and I said “no” to her at the same time, in normal kind voices, and she burst into tears. I realize of the significance of her needing therapy at only four for anxiety. She's always been so sensitive. I whisper to her, maybe there is something missing in your brain, some chemical. That’s all the medicine would be, a replacement. She shakes her head. No different than when a thyroid isn’t working right, you supplement it. It’s a supplement. She shakes her head. Why don’t you want to take medicine? What are you afraid will happen? You’ll have to force me. To take the medicine? To live. I will. I have.

2

It’s not that she’s thought it, that it flickered across her mind in frustration, anger—trapped in the pre-teen walls of no choice. It’s that she wallowed in it, polished it, harvested her crops of death, cherishing them, yearning for their peace. When I thought she was lying in her bed, mp3 player in her ears dreaming of boys to come, Justin Beiber and Taylor Lautner gazing down to illuminate her dreams. She was secretly entertaining plots I can’t even let slide across my mind.

3

I’m calmer about it now, though the scratches on her wrists grow deeper. It’s become like anything intolerable that you can’t escape from, a task. My new job is trying to help her stay afloat. Phone calls to find psychiatrists (surprisingly hard if you want someone insurance will pay for and the patient is 12, turns out, actually, impossible. So, out of pocket we are), to her therapist, to new therapists, to see about book clubs, teen centers, writing workshops, music lessons, orchestras, friends, new places for her to go, things for her to do. I am getting flashbacks to my mother’s last months. I feel like I am on a hamster wheel, going round and round getting nowhere new—exhausted and distanced from the business of trying to solve this complex riddle of how to help her.

4

I keep waiting to finish writing this—waiting to find the solution, the psychiatrist, the medicine, the writing class, the remedy, the new friend that will help her. After each step we take, she does seem lighter, less burdened, as if shedding those dark secrets has elevated her from depths we never understood were there, holding her down. Though there was that week, when the scratches became deeper, scarring; I felt myself becoming ashes, waiting for the phoenix.

It’s amazing to me how many times in life you can break and mend and move on, the scar thickening, never quite the same, but grown over. I am not the same person I was weeks ago, before I heard those words from her mouth. I’ve shattered, dissolved, reformed as a fragmented part and moved on. I’m regaining strength, but some unbreakable piece in me is broken. It’s like not knowing you had a certain type of bone until you shattered it. I’m on the other side of a dark curtain that not every parent has to stand in front of. I’ve passed through and it’s fallen behind me, sealing me from the world that was before, from those who have no dark curtain. I am alone and blinking in the dim light of a new world. I’d say I hope I don’t falter, or I hope we move beyond, or I hope we find a new path. But I’m beyond hope. I don’t mean that in a negative way, just factual. If I cling to such words as hopes and dreams and the sunlit world I imagined my precious daughter waking to, I won’t be present enough to help her in this reality. I won’t be here. Help even seems a distant word right now. I am. She is. We are. One day at a time has never seemed so genuine.


(Update: It’s better. We found a good, expensive psychiatrist that we can’t afford. He diagnosed her with a “serious” depression, the "illness of depression," possibly stemming from mourning for my mother, possibly just her destiny. He confirmed all my worst fears from that first night when she told me: that this age group up throughout the teens is the most likely to actually attempt and commit suicide, that having had depression once she is more at risk to have it again, that we will have to be vigilant, vigilant in our watch over her. But we have advantage over other parents, we know she's thought it. He said 99.9 % of the time suicide is the end result of the illness of depression. We just got the shock of discovering the illness through a symptom. The medicine started so low it got worse before better, panic attacks, locking, fleeing...as the dose goes up, so do her moods, and for the first time in her life, her anxiety is going down. I’ve seen some beautiful things. I might even feel a wing growing.)

Request: Unless you've walked through the other side of the dark curtain, please don't offer advice. I just wanted to share.

Image: http://www.sapergalleries.com/Garcia.html