Answer Addiction

Category: Grief

  • On the Other Side of Addiction, Only Love Remains

    On the Other Side of Addiction, Only Love Remains

    I knew that when we divorced I had abdicated my rights to the family. But I still loved him as I had since childhood.

    In my darker moments I’d search the obituaries for his name.

    Orlando Reyes Jimenez

    Preparing to grieve my ex-husband’s death had become familiar; a routine performed in solitude. My procedure was always the same. I’d fill his favorite silver mug with chamomile tea and type his name into a search engine. I would scroll the death notices and inhale the steam; it smelled of sunlight and grass. I would wrap my hands around his mug until the tea grew cold. After four years I still hadn’t found an obituary but I knew he could be dead. I knew he had been homeless. I knew his health was spiraling downward. I suspected he still drank heavily. I was tired of the shame and silence that surrounded loving him. Alcoholism overshadowed his life. I did not want it to overshadow his death.

    My Second Family

    At the end of our ten-year marriage I had become terrified that he’d die. Almost daily I would help him to bed after whiskey binges led him to black out. He never remembered the way he crawled down the hallway and how I turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit. In the mornings I’d wipe his clammy forehead and smooth his black bangs. His thick hair still curled at the ends just as it had when we met. We were just kids then, only 12 years old. 

    During our teens I spent so much time at his house that his parents and brothers became my second family. His mom fed me bowls of molé with tortillas while his dad and I discussed books and music deep into the twilight. By the time we got married in our twenties, the wedding ceremony made formal what we had known all along: we were family. In our twenties we partied, but I assumed it was just a college thing. I grew out of it and into graduate school. 

    By the time I began teaching college and seeing music therapy clients his party binges had turned into daily drinking. He began punching holes in the walls of our apartment. When I confronted him, he began to hide his drinking. A drunk driving arrest led to rehab and a year of sobriety. But he relapsed and refused help. He began verbally abusing me. I contracted my world around him until the threat of physical violence became obvious. Eventually I got counseling and spiritual advising and we divorced. I no longer sat with his mom and dad at the kitchen table.

    But Orlando and I stayed in touch. After all, we had been friends since seventh grade. He’d call and tell me about his homelessness, his ejection from a halfway house for being drunk. I remarried, moved, and built a healthy life. The gap between our lives widened. After a few years he stopped calling.

    A Way to Feel Connected

    I began my search for his obituary. 

    My search began as a way to feel connected to him. All typical social contact had been severed by both the divorce and his behavior. At first, acquaintances had fallen away after his violent outbursts in public. Then friends stopped calling after he borrowed money and didn’t pay it back. Even his siblings seemed to become disillusioned after he passed out during a backyard barbecue in front of his nieces. By the time we divorced his family had taken over his care and I dropped out of contact with them. United in our love for him, yet fearing for his life, we seemed to retreat from each other as if disconnecting would help us move forward. 

    When his phone calls stopped and he dropped off social media, I was shadowed by the sense of him wandering the world alone. I would picture him drunk and in constant danger of an accident or cumulation of uncontrolled diabetes keeping him a hair’s breadth from death. I could no longer turn him on his side and wipe his forehead. My search became the only way I could care for him. 

    Each time I didn’t find an obituary, it meant there was still a chance he was alive. 

    Six years after our divorce, his family sent me an email. Orlando had died from a pulmonary embolism, just four days from what would have been our eighteenth wedding anniversary. They did not invite me to the funeral or burial and I craved a way to externalize my grief. I sent a request to the Michigan coroner for his death certificate. When it arrived a few weeks later, I went into my garden and read it repeatedly as in ritual. The cause of death was listed as accidental. I tried not to imagine what had happened. I ran my fingers along the coroner’s signature as if the letters could connect me to everyone who loved Orlando.

    I Needed a Place to Put My Pain

    Most family written death notices are quite simple, and I’m not sure why his family didn’t write one. Perhaps their grief was too heavy to share publicly. Perhaps they were ashamed of him. Or maybe it just wasn’t a meaningful part of their grieving process. It wasn’t the length of the obituary I needed, nor its ability to express the complexity of his life. It was the simple and public recognition that he had existed. That his life warranted notice. The grieving process needs two things: solitude and community. An obituary would have allowed me the feeling of sharing my loss with others. I knew that when we divorced I had abdicated my rights to the family. But I still loved him as I had since childhood. I needed a place to put my pain.

    So I once again returned to brewing chamomile tea in his favorite mug, a silver travel mug that was the only thing of his I’d kept after our divorce. I would cup my hands around its rotund shape and for a moment feel his warmth again. I opened my computer, but instead of typing his name into the search engine, I typed it across the top of a new document. I wrote all the words I had searched for. I gave him an obituary. 

    Jimenez, Orlando Reyes, 42, of Waukegan died on August 20, 2016 at a hospital in Detroit. His death was ruled accidental. Orlando will be remembered for the way he loved to make people laugh and for his engulfing hugs. He is survived by his parents, two brothers, and two nieces. He is also survived by his ex-wife, his childhood sweetheart. She continues to use his favorite silver mug in which she brews tea that smells of summer and hope. In lieu of flowers please forgive the addiction and remember the soul. On the other side of addiction only love remains. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Please Don’t Tell Me How to Grieve

    Please Don’t Tell Me How to Grieve

    We are not taught how to grieve. Acknowledging that death is inevitable means that we have to come face-to-face with our own mortality and the mortality of everyone we love in this world. It’s incredibly scary.

    “Get over it.”
    “I’ve moved on. You need to move on too.”
    “Don’t talk about that.”
    “What’s wrong with you?”

    When it comes to grief, everyone seems to be an expert. We may not have life or death figured out, but life after death? People know how to do that. Or at least they think they do. According to them, there’s only one right way to grieve:

    Their way.

    Grief is universal. The way we experience it and process it, however, is not. To approach grief as if curing it were as easy as taking a pill is both irresponsible and insensitive.

    And yet, there are still people who take it upon themselves to try and tell you how, where, and when you should grieve. Now, in the age of social media, the shoulds and should nots have only gotten stricter. Grieving online is perhaps the biggest no-no. Experts have even coined the term “grief police” to describe the trend of policing just how people grieve — telling them they’re grieving too much or not enough.

    And in the last six months, we’ve even seen this grief-shaming play out in the headlines. First, people criticized The View co-host Meghan McCain for talking too much about her late father Senator John McCain following his death. Then, following actor Luke Perry’s sudden death, online trolls criticized his daughter Sophie for seemingly doing too well and not grieving enough.

    We get it: No matter how we grieve, people will have opinions about it. But it’s important to remember there is no “right” way to grieve, says Lauren Consul, a California-based licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in grief. Grief can be difficult to navigate because it’s not something our society is open about.

    “We are not taught how to grieve. Acknowledging that death is inevitable means that we have to come face-to-face with our own mortality and the mortality of everyone we love in this world. It’s incredibly scary,” said Consul. “Seeing someone who is grieving is a stark reminder that one day that will be us too. It’s painful to think about, so people tend to avoid and downplay other people’s grief. It can give a sense of control; if they can manage that person’s grief, they don’t have to think about their own.”

    This grief policing is especially true when the death is unexpected, as was the case when my father died from suicide in 2003. I learned pretty quickly that talking about death on places like Facebook makes some people uncomfortable. We may be a society that lives our life online, but for all the sharing we do on social media, there’s still this stigma associated with posting about our grief and the loved ones we’ve lost. It feels like an unspoken rule of sorts: grieve in silence. Don’t talk about it. And, if you do talk about it, make sure you find just the right balance – not too much and not too little.

    But here’s the thing about grieving: You’re never going to please everyone. You’re never going to grieve the “right” way because there is no right way to grieve. That’s something that took me a while to learn and understand. At first, I was afraid of what people would think or how they would view my grieving process, which included writing about my father’s suicide regularly on my blog. I even began to feel as though I needed to hold myself back and not talk about it, but you know what? That wasn’t good for me. In fact, it stalled my grieving process, and that wasn’t healthy.

    Maybe that’s why I’m always thinking of what I’d like to say to the “grief police.” If I had the chance to sit down with them and have an honest conversation about the realities of figuring out your life after losing a loved one, here are four things I’d tell them:

    My grief is not your grief. And your grief is not my grief.

    Grief is perhaps one of the most intense and most confusing emotions we’ll ever feel. And even though a plethora of grief books line the self-help sections of bookstores and libraries, how we actually go through our grief is a very personal journey. The strategies and coping skills that work for some may not work for others. Grief is as individual as the person going through it. For every loss, there are a hundred more ways to grieve. There is no right way, no one size fits all. Grief is an individual journey and no one can tell us how to do it. We must find the way that works for us and not judge others because they may grieve differently.

    Grieving is a journey – not a destination.

    That sounds cliché, but it’s true. Grief has no timetable, no script, and definitely no shortcuts. It’s not as easy as getting from Point A to Point B because the grieving road is far from linear. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross may have outlined the five stages of grief, but it’s not uncommon to vacillate back and forth sometimes. Even 16 years after my father’s death, I find myself returning to emotions like anger every so often. It doesn’t mean that I’m still in the throes of deep grief, though; it just reminds me that the work of grief is never really done.

    Sometimes, we just want people to listen.

    Grief demands that we feel, think, process, reflect – over and over. And there are times that we need to give voice to those feelings as we process. To put words to our emotions. To try and make sense of everything that’s happened to us. Maybe that’s why my writing has been such a healing part of my grief. I’ve been able to put the unimaginable into words, even at times when those words were hard to come by.

    Being there for someone during this time is a powerful thing. You don’t necessarily have to say anything. Trust me, your presence means more than you’ll ever know.

    Not everyone wants to be “cured” from their grief.

    People might be surprised to learn that I don’t want to “get over” my grief. There’s this misconception that you can easily move on, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. As painful as some of these emotions are (hi, regret), I need to feel them. So while it’s tempting to listen and then try and offer advice to help us move on, I ask that you just listen. In the end, there are no magic words that will make everything better. We need to feel what we feel when we feel it — and feel it without judgment.

    I’m always going to talk about my father, my grief and my journey. It’s all part of my life and my story. We each have to move through grief at our own pace and in a way that is comfortable for us. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be there for each other — in a way that is comforting without being condescending, sensitive without shaming, and helpful without being harmful. That just might be the greatest gift we can ever give someone: a safe space to grieve and begin the healing process.

    View the original article at thefix.com