“Macie died”, he said.
Those two words slammed into my mind like an unexpected wave while standing in the ocean. My thoughts tumbled over each other as the dark reality of what I had just been told grabbed my breath and held it. Just for a moment. My counselor kept talking but I wasn’t there. I held his gaze as a cover for what was happening inside my head.
Her face appeared. Framed by her wavy, strawberry blonde hair she looked deep into the eyes of my mind. Her beautiful hazel eyes were sparkling. Her skin was glowing, and she was smiling – that irresistible smile with perfect, snow-white teeth. She looked the same way I saw her that first night. It felt like a thousand years ago.
Her image started to recede and I could hear her quiet giggling go with her. It was that sweet, simple sound that used to make all my problems fade away.
I settled back into my counselor’s gaze. He was silent and so was I. There was a crumpled tissue in my right hand and my eyes felt damp. I had been crying. In the back of my distant mind, I heard steel doors slamming, one after the other, sealing in all other memories clamoring to get my attention. Not now. There would be plenty of time for that. I finished up my session with a customary sarcastic comment and a fake smile, trying to act as normally as I could, but I don’t remember much. The faraway pounding on the other side of those steel doors was too distracting.
I carried myself through the rest of that day, my schedule as my guide, hanging my well-worn smile as necessary, at yet another in-patient treatment center.
It’ll be different this time, I thought to myself as I exited the plane months ago. Sure, it would. Isn’t that the same thing I thought to myself as I hoisted that first drink after a few days, weeks or months of sobriety? Now I’m thousands of miles away from home and Macie’s even farther. Gone forever.
Of course, it’s different now.
Finally, I made it to the darkness. My stomach was empty except for night meds and my ear canals were stuffed with wax plugs to block the nightly snoring from my roommate.
I pulled the comforter up to my chin and closed my eyes. I could hear those steel doors in my mind again. They were creaking open, images spilling out like a broken-down dam: The endless laughter at the neighborhood bar on that first night. Her eyes. The romantic dinners on the river. That smile. Up to a lake-side bar for shots of cold-flavored vodka and then back to my house.
Endless conversations, crispy clean white sheets, and king-sized pillows. “We should have been filming”, she giggled. Then she whispered, “I love you” as she nestled into the spoon before falling asleep in my arms.
More images: Early morning mimosas at the only bar that opened at 8:00am. Her hair was tousled. Those eyes. That smile. That giggling that filled me with a quiet peace I hadn’t felt in years. Not since I left it under the pile of destruction with the last woman I loved. My ex-wife.
But it’ll be different this time, won’t it?
The memories kept coming, floating by the back of my eyelids like a slideshow of moving pictures. I was dreaming now; the steel doors were wide open. The memories began to change though. The background of each moving slide increasingly became my bedroom. The places we used to go are becoming less and less part of the show. There’s her face again. She’s lying on my pillow. Her eyes closed in unity with her mouth. Her glow was diminished. Struggling slightly to breathe through her nose as she slept, I wanted to wake her. But it was only an image. I couldn’t get any closer! Macie??
That peaceful feeling was fading. The images started to speed up. They stopped. There she was again. She’s sitting up next to me in bed with the remote in her right hand and a glass of vodka on ice in her left. Her hair no longer just tousled – it was a mess. She set the drink down on the nightstand and picked up a large orange prescription bottle. I could see my arm reach into the frame as she tapped three amphetamine capsules into my hand. Didn’t we just take some?
The scenes kept changing but the scenery stayed the same. My bedroom. She was leaning on the end of the bed now, trying to stand up… reaching for the door handle. Why couldn’t she walk? I looked down at my legs. Skin and bones sticking out from blue boxers. When was the last time I got dressed?
Thumping in the kitchen now. I heard the back door open and close. More vodka delivered. Crashing sounds. What was she doing? Everything sped up in the dream. Scenes flying by. Days? Weeks? A month?
They stopped. The dream continued. I was sitting up in bed with vodka on ice in my right hand. I was putting more capsules in my mouth with my left. I turned to see what the light clinking sound was. Her head was tilted back as she gulped her vodka to swallow more pills with me.
Her hair was matted on the back of her head and sticking up everywhere else. So skinny. Her bony legs were sticking out from my wrinkled white dress shirt.
She slowly turned and smiled at me, holding up her glass to say, ‘Cheers’. Her eyes were dull, her skin a pasty white. Her smile was still there but looked incongruously affixed to her face. My right hand lifted my drink into my field of view to toast her back. My hand bony, the skin hanging loose.
Everything blurred. It sped up for a moment and then stopped. I was leaning over the side of the bed and staring into a silver bucket. My God, is that all blood?
My throat was burning. So dizzy. I pulled myself up to a sitting position and looked over at her. She was laying down, her head tilted back. Traces of blood were dripping down her cheek. Her eyes were rolled back into their sockets as she clenched the sheets with both hands.
“Enough!”, my raspy voice echoed through the dream. The nightstand. My phone was there. Fully charged? When did I do that? 911. Sirens. She was barely conscious as we both crawled to the front door. I was pulling her most of the way.
I was looking down at her now, barely standing as I clung to the ambulance door. She was on the gurney looking up at me. Tears rolling down her temples. “I love you”, I heard her say as I tried to see through my tears. Her last words to me echoed through the dream: “I’ll never see you again, will I?” They pushed her into the ambulance as I tried to speak. Nothing.
Still dreaming: Suddenly I was back in the bedroom. So quiet. I looked over to her side of the bed. There was nothing but the imprint of her head on the pillow. The loneliness was overwhelming. I grabbed the plastic handle of vodka on the nightstand and took two big gulps. Back over to the silver pail. More blood splashed into the bucket. My throat was on fire. How long ago did she leave?
The desolation was terrifying.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I mumbled to no one. I reached for my phone. I was spinning fast. The room got brighter. Then darker. Now…flickering white lights? I could barely see my phone’s keypad as I tapped 911 and hit Send. I felt myself falling backwards…falling…faster and faster. Darkness.
My eyes opened. Awake at rehab again. I was breathing heavily and sweating. I reached for the water bottle on the desk next to my bed. What a dream, I thought. But it was all too real. I sat up in bed and pulled the comforter off. I had to get up. I can’t risk falling back to sleep and into that mess again. In my distant, still groggy mind those steel doors started to slam shut (again) as I stood up, shook off the rest of my sleep and made my way to the shower. Maybe I can wash it all away with the sweat.
Wouldn’t that be different?
A week went by as I went through the motions of in-patient treatment. Chores. Group. Lunch. Group. Group. Off to an A.A. meeting in the big van. I tried to share what I was grappling with a few times during groups, and at the outside A.A. meeting, but the tears would build up in the corners of my eyes as my throat prepped to vomit. No way. I’ll keep this one inside for now.
Before I knew it, I was back in my counselor’s office again for my weekly session. After the initial small talk he paused, looked at me in earnest anger, and asked me if I had gotten it yet. “You were hours from death yourself!”, he yelled at me. “You were right there with her!” I stared back at him with my well-worn look of, ‘Oh well.’
What happened to me must be hiding behind those steel doors in my mind. Suddenly, from a hospital phone call not long ago, my sister’s voice echoed in my head: ‘You almost died!!’
My counselor was still yelling something so I paused him with an angry stare. I was right there with Macie. I didn’t want to remember. I had to. I let the anger he was using to rattle my awareness settle in. The session was ending. He calmed down and quietly handed me another one of his countless assignments to work on. With cautious gratitude I placed the assignment into my backpack, thanked him, and left his office to find a place to think.
I went to a picnic table overlooking a large, sparkling pond, sat down and closed my eyes. I let the steel doors open for good. The memory of a computer screen filled with my family’s worried faces during a Zoom call, just prior to coming here, filled my thoughts. I then forced my mind to stare at the look of fear on my son’s face. My fatherly direction, as he grew from a boy to a man, had always ended with, ‘Stay strong!’ Now, with hopeful eyes, he was passing it back to me. My God, no wonder I woke up during that dream.
I refused to face, even while dreaming, what happened to me.
After several days’ unconscious in the ICU, I woke up with a thick plastic liner in my trachea, breathing with a respirator, IVs in both arms, and still hallucinating from all the drugs they’d pumped into me. My brother, who had raced in from Connecticut, was sitting in the room with me but I kept falling back to sleep before I registered that he was there.
I remembered a doctor coming into my room and telling me that I was hours away from “not responding”, as he solemnly put it. I remembered my brother telling me that a priest came into the room and said prayers over me. I remembered finding out (later) that my closest friend had asked the priest to be there. I remember going through a week of physical therapy as my legs found enough strength to let me walk again. I remembered leaving the hospital with the help of a walker.
I remembered it all.
Sitting there at a picnic table, staring across a pond covered with a blanket of twinkling ripples, illuminated by the radiance of the high noon sun, I knew something was happening.
Suddenly, Buddy, one of the ranch dogs, came running towards me and jumped on top of the table. He laid down as close to me as he could get. He placed his left paw across my right arm. He started to smile, the way happy dogs do, and looked into the sparkling light with me. At best a “Cafeteria Catholic”, I couldn’t resist the thought: God? I believe my higher power, that I choose to refer to as ‘God’, was with me, then and there, in more ways than one.
And then it came to me. As these sobering thoughts took their orderly place, one after the other, an unforeseen and fearless awareness was born in my conscious mind. A moment later, a peaceful wave, now expected and silent, came over me. I closed my eyes and watched those steel doors turn to dust and blow away.
The news about Macie had set forth a chain of mindful experiences that had led me exactly to where I was at that moment. First, in shock, my mind had processed the news with crystal clear images and lucid dreams. That experience wrenched from the darkness of my unconsciousness, into my conscious thoughts, the stark reality of how horrific and deadly the disease of alcoholism really is. How sadly, and beyond words, it had (eventually) taken Macie to the bitter end.
And now, the stark reality of how close to death I had been sunk into my sober mind. My counselor was right. My sister was right. The rest of my family was right. My son’s sad look of confusion and fear was warranted. My love for my son filled my thoughts.
After decades of playing the God of Reason, by manipulating everyone and everything I believed to be my puppets on the stage of my self-centered life, I had reached a crossroads at which there were only two options: life or death. As I watched those endless twinkling ripples of light continue their uninterrupted march towards the shore, I knew, with an awareness I had never known before, it was time to take a first step, towards life.
Unmistakably, I became aware of how completely powerless I was over the constant, incessant pursuit of pleasure that my body and mind sought from alcohol. My solution had failed me. My way of thinking, and therefore every aspect of my life, was, and had always been, unmanageable. For as long as I could remember.
Basking in humility, I surrendered.
I was already well past 6 months of sobriety but, until that very moment, I was “just hanging out in treatment”. Several of the counselors had tried to tell me that. I couldn’t begin to comprehend what they were saying until that moment. Everything began to make sense.
I had spent decades creating piles of destruction with bulldozers of resentment I had towards everyone and everything that got in my way of a drink. Driven by character defects of selfishness, arrogance, manipulation, and dishonesty, to name a few, no one was safe. All the educational A.A. step work I had done up to that point was merely appreciated. But until I truly comprehended powerlessness and unmanageability, that I had only previously acknowledged, could I be enveloped by the peace that humility and surrender offered.
I snapped from my reverie. I put my forehead up to Buddy’s, scratched him behind both his ears as a gesture of thanks for sharing my experience, and stood up from the picnic table.
I made my way across the field and back to my dorm. It felt like I was floating. It felt so much better than any fleeting moment of happiness; it was a cautious, yet peaceful awareness that I was heading towards freedom.
I made it to my dorm room and realized that I had the room to myself, for now. I sat down at the desk and zipped open my backpack. The most recent assignment my counselor had given me was crumpled up on top.
Normally, I would have just thrown it in my drawer (with the rest of them) and pulled out whatever work of fiction I was reading at the time. But my outlook had changed. After my experience at the picnic table, I wanted more. Could I put my addictive behavior to preferable use? The thought brought a smile to my face.
I straightened out the assignment on the desktop and read his instructions carefully. I opened the bottom drawer and pulled out one of my many unused notebooks. This one was bright yellow.
I grabbed a new pen out of the box in my backpack. I had been mentally and physically drained for over a week, but a new and confident energy flowed through me. I cautiously reminded myself that this new and demanding journey was just beginning. I made a commitment then and there, to my higher power and to myself, that yes, it will be different this time.
I opened the notebook to that first crisp, white sheet of paper and re-read the instructions. Then it hit me. So intricately simple. I clicked the pen open, touched it to the top of the page and began my assignment with one short and difficult sentence:
“Macie died,” he said.
Hope this helps someone. My story.
… that got me 
