Category Archives: heartbreak

Remembering Erich

My younger brother, my only sibling, died a little more than a year ago. This will be our second Christmas without him. My brother was a loner and unpredictable so Christmas without him, even when he was alive, was not rare, but this year feels different. When you love someone, even if you don’t always enjoy their company when they are around, knowing they are safe somewhere in the world is a comfort. My brother’s existence seemed less and less safe as the years went by, certainly in the last few years when he had physically moved a thousand miles away and was living in his van, but he kept in touch with my mother by phone, often daily. I didn’t always believe or trust in the news he shared with her about his life. My brother’s narratives often strayed from reality, and I never knew how much he believed of his own tales. Toward the end of his life I would have liked more than anything to know how much he believed himself of what he spun for the rest of us. But that was the one thing you could never really know with him.

My brother was an alcoholic.

He was the smartest person I ever knew, smart enough to observe and draw conclusions about life that most people happily miss. He was smart enough to see that his intelligence, his dyslexia, his six foot seven inch, one hundred ninety pound frame, his poet’s heart and painter’s eye made him an odd stranger in this world. We were eighteen months apart in age, and the children of addicts. That it was my job to pilot my little brother to safe waters seemed clear to me at an early age, but I lost that sense of mission when I started school. While school was a place of safety and belonging for me, it was only ever a danger to my brother. So it became every man for himself in my little family, and that single, unspoken truth wounded him immeasurably. It also, as wounds often do, defined him.

When you love an addict, you always imagine there is a way of helping just within reach, something that you, and maybe only you, can do, or say, or maybe a way of being that will change things. That somehow it lies within your power to make the light snap on. There isn’t of course, but the fact that you believe there is makes you and your addict perfectly suited to one another. My brother found and made his own family as an adult, cobbled together from childhood friends, and like-minded dreamers. He sometimes loved well, and was loved by others along the way, but his wound would not be healed. He died alone. A resilient few people tried hard to keep that from happening, but looking back, I think that is how he had planned it.

Christmas, however, offers an alternate ending to my brother’s story.

Christmas was not his holiday. Too much family. Too much forced cheeriness. Too many ways to disappoint and be disappointed. Christmas is about beginnings, about the hope that comes with beginnings. Christmas, as a holiday on its own, does not have much to recommend itself to broken people, people with wounds, people who have seen more endings than beginnings. But Christmas, as a holiday, doesn’t stand alone. It is encompassed within the story of a larger life, the life of a man who, like my brother was defined by his wounds, left alone by his friends, and homeless. Christmas, as a story, is circumscribed by the story of Good Friday and Easter. The baby grows. The man loves others more than himself. The world sees no use for him. He dies alone.

And then, in the most unimaginable twist, he conquers death, takes back his broken body and walks among us. Christmas introduces us to the One who can truly say, “No one dies alone.”

I think, in the days and hours after we left his side, the days and hours he lay in hospice dying, my brother had a divine appointment with a fellow wanderer. How he responded in those last moments is, for a time, a mystery, but because it is Christmas I can hope.

Still No Room at the Inn

A different kind of Christmas story, but some of the characters feel the same. There’s a fourteen year old girl. She’s not pregnant, but she carries a heavy load. There are shepherds scattered throughout this tale, a high school principal, a guidance counselor, a police officer, keeping watch. Like the original story, a journey must be made, lodging and assistance is required and time is of the essence, but the innkeeper in this story is not a busy, distracted hotelier. It is an overwhelmed and completely impersonal mental health system.

Zero in on the setting for this drama- not a crowded, filthy stable, but an empty, windowless cell in the psychiatric lockdown unit of a suburban ER. No manger for a bed, rather a two inch thick vinyl covered mat on a bare tile floor. There are shepherds here also. They wear military type uniforms. They confiscate and lock up your possessions, show you the stance you are to take as you are “wanded” for contraband, and control the door in and out of the unit, in and out of your cell, a door with no handle on your side. They are just doing their job. Our fourteen year old young lady, scared and confused, bears her load with grace and dignity and waits for help.

Like the stable on that long ago night, the lockdown is crowded. Neighbors arrive on stretchers, in handcuffs, sometimes other restraints. They bring their people, just like our young lady brought you. We make a strange little collective, a collage of humanity, the dazed, the raging, the profane, the apologetic, the apathetic, and the sad. The sensory deprivation of the cell, the brightness of the light, the lack of information about what to expect, what to hope for, tests you.

A bed in one of three in-patient units in the city… that’s what you wait for, but like the original Christmas day, you are in a crowded city teeming with activity. Information is fed to you in little scraps sandwiched between thick slabs of boredom spent waiting for more little scraps until you feel like a lab rat staring at your door, listening to conversations in the hallway, watching the activity that passes by. With no clocks anywhere, time doesn’t pass so much as pause. The challenge for a fourteen year old in such a place is to keep her humor sharpened, to wield it defensively as needed, and sometimes to flatten it like a shield across her heart when the impossible looms.

Unlike our young lady, you are allowed to exit the lockdown and re-enter the larger world. When you do, the contrast is unsettling. It is December and all the world is planning a party. Swags of evergreen and twinkle lights drape the hospital doorways. The halls are swarming with cheerful ladies in green jackets selling cakes, cookies, wreaths. Tables are lined up featuring jewelry, bobbles, handmade crafts from around the world. You can barely navigate through the common areas. Even in the hospital, people are shopping.

A wise man finds his way to our girl’s cell, a pediatrician. He is kind, and gentle, but he cannot provide a bed at an in-patient unit. Another wise man, a psychologist bearing gifts, recommends two books to read when our fourteen year old returns home. He is apologetic that he cannot find a room at the in-patient unit.

A day, a night, a day.

It is Christmas in America, and I am looking everywhere for Jesus.

Maybe Christmas is just a holiday for happy people. Maybe the way we celebrate Christmas, the commotion, the gift buying and giving, the lights, the music, the hype and expectation of it all does nothing to invite the sad, the discouraged, the frightened, the lonely. A crowded church full of joyous, well-dressed people singing familiar songs does not automatically banish the demons that prey on the downtrodden. Nothing about a brightly lit tree or a house full of relatives can fill an empty heart. No gift that comes in a box or a bag will make up for returning home to a broken life at the end of the day.

A fourteen year old wakes up on a December morning and isn’t certain she can make it through the day without hurting herself, but like the young woman in Bethlehem whose baby comes early into an overcrowded world, there is no room at the inn for her. It’s a different kind of Christmas story, but it’s the one I lived this past week.

Processing the Latest Development…

Last week, my life took a sudden turn. I’m still trying to think of appropriate metaphors to explain the impact this has had on me, but none of them work. Seismic shifts, blinding storms, whirlwinds, tsunamis, these are all disasters of one magnitude or the other and this change in my life is not a disaster, not for me. Other comparisons, Dorothy stepping from her house into Oz, Wendy discovering Never Neverland, Gulliver meeting the Lilliputians all evoke images of the fantastic, the magical, the otherworldly, and there is nothing remotely magical or otherworldly about this development. So the best I can do is to say that overnight, my life has changed from a much anticipated and long awaited drive in an idyllic countryside to a high speed, rubber burning, bullet dodging car chase through urban streets.

That’s what it feels like at least.

Last week, my husband and I were enjoying scouting the lay of the land as empty-nesters (albeit koo-koo bird empty-nesters, since two of our four kids have boomeranged back home, our youngest, a freshman in college, is home for holidays, our oldest brings her toddler over for babysitting three days a week, and my mother has moved in)…so although our home is not exactly empty, everyone living here is a grown-up. We can leave them. We enjoy leaving them. We leave them on a regular basis. Whenever we want. For as long as we want. Laughing as we go out the door.

Three days ago, Thanksgiving morning, we became the grateful, and greatly fearful, guardians of a fourteen year old fresh out of options for such a short life. She is depressed, anxious, and possibly still suicidal, but I really feel like she is the sanest person in our household. It was her circumstances that were crazy. She is a survivor. Just barely.

I am instantly back in long familiar territory. Braces, morning and afternoon school drops, friends, doctors’ appointments, clubs, sports, three square meals, homework, curfews. I can do this in my sleep. I am also instantly floundering in completely uncharted waters. Suicide watch, pharmaceuticals under lock and key, vitamin deficiencies, cutting, someone else’s child who I don’t know like the back of my hand, whose moods I can’t read, whose inside jokes are outside of our history together. The good news is, maybe we will have some time before snarky, sullen responses and disgusted eye rolling sets in. We have no baggage. The bad news is, how will I keep vigilant enough to know if she’s in danger? I don’t know this child.

I’m trying to live completely in the present. I can’t have expectations of raising her. I’m rooting for her mother. But I can’t be less than a hundred percent in. Her very real and actual life may depend on our commitment. Recovery, reconciliation, and forgiveness- I want these for her, but I also want to protect her from soul-killing imitations. Today I saw genuine and spontaneous joy in one of her smiles. I’m greedy. I want more, but I feel like a thief wanting more. That smile should have been witnessed by another mother. I have been blessed by such a big and consuming family life, that I feel ashamed to throw my whole lot in with another woman’s child. I don’t want to be like King David when Nathan warned him of having everything and still coveting the meager blessing of another. Still another part of me wants my old life back, and knows that when, if, Hannah returns home, I will be relieved. Every day that goes by, these two conflicting emotions will each only grow stronger. How do I live with either one of these desires except to wholeheartedly embrace the present, and trust that every tomorrow is in better, more knowing hands than mine?