If I Die Before I Wake (16 page)

Sammi hasn't been acting like herself. Recently, when we pick her up, she squeals as if in pain. We're here to get her checked out. In the waiting room, after the X-rays, we wait. Wrapped in her favorite blanket, Sammi looks at me with her big, brown, trusting eyes, and I pet her back to assure her that everything will be all right. I know she's old, but she's healthy. I pull her close to my chest.

We're called back into the exam room. The vet says she's got a growth on her spleen. It must be removed. Reluctantly, I hand Sammi over. Even though the vet says it will be a while, that Tom and I should go get something to eat, I can't leave … to abandon my beloved dog in a strange place alone. Back in the waiting room, Tom and I sit in adjoining leather chairs. Tom's hand covers mine. He squeezes. He can say more with the touch of his hand than anyone ever conveyed to me in words.

In all of my life, I've never had another person who I knew was there for me no matter what. Tom has been there through so much and never questioned, blamed, or shamed me. When I got in trouble, made the call, he always came through—paying for my divorces, bailing me out financially, giving me cars, helping with Jon, paying for lawyers. I jumped from one bad situation to another, always searching for that elusive something that would make me happy. And though I had many brief encounters that I called marriage, Tom never married, insisting that we would end up together one day.

We've been married for over twenty years, which is a miracle considering my track record. I'm not sure why, but in the throes of my drinking and drug use, my solutions consisted of moving, changing jobs, and getting married. I only stayed in new places for a short time for fear that others would figure out the truth of who I was. I couldn't hold jobs any length of time because I was always on the run. And marriages … well, one of us always sobered up, reality hit, and at the first sign of trouble, I was planning my escape. I called them adventures, but they were disasters. I lived in a state of excited misery for years.

By the time I dragged myself into the first 12-step meeting, I was tired—tired of running, tired of living the way I did, tired of dreading every new sunrise. I wanted to stop, to rest, to find a moment's peace. It took finding peace while living in the garage, staying sober, working my steps, and not asking anyone else to bail me out of trouble before I was ready for an honest, lasting relationship. It took opening myself to a Higher Power to understand what it means to love and be loved, to feel worthy of a good life.

I had an epiphany at a 12-step meeting for women many years ago. New to sobriety, I sat through it listening to other women talk about their devastations over husbands cheating, leaving them alone, driving them to drink. I recall thinking, what a bunch of whiners. I got divorced all the time. What was the big deal? It didn't dawn on me until much later that they actually loved their husbands. I kept marrying men I didn't even like that much so that when it ended I wouldn't feel the way those ladies did. I wasn't willing to put my heart on the line, to
risk the pain. That's probably why I didn't marry Tom. I was in love with him. He could hurt me.

I look over at Tom. He's worried too. Without any children or grandchildren, our dogs fill a hole in our lives. As a child, my best friend was a dog: Pedro, the tough little Manchester terrier. He was whom I went to with my secrets, my fears, my tears. When my children died, dogs filled my empty arms that ached to hold a baby. Georgie, who's at home waiting for us, saw me through the loss of my son's dog, Angel. Sammi, who's in surgery now, helped me get through the suffering caused by being housebound with Graves' disease for so long.

The vet is coming toward us. I don't like the look on his face. Breath held in, I stand. Tom puts his arm around my waist. All day I've been trying to use the eleventh step … praying “only” for God's will and the power to carry it out. The vet motions us to follow him into another room. As we walk in, I look over his shoulder through a glass barrier. Sammi is laid out on an operating table, still under the anesthetic. The vet says, “Sammi has cancer. It has metastasized. I can bring her back if you want, but the kindest thing you can do now is let her go.”

An old, familiar knot begins to form in my gut. Unable to speak, I nod. He says, “I'll take care of it and get her ready if you want to say good-bye.” Pictures of my babies dead in my arms flood my mind. I can't do it. I shake my head, look to Tom who I know is as upset as I am, and, as always, he knows what I need. I have to get out of here. He ushers me out the door. By the time we reach the car, I'm convulsing in pain, strange sounds coming
from deep inside me, tears flowing unchecked down my face. He wraps me in a gentle embrace.

My eyes red and swollen and the end of my nose raw from wiping at it with a paper towel by the time we get home, I wonder if I have enough left in me to walk up the hill to the house. Tom helps me. Inside, I'm reminded of the day I learned of Jon's death as I weep into Georgie's soft fur.

Something's wrong with Tom. I don't think I've ever seen that look on his face. He slams out the door. I follow. He says, “He should have told us. I didn't even get to hold her before he took her. I just thought it was some little operation. He shouldn't have taken us back there … you know, where we could see her laying there.” I've never seen him so angry.

Quickly, I realize that because he can't deal with the pain of loss, he's gone directly to anger and is placing blame on the vet. I say, “It wasn't his fault. He tried to save her. He might have handled it better, but it is what it is.” Tom begins to break down. I wrap my arms around him as he had with me earlier, and we mourn together. This is what a real marriage is about—being there for each other through whatever life throws at us. We'd made it through my disease, Tom's bout with prostate cancer, the loss of two brothers-in-law as well as Tom's brother and sister, and we'd make it through this. “We still have Georgie,” I say, “and she needs us.” I glance at her dancing around our feet, glad we're home, and know that soon we'll be going through another loss. She's nearly 20 years old.

I bring the eleventh step to mind as I weep softly into my pillow, missing the feel of Sammi curled up next to me. I know
that I must keep this conscious contact with the God of my understanding or I will be swallowed up by the pain of Sammi's loss and of the past. I can't allow myself to go backward. I'll get up and write in the morning, as I do each morning. I'm working under a deadline on my new book.

Thinking of the new project, an inspirational book based on the Serenity Prayer, makes me remember all the good things in my life. Tom and I have had quite a run for the past twenty-one years. Considering the kind of lives we led—drinking, screwing around, doing sometimes unspeakable things—I am in awe of the life we've had together. I never knew it could be like this. With Tom's help, I realized my dream of becoming a costumer, ran a successful business before I got sick, and now he's happily retired and I'm an author. To date, in addition to my costume books and the fortune-telling kit, I have three inspirational books published and am about to finish another. But what I count as the greatest achievement in my life is that I've become a genuinely decent person, a trusted friend to many, and a devoted wife, thanks to the help of a program, people who cared for me when I wasn't capable of caring for myself, and divine intervention. A person simply can't get to where I am, from where I started, without divine intervention.

Late into the night, I pace the floor. I smoke. I cry. I try to obliterate the image of Sammi lying on that cold metal table, her side cut open. When I begin to feel a twinge of pain in my right side and back, I take to my bed. Totally exhausted, I sleep, only to awaken a few hours later in agony. Every time I move, sharp pains slice through my side and back. It must have been
the fall. After a hot tub soak and some arthritis cream rubbed into the sore areas, I'll be fine.

Unable to return to sleep, I sit down at my desk to work on the book. Within seconds, doubled over in misery, I stand. I need to walk it off, to loosen up, but each step I take makes it worse. Standing in the middle of my kitchen floor, questions float into my mind. Why me? Why now? Aren't I in enough pain already? What the hell is happening? I've been good. I'm sober, working the program, pray every day, help others, and try to be the best person I can be. “Why?” I scream at God. As soon as I hear myself, I stop. What am I doing? I'd heard it around the meetings so many times: drunk or sober, life keeps happening. It's what we do with what happens that's important. For those of us who have chosen to live a spiritually based life, God is everything, or God is nothing.

It has been easy living a spiritually based life over the past ten years, when everything was going my way. How many times have I said to people in meetings, “If you believe one thing in your life happened for a reason, then you must believe all things happen for a reason. You don't get to pick and choose”? How easily those words came out of my mouth. Do I really believe it?

SOOTHING MUSIC WAFTS SOFTLY THROUGH A ROOM
painted in soft shades of green, peaceful artwork adorning each wall. I'm lying on a padded table in the center of the room with skinny needles protruding from my ankles, wrists and hands, side, and the top of my head. This woman is good. She poked those needles right into my skin without inflicting any pain. I'm still amazed I'm here, considering my great fear of needles.

Since, as a child, I was forced to go to a ham-fisted ex-army dentist friend of my stepfather, the thought of needles evokes
fear and pain. I can see the dentist's hairy hand coming toward my face, holding a needle so large it looks like it could go all the way through my head. He hurt me more times than I care to remember. I don't know if my bad teeth were genetic or if what he did to me all those years didn't work, but I ended up with false teeth by the time I turned 17. The one thing he did do for me was to instill in me such a fear of needles that he inadvertently kept me from becoming a heroin addict. God knows the people I ran around with over the years gave me every opportunity.

“Please, let this help,” I whisper to God. It had been a long, painful year since Sammi's death. At first I stayed in bed, living in fear of moving because I knew I would suffer sharp, debilitating pains that felt like someone had shoved a hot poker through my side. Every time I sat up it felt like a big fiery ball had lodged itself beneath my rib cage, which would send me reeling to a prone position, holding my breath until the pain passed. I wondered if I had one of those giant tumors growing inside me like people I'd seen on television. I knew anything that hurt that bad had to be something terrible. The worst part of lying around day by day was the silence, all that time to think. Thoughts began to creep into my mind, angry, resentful thoughts that brought me feelings of self-pity and finally depression—all things an addict in recovery can ill afford. It didn't matter that I'd been sober and drug-free all those years because at the end of the day, I was still an addict. I knew what would take the pain away, at least for a while.

One afternoon, as I wallowed in my misery, both physical and mental, another thought came to mind: you can live in the
problem or live in the solution … it's entirely up to you. I'd heard it said many times in meetings, but had never needed to hear it as profoundly as I did at that moment. Jack used to say that attending meetings was like making payments on an insurance policy. I may not need something I hear at a meeting for a week, a year, or ten years, but when I need it, it'll be there. Then he would add, “Of course, if you don't show up, you may miss hearing the very thing that can save your ass down the road, and your policy could lapse.” I'd seen it time and again—people with years in sobriety who suffered a trauma and went back out.

When the fear of relapse became bigger than the fear of the pain, I got on my feet, determined not to let it happen to me. I talked to Tom about my decision. I knew that whatever choice I made, he would go along with it. One of the things I loved most about him was that he treated me like an equal with the ability to know what was best for myself. That was certainly something I'd never experienced in a relationship before. I said, “We're going to have to change some things around.” The pain lessened when I was standing or lying down, so we'd have to set the household up differently, just as a person in a wheelchair had to do.

The transition began. Tom moved a waist-high table into the corner of the kitchen and placed my typewriter atop it so I could stand to write. He removed my favorite chair, the one that hung from a beam that separated the kitchen from the dining area, and set up an outside lounge chair instead so I could lie back to watch my television. To eat, I'd stand at the bar. Tom
carried a thick blanket and pillow down the hill to the car and arranged it in the backseat as a bed for when I was forced to ride somewhere. It felt good to get into action. That feeling was short-lived when I knew the next phase was at hand: calling the doctor.

After all I'd gone through with my Graves' disease, the mere thought of going back to a doctor sent a shudder through my spine. For six months, truly believing that death hung over my head, I'd made the rounds to one specialist after another. They poked, prodded, and ran tests, but I continued to get worse. Some doctors acted as if it was all in my head, others shook their heads and said, “I just don't know.” When I nearly died, eventually ending up in the emergency room where I was finally diagnosed, I had to deal with many doctors who'd never had a Graves' disease patient. They were not terribly sure of what to do with me. I got sick of hearing things like, “let's try this.”

I stood staring at the telephone for long moments, telling myself that it had to be done and assuring myself that to base the present on the past did no good. I made the call, and by the afternoon I was standing in a crowded emergency room in Sun City, waiting to be seen. Hours later, it began: doctor after doctor guessing what they thought might be wrong with me, grueling tests that showed nothing, pills that caused hives, itching, some that made me fall down, others that caused bleeding and low blood pressure, but nothing that helped.