Everything Is Not Fine

My daughter calls most mornings on her way to work. We moved to Florida several years ago; our kids stayed in Maine. We like to check in on each other. We’re not old-old. I’m not on Medicare though my husband passed that milestone two years ago. But we got tired of worrying over unanswered calls and developed a routine. A quick ten minutes to ensure everything is fine, laugh a little, vent a lot, and say I love you. We always say I love you or some variation. Love you, love you guys, tell Dad I love him, kiss the kids for me.

My son, on the other hand, calls or texts whenever the mood strikes. The phone often rings when we sit down for lunch, step into the hot tub, or start a movie. The sound brings a “guess who” from his father with a smile, and a chuckle from me.

“I’ll call him back,” I sometimes say.

“No, answer it. This can wait,” his dad always responds.

My son didn’t call this week, but his texts were all about his father. My husband had hip-replacement surgery on Monday. “Damn body’s falling apart,” he’d said for more than a year before finally taking this step. An athlete and a man who’d done everything from pulling 100-foot hoses full of heating oil during frigid Maine winters to replacing every kind of roof imaginable on the many properties we’d rehabbed over the past nearly half a century. He’s worked on fourteen-foot ceilings and in crawl spaces barely two-feet high. It doesn’t seem right that he still looks so young, but his worn-out joints make him feel so old.

I’d text my son after the surgery and heard back a couple of hours later. Ironically, he was working in a crawl space and hadn’t heard the familiar beep, but when he usually responds within minutes of a text, those few hours were concerning. You get to know your children over the years. You feel when something isn’t quite as it should be.

I was over reacting. Tuesday and Wednesday brought more messages from him with typical questions about his father’s recovery, one even asking about the make, model, and serial number of the new hip.

“Creepy,” my husband says when I read him the text this morning. “Why would he ask that?”

“It’s not creepy,” I say. “He’s planning on caring for you in your old age. Your son wants to be prepared if that information becomes important.” As I make coffee, I call over my shoulder, “In the message, he said to tell you he loves you.” I remember my response to that text, Take care of yourself! Love you. I ended with a purple heart emoji like I’ve been doing for years.

I bring the coffee to the table and glance at the time. My daughter should be calling soon. Her eleven-year-old catches the bus at 6:45; the phone usually rings a minute or so later. When my husband is finished with his coffee, I tell him to go lie down. He’s less than three days post op. No sitting for more than a few minutes. “Yes, ma’am,” he says with an eye-roll. I’ve been bossy lately which isn’t normal, but I’m worried.

The phone rings right on time, and I see my daughter’s smiling face under her name. I watch as my husband gingerly stands with both hands on the walker we rescued from the attic.

“Good morning, sweetie,” I say and walk to the other side of the house. The windows are chest-high in the guest room with the queen bed, and I rest my arms on the sill. I enjoy the view while we talk about work, the children, and as always, her brother. She hasn’t heard from him in a while, but she’s driving by his home. He lives on the main road through town.

“His truck’s in the driveway,” she says. “It’s running, so he should have work. That’s good.”

“That is good,” I say. We’re both worried since he started work on his own two months ago. He’s a brilliant HVAC tech, but we’re not sure he can handle self-employment. “He hasn’t called since Sunday, but he’s been texting. Asking about your dad’s recovery.”

We’re both lost for words that will bring comfort to a difficult situation, so there’s a little dead air before we say our goodbyes.

“Love you,” she says. “Tell Dad I love him.”

“Love you too, sweetie.” I stare at her picture, wishing I could give her a hug.

The morning continues as normal as possible. I haven’t exercised in over a week so I grab a quick fifteen minutes, hop in the shower, and get breakfast on the table. When we’ve finished, I take my husband’s blood pressure, and he heads back to bed.

The house is now quiet except for my keyboard taps, so when the phone rings, I’m startled. I stand up, grab the phone, and flip open its wallet-type cover. There is my daughter’s smiling face, and my heart stops.

We’ve already talked. I know instinctively something is wrong. I answer with a tentative, “Hi,” and hear the words I’ve dreaded for twenty years.

“I never wanted to make this call.” Her voice cracks, and she can’t say anymore.

I am frozen, numb as I wait, but the words to come have been anticipated, expected even at times. I want to comfort her for I know in my heart she has lost her brother.

“He’s gone.” I hear a sob. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“How?” I ask, but I already know.

“Overdose.”

“Where are you?”

“Work.”

“Where’s your husband?”

“On his way.”

“Good.” I am composed. I wonder what’s wrong with me.

“He was home. In his truck. I think he was gone when I drove by.”

I see where her mind is going, and I tell her to stop. There was nothing we could have done. She tells me her husband has arrived, and they’re going to my son’s house. She’ll call back. Before the call ends, she says, “Mom, I believe he’s at peace now.”

“I think you’re right,” I say. I want to be there. For her and my grandchildren. My husband and I talked about this months ago when the signs were there. He’d mostly been clean for seven years, but occasional slip-ups began three years ago, separated by long stretches of sobriety. The time between those slip-ups started decreasing in the past six months. No amount of begging him to get help would crack his stand-by reply; Everything is fine, Mom.

A realization smacks me in the head. “We can’t come to Maine!” I blurt out before the call disconnects. “Your father can’t travel, and I can’t leave him alone.”

“I know,” she says. “It’s okay.”

We say goodbye, and I set the phone down.

I’m still standing beside my desk, staring into the room we call the kids’ room. It has two twin beds separated by a night stand with a dresser and mirror against the opposite wall. I spent time in March cleaning the walls and floor and painting the furniture. When our son and his wife visited later that month, he’d used the room for suitcases. They were headed for a cruise and had a lot of stuff, requiring some maneuvering to get it all back into their bags. I see him sitting on the floor with clothes strewn all over.

I walk into the room as if I can touch him and sit where he had been. I’m still numb, still no tears. I wonder what’s wrong with me as I slide down to lie on the narrow rug that runs between the beds. I stare at the ceiling. I tell myself to stop pretending nothing is wrong. I breathe slowly as the words replay; He’s gone. Yet I continue to stare upwards.

I roll onto my side. There is something under the bed. There shouldn’t be. My eyes focus on a navy-blue object. It’s a pair of slippers. My husband has navy-blue slippers. He’d worn them to the hospital on Monday and back home on Tuesday, but they wouldn’t be here. I realize the slippers are slightly different. Higher sides and faux fur trim. My son’s. Neatly placed just under the bed, forgotten in his rush to pack or waiting for him to come back. But he never would be coming back. The tears arrive in full force as if suddenly freed. Reality has hit with a vengeance.

There is no screaming, just uncontrollable tears. I realize they won’t be stopping anytime soon, and I have to tell my husband that our firstborn has died.

When we talked about the possibility, I never really thought it would happen. I figured he’d lose his job, which he did. Then maybe get arrested or in financial trouble and finally hit that bottom. The one he’d hit seven years ago. The one that gave us our son back for a while, like he was in remission from a deadly disease. One that could come back at any given moment. It would start out of nowhere, it did. Then the symptoms would get worse, they did, until there was no way to slow the progression, like a snowball on a steep slope growing larger until it hit a tree. But then he’d pick himself up and take sobriety seriously again, like he’d done so many times before.

We said we’d be ready if this happened. I’m not. Our son had been battling this awful addiction for twenty years, and we knew it may end this way. But it seems so sudden. A week ago, he told me he’d stopped taking the oxycodone for his aching back because that’s what everyone wants. He’d find another way to deal with the pain. I breathed a little easier. I thought he’d turned a corner.

Now I stare at his picture on the roll-top desk I use for writing. My sister took the black and white photo when he was in his twenties. It’s my favorite and I can’t catch my breath. Another dose of reality strikes, but I turn away and head for our bedroom. My husband is lying flat; his head propped on a pillow and his eyes staring at the open door. He knows something is wrong. I see the pain in those eyes as he braces himself and hopes for reassurance I can’t give. He knows, though I can’t speak. I crawl into bed next to him, careful of the six-inch scar on his hip. He wraps his arm around me, and I bury my head in his chest. His other arm muses my hair as he waits for me to volunteer information, but I can’t.

After a few minutes, he whispers our son’s name with a question in his voice. I shake my head yes, and he asks, “Overdose?” I shake my head again and he squeezes me tight. I hear, I’m so sorry. His tears are silent, but I feel his body shake under mine. There is nothing more to say.

We lie on the bed and hold each other as the sobs fade to intermittent bursts and eventually silence. A sadness has filled the room, and I dare not move or speak. Perhaps it was just a dream, though I know it’s not. The first stage of grief is denial, and I have passed through that stage quickly. I’m told anger will be next, but I’ve been angry for twenty years; I don’t want to continue down that road.

The ringing phone forces me off the bed. I see my daughter’s smiling face. An illusion as I know she is not smiling, and I wonder if we’ll ever smile again. She gives me more details. His wife of less than two years is hysterical, and my daughter has suggested no funeral. A celebration of life at a later date, and she agreed. We don’t know her well, but she is the next-of-kin.

My daughter’s going home to grieve with her husband until their daughters arrive from school, and she has to tell them their uncle has passed. They’ve called him Uncle Zippy since the oldest was a toddler; I’m not sure why. The news will hit her especially hard. She beeps her horn every time she passes his house since getting her license a year ago. If he was home an emoji followed. A heart, Smilie face, or anything to make her laugh and know he cared.

I spend the next few hours talking with family and responding to heart-felt texts from those in our inner circle of friends. I hadn’t opened the curtains before I got that ominous phone call, so the bedroom is appropriately dark and somber when we finally retreat there at dusk. We are left to mourn in private.

Evening comes slowly and turns to night in an eerie silence as I lay awake beside my husband. Sleep is elusive for us both, and he holds me as I cry, overcome with memories of our son’s first smile. First steps and first words float by as the years of his life make their journey through my mind. The next moment, he is two and holding his baby sister with a huge smile. Kindergarten was a heartbeat forward. I drove him because we didn’t trust the bus to keep him safe. I continue to follow him through the years until he blessed us with a beautiful granddaughter.

The narrative gets difficult after that as my son’s twenty-year battle with addiction began with a back injury. I force myself to watch his struggle through the ups and downs. I see his youngest daughter and a son enter our lives, and his marriage fail. I wonder where we failed. Did we miss the signs? Could we have done anything differently? I’ll forever second guess every decision I made.

I drag myself out of bed at dawn and walk through the house. My son is everywhere and nowhere. In pictures and memories. An ever-present feeling that he is in the next room or around the corner. I hear him laugh and I sense his pain. I know he will never enter this house again. I start the coffee and rush to the bedroom and the comfort of my husband.

He’s working his way out of bed. A challenge with the new hip, and I see pain in his face before he turns toward the bathroom with the walker sliding across the tile floor. I walk back to the door but stop when I hear, “She killed him, you know.”

He’s talking about our daughter-in-law, and he’s not wrong. “I know,” I whisper and wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. I’m trying to pretend she hadn’t had anything to do with it. I don’t want to go there now.

I squash the anger and head to the kitchen, but his words replay and my world comes crashing in. My sorrow pushed aside by a fury so overwhelming I can’t breathe. I hear my husband’s words after he’d first met her, She’ll be the death of him.

Can you kill someone with negativity? Murder by insults? Can angry rants become knives stabbing into a heart made weak by the continuous onslaught of cynicism and disapproval? The next few hours are a blur of replays. We’d spent a limited amount of time with our daughter-in-law. Mostly visits of a few days either side of a vacation. I relive each encounter and the constant bad-mouthing of my son. Before, during, and after their wedding. We’d begged him not to marry her.

Our son was a gentle, caring soul. Always willing to help no matter the time of day or night. He was quick with a laugh and a hug. Passionate about his work and his family. Always pleasant; never confrontational. He was a catch, my daughter often said after he got sober. It was a fragile sobriety, though, and we worried. We worried even more when we met the woman who would become his second wife.

He showered her with gifts and vacations, but she complained. The cruise was too busy. The Florida Keys were boring. An Airbnb was not decorated properly. My son didn’t communicate well; then he was too needy. She didn’t ever apologize because she was never wrong. In every conversation, my daughter-in-law’s words reeked of toxicity. How long before disparaging words cause despair and a search for a way to tolerate the intolerable ends in a relapse?

With each recollection, my fury rages until the sound of the phone causes me to rein it in. It’s charging beside the black and white photo of our son. For a second, I think it might be him, but it’s my daughter’s smiling face when I open the cover. Her voice is not smiling, though, as I answer and hear, “She killed him, you know.”

My daughter had seen the signs too and watched in anguish as her brother’s world crumbled. I hear the pain and the frustration in her words.

“I know,” I say with a sadness that’s replaced the anger for a moment. My heart breaks for her. If the roles had been reversed, would we have intervened more than we did for our son? Another thing to question. I’m sure blame and guilt will join my anger and become constant companions as I move forward. I know the pharmaceuticals, doctors, drug dealers, and online pharmacies are waiting in the wings for my condemnation. Our daughter-in-law is only the first. I’m sure there are others whose paths crossed my son’s and contributed to his passing that I have forgotten, but my rage has no timeframe.

The second stage of grief has arrived with all its pent-up wrath. I wonder how long it will last. It's been barely twenty-four hours since I found out my son is dead and everything is not fine.

THE END