Dry January

I never really believed in participating in dry January. What’s the point? You don’t drink for a month and then come February 1st you're back to your same old self and drinking almost on a daily basis. One month isn’t going to save your liver.

I never felt the need to do it until Taylor. Oh Taylor. My best friend- my soulmate. She’s the kind of person that you meet and instantly know that she is going to be in your life forever. Or so I thought.

When I got the phone call that she was in the hospital I didn’t expect what I saw. She was 27. I knew she drank a lot. Quite frankly we all did. Years of partying throughout college carried into adulthood where instead of drinking to socialize with your friends you're doing it at home because life is so difficult you just want to feel numb.

I’ll never forget the yellow. I walked into the hospital that day, not sure of what to expect and there she was, sitting on the bed surrounded by her family and friends. It wasn’t her though. This person was yellow- not a tint like the color of a leaf dying in the fall. It was yellow like a Simpsons character had jumped off the screen and was sitting in the bed.

Our past conversations jumped into my head. She said she was struggling- weren’t we all? She claimed to be an alcoholic- the same way we all did in a joking manner because we all drank more than we should. Our best memories were ones where we drank and acted silly or did something stupid. I didn’t know it was this bad.

She was hooked to tubes, restricted from eating because they had to run tests on her. Her dad, who I’ve known most of my life, shared updates with me, all with a positive spin. “She needs to be at this number and she’s currently at this number. It’s not getting better but it’s not getting worse so that’s a good thing.”

We sat around her, talking about TV shows and work as if this girl- this amazing, wonderful girl- wasn’t next to us the color of the sun, vomiting and hooked up to more IVs than I’ve seen in my life. Her kidneys were failing so they needed to start dialysis. Just another machine hooked up to keep her alive.

She needed to fight. I saw it in her eyes though, she didn’t want to fight anymore. It’s the same look I’ve seen in the face of other alcoholics. If I can’t have the thing that makes me feel better (even though it really doesn’t), then what’s the point of living.

In the middle of the night I was awakened by a phone call from her dad. “They are moving Taylor to the ICU. Her heart rate fell really low, and they needed to intubate her.”

I rushed down to the hospital to wait with her family. They told me she was put into a medically induced coma. When I visited her, she was on her stomach, her mouth covered by a tube hanging out of it. 

A doctor in scrubs and an angry look on his face approached. “I’m sure you know that Taylor is in liver failure which is causing the rest of her organs to fail too. She needs a liver transplant but laws prohibit us from giving her one until she has been sober for six months. We are just going to keep moving forward and hope that her body will start responding to treatment.”

How wrong. I get it, in your eyes she was just another alcoholic. But in my eyes she was the best person I knew. Test me, I’ll give her half my liver without waiting. She’s so young. Doesn’t she deserve a second chance?

For days I sit at the hospital, working on my laptop, waiting for some sort of absolution. For days her parents hit me with the same story, “It’s improved in this way which isn’t a lot but it’s not any worse.”

I believed them. You want to hold on to the thought that everything is going to work out and be okay. On the surface I had hope. But deep down, I actually didn’t. 

There came a moment when the doctor talked to me directly. I can’t remember what he said. I suppose it was some sort of defense mechanism to shield me from the unbearable pain. I just remember calling my friend Keisha and telling her, “It’s really bad. You need to come down here.”

Somehow, we all knew. Though it had been a week of denial now there was no more ignoring the truth. This was the end. We gathered around her and sang, You are My Sunshine. Tears flowed down my face as I could barely get the words out. I found it to be ironic with the color of her skin. In actuality she was our sunshine. Within minutes of finishing, she was dead.

I didn’t want to accept it. She was only 27. She was my best friend. How could my best friend be gone from my life? How could such a young woman die of liver failure? There had to be some sort of reasoning, some sort of explanation. 

The only real explanation is the truth. She abused alcohol for far too long and much more than anyone knew. It killed her, the way it kills so many others. 

As I look into dry January this year, it’s different. I do it for her. I do it because maybe if she had done more dry days she would still be here. It’s funny, alcohol is the thing I want most and least after losing her. I want to numb the pain, but I don’t want to end up like her. Is the temporary fix really worth the consequences?

The booze is gone, out of my life for this dry month of cold and snow. Who knows, it might stay gone forever. All I know is that this dry January is for Taylor.