• • •
This random guy who lived with you at The Hills has messaged me several times about coming by your house to pick up some of his gear from your music room. Aside from his gear not being my priority at the moment, I don’t know this person and am hesitant to invite him into your home to potentially steal your drum kit and whatever other fancy shit you have back there. In the midst of this whirlwind, I don’t know how to gauge who’s a legitimate friend and who’s out to capitalize on your death. Your tragic story has been plastered all over the internet for two weeks. Everyone has something to say. One girl wrote a detailed piece that she shared all over Facebook chronicling the details of your sexual relationship. Our mother read it. Lots of people we’ve never heard of have reached out to Mom and me on Facebook to say how close you were, how much you meant to them, and how devastated they are that you’re gone. It’s a difficult thing to field, and I’m paranoid that people will take advantage of that.
I check with Paul and Michael, your bandmates from Don’t Stop or We’ll Die, and they confirm that you did, indeed, have a “Secret Rehab Band,” so I give this guy the green light. He comes with a driver or chaperone or something—a Henry Rollins type. The bodyguard tells us six people from sober living have overdosed on heroin in the last nine months. Six people. Six daughters, sons, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers. Six other families have lived through this merciless nightmare. You knew the statistics but were convinced it wouldn’t happen to you. I make shitty small talk with the guy from Secret Rehab Band, all the while resenting that he’s alive and you’re dead.
05 Week Three
Once the house is packed up and the movers have come and gone and the rooms are empty, aside from a couple of beds, dressers, a dining room table, and the sofa in the living room, we say goodbye to your house in Los Feliz that we’ll never see again and head back to LAX. We return the rental car and take the shuttle to the terminal, and as we sit at the gate, waiting for the plane to arrive, it hits me that we’re flying back home to Houston, but I’m not ready to go back to my life.
I can’t go back to my life.
It’s March 7, and I haven’t been to work since February 19. I text my boss to tell him I’m still a mess and currently have the baby’s cold and possibly a sprained ankle (from the bedpost). I ask for more time. He tells me to take another week. One week plus spring break, which is the following week, will give me two more weeks. To do what? I don’t know.
The grief takes up so much space that there’s not much room for anything else. When I’m not thinking about how bleak life is going to be without you, I’m signing on some dotted line and trying my best to wake up every day for the sake of Iris. I force myself to smile in her presence because she’s a loving, innocent baby who deserves a smiling mother. This is taking all the energy I have. As a result, my ability to think and remember is notably compromised. I frequently say one word but mean another. Constantly, I hear “You told me that already.”
It’s all choppy and messy and nonlinear. One emotion doesn’t flow neatly into another; it hits me suddenly, like morning sickness, and can’t be pushed down. The only way to make it stop is to vomit up the feeling—to feel it deeply and loudly. I cry and cry and cry. Then I’m suddenly making a joke: “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d fucking kill him.” And everyone laughs.
It comes and goes and comes and goes. You don’t pass one stage, scratch it off the list, and graduate onto the next. It’s not compartmentalized like the chart suggests. It’s circuitous and never-ending. Joan Didion said it better: “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
“Sudden apprehension” is pretty much the theme of daily life, once the perpetual sobbing subsides. No one (besides Joan Didion) talks about that. You hear about anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance, but never about the crippling anxiety. I’m already prone to anxiety, but it reaches a fever pitch after the initial shock wears off.
Once we get back to Houston, I begin to displace all my sorrow on anxiety over Iris’s health. Every time I call her name, and she doesn’t immediately turn around, I decide she’s lost the rest of her hearing. Every time she gets a diaper rash, I assume it’s the measles. I worry about everything, really. I worry when Mike walks the dog at night or when I drive with the baby in the car. I worry that something bad is lurking behind every corner or ready to fall from the sky. I worry, worry, worry. Even though I’m going to therapy two, sometimes three, times a week, I’m either sad or gearing up for the next shitstorm. It’s exhausting. I just want to sleep. That’s all I want to do. If I’m asleep, I can’t worry or cry or think about how my only brother is dead. Plus, you are alive in my dreams. In my dreams, everything is as it was.
Here is what I am supposed to do:
I am supposed to tell funny stories about when we were kids at your rehearsal dinner.
I am supposed to
