I’m convinced that depriving someone for a month or more at a time of the most important relationships in his or her life—in my case, my three daughters—is too often a critical failure in how addicts are treated. I felt only one thing there: alone. Yet to have any chance of returning home, it’s what I had to do.
That fall, I moved into an apartment in Washington, a second-story two-bedroom in a new building on the corner of Eleventh Street and Rhode Island Avenue, near Logan Circle. It was across the street from a skate park and catty-corner to a liquor store. It was the first time in forty-six years that I lived by myself. Instead of going home every night to be embraced by three children I adored, I returned to a strange, silent space. I slept only on the couch; the idea of sleeping in a bed by myself heightened my gnawing sense that Kathleen already knew she was never letting me come back.
I went to therapy three days a week and met with a sober coach. I toted around a portable Breathalyzer with a built-in camera, blowing into it four times a day as it fed a live image to a remote counselor, making sure I didn’t sneak a drink. I attended yoga sessions six times a week, and at my therapist’s urging went two nights a week to a self-realization program in Aberdeen, Maryland, a ninety-minute drive each way. Throughout all that, I maintained my consulting business, downsized as it was.
I still went to my daughters’ soccer games and other extracurricular activities outside the house, and Naomi was now attending Penn. I was also able to spend more time with Beau’s kids, Natalie and Hunter. A shared-travails bond began to form between Hallie and me. She became someone to confide in—at that point, nothing more. My anger, some justified, some not, served for me as its own counterintuitive motivation: I was going to get sober and get better, dammit, but no longer beg Kathleen to be her husband.
That October, my dad announced he would not run for president in 2016. He talked publicly about the impact of Beau’s death on him and our family, and the need for more time to recover. He didn’t talk about the other dynamic in the equation: the prevailing attitude among Democratic Party influencers that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn, a dividend she’d earned from her narrow primary loss to Obama and her service afterward as secretary of state. For Dad to compete, it would have been an uphill climb from the start.
I don’t know if my relapses figured into his calculation. They certainly couldn’t have helped, but that’s not something Dad would ever say. I encouraged him to run. My dad saw how hard, if choppily, I was working to get sober. More than anybody, he knows this one thing: adversity brings our family closer together.
By then, the fall air had turned cooler and the light angled lower. All the old daily rhythms that revolved around Beau seemed off. I no longer called him, or answered his call, three times a day, like clockwork, arguing almost as much as we laughed. I no longer walked into my parents’ house to find him already there, half joking about the expired jar of mayonnaise in the back of the refrigerator.
Everything I drove past, it seemed, triggered his memory: the Amtrak station where we basically were raised; the railroad tracks we hiked up and down as kids; the Charcoal Pit, where we ordered triple-thick black-and-white milkshakes, cheesesteaks, and well-done fries. Even seeing a duck fly by—Beau loved those damn ducks.
This strange new normal quickened during the holidays. My girls were traumatized by Beau’s death and confused by their family seeming to disintegrate before their eyes. I kept telling them, “Your mom and I, we’ll figure this out. Don’t be mad. It’s not your mom’s fault. It all revolves around my drinking or not drinking.” But that was bullshit. It felt as if everyone was waiting for me to lose it and prove their point.
Which I did, beginning the week before Christmas.
Each year on December 18, our immediate family, along with a handful of longtime friends, gather for the anniversary of my mommy’s and baby sister’s deaths. We’d meet in Wilmington for 7 a.m. mass at St. Joe’s, then head to my parents’ house for coffee and Danish or bagels. Dad and Beau and I would visit the grave sites to lay a wreath topped with three white roses. Now, Beau rested fifteen feet away.
In past years, Kathleen and I would come up the night before with the girls, who were out of school by then, so we could all go to the service in the morning. We’d then stay in Delaware through Christmas morning, when we’d all fly to Chicago to be with Kathleen’s family at their lake house.
This anniversary, however, Kathleen called to tell me the girls weren’t coming to Delaware until Christmas Eve, and that she didn’t want me accompanying them to Michigan City for Christmas.
I was shattered. I see now that what she was trying to do was to protect our girls. As much as it hurt me, I was the threat that she needed to protect
