Guilt

by Michelle Read DeGarmo

A letter to my friend on the anniversary of your death:

I was collateral damage. Insulting as that sounds, it brings me comfort to think that in the end, I didn’t matter anymore. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t a choice. I, my family, our company, the people who loved you and tried to circle the wagons when you started to get “sick”, we didn’t matter.

You, a recovering addict when we first met, were a ticking time bomb of sorts. From what I’ve learned about your life before we met, and addiction in general, every day was a struggle. Every waking moment you made a gut-wrenching choice to maintain your tenuous hold on recovery. For more than twenty years you chose to be present in your life, and for your last fourteen years in the world you chose to spend that life with me. I will never know what happened, what was the tipping point that led you to make a single disastrous choice after so many years of staying clean. I do, however, need to accept that it had nothing at all to do with me.

Six days after you died, your sister told me that I drove you to use cocaine. An eerily similar accusation to those you made in fits of rage during the awful two years preceding your death. When faced with irrefutable proof of your failing business and deteriorating health, you reverted to blaming me for everything. If I wasn’t such a nagging bitch you could do your job. If my expectations weren’t so high, the company would be fine. If I was a better grant writer, or a better program manager, or a better person in general, your job would be easier and you’d get more work done. You can’t do your job well because you must “babysit” me so often. I am emotionally unstable, which is terribly distracting to you. Look at the filing cabinets full of finished projects (from the previous ten years). Why isn’t anything you do ever good enough? Why must I continually crack the whip. I’m always making you out to be the bad guy, and you’re not going to take it anymore. This isn’t friendship, this is business. I am not your friend, and you are not mine. Bitch. Whore. Liar. Thief.

Those words, your words, still haunt me. I watched you disappear, without explanation or acknowledgement, and you took my life’s work with you. I stood by, enabling you, covering for you, allowing you to treat me this way. Paralyzed by a toxic cocktail of co-dependence, loyalty, and disbelief. And yet I feel guilty. I hate that your perception of reality was that I stabbed you in the back. I hate that your last hours on earth were spent in an empty office, while I hid from you upstairs, watching your truck from the window to make sure I could leave without seeing you, because I didn’t want you to yell at me again.

You called me ten hours before you died. I did not answer the phone. I was having a quiet evening with my children, and I wanted to avoid another screaming match. I wanted to read bedtime stories and get a good night’s sleep for once. So I screened your call, and you did not leave a message. It was my last opportunity to speak with you, and I missed it. I have such profound regret for missing that phone call. For hiding from you in our office building, less than 400 feet away, as you sat in an empty room, faced with the broken pieces of our empire. I regret that you died alone.

But dying alone was your choice.

I would have stayed by your side until the end, if only you had let me. I tried my best. I threw myself against the brick wall of your “illness” until I was broken.

The ugly truth is that grieving your death this year has been much easier than watching you die. You took your time leaving the world. It was a slow march toward oblivion, and I was with you every step of the way. I did your job for you, invested my meager savings in our company as everything spiraled out of control, as you bled it dry to feed your addiction. You betrayed our staff and clients, wonderful people who respected and trusted you. I could have walked away from you, and taken our clients with me, at any point during those awful two years, and yet I stayed. Because you were my friend and I loved you, I stayed, and by staying I helped you kill yourself. Blindly, fiercely attempting to save you until there was nothing left to save.

When you died, I was beyond exhaustion. I missed my friend. I missed your morning phone call, so often interrupting me in the shower, to discuss the coming day. I missed joking with you while I cooked dinner, and the late night chats when we watched PBS documentaries or listened to NPR. For over a decade my days began and ended with you. You disappeared slowly at first, then all at once, until one day I was left with a gaping hole in the middle of my life, and found a very angry man who looked and sounded like you had taken your place.

In the final two years of your life, you acted as if you hated me. This paradox still confounds me. You used our friendship as a weapon against me in ways that are unforgivable. What an awful thing, to let me love you and then use that love against me. You turned into a horrible person, and I stayed by your side to witness your long, slow shamble toward death. And in the end, your family blamed me, just like you blamed me.

And for awhile, I blamed me too.

In the end, I don’t think you even knew who I was anymore. Our arguments were absurd – you accusing me of things that happened before I was born or screaming racial slurs. In the last photo I ever took of you, just before you died, you look so sad. Zombie-like, no life in your eyes, nothing left of you. While gathering pictures for your memorial service, I was struck by how different you looked in the years before you started to slip away. How alive you looked, the way your eyes crinkled when you laughed. In 2009 you stood, handsome and poised in the lobby of our office building, a hundred people listening to you speak passionately about historic preservation. Eight days before you died, you slumped in a chair as if simply being upright was a huge effort. Your thousand-mile-stare, the way you no longer lifted your feet when you walked, uncertain, unbalanced. The way you spoke changed, not just the tone but the cadence of your voice. As if your body were inhabited by another person altogether. I didn’t know you anymore.

In the end, I got no recognition, no medal of honor, not even a friendly nod to acknowledge the hell through which I accompanied you. I lost you, I lost our company, and I lost two years of my life. Your death was a relief. Grieving you has not been easy, but there is no denying that my life this year has been significantly more pleasant without you. Sometimes I feel only the slightest twinge of residual guilt in thinking such a callous statement, and just as easily the same truth overwhelms me with crushing guilt, as if I have been knocked down by an ocean wave.

I cannot possibly be the only person to feel this way when a loved one dies of addiction, slowly, horribly, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. I needed these words this past year. I hope by writing them, another person who needs the words can find them and be comforted.