Marvin&Company: Stories About Death And Entrepreneurship

Things I Write About Stuff

Category: grief

October 1, 2020

Chronic

I’ve had chronic pain for 26 years because of a car accident. The seatbelt that saved my life caused irreparable nerve and tendon damage. Because I survived that car accident, I live in pain.

October is a time of heightened grief awareness for me. It’s the start of my favorite season and the anniversary of my partner’s death. October took me by surprise this year, with all the other things happening in the world. So I’m thinking about grief and my car accident. There’s a parallel between them.

I don’t think about the car accident every time I notice shoulder pain. When life gets stressful and I forget the physical therapy exercises that keep my left arm from becoming useless ballast, I don’t curse the seatbelt when my hand can no longer hold a coffee cup.

I don’t think about Marvin’s death every time grief sneaks up on me. When I suddenly feel as if a large stone has been placed on my chest, I touch the soft place at the base of my throat, thank the man who helped me get to this place in my life, and move on. I earned this grief, it’s mine to carry for the remainder of my time in the world. I loved our life, and I love the one I’m living now. Like the seatbelt that both saved and broke me, my life today would not have been possible without those scars.

Chronic pain, whether from a seatbelt or grief, is just the thing that happened next after the crash. It’s mine, and it means I lived.

August 10, 2020

About Marvin

When I tell people about you, those who never got to know you when you were in the world, this is what I say:

You were brilliant. Able to take a building apart and put it back together in your head, then write the instructions. You loved architecture, history, and railroads the way a potter loves clay. You were one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and yet you possessed the charisma to speak with anyone without a hint of superiority. You could command a room with a look or a word. This was the best of you.

I also got to see the worst parts of you. Your temper, that deep fiery rage with teeth and claws. How your eloquent words, when turned loose in anger, could tear your opponent apart, even when, especially when, you didn’t raise your voice. I saw your insecurities, how you hated yourself more than anyone else ever could. Our shared fear that the world would find out the secret to our success was just pretending to have a plan.

Most of the time, though, you showed up for our friendship with your best self, and challenged me to do the same. Problem solving was our language. We built a company and a life like an old couple working through a crossword together.

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August 9, 2020

COVID-Grief

Grief is a whole-body experience. It’s different than sadness and depression. It bathes our brains in a unique chemical cocktail unlike anything else we’ll ever experienced. So even if we’re not necessarily feeling overwhelmingly sad, those feelings of “not quite right” can still be a manifestation of grief.

Maybe you wake up each morning with a vague sense of dread, unable to pinpoint the exact source of that fear. You feel fine sometimes; grateful, even, for the chance to slow down, spend time with family or hobbies or pets. You walk more, notice nature more, really pay attention to how much you enjoy toast and tea.

But it all feels off, somehow. Everything seems surreal. The events by which you’ve marked the passage of time throughout your adult life no longer exist. Sometimes you feel like you’ve got this – it’s only for now, everything is probably going to be fine. And sometimes deciding what shirt to wear today is just too much.

You have all of the emotions all at once. You’re inexplicably enraged over some things yet totally Zen about others; you cry when the cat doesn’t want to sit on your lap. You’re tired all the time and have trouble staying asleep.

Everything feels unsettling. Like you’re supposed to be doing something but keep remembering there’s nothing to do – nothing that feels like it matters. Most of us aren’t used to sitting still. It’s hard work for which we were entirely unprepared.

You can feel all of this, or none of it, and that’s okay*.

Grief changes us and acclimating is difficult, but this part really is only for now. Later we’ll talk about how we can learn to sit with and move through grief. Today please just know that you’re not alone and you’re not losing your mind.

*If you are having thoughts about harming yourself contact a mental health provider or call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-271-8255.

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August 8, 2020

Retelling Our Story

You dismantled the world piece by piece.

We fell apart.

You made me watch.

I chose to stay.

You broke my heart.

We break our own hearts.

You were my partner and you changed your mind.

Addiction is a monster that stole the best parts of you.

Why wasn’t I enough for you?

I loved our life. I know you did too.

I stayed longer than I should have.

I stood with you.  

You destroyed the life we built together.

You changed the trajectory of my life.

Why did you leave me?

 Your addiction was not my fault.

What did I do wrong?

There is nothing I could have done differently.

You changed our life without acknowledgement.

You were drowning.

You never said you were sorry.

You were ashamed and afraid.

You didn’t say goodbye.

I know you loved me.

I don’t think I can ever forgive you

I forgive you.

December 3, 2013

You Are Gone

You are gone and now you are everywhere. All over my town, the places we worked, the streets where you parked your truck. I drive down those streets every day and I see you. The day before Thanksgiving 2008, it was snowing and you bought me an orange canvas coat. It doesn’t fit anymore and I was about to donate it but now I’ll keep it forever. Because you died, and death hardens the edges of things, makes them turn into stone so that a street will never again be just a street but a monument to the life that was us, before.

The day before Thanksgiving. Two site visits, then lunch at the diner. Turkey and cranberry sandwiches with green apple slices and cheddar cheese. I always gave you my pickle. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember the sandwiches, and the snow, and you. Always you.

Why did you leave me? Not just the death, that happens all the time, and death by itself could have rolled from tragic to bittersweet to nostalgic in a reasonable time frame but this is something else entirely. I lost you a little bit at a time, so slowly that I didn’t even realize it was happening at first, until one day you were Gone.

I don’t remember when I lost you, when was the exact moment that you were out of reach. At a conference in 2010 we were happy. We watched TV and ate too much candy and played pinball until 4AM. You stayed awake with me because I have trouble sleeping in hotel rooms alone, and even though you never once said the words out loud I didn’t doubt for a second that you adored me.

That was the last Good Time. We had other little glimpses of how it used to be after that, but by then you were well on your way to being Gone, so the times you were you became more infrequent until one day I realized it had been a very long time since I had last seen you. I mean, I saw you shuffle in and out of the office, I heard you scream profanity and make delusional accusations, but it was like a you-shaped zombie in the room. You weren’t there anymore.

I try to remember the last Good Time as a sweet, perfect memory, preserved like Snow White in her glass shroud. But there was the next day, when you didn’t come out of your room and yelled at me for knocking on your door. I told people you weren’t feeling well, the chlorine from the pool made your sinuses act up. You didn’t come out of your room, bleary eyed and angry, until it was time to go home. I thought you were mad at me, and I couldn’t figure out why. The night before, we had been us, like we had been for years. It changed so fast.

Later, when it was time to go, you stopped at every rest stop with me. You know I generally have to pee every five minutes, and that I feel embarrassed about it, so you called me every time a rest stop was coming up and tell me you needed more coffee. We had dinner at the truck stop at exit 28 and you bought little presents for my kids. You seemed like you again, and so I started to believe my story about the chlorine and your sinuses. That sinus infection lasted for two years, until you died. Now I know why.

Before I understood that addiction was beyond your control, I would often wonder, what part of our life together made you so unhappy that you had to use cocaine and prescription narcotics to get through the day? Did you hate me? Did I do something to make you need to escape?

When it got to the point where you were angry and yelling all the time, you said it was all my fault, I was a nagging bitch that just wanted you to work harder. I cried and begged you to come back to work, come back to me, and you screamed things at me which made no sense. You said I stabbed you in the back, ruined everything, with no further explanation. Back then I believed you.

You disappeared for weeks at a time, lost track of inspections and clients, misplaced documents in your truck or didn’t remember doing them at all. I covered for you – I did your job and kept your secret for as long as I could, made the clients and the contractors believe that you were super busy and that’s why no one had seen you in public for two years. How did I end up being the villain in your story? You barely left your house and when you did it was in the middle of the night to go to Schenectady.

Well, now I know what you were doing in Schenectady, why you left me alone to watch helplessly as our company fell apart. Now I know that you probably didn’t even realize how hurtful your words were in the end, couldn’t see the hell you dragged me through. I want to believe that the Real you would have wanted to beat the shit out of the Gone you for being so mean to me.

Back when you liked me, you never would have stood for anyone treating me that way. You would have unleashed an army on them – eviscerated them with your words, that was your special gift. The Real you was my fearless defender, my knight in shining armor, my very best friend in the whole wide world. The Gone you said it was all in my head, that you were the same as always and I turned into a nagging psycho bitch. You told me you couldn’t take me or my bullshit emotions anymore, that we weren’t friends, it was just business.

You broke my heart into a million pieces the first day you said that. Our company was built around our friendship. It was a perfectly choreographed dance. People who met us thought we were married, so in sync we were with each other. If not for our friendship, why would I stay? Why would I turn myself inside out trying to keep the business running?

I tried to give you the time to get better from whatever it was that made you turn into this mean, absent person that I didn’t recognize. I paid your personal bills when your propane stopped being delivered and your house phone kept getting turned off. I paid the business expenses with my credit card when yours started being declined. I quietly did the inspections you forgot about, kept up the façade that you were okay because I couldn’t stand the thought of you losing your dignity. I stayed longer than anyone else would have, because I was your friend. It was never just business.

I know in my rational mind that addiction is an illness. But in my heart I am raging with anger that you made the choice to ruin your life, made a choice to fall apart for two years, leave me to clean up the mess you made of our life and our business, all the while making me feel as if it was all my fault. I want to remember how much I love you, grieve for my dear friend and honor your memory. But then I think of the screaming, the name calling, the accusations. I think of the thousands of dollars you sent via Western Union to that Schenectady gas station while you left our company destitute, all the white powder in perfectly proportioned little white envelopes all over your truck and hotel room and bedroom closet. And I hate you, I hate you for the past two years, I hate you for systematically destroying the company we raised up together as if it was our child, I hate you for choosing to leave me. This didn’t happen because of heart disease or cancer. Discovering your addiction after your death leaves me in uncharted territory. How do I live with this horrible ending?

I thought you were happy. I thought we were happy. The company was successful, we were well known and highly respected in our field. If you were unhappy with me, or with the company, you could have told me. We could have changed something, anything, to fix this. I would have walked away from you and never looked back if that is what you needed to be happy. Whatever you needed, whatever you wanted from me, I would have done anything for you. Anything to save you from the awful indignity of the past two years. Dirty clothes and slurred speech and never leaving your house. Hallucinating gypsies and minions and other crippling paranoia. Dying alone in your truck in a Walmart parking lot.

Oh my dear friend, my partner, my person. Where did you go and how did we get here? I don’t have the words to explain what happened and now it doesn’t matter anymore because you are dead. Now I am the zombie, going through the motions of my life but not really here.

I’m so lonely. And I don’t know what to do next, or who I am now, or how to live in the world without you.

December 2, 2013

Guilt

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.

December 2, 2013

Introduction

My friend, with whom I had run a successful consulting firm for over 14 years, died on October 31, 2012.

Five days later his siblings, who I had not met until the funeral, informed me that they now owned the company I created. I conceded the company name and attempted to keep the clients I had signed – people who knew my parents and grandparents (I’m from a really small town). The siblings then attempted to sue me. An inadequate understanding of business law caused me to lose my life’s work. Their first demand was to take down the company website.

 In doing so, I discovered that I owned the domain name. This led me to the idea of making it into something useful.

 This is me standing up for myself, claiming the last, small piece of my friend, and my former life, that no one can take from me. 

 I may write every day, or once a year. My first crack at blogging will be a collection of essays about navigating my way through grief, but I expect it may branch out into other things. We’ll see how it goes.