Mom nudged my shoulder and told me I had to talk to her. She said she needed help staying awake. The click-whoosh of the wiper blades kept time to our gentle conversation. The snow drifts along the midnight highway looked like the surface of the moon. I was tucked down in the passenger seat.
“Honey, you gotta keep me awake,” she said when I drifted off again.
We were driving from Illinois to Colorado because Great-Grandma Irma was in the hospital. We knew she was dying. Grandma Dotty had called us earlier that day.
When we pulled into Grandma’s driveway, Mom shook me again and asked me to open the front door for her. I climbed the steps and tapped on the door. Grandma didn’t hear me so I opened the door while Mom got Robert out of the car seat. Grandma came around a dim corner. The tip of her cigarette lit her face, and I saw her smile.
“Hi, honey,” she said and pulled me in for a hug. I wrapped my arms around her waist and pressed my face against her fuzzy bathrobe. She and Mom always hugged me so tight.
Great-Grandma died a couple of days later. I wasn’t allowed in the hospital room when Grandma and Mom said their goodbyes. That night, I cried and begged for a cup of water. Mom shouted down the hall to shut up. I kept crying, so she came in with a glass and threw water in my face.
“If you’re going to be such a fucking baby about it, there!”
I heard Grandma yell at Mom.
Mom stormed away and came back with a towel. She threw it at me and slammed the door. I laid on the floor in my wet sleeping bag and wiped my face. I couldn’t taste my tears anymore, so I fell asleep.
When we drove to Great-Grandma Irma’s funeral, Mom made me stay in the car. She said I wasn’t mature enough to attend. I pulled Grandma Dotty’s blanket over my coat; she always had one draped over the back seat. I felt numb. Numbness would become a relief as time went on.
I moved away from Mom in the summer of 1989 at only 10 years old. A couple of years later, it was my turn to be left. It was the end of my youngest sister’s first week of kindergarten when my stepmom packed my four siblings in her father’s RV and drove out of my life forever.
Dad and I never called my stepsiblings after that, never sent cards or gifts. We communicated with Tami only to make arrangements for visiting my youngest sister because she was Tami and Dad’s biological daughter. The only time my stepsiblings and I were together again was at our youngest sister’s high school graduation.
In exchange for family, I acquired many distractions. Dad and I could afford to go to the movies on weekends because there were fewer people to feed and clothe. I picked out my own groceries. We usually went on samples day, and I wandered the aisles unrestricted, picking my favorite cereals and tasting little bits of desserts and snacks.
It wasn’t such a bad thing. Dad and I became a family of two on our own depopulated island. We had more time for each other, and my dad was always kind and funny. We looked out for each other.
But more time and resources for myself became lonely consolations after a while. Dad started working two jobs and saved up so we could see my sister and his side of the family once a year. With a lot of time alone, I turned inward. I had the emotional intelligence of an unsupervised, prepubescent boy and learned to prize new material things over new relationships. In the end, however, action movies and amusement park rides could not silence the internal echoes of family pain and hatred.
Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a massive study of 17,000 adults from 1995 to 1997. They found dramatic connections between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and preventable diseases in adulthood. Their findings about addiction show “more than a 500% increase in adult alcoholism is related in a strong, graded manner to adverse childhood experiences.” Additionally, “a male child with an ACE Score of 6, when compared to a male child with an ACE Score of 0, has a 46-fold (4,600%) increase in the likelihood of becoming an injection drug user sometime later in life.”
I have an ACE score of 8.
Being barred from Great-Grandma’s funeral taught me I couldn’t handle pain. The best I could hope for was numbness and the empty relief it brought. I was under the perfect circumstances when I was first offered drugs. Now, I will be an addict for the rest of my life.
As I entered adulthood, I learned the satisfaction of replacing relationships with possessions was fleeting and immaterial. I was promoted right after college to a decent-paying, full-time position with benefits. I financed a car. I moved into an apartment off Hawthorne. I took my first paid vacation. I applied to Portland State University for grad school. Like dope, however, none of these things distracted me from shame and grief.
THE NEXT GENERATION: How do we prevent another generation of homelessness?
A common theme of pop culture in the last decade, especially among young people, is post-apocalyptic fiction. In these novels and TV series, author’s build an Orwellian world where oligarchies commit state-sanctioned genocide, usually in an English-speaking, mostly white culture. A protagonist rises from the ashes and, with help from a small group of allies, vanquishes the system. We are left to assume our new victors then turn power over to the people.
Many countries — and many Native nations in the U.S. — have experienced similar dissolutions of society and subsequent genocide. In fact, the 20th and 21st centuries have borne witness to at least five that I know of: the Jewish Holocaust under Hitler; Stalinist Russia; Cambodia under Pol Pot; the Bosnian genocide of 1992-95; and the mass slaughter of Tutsi, Twa and moderate Hutu in 1994 Rwanda. I emphasize I am privileged to never have experienced starvation or mass murder.
I thought the world ended when I was 9 because I believed Mom’s death threats, because she beat me enough to show she meant it. I thought the world ended when my stepmom and stepsiblings disappeared from my life when I was 12. I thought the world ended when I got divorced, and I was certain it ended when I landed on the streets. I lost hope many times in life, but the world did not end. I survived. I found the courage and tenacity to get up again and again and again.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but, as Prince Ea said, “There is no such thing as a smooth mountain.” Switchback trails are not efficient, but they are realistic. Most progress is full of ups and downs, loss and more loss and, sometimes, hope. I choose to stumble onward no matter what the terrain.
Histories — both personal and global — are as cyclical as they are linear. My life is a crooked path forward. Writing this column is a form of personal alchemy. Every article I write transforms the cold weight of my past into gold. Writing keeps me going and helps other people find their bearings. Some people have read my words as guideposts showing them they are right where they need to be and that they are not alone.
I am glad the world as I knew it ended in 2017. In the last two and half years of my sobriety, I have collected more happy memories than all the bad ones from the previous 33. And I created a few with other people, too. I ate clam chowder and complimentary dessert with Grandma Sharon on my first-ever resort trip to Seaside. I took my nephew, Jojo, outside for his first experience of autumn rain and summertime grass. And on Jan. 17, I was accepted into a graduate school of social work. Right now, I’m writing these words from an outdoor desk in Arizona, and I’m going on a four-wheeler ride in the desert this afternoon. And on a much larger scale, Israel’s population reached 6 million Jewish citizens in 2013.
The world ended a number of times and in horrific, inestimable ways. There is no taking that back. But people do live on. Nothing and no one — no nation, no ideology, no hateful individual, no abuser can destroy the human spirit. Survival is the legacy that multiplies hope.
This series is a first-hand account of the struggles and successes of overcoming trauma, mental illness, addiction, homelessness and more.
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