When I think about the Abyss and my story, Arise From the Abyss, and all I have encountered and all that others have survived and endured, I think of transformation, survival, a new life, hope, joy, endurance, and eternal bliss in paradise. But there is a dark side of this journey that none of us can ignore, although we hate to admit it is there, waiting anxiously and viciously to bare its demonic teeth and devour us slowly, destroying our lives and shattering our dreams. I sadly think of Trent Reznor’s lyrics to the Nine Inch Nails song, “Mr. Self Destruct”:
I am the truth from which you run
I am the silencing machine
I am the end of all your dreams.”
If you have read my book, you read of my friend Bo, who also lost his wife Charlie, the love of his life. Bo had lost her years before I lost Debbie, the love of my life. And yet Bo, unlike me, had drowned his sorrows in alcohol daily after becoming a widower. I refrained from drugs or alcohol for years after I became widowed. But before you begin congratulating me on my strength and courage, (and yes, this is the best way to encounter extreme grief – in sobriety) you should know that the only reason I remained sober during this time is that there were far too many eyes upon me and I would have been incarcerated for probation violations if I had become intoxicated.
After obtaining a DUI (driving under the influence), Bo was mandated to attend 12-step meetings and was subjected to alcohol testing. While I do not endorse the drowning of sorrows in alcohol, Bo being forced into sobriety in this manner led to his demise. As I desperately tried to explain to Bo in his last days, his extreme depression and melancholy were being fueled by his newfound sobriety, which was in no way welcome. In this new state of mind, he was now experiencing his grief over Charlie’s death as if she had just died days before, rather than years before! His daily intoxication had prevented him from experiencing the full depth of this excruciating pain, and now there was nothing to mask that immense pain. Despite all of my efforts and the efforts of Jan, Bo’s new wife, who had been widowed herself, and everyone else who loved him, Bo was engulfed by the Abyss and killed himself in the spring of 2006.
If you were hoping for a positive blog, I’m sorry to inform you that this is not it! Bo is an example from my book (along with Debbie and my good friend Joe Trudeau) of someone who did not survive the Abyss. I thought we were all supposed to arise from this damned abyss, right? Bo and Debbie and Joe did not, and I cried when Bo’s wife Jan wife told me he killed himself. But this blog is about a girl.
My first job (not counting working at my parents’ Greek restaurant since I was 12) was in Van Nuys (I think) at this insane market research facility. High school students, drug addicts, and sexual misfits gathered in a large room placing calls to strangers nationwide asking questions over the phone for surveys related to market research…what could possibly go wrong? What a shit show! One night at work I noticed a very pretty young lady with beautiful green eyes gazing at me from another cubicle. She was also making a cold call as I was. She looked into my eyes and smiled adoringly. This young lady, who was merely a teenager then, was named Michelle and soon became my girlfriend. We dated for a few months but soon parted ways. Michelle soon delved into a world of extreme drug addiction. Mind you, I was experimenting with drugs at this point of my life as well, but Michelle had told me of a very dark past with drugs. And this dark past seemed to be resurfacing as I began to notice track marks up and down her arms after we had broken up. After I broke up with her, I soon discovered that she was going out with a close friend of mine. Despite her being ousted from my life, this was a low blow, and it permanently damaged my relationship with my friend.
Michelle and I stayed in touch for a short time but she soon disappeared into oblivion. She had gotten married and given birth to a daughter, and I am sad to admit that I was one of the men she cheated on her now departed husband with. Before disappearing, she had introduced me to one of her closest childhood friends, Diana. I had stayed in touch with Diana for a short time, inquiring into the whereabouts of Michelle, but Michelle soon disappeared off everyone’s radar. Her whereabouts were unknown to everyone, including her dad, her stepmom, Diana, and me. Tragically, Michelle had chosen to abandon her children to be raised by others and never formed a close bond or relationship with them.
Years passed, and I had even searched for Michelle on Facebook, but she had become a ghost. In 2015, Michelle found me on Facebook. I did not recognize her. I literally asked her if we knew each other because she was using a fictitious name and looked so different. Michelle had become extremely addicted to what is known as “speed balling.” This is the insanely addictive and immensely dangerous act of injecting cocaine, and then when the short-lived high begins to subside, injecting heroin. (The brilliant actor/comedian John Belushi died as a result of speed balling in 1982.) Michelle had informed me that she was engaging in this lethal activity five times a day at one point. I began to learn things about Michelle that I had never known, including the fact that she was bipolar. This fun fact explained a lot to me pertaining to her violent outbursts when we had dated years earlier.
We texted and corresponded on Facebook occasionally and had even spoken on the phone, but I soon distanced myself from Michelle due to her often psychotic and abusive behavior. She was very out of touch with reality due to her immense drug abuse and would often fall into a comatose stupor or become downright malicious. I stopped responding to her texts, Facebook inquiries, or occasional calls.
As always, Michelle would disappear into oblivion, but she would text me after months or even a year of silence. Then in early April 2019 I began thinking that I had not heard from her in about a year. This was nothing new, but there seemed to be a different feeling attached to this silence. I feared it was a prophetic feeling about her demise from an overdose. I looked at her Facebook page and saw that there had been no activity in several months. There was, however, a recent post from her childhood friend Diana, who posted a note to Michelle’s timeline saying she hoped Michelle was okay. There was no reply to Diana’s post, which had been on Michelle’s timeline for about two months. I reached out to Diana, reminding her of who I was from decades earlier and that we had previously met.
A few days later, Diana sent me a message and informed me that she had recently learned that Michelle had died in November 2018. There were not many details available, but it is a safe guess that Michelle died as a result of an overdose from speed balling. She went on to say it was nice to be back in touch with me. Diana told me that any friend of Michelle’s was a friend of hers, and we spoke of this woman we were both connected to in different ways who had appeared to have had so much potential and yet chose a dark and ultimately a destructive path. Diana told me it would be nice to reminisce about our mutual friend, and I agreed.
But after messaging back and forth over a dozen times with Diana, something very painfully obvious and quite dark and tragic occurred to me. Not only was Michelle’s story an example of a failure to arise from her own abyss, hers was perhaps one of the most horrendous, self-destructive and self-centered journeys I have ever experienced! I reread the messages between Diana and me, and I pointed something out to her that I found quite disturbing. I reminded her that she had made a comment early on in our correspondence that it would be nice to reminisce about Michelle. I went on to tell Diana that the nature of our texts was not at all about the sweet, innocent girl Diana had met in junior high school or the beautiful, green eyed young lady I had met at work and began a relationship with. Instead, these messages were about a mentally ill, extremely abusive meth, heroin, and cocaine junkie who abandoned both of her children, cheated on her husband who raised and cared for her daughter, never made amends or efforts to reunify with her adult children, and left in shambles the lives of practically everyone with whom she came in contact. It seemed that her life had been a never-ending tornado of chaos, destruction, and abuse from the time she was in her late teens until her death in her early 50s. Her pattern appeared to be using and abusing everyone who entered her life, getting what she could out of them, all the while promising to get help and detoxify and rehabilitate herself, creating a mess in their lives, and then vanishing to move on to the next point on the map to wreak havoc with her tornado all over again.
There was not a lack of people who loved Michelle. She was raised in a beautiful home in Sun Valley, California. Her mother had died when she was 7, but her father loved her very much, and she also had a stepmother and stepsister who cared for her. She had friends who had remained in her life and cared for her through the decades, primarily Diana and me. And yet Michelle’s story is one of epic failure. Diana said to me in a message that she could not really mourn Michelle, and even more tragic is the realization that neither of her adult children were sad. Neither her estranged son nor her daughter shed tears when Diana informed them of their mother’s death.
“It is horrendous in a way to hear you say you can’t really mourn for Michelle,” I told Diana in a message. “You know why? Because I cannot truly mourn her death either. I have not shed a tear for her, and I am quite certain I never will. That, my friend, is f@&king depressing! I’m not going to disagree with you about the immense damage she caused and the people she used because you are not wrong.”
I know that everyone cannot be saved. Sometimes it is simply because they refuse to save themselves. They refuse to get help from the people who love them who try so desperately to help them. I just cannot stop thinking about what Michelle could have been and could have done with her life. What she should have done with her life and her family and the friends who cared for her.
Some people would simply jump to the conclusion that Michelle was not a good person. She was abusive, manipulative, dishonest, mentally ill, and a career junkie. She abandoned her children, permanently affecting them and creating turmoil and emptiness in their lives. She used, abused, and abandoned all who crossed her path in a heinous display of selfishness in her egocentric life journey. It is easy for some people to condemn the actions of people caught in the death grip of extreme addiction. Some even cling to the perception that one should not use drugs in the first place. But those of us who have been there know that this is a very unrealistic and narrow-minded outlook concerning the nature of addiction and what leads people to engage in these destructive behaviors time and time again.
