When I went into rehab, I was smoking three packs of Marlboro Lights 100s a day. I was twenty pounds overweight and sleeping three hours a night and had pretty much succeeded in creating jet lag as a poetic art form. I had also started drinking again, which was worrisome because I hadn’t been drinking at all during the time I was with Cynthia, but it didn’t seem to me like my drinking was really out of control.
I realized I needed to be someplace where I could cry as much as I was compelled to do without freaking out everybody around me. About two weeks after Cynthia died, I went into rehab at St. Helena Hospital in Napa. I chose it because Weir had checked himself in there a couple of days before. In addition, they had offered Cynthia a job once. The second I announced my intention to go there, Weir announced his intention to leave, which I didn’t think was a coincidence but I also understood it because of how well I knew Weir.
I stayed at St. Helena for about three weeks. It was a traditional twelve-step program, and I went to a lot of meetings. I was in a group one day when a woman started talking about the reason she had come there. It was because her kitten had died and it had totally unhinged her and she had gone off on a bender. She started to cry. Somebody else started talking about how he had lost his dog and that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. There was also a really rough longshoreman—whom I had not seen shed a tear the whole time I had been there—and he started talking about a pet duck he’d had that had been killed by dogs, and he started to cry like a baby.
I was sitting there thinking, This guy is crying about a duck? What about me, guys? I’ve had a little bit of a loss here myself. I started to say something about it and then I suddenly realized that what they were all mourning was the only form of unconditional love they had ever been willing to accept. The closest they had ever gotten to it was from a pet, because they could not accept it from a human being, which is something that most people cannot do. And so I had to count myself as having been incredibly lucky to have experienced it with another human being.