Chapter Fifteen
My daughter Carrie came to New York to live with me because she was having problems with her mother in California. She never took drugs. She never was an addict. She smoked for a year of her life, a cigarette here, a cigarette there . . . but she never had a drinking problem. Carrie became a born-again Christian at fourteen or fifteen years old. Then she met Peter. She met him in the rooms when I took her to Nar-Anon meetings. He was an addict, ten years older than her—a little tiny guy and she liked him. They started dating and before she knew it, she was pregnant. Everything I was telling her not to do, she was doing.
A year after she had the baby, her husband Peter went to jail (he wound up dying in prison some years later), they got divorced, and Carrie went back to California. Carrie got a job as a teller in a bank. She was a real worker, all of my kids are workers, work like hell. That’s one good thing they got from me—I got that from my father. This guy Michael used to come into the bank all the time, and she saw he was a very shy guy. She started talking to him and then dated him. Carrie knew that this is the guy that she really wanted to be with. He didn’t drink or smoke, he was just nice. They got married and Carrie had another child.
A few years later, Carrie and my two grandchildren came to visit me for Thanksgiving. She was sick when she came, but I didn’t know what she was sick with. I just thought the lupus that she had been diagnosed with was bothering her. But she kept coughing. After Thanksgiving, she goes back to California and then gets very sick with PCP pneumonia. I get a call from Michael and he tells me that Carrie is very sick and he wants me to sit down. I said, “Michael, just fucking tell me what’s going on.” “Well, Carrie is HIV positive.” I said, “Carrie is not HIV positive. Carrie has AIDS. She’s past fucking HIV positive.” I knew it. I should have known it. I’m a drug counselor, I’m an AIDS counselor. I’ve been educated and I know all the symptoms. Carrie just couldn’t say it. She knew Peter was HIV positive but she thought that God, being that she was a born-again Christian, was going to take care of it. So she never took any medication, she never wanted any medication. That’s the choice that some people make. I just wish it wasn’t her choice. She believed that prayer and being with God was going to do it for her. For nine years she never told me.
Carrie’s on steroids and for the next seven months she has a remarkable recovery. The next year I go out to see her and we have a great Christmas together. The following year she gets very sick again. This time she’s dying. For a whole year, I called her every single day whether she could talk or not. She’d put the phone up to her ear and say, “Hi . . . Daddy . . . How, are, you?” I’d say, “How’re you doing Carrie? How’s things going? I love you. I’m praying for you. Things are gonna be okay. Keith and Dominick, everybody back here is fine. I spoke to Kayla and Peter before. They’re good, everybody’s good. They’re home praying.” She goes, “I’m . . . gonna . . . be . . . okay. Everything is . . . gonna be . . . fine.”
The New York Marathon is coming and I sign up to run. Carrie is very sick at this time and I’m worried about her dying. I’m gonna run this race for her. So I get on the bridge at Staten Island, then I’m running over the Verrazano Bridge when all of a sudden, I couldn’t run. I started walking. I couldn’t catch my breath. The anxiety was killing me. I was falling apart. I says, “I can’t do it. I’m gonna have to stop at the end of the bridge. I’d just finished running twenty miles a day, practicing for this race, but I just can’t get it. I just can’t get it. There’s something I can’t get. It ain’t coming.” I’m just thinking about Carrie, thinking about Carrie, thinking, thinking.
I was running with my friend Mark and I said to him after we finally came off the Verrazano Bridge and were running along Fourth Avenue, “Look, do me a favor. Just go. You run, I’ll be okay. If I finish, I finish. If I don’t, I’ll just meet youse home. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this.” I needed him to run away from me, run so I didn’t think that I needed to compete with somebody next to me or worry about him not running the race. Go run your race. And he did that, which was very good for me. I would run for a mile and then stop and walk because I couldn’t catch my breath. This never happened to me before. The anxiety attack that I had was overwhelming me because all I kept thinking was,“Carrie is gonna die, Carrie is gonna die.” And then I kept thinking, “I’m running this race . . . I gotta run this race. I have to finish this race. I’m running this race for Carrie.” So the thing that took me all the way through the whole twenty-six miles is that I kept saying to myself, “I can’t quit, I can’t quit.” If she’s in California and she’s dying from AIDS and she’s not quitting, then I can’t quit. I have to finish the race. She’s dying there and meanwhile she’s calling me up, telling me everything is going to be okay. She’s helping friends of mine that are rock stars, writing them letters and they’re writing her letters. I got people writing her tons of letters. She has them plastered all over the walls of the hospital. Meanwhile, I know there’s no hope for Carrie. I know she’s going to die. I just watched twenty-five of my friends die and when you get to this point you’re not going to live. You’re going to die.
I’m trying to get this in my head, that my daughter is dying and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m powerless. I’m losing my daughter who I love so much. I’m losing her. I gotta start understanding this. Meanwhile I’m going to Marianne Williamson’s course of miracles. I’m talking to her. I’m going to her meetings on Wednesday night. I’m going to her and she’s saying things to me like, “Even when Carrie goes, she’ll always be with you.” Just things I needed to hear, to know that I could let her go. I needed to let her go because she was dying, and it’s very hard because I really want her and yet I gotta let go of her. So I finished the race. It took me five hours and fifty-three minutes. I get the medal and have it engraved to Carrie. Six months later, Carrie is getting worse. So now I know she’s dying and I’m trying to do this shit on the phone. I said to Eileen at work, “I gotta go. I gotta go. This kid’s gonna die and I’m not gonna be there. I gotta go out to California.” Also I’m talking to my therapist and saying, “I can’t do this fucking shit. I can’t go out there and watch this kid die. This is my life, this kid. She’s so wonderful, she’s got these two children. How am I gonna do this?” So he says to me, “Just get on the plane and then get off the plane and do what you need to do.”
So I get out there and right away I see this kid and she’s talking but she’s fucking dying. My friend Linda was there with me and said, “Let’s have a big dinner,” because we’re talking to the doctor and he says it’s only a matter of time before Carrie’s going to die. Meanwhile I’m handling everything. I call up Keith and Dominick and I send them tickets and say, “Come on out, now. Your sister is dying.” So Dominick and Keith come out and stay with me. Keith went home three days before Carrie died because he just couldn’t deal with it. Dominick stayed with me.
Linda put on this tremendous dinner, bringing vans with tables and chairs and columns and set up the whole house like a giant French “best cuisine” restaurant like you never saw in your life. You couldn’t even give people a tip or nothing like that. They cooked in the kitchen and made steak and shrimp scampi and everything that Carrie liked. She couldn’t taste the food. She was all hooked up but we brought her out and put her on a special chair. I have pictures of her from the week before she died. I think I looked at them once. It’s hard to look at them today. I can’t. I was thinking, let me take the pictures out. No . . . I don’t think I’m able to look at them. Sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I can; sometimes I’m all right with it and sometimes I’m just not.
We took films; Michael has movie pictures and I took still shots. Carrie had twenty-five or thirty friends from the church and all her other friends there. A week after that the doctor comes in and tells me she has spinal meningitis and she’s gonna be in some pain. I said, “What can we do? I don’t want her in pain.” Meanwhile she has morphine patches all over the house. And I want to tell you, there’s a ton of morphine in this house and I’m a drug addict. And I didn’t even think of touching this stuff. All I knew was that I had to be clean. Michelle came out there, my ex-wife, she was high and I had to tell her, “If you don’t straighten up,”—I didn’t say it this nice—“you gotta get outta here. You ain’t her mother. You ain’t nothing. I want you out of here. I got enough to deal with my daughter dying. Don’t make me fucking . . . ” The thought in my head was, “I’ll take you into the fucking desert and kill you.” That’s how angry I was that somebody would get high and fuck up this whole thing when we’re all going through this terrible ordeal, of me losing my daughter.
We now got the kids in the room and the kids are praying. They’re holding her hand. “You have to go and say goodbye, because Mommy’s going to God.” It was hard. It was very hard. But the kids did it. Why would I pull them away from it? Even though Kayla was only six years old, she was so attached to her mother. Everybody she’s around she calls “Mother” because she wants a mommy. That’s the way she is with women. She will always miss her mother. She’ll never forget that first six years of her life that she was with her mother, and that’s good.
We let them say goodbye, then the doctor injected her with more morphine. You’re allowed to do this to bring on her death a little faster, otherwise she was going to suffer. Me and Michael okayed them to do it. The doctor said, “We’re able to do this because we’re in your house, not in a hospital.” I told my kids, “This is the way you want to die. If I’m dying, take me fucking home. This way you can do whatever you want in your house. You understand? You want to put me to sleep, you want to pull the plug, you do it.” My brother died a year later and I watched him die in the hospital, ripping the mask off his face, flipping out in the ER. I told him, “What the fuck is youse doing over here?” I got so crazy with them after watching my daughter just die nice and peaceful. Hit him with some morphine, bring it on baby! Fucking hell, why let him torture himself?
I was running every day and I had Dominick running with me. Keith had gone home, Michelle had stayed. She was with Carrie for a few years when we were married and Carrie was about nine. Michelle did have motherly feelings even though she was active. She was always one for doing the right thing and being there for other people. That’s one of her better traits. If she could only learn how to be there for herself it would be different. It’s just that she doesn’t know how to be there and be fucking conscious unless somebody tells her. Anybody out in California would tell you, even if they didn’t know me, I had this face on out there that said, “I’m handling things. If you think you’re coming in here to change anything you’re in the wrong fucking place. Don’t fuck with me. I’m taking care of everything. Just leave it alone. I don’t even want to hear your fucking ideas. I know what to do. My daughter is dying. This has to be nice. This has to be calm. This has to be respectful.” I was in a trance. If it didn’t go the right way, somebody was in trouble. I don’t know what kind of trouble they would’ve been in, but . . . Ultimately I said to Michael, “You’re her husband, that’s my daughter. Just remember that. So whatever I want, that’s what we’re going to do. I know you want the best for her but I want better than that.” And we did everything together, me and Michael. He’s the most wonderful son-in-law you ever wanted to have in your life. He took care of Carrie right to the last day. He was her nurse. When she had the catheter sticking out of her chest, he would give her all the medications. She wanted to die at home and that’s what she did, with the kids in the next room. But we didn’t let the kids see them wrap up her body and take the body out. We sent them across the street.
Carrie was in her room, sitting in her hospital bed and she had this little angel I had given her, a little tiny angel. She had it in her hand because I surrounded her with angels all the time. We were talking, then she stopped talking and became incoherent. I said, “She might be sleeping.” She was lying in the bed, not talking, and was just staring at us. It was about eight o’clock in the morning and everything was still good. She was breathing and we were watching her stomach and the sheets rise and fall. I said to Dominick, “Let’s go do a run. Come’n, let’s go. Everything is going to be okay. She’ll be all right until we get back.”
We did a run, a forty-five minute run. We ran up the road in the desert, all the way to the end. When we were coming back, Dominick, who could run like a little gazelle, ran about a block or two ahead of me down the hill. As I come around the turn, I see everybody out on the lawn. I see Michelle say something to Dominick and then him hug her. I knew Carrie was dead. I knew she was gone. All I kept thinking was that she couldn’t die in front of me. I didn’t say to myself, “Oh, you bad person for running and leaving her.” What I said was I needed to do the run so she could die. She needed me not to be there. I told her in the morning when I was talking to her and holding her hand, “Everything is okay. I’m gonna take care of Kayla and Peter. Things will be all right. You can let go now and you’ll be all right.” I told her about some of the people she knew who she was going to meet and they were gonna take care of her. We just talked and I said things like that. Then me and Dominick went out on a run.
Afterwards we had to get the kids out of the house. We brought them across the street to somebody else’s house and then we called the funeral parlor. We had made the arrangements a week before. Carrie wanted to be cremated so me and Michael went out and found the cemetery. The way they talk to you, “Yeah, the cremation, and then we have to grind up the bone, the urn” . . . they tell you all this stuff. I was listening to the guy and I said, “Whoa, didn’t expect to hear this. I just want her cremated and everything that she’s in gets cremated too.”
All the clothes that Carrie chose to be dressed in when she died were taken out and hung up. Michelle and a couple of the other ladies dressed her with clean underwear and the clothes that she wanted. She looked like a little country girl in her dress. Everything she wanted she got. Her mother Pat couldn’t deal with it, she didn’t know what to do. She was sitting out in the next room with her face stuck in a Bible. When Carrie was all dressed, the kids were able to come in and say goodbye. They could see that she was gone.
Me and Michael sat there and we hugged each other. They wrapped Carrie in a sheet, put her on a gurney and rolled her out of the house. We called the hospital to come immediately and take all the stuff out of the house, the hospital bed, all the medications. We emptied out the whole house in two hours. The hospital bed was next to Michael’s bed and he slept in the room with her every night.
One day I was there with her alone and she needed to go to the bathroom. I helped her out of bed and into the bathroom and she was in tears, crying. Her stomach was blown up and she didn’t make it to the bathroom and she went all over the floor. She told me to go outside, that she’d take care of it. But she couldn’t clean it up; everything was all over the floor. It was terrible. That was the most fearful experience I had, taking her to the bathroom. What do I do? What do I do? Do I take her pants off? I don’t know what to do. It just happened one of the days that everybody was out of the house.
We went to the funeral parlor and we did the cremation. Afterwards we went to the church, then invited one hundred fifty people to come back to the house to say goodbye. Again Linda had set up a large buffet with all of this food and fresh flowers. You can’t imagine how this place looked, like a palace. It was fit for a king. At the Church we had all of Carrie’s stuff that she loved the most. A black biker’s bag with spangles all over it that I had made for her, letters and autographed pictures from people she helped and who helped her, pictures of Carrie when she was a little baby. People came into the church and just looked at all the stuff. It was pretty emotional.
People got up and spoke, then I got up and said, “My name is Bob and I’m an addict. I’m in recovery. I know that my daughter would want me to say that because she was very proud of me being in recovery. I’m glad that I’m able to be here for her even on this day.” I don’t remember what I said, but I know I stood up there and spoke for half an hour, telling people what kind of a person she was, how she held people together in families, the good that she’d done all her life, the life that she led, how we worked on our relationship together, and we went out loving each other. So if there was anybody in this room that has a problem with alcohol and drugs that hasn’t got a relationship with their children, I think today would be a good day to start doing something about it. I had people come up to me afterwards, men, and say, “I’ve never heard anybody speak like that in my life. I have a problem with my kids, and I drink, and I do this, and I think I’m gonna fucking do something about it.” I just listened to them and said, “Well, there’s no time like the present. You only have a certain amount of time and if you don’t have a relationship with your children, why do we have them?”
We went back to the house with all the children and they wrote notes. The neighbors had blown up hundreds of balloons and they were putting the notes on them to send to God for Carrie. Then they sent the balloons up in the air. I got pictures of balloons going up and Kayla letting them go. It was really very good. It was very nice, very nice.
So at the end of this, after Carrie died, this is what happened. The place fell apart. When I came back from California after my daughter died, I went through some intensive therapy, and then I did some psychodrama weekends with the Caron Institute. I got to do some acting out in heavy duty therapy, killing the guy Peter my son-in-law who gave my daughter the virus and getting out a ton of anger. I was so angry for forty minutes, screaming and yelling at the loss of my daughter, and Peter giving her the virus and wanting to kill him, and my brothers, and everybody that didn’t teach me how to read or write. I was just mad at the whole world all over again after thirteen or fourteen years of being clean because I lost my daughter. I did a lot of that kind of work and it was very intense. Even people in my group said to me, “I was actually scared of you. You were so angry I thought you were going to die.” I was squeezing a towel like I was choking this guy to death, I wanted to fucking wring his neck out.
I have pictures all over the walls of Carrie. The one thing I didn’t do is take things and put them away because she’s not away. She’s gone but she’s not away and I have to understand that. She was so proud, she was so proud of me. She used to say, “My father, my father is a recovering drug addict.” She had thirteen years of me and her together, thirteen years of me being clean, and that’s what I had to focus on when she died and I had to change my thinking for the children and the grandchildren. “God don’t give you everybody for every day.”
When I got clean I never thought my daughter was going to die, I thought that I was going to retire and go live with my daughter. This was my fucking biggest dream, that I was going to live with my daughter in California with her kids and everything was going to be cool. That was going to be my headquarters, my place of residence, and I could see my son Bengie and fly to New York and see Keith and Dom. Now all that is gone. I wonder, what am I going to do when I get older? Are the boys going to say, “Hey Dad, you can live with me?” I say to them, “I live by myself, why don’t you call me once in a while?” I get very dramatic about it. “I could be lying dead here for three days and you wouldn’t know it.”