Blackout

There are some drinkers for whom blacking out is not unusual. Sarah Hepola writes in her book, aptly named Blackout, that she did so the very first time she drank. She describes it as a trapdoor, “a curtain, falling in the middle of the act, leaving minutes, and sometimes hours in the dark.” In all my years of drinking I had never had that exact experience.

I always had at least a vague idea of what I did and said the night before. I was usually able to fit things into a reasonably complete narrative, with a patchwork quilt of clues: there was an email I had sent (“God, why did I say that?”), where exactly I had left my clothes (neatly put away meant a pretty good night, dumped in a corner of the bathroom, not so much). Slowly the sodden manuscript of the evening before would float to the surface for me to see.

But, on July 7, 2012, I lost an entire afternoon and night of my life. Gone. Erased. Thirteen hours wiped out, like they had never happened… except they did.

It was Friday, a gorgeous summer day. I had a 20/20 shoot scheduled for late morning, and I woke up feeling drained and miserable. My head was pounding and my mouth felt like it was full of cotton. Things weren’t good at home. Marc knew I was drinking again, and he was angry, disgusted, and at his wits’ end. We were not even speaking, and instead of acting like an adult and confronting the tension and unhappiness head-on, I had spent the night before drinking to escape. Now, as I poured a cup of coffee and read over my research, I was paying the piper.

A car was downstairs waiting to take me to the shoot. I got in, buckled my seat belt, and took a deep breath. I still felt absolutely miserable. Dully I wracked my brain. What can I do to make myself feel better? The traffic slowed at one point, and I spotted a wine store, right next to a pharmacy, and like a thunderbolt, a sly thought occurred to me.

“Can you pull over for a minute please?” I asked. “I need to run into the pharmacy. I’ll just be a moment.”

But I didn’t dash into the drugstore for Advil. Instead, I ducked into 67 Wine and Spirits and bought a bottle of chardonnay and stashed it inside my purse.

I spent the rest of the ride to the set studying my notes for the shoot. It was a straightforward interview, and I had already done my homework. But in the back of my mind I was thinking about that bottle, nestled between my billfold and my reading glasses.

The shoot took a couple of hours. While the crew wrapped, I went into a room off to one side. No one else was there. I pulled out the wine, opened it, and filled a water glass nearly to the brim. I could barely wait for the relief from physical and emotional misery that it would bring. And it delivered. I remember sitting in that room, listening to the crew breaking down just outside the door, and drinking the chardonnay. It felt like I was sliding into a place where I could forget that my heart was breaking. I was oblivious to how wrong it was to escape like this, how destructive. Instead I poured myself a second glass. The last thing I remember from that day is tucking the bottle back into my purse, saying goodbye to the crew, and getting into a waiting car, and putting my seat belt on… and that’s where the screen goes blank.

At three the next morning, I woke up. I was in a small room with just a sink and a metal gurney. I was lying on top of it in a blue hospital gown, covered with a flimsy blanket. I sat up, wide awake, wary, completely baffled about where I was or how I got there. There was an orderly sitting outside. I crept to the door, clutching the gown shut around my body.

“Where am I? What time is it?”

“You are at St. Luke’s hospital emergency room.”

I was desperate to be in my apartment, in my own bed, anywhere but here. “Where are my clothes? I need to go home.”

The orderly returned with my orange sweater and my white skirt, still spotless, folded neatly. He also brought my high heels. I put everything on, feeling bizarrely overdressed, and still with no clue as to what happened.

“Do you have my purse?” I asked.

“No, this is all you came in with,” he answered, motioning to the clothes I was now wearing. I looked around desperately. I had no phone, no money, no way to get home, no way to call for help.

“Please, can I borrow your phone?” I asked. I dialed home. Marc answered after a few rings, sounding exhausted and resigned. He told me to stay where I was until morning, that he would not come in the middle of the night to get me. After hanging up, I briefly considered walking home, alone. Fifty blocks in high heels, in the middle of the night. Instead, I lay back down and waited. I spent the next four hours alone in that grim room with my increasingly anxious thoughts.

Why can’t I remember anything?

I was too embarrassed to ask the orderly what happened, and there was something in his face when he said the doctor wanted to see me before I left. There was also something in the sound of my husband’s defeated voice on the phone.

Over the next two days, I learned what happened or, at least, parts of it. Like a steel door, the rest of it locked shut on me. I have spent months trying to coax or pry a memory from around the edges of that door, and I cannot. Here is what I have been told happened: late afternoon Friday, a woman driving down Riverside Drive spots me someplace along the park. She pulls over and offers me a ride home. I am able to tell her where I live. By the time she arrives at my apartment building, I am unconscious. A superintendent carries me into the lobby while the frantic doorman calls Marc. The woman tells Marc she picked me up because she saw two sketchy-looking men hanging around me nearby. Marc waits for an ambulance with me, watching me breathe, terrified that at any moment my breath will cease. Our nanny keeps my two children upstairs, far away from the scene unfolding in the lobby; their mother is drunk, passed out for everyone to see, in the lobby of her own building. Once at the emergency room, tests show I have a blood alcohol level that is usually lethal: 0.4.

I still have no idea how much wine I drank that day. Nor do I have any idea where I went when I finished the shoot, nor what I did. All I do know is how lucky I am for what didn’t happen that day: I wasn’t robbed or raped in the park while unable to defend myself, and because that woman brought me home, I didn’t die from alcohol poisoning. For the first time, I was truly terrified. I needed help.

Clearly, the people at Cirque were right when they had said two weeks was definitely not enough; I needed to go back for the full twenty-eight days. I knew there was no putting off telling ABC where I was going and why. I could no longer keep my addiction a secret. I called my agent and told him everything. I spoke to Barbara Fedida, the ABC News executive in charge of talent, on the phone. She was warm and sympathetic. She did not press me for details; she was simply reassuring.

“Take this time to get better. We are here for you when you get back.”

Why, oh why had I not trusted in their support on my first secret visit to Cirque?

As I packed my suitcases for Utah once again that Sunday evening, the phone rang a second time. This time it was Ben Sherwood, the new president of the news division. Under his leadership, ABC News was reinvigorated—people were excited to work there, and the ratings on all our programs were on the upswing. Ben is smart, driven, and, that night, direct.

“When you took a couple of weeks off two months ago, was that about this, too?”

It would have been wrong to evade any further.

“Yes. I was trying to keep it a secret.”

“What are you addicted to?”

I caught my breath. He was the first person who ever straight out asked me that.

“Well… it’s alcohol,” I stammered. And then in that moment, flustered, I added, “and Ambien, too.” I thought simply being an alcoholic didn’t sound very feminine. It just shows how completely crazy I was. Instead of being frightened to my core about the fact that I nearly died, I was worried my boss would think I was a garden-variety drunk. Truth be told, there is nothing feminine about a woman who has had too much to drink. I had been there and seen many others there, too: voices ringing a little too loud, eyeliner slightly smeared, lipstick tattooing the rims of too many glasses on the table, and the perilous trip to the ladies’ room—eyeing the floor like it’s a sheet of ice, praying you don’t sway or stumble in your stilettos.

Ben’s voice on the phone interrupted my shame-filled reverie.

“I am going to have to tell Anne Sweeney [the president of the network]. This could affect our plans for when Robin starts her treatment.”

Robin Roberts, the co-host of Good Morning America, had just revealed she had been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. It is a rare blood disorder, and she would need a bone marrow transplant to save her life. She would begin an extended medical leave in just six weeks, and would be in the fight of her life for months. Ben had asked me to help fill in on GMA while she was gone.

I swallowed hard. “I understand, Ben. Thank you so much for your support.”

“You have it, Elizabeth. We are all rooting for you. Take whatever time you need.”

So I packed my bags and went back to Utah for the full program. As I drove the winding road up into the mountain for a second time, I was embarrassed to be returning so soon, but also relieved. I knew how lucky I was to get this second chance in this beautiful place to try to find a lasting sobriety.

Right away, Cirque had me meet with one of the towering figures in the world of recovery, Earl Hightower. His story of addiction is so harrowing it leaves you breathless. Yet he tells his tale of descent to the very bottom and his ultimate redemption with such candor, humanity, and humor—yes, humor! He had the room laughing uproariously one moment (Oh my God, he really did that?) and so still the next you could hear a pin drop (Oh my God, he really survived that?). Earl sat me down one afternoon.

“Elizabeth, do you know how close you came to dying? It’s unbelievable you survived. Do you understand that?”

Actually, it was hard for me to understand. I could not remember any of it. It felt like someone else’s story. Earl leaned in.

“You cannot have another drink in your life. Ever. You are just like me. We cannot drink safely.”

And with that dire admonition, I spent the next twenty-eight days working as hard as I could on my recovery. I worked with the therapists there, trying to detangle my lifelong anxiety, trying to learn how not to let it overrun me, how to find some other way to deal with it, and with my unhappiness, without alcohol. I had my own room and was able to sleep, deeply, every night, and despite the heat outdoors, I was biking or hiking every day. They encouraged exercise there—if you feel healthy and strong physically, it pays off emotionally. All my life working out had been one of the positive ways I relieved stress and anxiety. Being in all that natural beauty—away from television, electronics, newspapers, the daily distractions of a full and busy life—left me time to absorb the natural world and appreciate it. It was spiritual for me, that space… not just around me, but inside me, because life had slowed down. It was my father who pointed out to me on the phone one day that this was the first time in my life that I had gotten off the treadmill on which I always seemed to sprint.

“Think of it, honey,” my dad said. “You started working in high school during the summers, and started your first job the day after you graduated from college. You have gone from one job to the next for twenty-eight years without ever taking a break!”

I had never realized that. It was too soon for me to see how that inability to slow down and breathe in life had fed my anxiety and my addiction. That insight would come later. But those four weeks at Cirque gave me my first glimpse that racing through my days, always focused on what was coming up next, meant that I missed a lot of what was happening right around me.

I remember telling Marc about that one night. I was allowed to Skype with Marc and the boys every night for a short time. It was an unusual arrangement for any rehab facility to allow, but I had not told my children where I was—they thought I was on a long shoot—and I missed them desperately. Being able to see and talk to them nearly every day allowed me to relax and focus on the work I was doing. I felt I had Marc’s support and even affection during that stay. I told him one night that the essay I had written about being powerless over alcohol had gotten great feedback from the counselors. “Are you getting an A in rehab?” he teased. We both laughed, the joke on me—ever the worker, ever the perfectionist.

Twice a week, Cirque would invite a group of people who were recovering alcoholics over for dinner. They seemed to represent every walk of life—a chic woman in riding boots, a young man who built and raced bicycles, a crusty cowboy who never took off his hat. After dinner we would sit around the living room, the sun setting on the mountains through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and go around the room sharing our stories of addiction. On my last weekend at Cirque, it was my turn to share. To my surprise, my eyes filled with tears—I always hated showing any emotion. It made me feel naked, exposed.

“I am leaving in three days, and I am really scared.” The room got very quiet. The faces looking back at me were sympathetic. “I am afraid of going back to my life, of being surrounded by stress and temptation. I am afraid of my anxiety, and what I will do to escape it.”

An elderly man, grizzled and gray, was sitting next to me. He put his calloused hand on my head, like my father did when I was still a little girl.

“God bless you,” he said. “Pray to God to help you.” In that moment, I had never felt closer to someone than I did to him. I didn’t even know his name.

My last day at Cirque started before dawn. One of the administrators there, Dan, had invited me to go on a hike. I agreed, thinking it would be like every other hike I had done while I was there, but when we got to the base of the mountain at seven a.m., I realized this was very different. We were hiking a mountain—an entire mountain, from the bottom to the very top.

“Are you up to it?’ he asked, smiling.

“Of course!” I shot back, brimming with bravado. I laced up a pair of borrowed hiking boots, and we packed food and water into our backpacks and set off. After two hours, the sun had burned off the morning fog and a bit of my confidence. This was hard. I stripped off my fleece and tied it around my waist. On we went, hiking through brambles and wildflowers, up through dense trees, across narrow paths set into steep ravines. We spoke little—the effort to climb took all our strength. After three hours we stopped to eat. I looked up. The summit seemed no closer than when we started.

“How long is this going to take?”

“Last time I hiked it, it was about nine hours to get up and back,” Dan answered.

Nine hours?? I wasn’t sure I could make it, but I wasn’t about to say so. I looked up again at the distant summit.

“Okay then.” I got up and took another swig of water and shook out my legs. “Let’s go.”

For the next four hours we hiked up and up. The trees grew sparse, the path rockier until after a while there was no path at all. At a certain point I stopped looking up at the top; I concentrated on the ground in front of me—on putting one foot in front of the other. My calves were aching, and I felt blisters blooming on my heels where they rubbed against the unfamiliar boots. Dan stopped to rest. He was sweaty and red faced, out of breath in the thin mountain air.

“You keep going,” he called out. “I’ll catch up.”

I had no choice but to keep going. If I stopped to rest now I would never get back up. The muscles aching throughout my body would cramp. So I leaned into the mountain, and on I went. One step at a time, steadily, timed to my own breath. Inhale, step left, exhale, step right. Farther and farther up I climbed, until the air grew chilly and the wind picked up, the sound of it humming through the few pine trees left. Finally, in the afternoon, exhausted and exhilarated, I stumbled over the last ledge and reached the summit. I was alone at the top of the world. There was a pond of water, so clear and still that you could see the fish darting around beneath the clouds reflected on the surface. I sat down at the edge of it and waited for Dan. It was only then, as I leaned against a rock and turned my face up to the sun, that I realized this hike, this test of physical endurance, was a metaphor for recovery: one step at a time, one day at a time. Don’t look up at the whole mountain, or your whole life without the crutch of alcohol can seem too much. Just focus on what is right in front of you. Focus on that next step, and do the next right thing.