Miracles and Menaces
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE (translated by Stephen Mitchell), The Sonnets to Orpheus
MY life began again when I got sober, as though I had been reborn, as though all the years before had been a warm-up for the real thing. I could think, act, be present, and feel joy as well as pain. The deep fear and all the bitter resentments began to lift, and as the big change sank in, a myriad of other remarkable results began to follow. The constancy of habit—training, showing up, doing my work in spite of what might have been going on in my life—began to bring me the kind of joy and satisfaction that had always eluded me on the deepest levels.
The hemangioma surgery I’d had earlier had been successful, a near miracle. A tiny white scar was all that was left of the trouble, though it took me a couple of years to get back the full strength of my voice.
Three days before I had my last drink, in April 1978, I had been asked to go on a blind date with a man recommended to me by a friend of mine. Jeanne was dating his business partner and thought he was so wonderful she had to introduce me. I told her I was not in the mood, having been jilted by Jerry Oster, but she insisted, and I agreed to meet him at a fund-raiser, at Patrick O’Neal’s restaurant, the Ginger Man (which he had renamed the Ginger Person for that evening’s gathering in support of the Equal Rights Amendment).
I walked in, trying to look sober. This was going to be my final party before going off to the drunk farm to get clean. I was going to try to get in as much drinking as was humanly possible before I landed at Chit Chat.
A pair of blue eyes looked across at me in the restaurant. Louis Nelson greeted me and smiled. He was handsome, calm, and smart, with an open spirit. Not a singer, not an actor. I was drunk, but I was dazzled.
I knew only a little about Louis. He was an established and successful designer, having put the color in Head skis—the rainbow colors that took over from all the black in the 1960s. Because the color had drained out of my life, this seemed like a sign to me.
Louis pulled my chair out for me. I was shocked. I thought, “What does he want?”
Stephen Sondheim was there, as were Gloria Steinem and Patrick O’Neal. The night was festive. We were all hopeful that a women’s rights bill might be passed in Congress.
At the end of the evening Louis hailed a cab for me, then got in after me. I was pleased and surprised. Louis took me home, walked me to my door, and kissed me on the cheek.
Then he left.
I called him the next day, and he called me, and then I called him again. I wanted to tell him where I was headed, but instead I hemmed and hawed. I was going away, I said. I was sick, I said, and I was right.
I called him again the day before I left for Chit Chat. I thought about him on the flight to Pennsylvania, and when I came home, Louis called me. In July we went out to dinner.
On the inside of the wedding rings we wear is the date we met, April 16, 1978, the day the angels sent Louis. We have seldom been apart since our first real date, when we went to Orsini’s for dinner, except every now and then when he’s unable to join me on a concert tour. We talked all night over our chicken and mushrooms while waiters hovered, hoping we would leave. He saw me home and again left me at the door, promising to return, which he did.
Into my life came the things I have always been looking for. Louis and I are friends, lovers, confidants. We read and talk; we go to the movies. We love all our cats, including the most recent, Rachmaninoff, Coco Chanel, and Tom Wolfe. And we laugh a lot. He is a loving, creative, talented man. He knows how to listen and has helped me in every way with my career and music.
When Louis and I had been together for eighteen years, we were married at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in a wedding that celebrated our joys with five hundred of our friends and family. It was a sober wedding—not a drop of booze was served—and everyone seemed to have a wonderful time! It was a celebration of our life together, our devotion to each other, and the fact that since I met Louis, I have never looked back, never deceived him, never been unfaithful.
Louis was the one I had been looking for all along.
CLARK was nineteen and in the middle of a long stretch of drug use when I got sober. He was kicked out of Sarah Lawrence, then was accepted by Columbia, where he took Chinese calligraphy and semiotics. For five more years he fought the madness of his addiction, but in 1984, Clark finally surrendered and flew to Minnesota to go to Hazelden, the recovery center for addicts and alcoholics. His life changed at once, it seemed, and he began to live a happy, useful life, free of drugs and alcohol. He started to thrive, finding love. He and his wife, Alyson, had a beautiful baby daughter, Hollis, who is the apple of my eye. She is so like her father in every way—she looks like him, laughs as he laughed, walks and talks like him, a subtle reminder in every movement that she is her father’s child.
But in 1992, the bottom fell out of Clark’s recovery. On January 15 Alyson found him in his Subaru station wagon, dead from asphyxiation. He had been drinking, and he made a tape of his last words.
I feel the agony of that loss every day of my life. I adored my son. At times I wanted to kill anyone who may have been in any way responsible for the pain he was in. But I had to let go of blame and anger, for if I held on to it, it would destroy me.
When he got sober in 1984, Clark had begun to write me letters. The only letters I’d previously received from him were scrawls from camp, the kind moms often get:
Dear Mom,
I am having a good time—I caught a fish, here is a picture of the fish.
Love, Clark
It is always difficult to describe to someone who did not know him the beauty that was in Clark. People who spent time with him always felt it. There was a joy and tenderness in this attractive, tall, redheaded boy, a quality of caring for others. He was a good friend with a great heart and a smile and the ability to tear at your emotions with his laughter and tears.
He wrote me when I was seven years sober and he was celebrating fourteen months of sobriety.
St. Paul, Minnesota
Rainy Tuesday
April 23, 1985
Dear Mom,
Thank you for your wonderful and thoughtful letter. I mean thoughtful in the sense that it’s nice that you found time to write and in the sense that there are some things to think about in there.
Congratulations on your birthday. I can remember when you first got sober and boy I couldn’t believe you really did it! Then when you started trying to help me, I thought you were crazy! But you were actually being restored to sanity. You’ve changed so much. You’ve become a directed person in a way that you never were. I always had the feeling before you got sober that you couldn’t manage your life. (I’m not trying to be funny!) You were so vague and lacking in a true center, running around frantically, worried and unhappy. Now you have a calm centeredness and a directedness that is truly beautiful. Your strength and faith, found in (spirit), were something I couldn’t discount. They were such tangible facts that I couldn’t dismiss your sobriety as some kind of unhealthy fanaticism. I saw proof that sobriety works and I believe, as I’ve told you before, that a seed was planted in my heart—a belief in the possibility of joyful, rewarding sobriety.
I know that my relapses must have caused you a lot of pain. I know I’ve made an effort with this amend. But I think that I somehow know better what kind of grief we feel to see someone return to active addiction now that I’ve seen a few of those and one suicide.
And Mom, it must be really awful when it’s close family.
Life is good. I love you and I thank you for being a swell mom.
Love, Clark
I wept when I found this letter again many years after he had sent it, many years after his death—a letter from the grave. Like the touch of his hand, like the dreams I have of him that have come in startling numbers over the years since, they reassure me that I am not separated from him in any but a physical manner. He is here in his daughter’s beautiful bright eyes, in how his name comes up often in the world, in the memory of his sweet soul. I will never be apart from him.
When Clark died, I dug myself out of the pit of despair again, Louis by my side all the way. Each day I chose not to drink. And I chose not to take my own life.
I make these choices anew every day, one day at a time, and on many days it remains the only thing I do that feels right. I find great comfort in talking to other suicide survivors—great peace, in fact, in telling them that there is a gift in every loss and that they can survive. I tell them my story, and tell them what I do, and hope that it helps. That way I can keep Clark’s legacy alive, and keep my own heart busy so that it will not break, though the breaking heart can be a healing heart as well.
When my son died, I began to understand what heartbreak really was. It turned out I hadn’t had a clue.
In Judaism, it is taught that there are three stages of grief to be endured. First there is weeping, for we all must weep for what we have lost. Second comes silence, for in the silence we understand solace, beauty, and comfort from something greater than ourselves. Third comes singing, for in singing we pour out our hearts and regain our voice.