Requiem for My Niece
Many years ago on December 2nd, our big grey city was covered with a major snowstorm. It was another record-breaking snowfall of heavy white snow that made this noisy city as quite as it ever becomes. And on this December 2nd, my youngest American niece was born in a Chicago hospital. She was stunning, perfect as almost all newborns are, and she was so pink with that special glow of a healthy baby. Her name was Christina.
This year some 32 years later on May 25th in a small Montana town this same precious niece died. It was in another hospital in an ICU. Her much to early death was caused by alcoholism. She was in a coma at the end. It was end stage liver disease, along with the collapse of her organs including heart failure that ended her short time on earth. What a heartbreaking death. Her sister, and only sibling, was with her. And her long-ago bitterly divorced parents had been at the ICU earlier in the day.
But why didn’t I know that Christina was battling Demon Alcohol. Why didn’t I see what was happening to her. Why didn’t anyone tell me? This is haunting me.
Over 30 years ago, I decided to stop drinking. I had to. I was getting much too close to the edge of a horrible disease that has swallowed so many, including my godfather uncle. I vowed to never become like Uncle Spike. Never. It took a lot of hard work and therapy along with the generous, loving support of my dear friends and my father. My self-medicating drinking stopped, and along with it, so did much of the deep black depression that gripped my life. Sure some depression creeps into my life but its darkness has become far less visible.
Sweet Christina must have been smothered in such darkness and in such pain. Why didn’t I see.
Am I angry? Yes, but this anger is really a deep sadness, as I’ll never hear Christina’s laugh that, regardless of my mood, would always make me laugh as well. What a waste of such a beautiful, smart and talented woman. A waste of what could have been.
Just before Christina moved to Bozeman, MT she told me that her parents insisted that she go into an alcohol treatment center for 2 weeks. I was a bit shocked, as I had no idea that she had a drinking problem. “No, I’m not drinking now”, she said. She told me that her drinking, which she knew was very dangerous given her type 1 diabetes, had gotten out of hand at the end of her marriage. “It was a nasty time, Aunt Mary. So I was drinking too much.”
I once again told her about why I stopped drinking, and she said her drinking was a “thing of the past”. Anyway, she said that she’d be moving to beautiful Montana, living in Bozeman where she’d be starting over. She was very convincing, and sadly I believed her. I guess I wanted to believe that she couldn’t have an alcohol problem, as her doctors would not want her to move away from their treatment center.
Do I feel guilty? You betcha. If knew the depth of her drinking, I would have helped Christina get into a knock-down-tough going-messy professional intervention like the one that the Hazeldon Clinic helps to arrange. One of our cousins worked at Hazelden and surely we could have collectively come up with the necessary money to get her into a program. She would have had at least a month as an inpatient with at least 12 months of follow up therapy and out patient treatment.
Yes, perhaps, just perhaps Christina was in such denial that a professional intervention, a month long hospital stay, and then a year of intensive therapy might not have helped her. But we’ll never know, will we.
Denial can be so deadly. Anger turned inward is another lethal tonic. But it’s the spirit that dies from this kind of death.
At the end of her life, in May when she was once again back in the ICU, I was desperate to learn how she was doing. Since my brother, and Christina’s father, stopped talking to me several years ago (another puzzling thing), I would get bits and pieces of often-contradictory information from my younger sister.
I was told was that “Christina’s situation is not your business”. What the heck does that mean?
By the time I realized how dangerously ill she was, it was too late. At that point she only had a few months left to live. How I wish that I had known earlier, even years earlier as I gather her drinking problem wasn’t a recent development. She was likely drinking for years – not just the past 5 or 6 years. End stage liver disease usually happens after many years of alcohol abuse.
How sad that someone thought that it was best not to tell the family member who had successfully battled drinking that her niece was drowning with this addiction.
In my speaking up about the tragedy of Christina’s death by alcohol, I have broken a silence that some members of my family seem to cherish. Some of them are not pleased. So be it.
What I wish to do is to warn others, to plead that if they honestly suspect that their friend, their family member, or work colleague is battling drink or drugs (including prescription drugs), please stand up, speak up and get in touch with a top addiction clinic or hospital, and ask them for their help in getting that person you love into a tough, messy, professional intervention. Any addiction treatment takes huge amount of effort not only from the addict, the therapists, but also from her entire extended family and friends.
After last November, when she was in the ICU with liver failure, I was told that she was much better. But in my gut, I knew she was horribly ill, so I called and called her to suggest that she go to a major medical center (like the ones her doctors had recommended) for follow up care. I asked her if she had any medical insurance, which she did not have. So I told her that I’d pay for her follow up visit at a major medical center, pay for she & her sweetheart, to travel and stay wherever, and she again resisted.
I told her that my oncologist at the University of Chicago knew of several colleagues that might be able to help her, and she finally agreed to come to Chicago and see them. She called me the day before she went into the hospital to have a feeding tube, “just like Dad had”, inserted, as she couldn’t keep any food down. “I’ll call you when I get back from the hospital, so we can figure out what days I’ll be in Chicago”. That was the last time we talked. She was dead a few days later.
Was Christina just playing a game with me, did she not know that she had end stage liver disease from which there is no recovery? Did she not know that she was dying?
I’ll never know.
What I do know is that I was not a good enough aunt to Christina, as I should have seen what pain she was enduring. But I didn’t. I did not stand up and speak up for her, which will haunt me for the rest of my life.
We all hope that Christina’s spirit is resting in peace. And I pray that her soul is far, far away from all of the darkness, depression, and pain that so consumed her during her ever-too-short life.
