50 Miles. Sheryl St. Germain
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
While I respect the work of statisticians and journalists, and have often relied on their work in my own research, it’s my belief that the current opioid crisis is part of a larger spiritual crisis. I understand addiction as a kind of cancer of the spirit, and keep in mind Carl Jung’s observation that alcoholism (and, I would add, addiction) is at least partially caused by a spiritual thirst. The “merely rational” will never fully address problems of desire for Spirit that one sees in the alcoholic or addict. This is one reason why, for me, lyric essays, poetry, and literature speak more fully to the thing that stole my son, brothers, and father, than statistics and journalism. To heal from those kinds of losses, we need stories and poetry. As a writer, a recovering alcoholic, and a grieving mother, I need lyricism to feed my own spiritual need.
Many books and articles have been published in the last few years focusing on addiction, and offering solutions based in science, including, most notably, Gabor Maté’s flawed but compelling In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, and Maia Szalavitz’s insightful Unbroken Brain, both of which challenge traditional notions of addiction and treatment. One of my hobbies, as sad as it may seem, has become to read memoirs about addiction and recovery. Enough of these memoirs have been published in recent years to fill several book shelves, including my own favorite, Michael Clune’s lyric memoir of his addiction, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, although I also admire David Carr’s more narrative Night of the Gun. Perhaps the memoir that comes closest to my own project is David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, for obvious reasons, although Sheff’s story is structured, unlike mine, more as a cohesive narrative. His choice to privilege narrative makes sense, since he comes from a journalistic background, while my background is poetry, thus my bias towards lyricism. Sheff’s son, Nic, survived to write his own two memoirs of addiction, Tweak, and We All Fall Down.
My story is not like any of these memoirs, however, in that my son did not live. He could not write his own memoir because he did not survive to write it. I could not write about his road to recovery because he did not, in the end, recover. We like happy endings in America, and the ending of my son’s story is not happy, because he dies, although I live, and this collection is also very much a story of my own survival and healing.
Gray was diagnosed with ADD when he was very small, and wound up taking Ritalin and later Adderall for most of his life, which were the drugs he first abused as a teenager. When he was around nineteen I completed and tried—half-heartedly, it must be said—to publish a memoir about raising a son with ADD. The few publishers and agents I sent it to were uninterested mostly because there was no happy ending, although I would argue I held out hope in the end. The drugs prescribed to help with his ADD had helped a little in the short run, but eventually Gray experienced all the severe problems we had been told he’d experience if we didn’t give him the drugs. I thought it important to show the dark side of the stimulants we give ADD-diagnosed children, especially those children who come from a family with a history of substance abuse. I soon gave up trying to publish the manuscript because just a few months after I finished it all hell broke loose. I had to have Gray committed for drug and alcohol abuse, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well as drug use disorder, and everything else in my life fell to the side. The essay “Do No Harm,” is excerpted from that unpublished manuscript. In this essay, I highlight the role of schools and our cultural bias toward drugging young children.
This collection, like that unpublished manuscript, does not have a happy ending, if by that we mean survival of its main character, my son. But this is a book about hope. Many of the pieces here are about the ways I stayed sane, or tried to, while Gray was creating and living in ever darker worlds, and then how I worked with grief after he died, specifically through traditional arts such as crochet, and through travelling, gaming, teaching, and writing.
I learned to crochet at my mother’s lap as a child, and have worked with yarn most of my life. “It’s Come Undone: Crocheting and Catastrophe” traces the ways in which I used the craft of crochet to find peace and a sense of usefulness when things seemed hopeless.
I’ve always taken succor from the natural world. My first poems were celebrations of that broken world of polluted lakes, crawfish-filled ditches, wondrous blackberries that pricked fingers but tasted like summer sun, and the seductive Mississippi that surrounded me as a girl growing up in Louisiana. I tried to share this love of nature with Gray, and some of the essays mention the camping trips we took when he was young. Later when I had the opportunity to take him to Europe, I did, thinking perhaps to broaden his horizons, hoping that a new landscape would jolt him awake, as it often did me.
After he died I continued to travel, often to the Netherlands, as my second husband is Dutch, and to France, where a beloved artist’s retreat in the Languedoc area, La Muse, had provided solace and inspiration in the past. Pieces collected here are also inspired by visits to Peru with students, as well as Florida and Wyoming, where I went for artist retreats. Grief does not remain home when you travel, but being in different landscapes allows new lenses on that grief. The cycle of life and death is ever on vibrant display in the natural world. If you’re lucky, walks and hikes in the natural world can offer ways to understand your changed world, insights, and encouragement to continue living.
The longest piece in the collection, “Parking Lot Nights,” an essay inspired by video games, is also partly about travelling, as I would argue that playing certain kinds of games, especially role-playing games, can function as a kind of travel. I’ve been a gamer much of my adult life, thanks to my son, and this essay traces my relationship with Gray through gaming, and offers some discussion about the ways in which video games might offer metaphors through which we can connect with each other in surprisingly profound ways. The essay also looks at the ways in which gaming helped me both grieve and heal.
Writing is a key tool in healing, and a couple of pieces address that explicitly: “Essay in Search of a Poem,” for example, which traces my attempts to write a poem too soon after Gray’s death. Underlying all these pieces, though, even the ones not explicitly about writing, is the need to find a writing structure that houses grief honestly, especially in the second section, which was written in the aftermath of Gray’s death. The pieces in the second section are, for the most part, shorter, because they were written closer to the death, when any attempt at narrative seemed like a lie. The early pieces in this section, especially the first really short ones like “First Days” and “The Amaryllis Bud,” function more like fragments, prose poems, if you will. Anyone who has experienced tragedy knows that all one can do for a time is wail, and it seemed important to acknowledge that.
Many of the travel pieces are also in this section, and eventually the reader can witness me able to reflect more calmly, rifling off new landscapes to explore the landscape of grief inside.
The final piece of the second section, “Memory, Ever Green,” written in Paris, is built around memories of my father’s life, and asks questions about how we might best remember those we love who have destroyed their lives with drink or other substances.
The decision to make this book a collection of essays rather than one unbroken narrative was one I thought about for a long time. Wouldn’t there be a larger audience for an uninterrupted narrative, one that moved inevitably through beginning, conflict, resolution, the traditional art of story? Maybe, but to camouflage the way in which grief and healing moves in fits and starts, as well as the fits and starts of a life caught in addiction seemed to me the most profound of falsehoods. Some of the pieces in this collection were written before Gray died, and I did not want to go back and change them to reflect my knowledge that he would soon die. It felt more honest to let them stand as genuine moments in time.
It also seemed wrong to try to make all the pieces seem as if they were written in one voice. Depending on what the essay seems to need I might write in first, second or third person. Sometimes the essays are excruciatingly personal and other times I use a more distanced approach. There’s at least one poem in the collection,