Stop The Clocks

Running has been HARD this month, I feel completely let down by my bloody knees! I have spent more time on the bike. Nev played gin rummy with me for an hour the other night whilst I cycled, to pass the time, he thrashed me. I just need to keep going and keep my head down. It’s Brighton Half Marathon on February 25th, I’m desperate to finish it, it seems like such a milestone. If you’re in Brighton on February 25th, come and watch and shout for us all!

This is the fifth blog I have written. Up until now I have written each post assuming people don’t really have experience with addiction. It turns out that people do. So I am sorry if I have come over as patronising, I am supported but shocked by the number of people also affected. It turns out many of you understand and appreciate more than I ever knew. I also realise that many of you are continuing to live with addiction in your present. I want to make sure you know that the objectivity with which I have approached this blog is only possible because Eva died. That if she was still alive it is unlikely I would ever have been learning about addiction in the way that I am, and it is unlikely I ever would have been able to support her in the way I now know she needed supporting. It is really, really, really hard living with addiction, for both the person with addiction and as family and friends. I am sure you are doing an amazing job. There is help – the Addaction website, AA and Al-Anon websites are at the bottom of this blog. Keep going, keep loving and keep looking after yourself.

I have thought long and hard about whether to tell you about what happened when Eva died. I have decided that it is relevant, because I am writing about how addiction has affected me and nothing has affected me more than her death. It is emotional, it has been hard to write, it is much less scientific and much less objective than the other blogs so I have to ask your forgiveness for that. But it is my personal story, so of course it is relevant, because, to push the point, there is a personal story like mine behind every statistic you read.

Eva died on February 20th 2010. For all of us, this date is the hardest anniversary. Birthdays and Christmas are particularly hard because there is always, as with everything, a huge gap in our lives now that is all the more pronounced at family gatherings. February is a harder date because it is a reminder of the horror of that day and that time. This is what happened and this is how unnecessary it was, and this is what Addaction tries to prevent. This is the story behind the people and the charity. So if you can read, please do. This is now the history of my life, that I am sharing with you. I don’t want anyone to feel that I am writing this for pity. This is what happened to us. This is unembellished. This is part of our lives. And each and every one of Eva’s friends has their own version of our story.

This is what happened when she died:

The phone went at 5am. She had overdosed.

We sat round in Mum and Dad’s room. I don’t remember crying much for the first couple of hours. Then I couldn’t really stop. Over the course of the day we each got out of the house for a bit – I went to the shops and sat on the swings at the park and went to the pub with some good friends for a couple of hours. And then I went home and we reconvened and didn’t know what to say to each other and no one slept. We have always been a really close family, so this might sound like strange behaviour, but you have to understand that none of us was in a position to comfort the other. Over the years we have learnt how to help each other and what the others likely want or need, but this has taken a long time and I’m not sure I always get it right now. Hours after we got the news we were all in shock, lost and paralysed and desperate not to burden the others. So it might sound strange, but we each gave the others space whilst we stumbled through the first few hours. Cards came through the door – hundreds of them, nearly straight away. The first few were a shock to be honest, because the cards and flowers were a tangible acknowledgement of her death. There was no denying it had happened, however much you wanted to, when you were looking at a dining table so full of sympathy cards. People sent soup, hot chocolate, biscuits. Some people sent text messages, some people called, some people came to the door. Some people had no idea what to do and did nothing. I cannot tell you how comforting it was to have people talk to us and come in for a cup of tea.

I cried a lot. There was no big outpouring of grief. Initially I would have a sit down when I started to cry, but soon I just carried on doing whatever it was that I was doing at that time, making a cuppa, feeding the dog, showering, reading. The physical effects of grief weren’t really surprising. I was tired all the time, was achy, as if I had a cold, sometimes my chest felt tight and I couldn’t breathe, I got headaches, I was forgetful, I couldn’t concentrate, I lost my appetite for a bit and I was run down. And when they talk about sadness, anxiety and yearning as psychological symptoms of grief, for me the physical and psychological symptoms blurred. I did feel yearning and sadness but my chest felt it too, my heart felt it.

Some of my memories of that time are gone, some memories are blurry, some I could tell you down to the smallest detail. I remember a neighbour running around the corner towards our front door saying to me “It’s not true is it? Tell me it’s not” and I had to leave the house and walk past her because I couldn’t answer. Someone I barely knew at the time bumped into me and my brother in the pub and said to us, “God, have you heard about the young girl who was alcoholic, local girl, just died”. I got tattoos on my wrist, the same tattoos that Eva had, and I went for a drink afterwards and I chatted with people at the bar as if nothing had happened and I pretended to be normal. I did not know what to do with myself, how to fill time, how to fill my head with something, anything other than what had happened. We had to wait for toxicology and blood reports so the funeral was weeks later. I found that hard, it was a long wait. We got little booklets printed of Eva for the funeral with the words of the songs and some photos, and the printer bloke gave us huge discount and worked over his weekend and bought us flowers. The kindness of people was phenomenal. People cared intensely and truly. It was never just us that lost Eva, there were hundreds of people who had lost a hugely important part of their lives.

The funeral was surreal. We made the food for the wake, just so we had something to do in the morning. We drove up past hundreds of people who were stood in absolute silence in a queue watching us in the cars, waiting to get in. It was an incredible sight, all that silence. My brother, George, spoke and he was incredible. Wording was difficult. It was perfect. He told little stories about her. The story about her birth: Eva had a really traumatic birth. The doctors at the hospital told Mum and Dad that she wouldn’t survive and they had an emergency christening at the hospital in the middle of the night. Then, when she was fighting and she was surviving, they were told it was likely she’d be significantly brain damaged. But she smiled and she laughed early, and Mum says she just knew she was going to be ok. The story of when she passed her driving test: after her first journey out alone she drove the car straight into the garage door. I wailed. I wailed and I could not be strong and I could not hold it together. I was not dignified. The wake was full. Then, together with all our friends, we went into town and drank and drank. The next morning an old boyfriend of Eva’s came over with food for a full English.

As the inquest approached weeks later, newspaper reporters arrived at Mum and Dad’s door. They were sent away. Eva’s death was in print. But we wanted people to know her life and to know her, and it felt unlikely that was what they wanted to talk about.

Then…….life goes on. However much you don’t want it to, and you hate people for carrying on with their life whilst yours has collapsed, it just goes on. What you want is for people around you to be collapsing with you. That poem, Stop The Clocks, by W.H.Auden………. You want the world to pause for a bit and catch it’s breath. You want everyone to acknowledge and everyone to mourn. You don’t want life to go on regardless. Time passing means having to come to terms with a different reality and moving on without her. I mentioned to a friend a couple of years ago that I am scared all the time that she’ll be forgotten. She said, “Maybe you’re afraid that you’re forgetting?” I want to always remember her face and her smell and the expressions and the feel of her, but I do not remember them with the same clarity that I did. And that’s petrifying. It’s something I will never come to terms with. Time passing means there are more days between my present day and the last time I kissed her and smelt her perfume and looked at her eyes. That’s why I wanted things to stop where they were. That’s why just carrying on with life was such an awful thought.

However unfair it feels, life does continue. Work, bills, the big shop. I didn’t cope for a while. Work was a good distraction and a relief but I spent weeks arriving in tears. I dreamt about her, woke up, cried in the car and by the time I got to work I was really good for nothing. Eventually a friend suggested I access the work counselling service so I did, and time passed, and I slept a bit better, and things slowly improved, as they tend to do.

I only know about my experience with grief. It is an intensely personal experience. But there are differences in grief when someone has died from addiction. Looking at DrugFam’s website, they list many differences I recognise.

Age: Eva was young. Her death was out of the natural order of things. And I can never, ever imagine what my parents have been through during the years of her illness and since she died. When my eldest daughter was born, I couldn’t help think of my parents. I had this incredibly precious gift, someone I was so deeply in love with, someone I felt so protective over. So far in this blog I have found words to write about my feelings. I lose this ability here.

Explanation: not all people were aware of Eva’s addiction. I’m sure people found out through word of mouth. I don’t remember broaching these discussions. Stigma will have made this harder.

Timing: the timing of it was bad for me. The unexpectedness of it in the midst of a really difficult point in our relationship has left me with huge guilt. I know objectively that my behaviour and approach to Eva’s addiction was the same as a million others with siblings with addiction, I know it is hard, I know I’m not a bad person, I could say those words out loud to the counsellor I saw, but my chest feels heavy. I feel guilt.

Relief: Drugfam talk about people feeling relieved at the death of a person with addiction. I cannot say I experienced that. But what I do do, when I come across someone older who remains addicted, is imagine where’d we all be if Eva hadn’t died. My gut reaction is that it wouldn’t be over. And this makes me feel guilty.

Press: this is an unwelcome added complication. My parents had a phone call and a knock at the door and they were sent away. And it was not helpful. And it was printed anyway.

Grief during life: Drugfam also talk about a grief experienced whilst the individual is still alive. A loss. I got my hair cut in Brighton years ago and I was reading a magazine article by sisters about how special their relationship was. I cried in the hairdressers, I was so quiet I don’t think he noticed. I hope he didn’t. But I completely understand this type of grief – I felt like I had lost her long before she died.

I met up with some very old and very good friends whilst I was visiting my parents in January and we were talking about this blog. They were there when Eva died and they came for lunch when I wanted to go for lunch and they came for coffee when I wanted to go for coffee and they came to the funeral and they knew Eva. But Rach said that despite being there through it,  she didn’t really know about it all. “The thing is”, I said to Rach, “I am learning all of this now, I didn’t know it either.” There is so much unsaid. It took 4 years before George and I talked about what we did the day we got the phone call. It has taken me nearly 8 years before I was ready to really learn about addiction and share this. There was a lot unsaid because it’s so hard to say and I wasn’t ready. I’m ready now. For me, now is the time to talk about it. We have to talk about it. As a society we have to talk about it. It didn’t have to happen. The pain of it for all of us, for Eva, for my family, for all of Eva’s friends, was unnecessary. And we are one story of thousands.

Addaction works to support individuals with addiction and families and friends. They provide support and advice to those suffering with addiction and their loved ones, they provide specialist interventions from cognitive therapy to medication, residential rehab and support with housing and finances. They provide support for friends and families, who need strength to be able to support their loved one. They work with the Amy Winehouse Resilience Programme to educate young people about addiction. They save lives.

Please, please, read and share as widely as you can. And again, thank you for taking time to read.

http://www.addaction.org

http://www.drugfam.co.uk

And if you can donate:

Funeral Blues – W.H.Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message: “He is dead!”
Put crepe bows around the white necks of the public doves.
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my north, my south, my east and west,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can come to any good.