The Specter
For several years, I've lived with the specter of my daughter killing herself. It haunted me whenever the phone rang at a time when it didn't normally, or if a holiday passed without our having heard from her, or when I saw or heard Deirdre, my wife, weeping. However her death happened - a heroin overdose, hypothermia, murder, suicide, AIDS - I knew I would have to the find the words to express what had happened, and why.
And so, in interior monologues, I would imagine myself speaking at Carrick's funeral. I wanted everyone to know something about the hopelessness of addiction. The powerlessness of love. The elephant of drug and alcohol abuse on our village's Main Street - indeed, on all Main Streets. The thin line between enabling and encouraging. But words without stories are feeble comforts, like that of the priest in Alice McDermott's Charming Billy who assures us that Billy's death from drinking “wasn't a failure of our affections, it was a triumph of the disease.”
Carrick started smoking marijuana when she was twelve years old, and worked her way to a heroin addiction by seventeen. She sees her drug dependencies, as do I, as the inevitable outcome of a concatenation of genes, influences, and events. We have had a trying journey. When Carrick was using drugs, she often overwhelmed Deirdre, our son Duncan, and me - individually and collectively. We all have different ways of coping. My way has been to try to find some connections to the experiences of others. And so, as part of this journey, I have been writing The Elephant on Main Street: An Interactive Memoir of Addictions, which has become this website.
Thanksgiving 2004 was the first that Carrick spent at home since 1999 when she was 15. In 2000, she was in a wilderness therapy program in the high dessert of Utah. In 2001, she was living on the streets of Philadelphia with a lost soul who called himself Chaos Destruction. In 2002, she was hanging with Pete, who had just been released from state prison for drug dealing. In 2003, she and Pete were either incarcerated on Riker's Island or about to be - she was so strung out on heroin and cocaine that one day blended into the next.
After Thanksgiving dinner 2004, our 15-year-old son Duncan surprised us with a box of chocolates and a greeting card. He wrote: “Mom, Dad, Carrick, Pete. I love you guys all. We stick through the hardest times as a family.”
While I am always aware of our tenuous holds on sobriety, sanity and life itself, that's what The Elephant on Main Street is all about: Sticking through the hardest times — and telling the story.