Alive
Today is September 7th. I woke up, made coffee, walked my dog and then vacuumed the house while listening to a slightly eclectic playlist inspired by Bruce Springsteen. I met friends for lunch and we had Ethiopian food, the highlight of which was inky coffee served alongside a smoking cone of frankincense. I walked home to walk off the injera and to enjoy a perfectly Septembral afternoon. The harvest moon should rise in the sky tonight, shaded in amber from a lunar eclipse that will be visible all over Europe. All told it has been a very fine day with absolutely nothing to complain about or lament.
Today is September 7th. It is the twenty sixth anniversary of my death.
Do you know where you were on September 7th, 1999? You might: if it’s your wedding day, the birth of a child, the funeral of a parent, the date would stick with you. If it’s your own birthday you might well have specific memories of the party you had or didn’t, the cake you ate or wanted to have (fussy Virgos). I was in an apartment building in Washington Heights, laying on a mattress on the floor in the living room, dying. I was a heroin addict, and had been so for some time by that point. My boyfriend at that time was also addicted, and we had each developed a monstrous habit that turned us into bottomless pits, degraded and hollowed out from the inside. Our attempt to fill those needs took us to low, low places, places that you would not have found yourself in if September 7th is your wedding date or child’s birthday. We sold our souls to those places yet doing so never even touched the sides, never scratched the itch. We often injected cocaine simultaneously, a combo known as a speedball. You may have heard of it: it’s an alluring name and the sort of thing that sounds like it lives on the event horizon of things that will probably kill you. It does, often. It did, then.
From injecting cocaine and heroin together I contracted aspiration pneumonia, an infection that occurs when food, liquids, saliva, or stomach contents are inhaled into the lungs. It probably started a week before, although I do not remember a specific episode that could have been the moment. Aspiration pneumonia is a semi-serious but very treatable condition, if one seeks medical attention when they first notice symptoms. However, if one assumes that the symptoms are signs of heroin withdrawal and addresses these by injecting exponentially higher amounts of narcotics, it tends to get a bit more complicated. I wasn’t entirely irresponsible, of course: when I started to cough (heroin addicts don’t really cough much) I went to the bodega on St. Nicholas Avenue and got two bottles of NyQuil, which I would scientifically gulp whenever I remembered. I cannot say that I did so with Swiss watch like precision.
As the days went by, I got progressively weaker. It was harder to breathe and I began coughing up a foamy, pink substance that only seemed to increase in mass. I couldn’t taste anything so I stopped eating and more critically, stopped smoking. When walking became difficult we moved the mattress onto the living room floor, though I cannot say if it hadn’t been there already. My boyfriend would go for supplies (more dope) (and more NyQuil) and I would lay on the mattress watching Titanic, the only movie we had on video. We had not long before sold the DVD player. I waited for him to come back, waited for him to get the syringe ready when I couldn’t fix it anymore myself, waited for the NyQuil to finally kick in. Waited, wasting away.
On September 7th, 1999, I woke up and couldn’t breathe anymore, being entirely overwhelmed by the pink foam coming from my lungs. The pain had been a steady dull for days, pulsing even after the effects of narcotics worked their way into my blood. But that day it was sharp, cutting my chest in two and searing through the left side of my body at the intersection of my ribcage and the rest of me. I did not know that my left lung had collapsed, and I did not know that my right lung was 60% filled with fluid. But I knew something was very wrong, so I did the one thing I had learned never to do, ever. I called my parents.
But I did not call my parents to come for me, and I did not call my parents for advice. I called them for money. To buy more heroin.
You’ll read this and think, no. How could you not know? How could you do that? But one does not end up drowning from the inside out without making a series of questionable choices, and these prior steps make much, if not all, of the difference. How could I not know? Because I was a heroin addict. How could I do that? Because I was a heroin addict. Why was I a heroin addict?
Well, that’s another story for another day.
When I called my parents, I asked them to wire me money (that’s what oldie times called Venmo) because I needed to go to the doctor. I told them I was sick, without going into detail, and they believed me about as much as you do. They said that if I was sick they’d come to get me, even though we had neither seen nor spoken to each other in months (why were you a heroin addict, clue 1). After a few volleys back and forth I finally spat out that I was deeply addicted and probably sick, out of exhaustion more than anything else. My mother responded with words that she had said too many times for them to mean anything, too many times for it to matter anymore.
You broke my heart.
Tell me about it.
She hung up the phone and I knew that my father would be tearing across the Tri-State area in a blind rage, apoplectic that I’d ruined his night. My boyfriend and I looked at each other with a mixture of dread and hunger (always that hunger). The adrenaline spike got me upright, and I stood up for the first time in days to walk into the kitchen. I came back with the sharpest knife we had in the house and asked him to slit my wrists before his own. It would end now, and what would there be after? I was dying anyway, and the man coming for me was only going to look for ways to speed up that process. But he, being of a sounder mind and a far sounder body than I, said no. He wouldn’t let me do that, and he wouldn’t do it himself. But he also wouldn’t hang around waiting for my father to come, so he left that apartment in Washington Heights and left me on the mattress on the floor. I couldn’t blame him for it, not one bit. But in his haste, he’d left with all the dope. It was in his pocket, I was sure. They were gone, he and it. I don’t have to tell you which one I missed more.
I had not eaten in days, and my body was rapidly submerging itself in the fuschia waves bubbling inside of me. My father was on his way to take me somewhere, and I would have to answer for everything I’d done to get here. Yet the only thing I could think of was how to get one last hit, one last time. And so I hoisted my body up with the same force that an injured mountain climber gathers to climb out of a crevasse, with just as noble a mission. I packed my mobile phone into its box, descended onto the street, and made my way to the closest corner where boys were slinging in broad daylight. It’s tempting to believe that I was the worst sight they’d ever seen but I know it isn’t true. They’ve seen much worse than any of us could ever imagine.
By the time I’d traded my phone for three bags of heroin and made it back up the stairs to my apartment (the triumph of the human spirit!), my father was throwing clothes into a bag, oblivious to the fact that neither the clothes nor the bag were mine. I watched him and can remember him now, frantically pacing with no objective in mind. Aware that it was his doing, all of this. He almost didn’t see me come in, and when he did his expression was blank, devoid of all emotion except for haste. The need to leave this place, to get me anywhere, to not have my blood on his hands one more time. But I had other plans.
“I’ll be with you in just a minute. Just going to go to the bathroom before we leave.”
The clarity of that memory, how calmly I uttered those words, is one of the most haunting memories of that generally very haunting day. I stepped over the mattress, which by that time was covered in things that did not belong to me, and into the bathroom. There was, of course, an emergency rig [kit for doing the drugs, origin probably Latin or Greek] in the medicine cabinet and although the needle was slightly worn, it was more than capable of delivering. Without being able to breathe, with the end of my life stabbing me through the left flank, I took my last shot of heroin on September 7th, 1999. I will remember it for eternity, a memory that will outlive me. At some point my father realized what I was doing and pounded the bathroom door, where I was peacefully leaning. I got up, stumbling through the doorway, and turned to him. “Ok, we can go now.” I took nothing from the apartment, choosing to leave the bag he’d packed full of things that weren’t mine. I made it down the stairs and into his car, where he slapped me periodically to keep me awake. It did not work but I didn’t really mind. He did it more for himself than for me, anyway.
And then, shortly after, I died.
I cannot say when I died exactly. I was alive when I arrived at the hospital and the nurses cut me out of my clothes. I was alive when they did the first series of tests and declared my left lung a swamp. I was definitely alive when my mother came in and told me I’d broken her heart, which I now know meant that she too had to skip her favorite TV shows because of me. At some point thereafter, it all went black. Not a terrible black, mind you. Not a black that doesn’t forgive, not a black that sucks the light in. Simply imagine the point at the end of this sentence, and then dive into it. That’s the sort of black it was. And I knew it, I recognized it, and I dove. I wished I’d been a better sister, and then I dove. It was my only thought. And then, I dove.
I woke up sometime later in an isolation room, suspended by a series of tubes delivering to and extracting from my body in almost equal measure. A nurse came to inject a comically large needle into my lung, from which she drained that familiar pink froth. She held me protectively in her arms while she did so, and I lay limp but appreciative. She was a good woman, and I will never know her name. But wherever you are, I remember you.
September 8th is what’s known as my “clean day”. I have celebrated the 8th of September in many ways over the past twenty five years, and this year will be no exception. I have work to do, driving classes to take, and people that I’ll see. I’ll walk my dog, I’ll feed my cats, and I will go on with everything in front of me. I’ll continue navigating that strange line between gratitude for being saved and gratitude for the people who did the saving, for they are not always the same thing. September 7th is when I die and September 8th is the first day of the rest of me, the life I have now.
I cannot say that I am perfectly clean in the most orthodox sense but I no longer believe that I am permanently stained by what I was and what I did. Because what I was is what I am, and what I did is not the end of me. It’s not the end of any of us. We are not a sum total of bad decisions, false starts, or egregious detours. They don’t get more weight in the final tally, no matter what anyone says and no matter how many hearts stay broken. My own heart, the one that drowned and then floated back up to the surface, is on its own slow but steady mend. That boyfriend I had back then is doing incredibly well and remains one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. We are close friends again after the many years we both needed apart. We are alive.
Look at the moon tonight. It’s the harvest moon and it should rise in the sky, shaded in amber and visible to millions of people at the exact same time. If it’s your birthday or wedding day or another day that means something to you, hold it close. If September 7th is just another day to you, no matter. Look at the moon. You are alive.
