NewDayNews Recovery Forum
est: Part 14: Out of the Blue, Into the
Black
Posted By:
Joseph
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Date: Saturday, 10 June 2006, at 2:11 p.m.
Following the death of my 18 year old brother, Jimmy, I went into what I know now was a deep depression.
I suddenly gave up Roadshow Players, which even with the est stuff, remains one of the best things I was ever involved in. We had generated such demand, that during the Christmas season of 1982, we had three separate casts performing the same show all over Southern California. Every cast would do a show each weeknight, except est seminar night, and then two shows on Saturday, for a total 18 shows per week. We generated enough revenue to have our own office on Foothill Blvd with a desk, phone, and space enough to rehearse. We were the subject of a large feature article in the Los Angeles Times. We had a weekly gig at Camp Hollywoodland in the summer, and were treated like rock stars by the young campers who memorized all of our lines, and said them with us like they were watching “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. Cable TV companies were regularly playing tapes of our performances into the homes of their customers. It was a dream come true, and I just walked out of it.
Even with all of this success for a group I started myself, performing scripts I had co-written, I was cloaked in darkness.
Even the music I listened to became dark. I would play Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” over and over again:
“Out of the blue and into the black
They give you this, but you pay for that
And once you're gone, you can never come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black.”
John Cougar Mellencamp had recently come out with his hit song “Jack and Diane”. In my mind, I directed a music video about Jimmy that went to the song about two young people who fall in love.I could picture Jimmy and Cindy going around doing all the teenaged things in the song. “Suckin’ on chili-dogs outside the Tasty Freeze..”. Then there is this drum solo that comes out of nowhere. I pictured that being the sounds of Jimmy’s truck tumbling off the cliff.
Then, for the next chorus, I pictured all of us mourners sitting at the grave in those folding chairs, with sunglasses on, wearing black, looking straight ahead without emotion like presenters. Singing in unison, “Let it Rock! Let it Roll! Let the Bible Belt come and Save my Soul!” Of course, here I pictured the fat Forest Lawn Rent-a-Preacher shaking his bible at us. We continue to sing, “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can! Changes come around real soon, make us women and men!”. At that point, his girl Cindy rides by the grave in a black convertible wearing a wedding dress. The driver is a guy she has just married. She tosses her bridal bouquet onto the mound of flowers on Jimmy’s grave.
I didn’t stand up and share in est seminars, because I knew exactly what they would tell me. I was hanging on to my dead brother, dragging his corpse around with me, and showing it off for all to see. To get over this, I would have to complete my relationship with my brother and let him go. Not being willing to let go made me a selfish attention whore. I wasn’t letting anybody go there with me, because if they did, I could not be counted on to react in a sane and rational manner.
My Father didn’t speak Jimmy’s name, or talk about him at all. I knew that this was off limits with him. My Mother would tell me that they would often visit Jimmy’s grave, and when they did, my Dad would cry openly.
I would visit his grave too, and often stroll around the cemetery at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills. One day, I walked over to see who was in a fresh grave a few feet from Jimmy, and it was Actor, Jack Webb from Dragnet. Another time, I found the father of the Governor of California just a few feet up the hill. In another section was Liberace, not far from the grave of Stan Laurel from Laurel and Hardy. It was always interesting to see what famous person you could find by just wandering the grounds.
My Mother had purchased three plots side by side. She wanted to buy four, but I told her to leave me out of it, since I had no idea yet if I would end up wanting to be buried with my own wife and kids. I would stand and look at Jimmy’s grave, and the two spaces next to it and realize how much sadness this one patch of earth would bring me over time. That I would come here twice more, and again experience grief.
Before Jimmy died, all I could think about was est. Now, all I could think about was Jimmy. My mind would go on for hours trying to figure out ways that I could have prevented his death. How I could have been a better brother to him. Every time we fought, and how stupid that was. When Ray was bitching to me at the sign shop about what an asshole his brother was, I shot back, “At least he’s alive”.
I couldn’t go anywhere in the town where we lived without seeing the cross up on the hill. I could be doing okay, then I’d look up and there was the cross. Jimmy’s truck was so far down in a ravine that nobody could pull it out. Kids from Mount Lukens Continuation School were known to hike down to the truck and hold late night parties in Jimmy’s honor. At the school, they dedicated a landscaped hillside to him with a plaque.
Driving my est-trained Mother past the cross one day, I remarked that I was experiencing a lot of grief, and that if felt like if I gave up the sadness, I would have to give up Jimmy. She said that maybe we would just have to be sad. Those who really know est, know that this is probably est at its best. Inside of all the tips and tricks, and quick self-help, was the philosophy that we just are. We are the way we are, and that is perfect. But, you don’t want to be sad, you want to be happy, and the more you resist the sadness, the more it persists.
At home, we were involved in parenting a seriously ill child. Gretchen’s was the size of a normal 3 year old, but she had less function than a newborn baby. She was completely limp most of the time. Jane is tiny, and it was hard for her to carry Gretchen around anymore. At some point, Jane went out and bought an old Dodge Dart, and my Mom taught her to drive. She was 26 years old when she got her first drivers license, which I learned was not unusual for women who had been in The Family.
We had not gotten married, because Gretchen required a lot of medical care. I had health insurance with the union, but the owner of Paradice had become a cocaine addict, and was squandering company funds. I was worried that he would put us out of business, and I would end up with no health insurance. Even though Jane had taken a job working at McDonalds, she made so little money that Gretchen received free medical care via California’s Medi-Cal program. This would all go away if we married, so we stayed single, but lived like a married couple with kids.
Jane was able to get the state to pay for a type of wheelchair that was similar to a baby stroller. But, it had Velcro strips that you could put over her arms, legs, and forehead to keep her sitting upright in it. It was hard to get the chair in and out of my Pinto, so when the clutch went out, I traded it in for a brand new 1983 Ford LTD station wagon.
Gretchen was blind, and mentally retarded. She had to be fed via a gastrostomy tube that was surgically implanted into her stomach, and hung out of a hole that had to be constantly cleaned to avoid infection. Jane would blend up her food into liquid, and pour it into a large syringe. The syringe would be attached to the tube, and you would hold it up in the air and let gravity slowly do its work. If it stopped, you had to take a plunger and gently push and get it going again. At the end, you would put water in and flush the tube, then stick a plastic stopper into it and tuck the tube back into her clothes.
She also needed constant trips to doctors and neurologists. She would suddenly become ill, and end up in the hospital. On one hospital stay, I was thinking about what my Aunt Doris said in Houston about Gretchen. I asked the doctor what Gretchen’s long term outlook was. He said back, “Well, she might live into adulthood, but probably not. A person in this condition can develop and infection that you and I could just fight off, but they can’t”.
Until then, I had pictured us always taking care of Gretchen. I worried what would happen to her when we died. Jane and I had talked about it, and she had said that all children eventually move away from home. Perhaps when she became too difficult for us to care for she may need to go into a care facility. But, here we were being told that her chances of surviving childhood were not guaranteed. I just tried to put that out of my mind.
We took her everywhere we went. On our yearly vacations to the Sierras, we brought her right along in the station wagon. She seemed to especially like the ghost town of Bodie. Gretchen’s reactions where very subtle but she did have them.
We found a baby sitter for her named Sandra who was a nurse’s assistant. This worked out well, because other baby sitters couldn’t deal with the tube feeding and Gretchen’s seizures. When Jane would go to work, Sandra would watch her, giving Jane a chance to experience some life outside taking care of a sick child.
The state also offered a certain number of hours per month of childcare in the home by a nurse. We used this once a week so we could to our est seminars. We had a male nurse named Jerome. He would come to the house after we ate dinner. After he arrived we would quickly leave so as not to be late to the seminar and have to get cleared.
One day, Jane was at home taking care of Gretchen, when there was a knock at the door. It was two uniformed armed police officers. They were there to investigate possible child abuse.
Jane was flabbergasted, but invited them to come in. They saw Gretchen, and asked about her state, and Jane had to explain that this was the way she was because she was chronically ill.
The police left finding no evidence of abuse. We found out later that Jerome had noted on his report that we left dirty dishes in the sink. We did this because we were in a rush after I got home from work to eat dinner and to get to the seminar. We would wash the dishes after we got home. We really didn’t think much of it being young and all. But, apparently, when Jerome’s supervisor read the report, she considered the dirty dishes to be a red flag and reported us to the police.
It made me really angry when I found out. Not long before, we had observed a neighbor across the street taking his young child out into the yard, holding him up by his arm, and beating him with a broom handle. We called the police about that, and they never even showed up. I couldn’t imagine how some dirty dishes in the sink turned into us abusing this helpless child. We stopped having Jerome come.
We still tried to go out and do things, leaving Gretchen with Sandra when we went out. I bought tickets to see Bob Seger in concert. Jane and I were planning to go together. I mentioned this to my friend John, and he got all excited and said he wanted to go with me. I told him that I was going with Jane. So, he called Jane up and told her that if she would let him have her ticket so he could go with me to the concert, he would invite us to a weekend on 4th of July at the Madonna Inn.
The Madonna In is a famous hotel in San Luis Obispo near Hearst Castle. The rooms are highly decorated in themes. John had reservations for the “Cave Man” room, and the adjoining “Daisy May” room. These rooms were totally made out of rock, so it was like being inside a cave. To go between the two rooms, you opened a little wooden door, and had to stoop down through a tunnel. The showers were designed like a waterfall with the hot water going down one ledge, and cold another and they met in the middle and poured down on you. The cave man room had it’s own rock fountain inside.
Jane agreed to give up her ticket, and John and I went to the concert together.
When 4th of July weekend rolled around, we took Christian and Gretchen to Sandra’s, and left her with all of the food and supplies she would need.
We had a wonderful time at the Madonna inn. When you are caretakers for a chronically sick person, every moment you are waiting for something to happen where you need to spring into action. It seemed very strange to be away from Gretchen for two nights, but it was relaxing at the same time.
When we returned back to Sunland, we drove immediately to Sandra’s house. She told us that Gretchen had been having a lot of seizures while we were gone. We looked at her and something seemed strange about her. We took her home.
Jane went inside the house with Gretchen, and I stepped outside to start unloading our luggage from the station wagon. Then Jane yelled, “JOE!”. I ran back inside and I saw something that I had never seen.
Gretchen was having a grand mal seizure.
We didn’t know what to do, because she never had one before. Her seizures were petit mal, and usually consisted of her stiffening up, then relaxing and twitching. She was now having full convulsions.
Jane grabbed her and we darted for the car. We drove her to the closest hospital, and they didn’t know what to do with her, not having a pediatric neurologist on staff. They put her in an ambulance and sent her to a hospital across the Valley in Tarzana.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital she had another seizure. When we arrived, they sedated her heavily, and the seizures stopped.
When night came, the hospital convinced us to go home and get some sleep. They promised to call us immediately if anything changed.
In the middle of the night, the phone rang. Jane answered it, and it was the hospital. Gretchen had a seizure that had lasted more than five minutes. They said that Jane should come immediately.
Jane asked me to stay at the house with Christian, and she would call me and let me know what was going on.
After she left, I had what I now know was my first full blow anxiety attack. I laid in bed and began to shake violently. My teeth were chattering so hard I thought one might get chipped. I wasn’t cold, but I was shaking as if I were freezing.
In the morning, I took Christian to school, and rounded up someone to pick him up and take care of him that night, and headed off to Tarzana.
When I arrived, I learned that Gretchen had been put on a respirator. When she had seizures she would not breathe, which meant that she had gone for more than five minutes without oxygen. It was the same as putting a pillow over someone’s face for five minutes. She was unable to breathe on her own.
A doctor explained to us that she might be brain dead. That they would run frequent tests over the coming hours to determine if there was any brain activity, but the tests that they had run so far didn’t show any.
A Social Worker came to talk to us and explained our options. After a certain number of hours, Gretchen would be considered legally brain dead. She could be kept on the respirator in this state indefinitely, but she would never recover, and would be considered legally and clinically dead. Unless there was a miracle and her brain began to show activity, we would have to make a decision to either maintain her on the respirator, or shut off the machines and let her go. We were informed that in this condition, with zero brain function, there would be no pain, and she would not breathe, and her body would cease to function as her brain already had.
Our friend Mary, who I had gone to high school with, and was one of the Roadshow Players directors came to the hospital. Mary had stayed at the hospital with Jane when Gretchen was born, and often claimed to be Gretchen’s real Father.
The three of us occupied the waiting room at the hospital refusing to go home until we knew what the final outcome would be.
We would take turns rotating into the intensive care room to sit with Gretchen. She looked like herself, except for the respirator tube going into her mouth. She was still being fed with the tube. She just looked like she was asleep. Then there would be a click, and a whoosh, and her chest would expand. Then another click, and it would go back down again.
When the legal time period expired, she still showed now brain activity. The Social Worker came back to ask us what we had decided. I told Jane that I would support her in any choice she made. The three of us talked about it, and came to the agonizing decision that it was best to let her go.
The Social Worker then asked us what our plans were for her body. Jane wanted to donate her organs. We discussed options for her other remains. Jane decided to have the Neptune Society handle them. Gretchen’s remains would be cremated and scattered at sea. Jane didn’t have the money to pay for the service. Though we all lived together, we had maintained separate bank accounts and finances. I insisted on paying the fees, and wrote a check and gave it to the social worker.
The Social Worker then asked Jane if she was ready to go in and say goodbye. Jane got up, and flexed her muscles, then thrust her arms toward the sky. It was as if to say, “God, please give me strength.”. When she would leave the room, Gretchen would still be hooked up, because they would have to keep her body alive to assemble the transplant team. We would not be able to be there when she was unhooked.
Mary and I sat in the waiting room. The TV was going, playing some sitcom. The Mother was mad at the son, and was reading him the riot act. The phone rang, and the Mother answered it by saying, “Hang on for a minute, there’s gonna be a death in the family!”. Mary and I just looked at each other, convinced we were creating what was on TV at that moment.
Jane came back and said she was ready to go. We all hugged each other. We said goodbye to Mary and thanked her for being there for us. It was strange that in all the time we spent at the hospital, she was the only person we knew who came to be with us. I thought it was especially odd that none of our parents showed up to offer moral support. I guess what was happening was just too awful for most people to even acknowledge.
We walked out to the parking lot, and Mary got in her car and left. It seemed unreal that we were leaving the hospital without one of our kids.
Jane was silent and looked in a state of shock. I was so upset I was dangerous behind the wheel, I almost got into an accident pulling out of the parking lot. Jimmy had died in December. It was only July and now we had lost one of our children. I felt completely powerless, and defeated.
We hardly spoke on the way home. Christian was staying with a friend of Jane’s family named Michelle, a very outspoken redhead who had dated Jane’s brother many years ago and been adopted by the sisters after they broke up.
We sadly walked up to the door, wondering how we were going to break the news to Christian, who was only five years old.
We rang the doorbell, and Michelle opened the door. She asked what had happened. One of us said something like, “It’s over.” I don’t think Michelle meant to be so abrupt, but it was probably just the shock. She yelled out at us, “YOU PULLED THE PLUG????”.
All we could do is just look back at her. She got Christian ready for us. We got back in the car, and Christian asked us how Gretchie was doing. We told him we would talk to him about her when we got home.
Arriving home, Jane sat Christian down and told him that Gretchen had gone to live with Jesus. Christian looked back at her with his big blue eyes welling with tears and asked, “So we won’t see her anymore?”. Jane told him that when we went to be with Jesus someday Gretchie would be there to meet us.
Jane’s part of this story is her own, and if she wants to tell it that is her business. All I know is what it was like for me. I can’t remember much about it to tell the truth. I went from being depressed over losing my brother to being just off the chart after losing our baby girl. I was so depressed; I didn’t even know what est would have to say to me about it. I didn’t care.
The autopsy was inconclusive regarding why Gretchen had seizures. The Doctor did tell us that there was massive damage in her brain, and they really didn’t know why.
As the weeks went by, we received a letter of thanks from the Lion’s Doheney Eye Bank, saying that Gretchen’s eyes had been received, and someone would be given the gift of sight because of her. A friend said to Jane that maybe one day she would see Gretchen’s blue eyes looking back at her. Gretchen had been blind, but it was a sort of blindness that happens in the brain. Her eyes functioned normally, but her brain just couldn’t decode the signals.
Pictures of us at this time show us smiling for the camera, but when you look into our eyes, you could see no state of aliveness.
These last two chapters of the story are the reason I’ve never talked much about est. I can’t tell the story of how I came to est, without telling how I came to leave. Until now, it’s just been too painful for me to really assemble in one story.
I went from thinking I had all the answers to knowing that I didn’t have any answers about anything. I not only knew that I had lost it, I wondered if I ever even had it, or if it existed.
As far as my religious beliefs went, I had been saved as a teenager, and at that time was really on fire witnessing and such. Then I had a bad experience with the Baptist church I was going to, and cooled off. Around the time I took est, I believed I was an Agnostic. After Jimmy and Gretchen died, I wasn’t angry with God, I became convinced there was no God to be angry at, and I became a de facto Atheist, though I never identified myself as one. I just refused to talk about God or religion for many years after that.
After this chapter, I’m going to wind it up. Obviously, things got better, or I wouldn’t be here to write this over twenty years later. Even though I had “lost it”, I still continued to go to est seminars for a while. In the next chapter, I’ll talk about how I made the choice to stop, and what life has been like since then, and what I have learned.
But first, here are the lyrics to the song always makes us think of our beautiful little daughter Gretchen. She was the only innocent human being I have ever known.
Angel Flying too Close to the Ground
By Willie NelsonIf you would not have fallen
Then I would not have found you
Angel flying too close to the groundAnd I patched up your broken wings
And hung around for a while
Trying to keep your spirits up
And your fever downAnd I knew someday that you would fly away
For love's the greatest healer to be found
So leave me if you need to
I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the groundFly on, fly on Past the speed of sound
I'd rather see you up
Than see you down
So leave me if you need to
I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground
