28 Days

What I remember about the rehab hospital was how plain vanilla and unremarkable it seemed. There was no hint of the madness and desperation behind its walls and certainly no indication that it might be capable of making miracles. I'd driven by the place twice a day, five days a week, for better than three years and had never really noticed it.

Worcester was not a pretty city in the '80's. Urban renewal and gentrification were running wild just an hour away in Boston but Worcester with it's grimy, stale air and dirty streets was as blue collar as it got. The hospital, squarely in the heart of downtown, was an unimposing and easily overlooked three story structure of garden variety brick. It didn't look like the forbidding lunatic asylum I sometimes had nightmares about - Olivia deHavilland's “Snakepit” had made an indelible impression on me and back then there were times when I called my own fragile sanity into question - but it was also clearly not the tennis courts and manicured lawns of Cascade, the convalescent hospital where Bette Davis got well in “Now Voyager”. Sitting in the pot holed parking lot while I killed time waiting for my appointment with my counselor and trying to work up my courage, I saw the sun reflecting off the small third floor windows. Windows with bars, I couldn't help but notice.

“Dextox ward,” my nervewrackingly cheerful and decidedly un-Claude Raines aftercare counselor had casually told me, “As long as they're not violent, the average stay is 72 hours. No visitors, of course.”

Of course, I'd thought and nodded as if I were an old hand at this. I didn't want him to know that I thought at any moment my knees were going to buckle and I'd start screaming.

“Here,” he said kindly and steered me to a chair, “Sit down before you fall.”

I sat. I thought if he kept being kind to me, I might breakdown entirely but I couldn't figure out how to say so.

“Take a deep breath,” he suggested, “Talk if you want to.”

His name was Calvin. He was young, barely into his 40's, I thought, and had been sober for the last 18 years. He wore corduroy jackets, blue jeans and tennis shoes and sometimes smoked a pipe.

I”t gives me something to do with my hands,” he'd told me in an early counseling session, “and my patients seem to be reassured by the image. Image is so important to us, I'm sure you know. Do you smoke?”

“Like a chimney,” I'd admitted.

He'd smiled, brushed aside a stack of papers on his desk and slid a plastic ashtray toward me.

It's not really allowed but I think we'll make an exception this one time,” he'd told me.

More kindness, I'd thought bitterly but had managed to mumble a thank you.

Back in the now, several weeks later, we sat in his small cluttered office with its overflowing bookcases and water colored walls and a streak of sunshine coming from the one unbarred window. Two floors up, my husband was in his second day of detox and I was obsessed with the fear that he wouldn't make it to his third. Truth to tell, I was more than a little stunned that he'd made it to his second.

“Funny, isn't it,” Calvin said quietly, nodding toward a carton of Marboro Menthols in my lap, “cigarettes are allowed but coffee isn't. It's the caffeine, you see, almost as bad as nicotine. He'll get used to it.”

Having lived with the man for a decade, I didn't think so. He'd staged a massive retreat at the news that there'd be no Luzianne Chicory Coffee for 28 days and I'd have bet money he was going to tell them all to shove it and walk out but the nurses just shrugged and reminded him that it was all voluntary and that he could leave anytime. He'd cussed a vicious blue streak, slammed his duffel bag against a wall and torn up the antiseptically made bed but he'd agreed to stay.

Calvin, I realized dimly, would know all about that little scene. As determined as I was not to, I began to cry. Well, it wasn't so much as crying as it was hysteria. I felt as if something had broken clean in two within me, snapped like a branch in a hurricane wind and come crashing to the ground. I wailed. I didn't think I'd ever be able to stop. Ten years of living with a drunk, ten years of lying about it, ten years of protecting him and the image of a happy marriage, ten years of desperation, despair and loathing poured fourth like an open fire hydrant.

Calvin crossed one ankle over one knee and patiently waited me out.

“I'll see that he gets the cigarettes,” he said after several minutes when the waterworks finally receded, “and you can see him day after tomorrow. If you want to, of course. Now, “he paused and handed me a box of Kleenex, “Let's talk about you.”

I was, in a funny and perverse kind of way, relieved he hadn't tried to comfort me. The part of me that was busily, guiltily imagining the horrors on the third floor - restraints and dt's and God only knew what else - didn't need any encouragement. The martyred and resentful part begging for recognition and sympathy after all my self-sacrifice was looking for a medal. And the part that was so deathly afraid of the whole thing being a miserable, public failure wanted only for someone to wave a magic wand and make it all go away. It could be, I was beginning to see, although reluctantly, that comfort would only prolong my illusions. It wouldn't have been a kindness.

“You need a plan,” Calvin was saying, “May I make a suggestion?”

I nodded.

“There's an AlAnon meeting downstairs in a half hour. Start there. Then go home. Eat something. Get some sleep. Just for tonight, let it go and worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here. One day at a time. One night at a time. One hour at a time if you have to.”

“Pretty short term plan,” I said shakily and he laughed.

“Pretty short term problem,” he said gently, “Just for tonight.”

Nonetheless, I decided, it was a good plan. I stopped at the visitors washroom to soak some paper towels in cold water and hold them to my eyes until the swelling eased, repaired my makeup as best I could, and then slipped outside to the small patio to smoke a cigarette and, as my grandmother used to say, collect myself. When I felt calmer and cooler and a little more in control, I walked back inside to the meeting. The minute the door swung silently shut behind me, I felt a shadow of sanity wake up, rouse itself, and begin to make its way back to me. I joined the mostly all women circle - some, no doubt, with husbands in the very same predicament as mine on the third floor - and tried to clear my mind. The women I knew smiled at me, peaceful smiles, survival smiles, despite what I knew from their stories were obscene personal tragedies. Sitting across from me was my friend and sponsor, Dottie. “Let go and let God,” she mouthed at me, gave me a wink and then threw open her flowered jacket to show off her bright blue t shirt emblazoned in oversized white letters that read “Surrender, Dorothy!” It was the first time in the lifetime that been the last two days that I laughed, genuinely and out loud, and the other women joined in almost at once. How could you not? “Bless you, Dottie,” someone said and she blushed.

It was still light as I drove the twenty miles to the now empty apartment at the top of Dead Horse Hill. It was pretty country, a little on the rural side, and there was practically no traffic. It gave me a chance to breathe and think and wonder what I was supposed to do now. The cats were suitably glad to see me and the silence of the small apartment didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected. It occurred suddenly to me that in my whole life I'd never lived alone. Now I found myself wondering if I'd like it.

“Well,” I told my small black cat who had been with me the longest, “we've got 28 days to find out, don't we.”

It only took four.

With the accuracy of heat seeking missile, I searched, found, and demolished every despised beer can, full or empty, until I'd filled three lawn and leaf bags. I washed floors and walls, fixtures and furniture, put fresh sheets on the bed, defrosted the refrigerator, Easy Off'd the oven and still made an AlAnon meeting every night. I went to work each day with a renewed sense of purpose and spent my evenings reading, stitching, playing with the cats. I ate exactly what I liked when I was hungry and slept like the dead. I felt free.

Calvin, in a final act of kindness, called at the end of the third week to tell me my husband had pronounced himself cured and checked himself out, a week early and very much against medical advice. There was nothing he could do but warn me.

“He's sober,” my aftercare counselor said neutrally, “But he's not well or much changed. Promise me you'll be careful and remember to take care of yourself. Don't skip your meetings and don't get sucked back in.”

I promised. I thanked him. I assured him I'd see him soon. And then I vomited until my throat was raw.

The homecoming was awkward. He was, as Calvin had said, sober. But he was also defiant, angry, sullen and silent. I knew at once that the minor battle had been won but the great war was hopelessly lost. Then it slowly began to dawn on me that I wasn't - lost, that is - the kindness of my aftercare counselor and my AlAnon group, my sponsor and all the friends who had started out as strangers had been a gift. It had, albeit painfully, brought me to my senses and to strength and reality, all without a single word or gesture of actual sympathy or well intentioned advice. These precious people had comforted me with kindness just as someone had once comforted them. I have done my best to do the same for others ever since.