I chose life

There's an anonymous poem floating around the internet, primarily on blogs, that goes something like this:


fuck the poets of the past, my friends.
there are no beautiful suicides
just cold corpses with shit in their pants
& the end of the gifts.


I don't know why this hit me right now...I guess it's just because I've been thinking about my kids today. In case you're a stranger who just happened upon this blog, I should explain that both my kids, my 28-year-old daughter and my 25-year-old son, are heroin addicts. They aren't doing well.

It's so easy to blame someone else for your own behavior. And of course, sometimes others have a huge hand in the behavior of children--the fathers who molest, the mothers who lock their kids in closets--but at some point it becomes necessary to leave the blame behind and move forward on your own steam. There's no future in blame; Mom and Dad and Uncle Joe can't go back and undo the past, and they can't live your life for you now.

At some point, most children--and we are all somebody's children--start to see that it's not as simple as they once thought it was; that their parents did not, for the most part, do what they did with the intention of torturing or screwing up their kids. It becomes possible to forgive, and at the same time, impossible to continue to attribute responsibility for their lives to their parents. Most children.

There's a movie called "The Hours", starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman as, respectively, a contemporary woman who is dealing with the final days of her dying ex-husband; a depressed housewife from, perhaps, the 1950s; and Virginia Woolf. The three women are tied together both thematically and by various plot elements.

I strongly identified with the story of the depressed housewife--not because I'm a bird in a gilded cage, like the housewife in the movie--stuck in a marriage that offers her no fulfillment--but because she makes a terrible choice--the same choice I have made in life. She chooses to leave her family, including her very young son, rather than committing suicide. When confronted at the end of the movie, she does not try to make excuses; she simply says, "I chose life". That's what I did too--I chose life.

I often beat up on myself for deciding at various times to cut myself off from my children, spend less time with them than might be expected, deny their wish to live with me. The fact is, those choices were a matter of survival. I was not willing to allow myself to stay in situations I could not handle, and which might ultimately have destroyed me. I chose life.

Sometimes over the years, when people asked me where I lived, I would be tempted to reply, "Between a rock and a hard place". I wish my actions had not been so painful for my children. I wish I had not had to make such hard, hard choices. And most of all, now that I have Stage IV breast cancer, I wish there could be some kind of reconciliation before I die.

But that's not under my control. I have to live with my choices. I hope that someday, my kids will be able to accept responsibility for their own lives, and live with their own choices. And I hope, for their sakes, they will be able to forgive.

May