In March of 2011 I received a letter informing me that my ex-wife, Adrianna, had died. She had been found on the bathroom floor of some cheesy Lansing, Michigan motel room, dead of an apparent heroin overdose. She was thirty-five. Her old man was in bed. He died of an overdose too. The cleaning ladies found them when they came in that morning.
I was recently re-reading that old letter. It begins: “I have some horrible news. I was looking for Adrianna. She died…” Most times, life changing events happen right before our eyes and we never even notice. But not this one. This one I knew would be a life defining moment that became frozen in time, shaping who I would become from thence forward. Similar to those moments like when Jack Kennedy was shot, the World Trade Centers fell, or when John Lennon was murdered.
I can still remember opening that letter. At first I had no reaction at all except a slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember Three Dog Night playing on my radio, doing their version of “I’ve Never Been To Spain.” I’ve always loved this song, but couldn’t listen to it for several years afterward. I would turn it off before he could finish the opening line. I can still recall how the light in my cell seemed overly bright, the way that some bulbs get just before they give up the ghost. The words “Adrianna” and “died” together in the same sentence just wouldn’t make sense.
On the Wednesday evening when I’d first read that letter I’d been in TDC for somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years and probably hadn’t spoken with Adrianna in at least that long. But just as the reality of what happened to her began to slog its way through the swamp land that was my brain, so too with it came all the old hurts and past recriminations, the self-castigation for all the blame I layer at my own feet.
If I hadn’t been the one to start her up on the dope she’d still be alive. If I had just stuck it out with her a little longer and tried just a little harder to make it work, then I wouldn’t have squandered my life in prison and she’d still be alive. If only I’d … ad nauseum. I told myself all these things as well as a host of other lies for a long time. I even did a pretty fair job of convincing myself they were true. But that first night it was all I could do to wrap my head around what her death meant and how it was the cause of the enormous hole in my heart where she’d haunted for so long. I know that cowboys don’t cry. All us convicts are way too tough for all that stuff anyway (tongue in cheek), but once I began to comprehend how I was standing at the edge of a great abyss, it was all I could do to not start clawing my face.
Even now I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s poem, “Requiescat,” and the bad feeling associated with it. “All her bright and golden hair Tarnished with rust, She was that young and fair Fallen to dust.” (Lines 4-8) The cat who lived next door to me at the time (and is still one of my great pards to this day) knew that something was wrong, that I’d received some bad news in the mail or something. So, like any good, respectful friend, he gave me my space until I decided that I wanted to be fucked with.
What he had no way of knowing was that space was the one thing I didn’t need. I needed people. I needed to talk. Not so much about Adrianna and certainly not about the way I was feeling. Nothing so therapeutic as all that. I mean, I felt fucking insane. I just wanted to chop it up, to escape all my crazy thoughts and feelings for a while. Hell, we could talk about anything: dope, whores, the Dallas Cowboys, pork futures, Chinese democracy, or which one of these chicks on the unit had the most edible ass.
Ironically, it was during this period that I’d accomplished what I think was some of my best writing. I was writing about anything and everything. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry alike. Whatever got me out of my own head or just allowed me to not be me for a little while. I tossed every page of it in the trash. Every last line. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it. The stuff was pure poison.
I couldn’t even look at it. I refer to this period of my life as the “Crazy Time.” And it got pretty crazy, no doubt about it. Anyone who has lost someone they deeply cared for knows exactly what I’m talking about. For the next year or so I was as crazy as crazy can be. It may not always have shown (or maybe it did). I may have been able to hide it at times (or maybe I couldn’t). But I truly thought it was going to kill me. I felt as if I were stumbling through a dark tunnel while unseen hands grabbed at me from the shadows. I didn’t always know where I was going to or even where I was coming from. I only knew that I couldn’t seem to find my way out of the dark and yet I was terrified of what I would find if I did. I quit exercising and started eating bad. A lot of sugar, a lot of grease, a lot of fat, and a lot of salt. Comfort foods. I began to put on weight. A little at first, but then a lot. I was taking pills by the handful and drinking too much homemade wine. Anything to take the edge off.
Although Adrianna had been gone from my life for a long time, I was feeling her absence acutely. And I was angry. I was angry at God for taking her. From me. From her. From whomever. I was angry at myself for being such an asshole and I was angry at her for allowing me to be one. Most of all I was just plain pissed off at her for dying. I mean, what the fuck? How could God just take her away like that and who the hell told Him He could anyway? I didn’t know it when I had her (or maybe I was just too stupid to know) but she meant everything to me. As long as I knew that she was in the world I was okay. I thought that God must really hate me for living such a horrible life or for treating her like a second-class citizen in her own country. I thought He was finally taking His revenge on me. I hated the way I was feeling and I hated my life. I wanted to die. I’d somehow gotten it into my head that if I did, then I would see her again and would be able to apologize to her for all the wrong I’d done her. So I tried to kill myself. I tried to hang myself with a fan cord. It almost worked too, but I chickened out just before everything went black. Then I felt like a total loser for being such a fucking coward.
What kept bothering me so much was our last night together. At the same house anyway. She was sitting on our bed crying, asking me to come lay down with her in a last ditch effort to try and work things out between us, putting out there the one thing she had left that might still move me. And I walked out of the room. Random images kept surfacing in my mind: thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams. I remembered how even way back in the day she wanted us to get off the dope and the booze, to get our lives together and start going to church. I thought about how we could have been normal. Instead I cried, mourning my loss, her loss, our loss. All in secret. I simply couldn’t let anyone know how bad it was and I didn’t want to. I felt too ashamed, not only of how her death was effecting me but how badly I was handling it. I mean, what would’ve been the point in telling anyone what an asshole I am? Hell, they already knew that. My family would’ve only worried needlessly over something they couldn’t do anything about. The prison administration/medical department would stick me in a psych cell. And the people I associated with would’ve thought I was weak or a psych patient for failing to keep a stiff upper lip.
The one thing I kept returning to, like a dog to his vomit, was that her death was ultimately my fault. Her being on heroin was my fault. Her shitty relationship with her mother was my fault. That she hadn’t been in contact with her father for years was my fault. And if she was now condemned to some Hell, that would be my fault too. My mind knew that this was completely irrational but my heart wouldn’t be convinced. I felt like I was coming apart at the seams. I couldn’t figure out how to soften the sharp edges of the pain or the craziness except to swallow more pills. I was giving myself all the credit, and all the blame, for the tragedies of another adult’s life and death. In my grief and insanity I had finally reached the height of arrogance. Although I couldn’t understand it while I was down the rabbit hole, Death is not the enemy. At times, he’s even a welcomed friend. And while I’m terrified of ever having to walk through that tunnel again, I know it’s going to happen and the time is coming. It’s going to happen to all of us at some point. That’s life. No one makes it out alive.
In another twist of irony, it was Adrianna that extended the hand that pulled me up out of the hole I’d dug for myself. Her and the grace of God. It was a week or so before Halloween (22 October to be exact. I went as an insane convict that year). I was sitting on my bunk, listening to the Mike Harvey Show on my radio and brooding again over them old “Adriannic” letters, flagellating myself and making sure none of my scabs were healed too well to bleed. Just another day at the office.
In a voice as loud and clear as if she was sitting right next to me, I heard my dead wife say, “Just quit beating yourself up with it!” Her voice was so clear—so right there with me—that I sat up like she’d punched me, replying to my empty cell: “Is that what I’m doing?” But, of course, it was and we both knew it. I’d been slamming my head against the brick wall of her death for so long by that time that it was a blue-eyed wonder I could even see straight. Even all these years later I still believe—No, I know with certainty—that it was her. I can’t explain how this could’ve been possible or even why it should’ve been so. But I do know that for one split second God permitted her to breach the veil between this plane of existence and the next, just so that she could toss a life jacket to an old friend whose ship was sinking fast and allowing me to know that all is well, all past slights are forgiven, and there are no hard feelings.
It was a solemn and sacred moment. I’d never experienced anything like it before and doubt that I ever will again. The whole incident probably didn’t last a full second. But it has spun out before me to this day, allowing me to begin letting go of all the pain and hold on to the love. There are more mysteries in this world than in all your philosophies, Horatio.
J.S. Slaymaker #04078087
Alfred Hughes Unit
2101 FM 369
North Iowa Park, TX 76367
