Carrie Fisher: Shockaholic

Given my enormous sense of guilt, I suppose part of me wanted Greg to come back. In any form. And since corporeal was totally out of the question, ethereal would have to do. I didn’t actually feel his presence until about nine months after he’d died. It was close to Christmas, and I would open the front door to the house, stand on the threshold, and call out, “Hi, Greg!” Or, “Homo, I’m Hun!” Naturally, I avoided these salutations if I thought my daughter, Billie, was anywhere she might hear me. Not to mention anyone with some authority to have me committed.

At some point around this time, I was conferring with my book editor, and when I mentioned feeling Greg’s GRPO energy around the house she recommended I call the author of a book she was editing, who coincidentally also happened to be a psychic and who she felt might be able to shed some light on my recent darkish times. I did finally phone the woman, who told me that she felt that the reason Greg might still be around—and as I said, in my opinion, he was very around—was because he hadn’t realized yet that he was dead. He had been yanked from the world so suddenly that he didn’t know that he was no longer still in it. I told her that I felt that for quite some time now the air in the house seemed saddled with something more complicated than air. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that heaviness, either. A lot of people staying with me at the time had told me that they felt something, too. Okay, so maybe not all these people were safely on the sober side, but I’d spent a shitload of time in my life more than slightly shitfaced and not once was I ever troubled by spirits—alcoholic or otherwise. Over the next six months, this Greg-ish feeling diminished until one day I noticed it had gone away entirely. Perhaps he finally realized he wasn’t alive anymore.

But in my stressed state—oh, no! Unfortunately oh, yes!—I had begun using drugs again. And not just any drug. No, I had to start using the drug that Greg had so recently done to his premature death. I began snorting OxyContin.

Now, I am not a stupid person. I’m a fairly intelligent person who does stupid things. Incredibly stupid things. I can’t defend it. I can explain it until the end of time, but that still doesn’t make it in any way excusable, especially when you factor in the impact it had on my daughter (along with anyone else in my bonkers life who gave a shit about me). And I did it knowing full well how painful it was to have a parent who was unable to resist the impulse to resort to getting consistently altered. Altered and unavailable.

Back when Greg died, the first thing Billie said to her father was, “Now Mommy will be sad.” She didn’t express how having a dead friend of ours affected her directly. No, she immediately considered what his death would do to me, and perhaps secondarily how difficult, eventually over time, my grief and guilt would be for her. I tried really hard to make it not matter. Truly, I wanted so badly to be okay. Sure, yeah, for myself; but more than that for her. To protect her from the darker parts of me.

But I failed. It’s difficult to put into compelling words the sort of toll it took on us both. I tried—I swear, I tried—to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get on with my life. But (a) I don’t wear boots (so pulling up their straps was out) and (b) I found I simply couldn’t.

I tried to take a version of the AA wisdom to heart. “What others have done I can do.” I found myself watching documentaries of World War II veterans describing the horrors they’d barely survived, and their tragedies humbled and weirdly consoled me. My experience of Greg’s death, my blaming myself for his loss, or however you want to describe it, was a freckle on the esophagus of what these men had gone through. I figured that if these guys could get through that, then surely I could overcome my measly dark feelings. But, unfortunately, not without that detour through my dear old hunting grounds, dope. (And what a good word for it that is.)

At some other point during my intermittently self-destructive existence, I heard someone’s counselor say, “If it wasn’t for drugs and alcohol, a lot of us would’ve killed ourselves.” I thought about that as I ingested my Oxy, abusing this insight as a justification for needing to mute the large sound of Greg’s fallen tree. Of course, I should have gone to a grief counselor and/or to meetings—both of which I eventually did—but first I bungled through this not-so-shortcut.

No wonder I felt Greg’s ghost haunting me, right? I summoned the guy every time I took in the comfy poison that blurred him almost all away. So eventually—as it always, always does—it all caught up with me. Those around me began considering how and when best to intervene. Coincidentally, the moment they chose was the very day that I’d decided to turn myself quietly in to the authorities. But too late! Just as I was about to surrender to the psychopharmacologists, the addiction doctors, and the reliably saving grace of Twelve Steps, a few of my friends phoned Billie’s father and confirmed what he no doubt already suspected—that I was high, and as a result, my mothering skills were tragically very low.

Boy, was I beyond pissed at them! Newly sober and righteously indignant (which puts the “duh” in redundant), I began referring to my intervenors as the heavy meddlers. Why hadn’t they called me before calling Bryan?! Blah, blah, blah… all of which I’m beyond ashamed of now, and which eventually resulted in my sitting down and writing more than a few amends letters, belatedly assuring them I understood they’d acted in my—but more to the point, in Billie’s—best interest. They’d done what they did out of love for me and concern for my daughter. But oh, the months it took to get me to the letter-writing place! You know the one, a few miles beyond all that indignant self-righteous narcissism. The time it took for me to come to my recently and all-too-willingly abandoned senses was a period I wouldn’t return to for the world. And the whole wide one at that.

So, while I underwent that long demoralizing return trek to my version of normal, Billie went to live with her father, which was obviously the move that made the most sense, given that I was not only not any longer a person she could in almost any way rely on, but was also no longer anyone whose gestalt was anything predictable or reassuring. But simply because this was the most sensible solution under the circumstances didn’t do much to make my loss of her treasured company any easier to bear. For the first time in my life I really felt that I understood the word “heartbroken.” Which, of course, was made all the worse by knowing that I had brought all this breakage on myself. But she would remain safe and out of my potential harm’s way until I could turn my insensibly spinning life around.

Having betrayed Billie’s trust, I had to find my way back to being someone she could once again believe in. I had to try to recover whatever I could of what I’d previously heard referred to as a “maternal instinct.” I had to prove—not only to my daughter but to anyone else who had managed to maintain some sort of closeness to me other than proximity—that the management (that is, the diminishment and rearrangement) of my selfishly precious fucking feelings was not the sole or all-too-primary purpose of my misguided life.

I wish I could explain—and armed with that explanation, somehow excuse—the seemingly unending, ongoing, relentless, inordinately intense, pathetic fixation I have with my feelings. That wilderness lurking somewhere down south in my bi–solar plexus and, simultaneously, right there in back of my eyes, demanding my attention and eternally taking my emotional temperature. How do I feel? No, really how do I feel? How could I feel? Some other way, surely. By the end of this endless archeological self-examination, the observer part of your mind doesn’t know what it’s looking at anymore. Because being both archeologist and pit is, essentially… don’t make me say it… oh fuck. Okay… The pits.