Page 41 of All the Way to the River

I would love to say that things got better after that, but they didn’t.

Or rather, things didn’t get better immediately .

Life doesn’t fall apart all at once, and it doesn’t get healed all at once, either.

Rome was neither built nor dismantled in a day.

Sometimes a spiritual awakening takes a minute to sink in, or a few months, or a few years.

But something started happening within me, after my day of sobbing conversations in the park with all my wisest friends.

Something started turning toward the dim and distant light of comprehension.

The word addiction had been introduced—regarding not only Rayya but also me.

The word codependent had been introduced—about me .

The term caregiver collapse had been introduced—also about me .

And two separate people had suggested that I immediately attend some twelve-step meetings (in two separate fellowships!) in order to get myself some help. This was weird and a little offensive but also interesting, because it suggested that perhaps something was wrong with me , not only with Rayya.

Huh.

But healing is slow, messy, and not at all linear, and we do not achieve sanity overnight.

Which I mention only to explain why I did a very dumb thing that week.

I decided to stage a spontaneous intervention for Rayya, to confront her with her drug addiction.

This was not a good idea, as it turns out.

I do not recommend that anyone ever do this to their drug addict.

“Zero out of ten stars” is my review for what it feels like to hastily strong-arm a few friends and family members into confronting a rabid cokehead, with no plan in place, with no addiction expert in the room, with no script, with no car waiting to take them to rehab if they decide they want to go.

If you stage such an intervention without having had any sleep for a few weeks, it will go even worse.

But that’s what I did, because I didn’t know any better—and I was still trying to control the situation, because that’s what codependents do .

I called a few people and begged them to please come to our apartment and “back me up” as I dealt with Rayya.

Then those poor folks had to basically sit there and watch me spring an uncoordinated surprise attack on my partner, telling her that we were “all concerned” that she had “become a drug addict again” (as if an addict is ever not an addict!) and instructing her that something needed to change.

What needed to change, exactly?

This was the part I had not scripted, because I had no idea what needed to change—or how.

So I guess maybe I was leaving that part up to Rayya to decide—so she could fix it?

Rayya, who was utterly out of her mind?

You might not be surprised to hear that this janky-ass, hysteria-driven, ill-conceived, amateur-hour intervention did not go well.

Rayya—coked out of her brain, humiliated, exposed, and cornered—fought back with all her formidable power.

She was furious at everyone, but she focused the hottest stream of her fiery rage upon me, because everything was obviously my fault.

I was the one, after all, who had found the cancer doctors for her, and those doctors were the ones who had prescribed all this medication to her, so it was clearly my fault if she was addicted.

And by the way, she insisted, she wasn’t even addicted to any of these substances!

(“I’m just doing a fucking medical experiment here, Liz, and if you can’t handle it, get the fuck out! ”)

But if she was addicted to cocaine, which she obviously was not, then it certainly was not her fault.

There wasn’t even any cocaine in the house, she promised.

And if anybody did happen to find any cocaine hidden in the house, she didn’t know how it had gotten there.

In fact, one of her doctors, Rayya swore, had told her that she should do cocaine (“medical-grade cocaine,” she explained, which she claimed he’d been ordering for her “from a secret research facility in New Jersey”), because cocaine was actually really good for her, and this doctor wished he could prescribe it to all his cancer patients, because it gave them a lot of energy.

In fact, he had told her she was a “fucking genius” for having the idea to do the cocaine in the first place, because it was so useful in cancer treatment.

Anyway, she went on, “since when is cocaine even addictive?” (“It never used to be addictive back in my day!” she shouted, staring me down with the eyes of an absolute maniac.)

And also—she reminded me many, many times during the intervention—she was dying , so everyone needed to back off and leave her alone and let her do what she wanted.

Meanwhile, I sobbed and pleaded with her to return to her senses.

Inelegantly, I begged her to become her “old self” again—as if she could have somehow magically done that.

I also said a bunch of really thoughtful things like “You wanna die all alone, with a needle in your arm and nobody you love at your side? Is that what you want, Rayya? IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?!”

And for some reason I decided that this was a really good time to remind her of all the generous things I had ever done for her, and what a good and kind and loving person I was, and how I deserved to be treated way better than this.

Curiously, she did not respond well to that.

“Fuck off , Liz!” she shouted. “I had a perfectly good fucking life before you stepped in and took control over everything!”

And then she got colder and quieter, and said the very worst thing that anyone has ever said to me—blasting the deadly words across the table and straight into my brain as though from a shoulder-mounted missile launcher.

“I wish we’d never gotten together,” she said.

“You threw yourself at me, and I never should’ve agreed to it.

You’re way too much fucking trouble to deal with—just like I always knew you would be.

I wish we’d just stayed friends. That way, I could still have access to all the good parts of you, but someone else could deal with all your emotional bullshit. ”

That’s when I ran out of the apartment sobbing—leaving Rayya there in the care of the poor, bewildered people I had strong-armed into the “intervention”—and I didn’t come back for several weeks.

So yeah.

That went well.