Page 46 of All the Way to the River

W hat Rayya ended up doing after that—after I told her I was exiting her story, and that she would have to make her own plans from now on—was to call her ex-girlfriend Stacey back in Detroit and ask if she could move in with her.

I know how that sounds, but it wasn’t like that.

Stacey and Rayya had been lovers once, but that had been decades ago—back when Rayya had been in active drug addiction the first time.

Stacey had seen Rayya at her very worst back then, and had been treated pretty badly by her at times, but the years had mellowed them into dear friends.

Amends had been made, bonds had been strengthened, terms of engagement had been negotiated and refined. Stacey and Rayya had become family.

I wasn’t there for the initial conversation, but I heard all about it later.

Rayya had called Stacey, saying, “I need your help, Stace.” Then she confessed to how deeply she had fallen into addiction, how I had cut her off, how she didn’t know where to go now.

Stacey made Rayya tell her what drugs she was on. (“And don’t you dare bullshit me, or I’ll hang up on you.”)

Rayya told her: cocaine, morphine, and methadone.

Oh yeah—and also trazodone, weed, Klonopin, fentanyl, and Xanax.

Oh yeah—and also prednisone, Adderall, Ambien, and muscle relaxants.

“Okay, so what do you want me to do about all this?” Stacey asked.

“I want you to help me get clean.”

“If you can get yourself to Detroit without dying or getting arrested, and if you’re really serious about this, I’ll help you. But I’m only giving you one chance.”

So Rayya—high out of her mind, carrying more drugs in her luggage than a Colombian mule—managed to get herself on a flight to Detroit the next day, a flight she would later not remember having taken (and boy, do I feel awfully sorry for whoever was sitting next to her).

Somehow she found her way to Stacey’s house.

Stacey met her at the door. She demanded that Rayya turn over all the drugs, both prescription and illegal. She’d be administering Rayya’s substances from now on.

When Rayya balked, Stacey said, “This isn’t like the old days, Rayya, and I’m not the person I used to be.

You can’t manipulate me the way you used to do, or the way you’ve been manipulating Liz and your family lately.

Frankly, I don’t have the same level of emotional investment in you.

I’m not your lover, I’m not your sister.

You’re just my dear old friend, and I adore you.

But if you don’t cooperate with me completely, I’ll throw you right out—and then where will you go?

You’re running out of options here. Nobody else will take you in, because nobody wants to deal with your bullshit.

You can go to jail, but they’ll make you kick the drugs cold turkey, which would probably kill you at this point.

Do you understand how boxed in you are, Rayya?

Even when you were a badass junkie living on the streets, you had way more power and control than you have right now.

Your days are numbered. You’re dying. That’s the reality.

So right now I’m asking you: How do you want to die?

You can die sober in a warm bed, with your loved ones around you and taking care of you, or you can go out there and kill yourself on the streets all alone, as a drug addict.

These are the options you’re facing. I’m not telling you to kill yourself, Rayya. But I am telling you to decide .”

Rayya agreed to turn over the drugs, and Stacey let her in.

Stacey told me all this on the phone later that night, once she had gotten Rayya settled to sleep. Her composure, as she spoke, blew my mind: How could anybody be so sure of herself, so strong, so capable?

“She swears she wants to get clean,” Stacey said, “and I think I can help her.”

“Why are you doing this, though?” I asked.

“Because she’s my best friend and I love her. I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t give her one last chance to die with dignity.”

To be honest, I never in a million years thought it would work.

But I was wrong.

What Stacey ended up running out of her home in the early autumn of 2017 was basically a private rehab clinic plus a hospice center.

She stayed awake for days and nights on end to monitor Rayya, who was shaking and crying and vomiting and shitting and hallucinating her way through the final detox of her life.

Stacey made it as comfortable for Rayya as she could, gradually weaning her off the hard stuff while also taking away her phone so she couldn’t dial up another delivery source in Detroit.

Gradually, Stacey was able to determine what dosage of painkillers Rayya actually needed to be on in order to manage the cancer pain, while titrating her off the drugs that were making her insane.

And Stacey did all this without being manipulated or bullied, and without melting down into caregiver collapse herself.

And that’s not all she did, either.

She also started taking Rayya to doctors’ appointments in Michigan—putting her in the care of an excellent physician who had been recommended by Rayya’s sister and who recalibrated Rayya’s entire palliative care plan.

The doctor also confirmed that Rayya had very little time left to live, with a liver that, at this point, was more tumor than organ.

That being the case, Stacey convinced Rayya to return to hospice—and, more astonishingly, convinced hospice to return to Rayya.

Soon there were nurses and social workers coming over every few days to help tend to all the side effects of Rayya’s cancer, from bedsores to itchy skin to bleeding gums, and to prepare Stacey’s house for the care of a dying woman.

Stacey also got Rayya to eat food. Real food.

And she got her to hydrate , for God’s sake.

It does not serve this memoir for me to pretend to be a better person than I am, so I must confess here that I was massively jealous of Stacey at first. I mean—how was she doing this? How had she pulled Rayya out of that impossible tailspin? And how was she doing it with such kindness?

I was experiencing something I can only call “grace envy,” because Stacey seemed so much more graceful than me! More patient, more loving, more good …

Stacey’s miraculous competence and decency made me feel like a total failure.

Not only had I failed at romantic love—failed at my “most beautiful story”—but I had failed as a nurse to my cancer patient.

And I had utterly failed in my job as “drug addict’s girlfriend”—meaning I’d failed to keep my partner from slipping back into addiction.

(Why hadn’t I thought to hide the opioids in a locked safe?

Why hadn’t I immediately flushed the street drugs down the toilet?) I had failed to keep Rayya in hospice.

I had failed to limit any of her worst impulses or destructive behaviors.

I had failed to earn her respect. And I don’t think I’d ever successfully made her drink a glass of water.

I now understand that anytime I put myself in comparison against someone else, especially another woman, I am in my disease of love addiction—because all comparison arises from the exact same place of scarcity, insecurity, and desperation that brought this mental illness upon me in the first place.

But I was so overwhelmed and hurt back then that I couldn’t help it.

Soon I became convinced not only that Rayya loved Stacey more than she loved me but also that she should —because Stacey was obviously a far better human being than I was.

Even worse, I had gone from being at the very center of Rayya’s life—her guardian, her gatekeeper, her noble caregiver, her lover, her best friend, the most important person in her life, the maker of all decisions—to being an outsider.

From six hundred miles away, I stared at my phone all day, waiting for my girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend to send me updates.

Just to be clear, it was not Stacey who was making me feel like an outsider.

No—Stacey was great . She was humble and compassionate, and she was clearly operating from a place of truly selfless service toward a friend in need.

And she was acting as a good friend to me, too.

She was considerate about keeping me in the loop about everything she was doing for Rayya, and she listened respectfully to my opinions about medical decisions.

And even though Stacey gently suggested that it might be better for everyone involved if I wasn’t around Rayya at this very moment (at least not until Rayya could “get her head on straight”), she also expressed concern about my well-being.

Stacey understood the hell I had been through with Rayya because she had been through that same hell herself, all those years ago.

She understood better than anyone what a chaos tornado a drug-addled Rayya Elias could stir up.

And she knew that I was under an immense amount of pressure to shut down the New York apartment.

Stacey kept suggesting that I use this time away from Rayya to get some long-overdue rest and to tend to my own life.

“Go out to dinner,” she would say. “Get some sleep! Reconnect with your friends! Treat yourself to some self-care!”

But you can’t tell an unrecovered codependent to do any of those things!

We don’t know how to do any of those things!

We don’t know how to take care of ourselves—that’s the whole goddamn problem!

If a codependent person is not at the white-hot epicenter of somebody else’s life—mothering, manipulating, managing, and martyring themselves; being validated as “important” and “irreplaceable”; being praised for all that they are “sacrificing” for the benefit of someone else—we don’t even know how to exist.

It didn’t help my mood that when Rayya finally got her phone back and her head on straight, and was able at last to call me from Michigan, she sounded chipper and sane—which really made me feel like I was losing my mind, because I was neither of those things, and I wasn’t even the one who was dying!

When I asked how she was feeling (hoping, of course, for tearful apologies and deep remorse for all the pain and suffering she had put me through, as well as passionate declarations of undying love), she spoke instead as if she had just been on a fantastic adventure that she thought I might appreciate hearing about, as if I were some kind of curious spectator or uninvolved audience member.

She said, “Babe, it’s the wildest thing!

I woke up the other morning and suddenly realized I was in Stacey’s guest room!

And I had no memory of how I got there! I was like, ‘Wait—why am I in Michigan? Where’s all my stuff?

Where’s Liz? Where’s my whole life?’ And then I suddenly understood: ‘Oh, man! I just lost everything again! Holy shit! That can only mean one thing! I must’ve become a drug addict again!

’” Then Rayya started laughing—that huge, famous, molasses-rich Rayya Elias laugh.

“Can you believe that, babe? After all these years, I became a junkie again!”

I replied, with all the coldness and spite that my martyred spirit could muster, “I was already made aware of that fact, yes.”

But she wasn’t done. Still giddy, Rayya said, “When are you coming out here to see us? Babe, I feel so blessed to be here. I feel so lucky to be alive! It’s a real miracle, everything Stacey has done for me.

She’s such an incredible person and I want you to get to know her better! She’s such a fucking angel !”

That did it.

That’s when I felt the top of my head fly off with rage.

It took all the self-control I possessed to not shout back, “No, she’s not! I’m the fucking angel around here! Do you hear me, Rayya?! I’M THE FUCKING ANGEL!”

But instead, I felt something else happen within me.

In the middle of that rage swell, I suddenly gave up.

I felt my ego go snap —and that’s when I heard God’s voice again.

My child, if you ever find yourself wanting to scream at somebody that you are “the fucking angel around here,” there is a slight to moderate possibility that you are not one.

You might, in fact, have become someone who needs an angel.

And just for today, that angel might be named Stacey.