Page 53 of All the Way to the River

I f this were only a story about the life and death of Rayya Elias, I suppose our book would be finished now, and may God rest her soul.

But it isn’t only a story about Rayya: It’s a story about the two of us—and we still have me to deal with here.

Me, who was left behind here in Earth School—feeling more alone and uncertain in my curriculum than ever.

Me, who was, at the time of Rayya’s death, still an unrecovered sex and love addict on the loose—still living in the same trauma-informed brain I’ve always possessed.

A brain that would chew itself to death if it were left unsupervised and undistracted for too long.

A brain that had always instructed me to grasp on to others for comfort whenever it was in need and pain.

A brain that was hardwired to seek solace outside of itself, wherever solace could be found.

A brain that was now permeated with the deepest grief of its life and was therefore hungrier than ever for sedation, stimulation, connection, relief.

A brain that, in the aftermath of Rayya’s departure, now felt like an uninsulated high-voltage wire, crackling and snapping and whipping about in the winds of a never-ending storm.

How did it go for me, then, after Rayya died?

What did I do next?

How do you think it went for me?

What do you think I did next?

I did what I had always done.

I did what any sick and suffering addict will always eventually do if they don’t have a program of recovery: I went out there and I used.

So.

Let me break it down for you, as Rayya used to say.

Attentive readers may remember that I had started attending twelve-step meetings when Rayya was on cocaine and my world was falling down around my ears. You may also remember that I’d hated every minute of those meeting—although I did take some notes.

You may not be surprised to learn, then, that I had stopped attending those meetings as soon as I could—which in my case meant: as soon as Rayya stopped using cocaine and started being nice to me again.

Because all my problems were solved after that, right?

I mean, why should I have to attend a recovery program designed to support people whose lives are affected by the addictions of others if my “other” wasn’t acting out in her addiction anymore?

And why should I have to attend meetings for sex and love addiction when I was actually getting love again, from someone I was devoted to?

Anyhow, I’m way smarter than most people, and I had quickly breezed through all the literature—so I figured that I basically understood all the principles of these programs and had learned all I needed to learn. Obviously.

So I had walked out of the rooms of recovery in late October of 2017 like, Thanks for all the information, everyone—I’m all set now! Nice meeting you! I’ll take it from here!

Except that I wasn’t all set, because I have never been “all set.”

I was, in fact, a mess—and not only because Rayya had died but also because, at some level, I had always been a mess.

Not that you would have known it by looking at me in the months after Rayya’s death!

But that’s because there are two things I know how to do really well in life.

One is to act like everything is fine; the other is to work my ass off.

And so, once Rayya died, I got back to the business of acting like everything was fine and working my ass off.

“I don’t really have time to grieve,” I remember saying to a colleague. “I just need to put my life back together again.”

There was, in fact, some truth to this. I really did need to put my life back together again, because I had not been tending to myself at all in the twenty months since Rayya had been diagnosed with cancer.

Now I needed to pick up the pieces of my own existence (whatever remained of it) and glue back together something resembling a life of my own.

One of the first things I did after Rayya died was to call Miriam Feuerle, my lecture agent, and ask her to book me a whole bunch of public speaking engagements, because I urgently needed to make some money.

My bank account had been gutted by the dual expenses of divorce and death, and I wanted to start earning again—and fast.

“Are you really sure you’re ready to do that?” Miriam asked.

“Totally sure,” I said. “I’ll take any job you can get for me.”

So Miriam hustled and found me a bunch of bookings, and I hit the road.

My first public speaking event was a scant two and a half weeks after Rayya died, which now seems insane to me—but I remember being quite proud of myself for getting up there on a stage in front of a bunch of strangers and performing as a bright, shiny public figure.

I remember thinking: “Look how well I’m doing! Look how strong and resilient I am!”

I also returned to writing the novel that I had abandoned the day Rayya got sick.

The project was now more than a year overdue.

I had never before missed a deadline, so this filled me with anxiety and shame.

I really needed to get the book finished so I could honor my contract and restore my relationship with my publisher—but also so I could get paid.

Hell, I needed to get the book started , because I had yet to write a single page of the thing.

But what was that book again, that I was meant to be writing?

Oh, right—it was supposed to be a glorious, funny, effervescent romp of a novel about a bunch of showgirls in the New York City theater world of the 1940s who really loved having sex.

Cool, cool, cool.

Perfect.

Just the thing to write in the devastating aftermath of your partner’s death.

So I got down to it, and I wrote City of Girls in the six months after Rayya died.

I did this by keeping up a blistering pace of productivity, writing harder than I have ever written before.

I calculated that I would need to write three thousand words a day, every day, for several months, in order to meet my new, extended deadline. So that’s exactly what I did.

Look, I still don’t think it was the worst idea.

Creativity has always been my safe and happy space, and it was nourishing to return to the work that I love.

It was good to remember who I was, besides a grieving widow.

But I pushed myself really, really hard to make that deadline.

I drove my exhausted body like a team of sled dogs in order to finish that book—which turned out, ironically enough, to be a tale so joyful that nearly every review of this novel would later use the word sparkling to describe the story.

I moved back into the old church where I had once lived so briefly, so long ago, and where Rayya had lived for nine years before she got sick.

That’s where I hunkered down and worked .

I surrounded myself with Rayya’s memory and her objects while I wrote.

I wore her clothes and ate her food out of the freezer and slept in the bed where she and I had once made love.

I talked to her all day and heard her talking to me in return.

I felt her presence in the church come and go, just as I had once felt her mother’s spirit come and go.

It was a very weird summer.

“Weird” in the Shakespearean sense of the word. Eerie and haunted.

For instance, new neighbors moved in that summer, right next door. They had a bunch of little children and one adorable puppy. When I asked the six-year-old daughter what the name of her doggy was, she looked me in the eye and said, “Rayya.”

I almost fell over. I thought I was hallucinating, but her mother confirmed it: Yes, the dog’s name was Rayya.

No, they did not know that a woman named Rayya had lived next door for many years.

Yes, the six-year-old girl had named the puppy.

Yes, she was aware that it was not a common name.

No, the little girl did not know why she had chosen that name.

“I just liked the sound of it,” said this tiny, wide-eyed child.

All summer long while I worked on my novel, I heard the children outside playing with their dog, calling her name in their high-pitched voices.

Rayya! Rayya! Rayyyyyyyyya!

Sometimes I would go over there and snuggle the puppy, who was a Rottweiler mix with huge feet and wide shoulders. She was growing up so fast! Beautiful and friendly, but also a little dangerous. Which made perfect sense.

A few months later, the family moved again, taking the dog with them, and I never saw canine Rayya again. I wept when they were gone, and the house next door stayed empty for a long time after that.

The other thing I did during that summer was go for long, searching walks in the woods, which I thought of as “dates” with Rayya.

I would hit the Record button on the voice-memo app of my phone and leave hour-long messages of me talking to her.

I was certain she could hear these messages.

(I am still certain that she could hear them.) I walked and talked and cried and laughed.

I told Rayya funny stories about our friends, and about how crazy everyone was, and about how tired and sad I was.

I would ask for guidance on how to deal with difficult people.

If I got quiet enough, I could hear her answers.

Sometimes I would hear her voice in my mind, speaking to me with direct and easy intimacy.

Other times, she would answer my questions by dropping a memory into my brain, the way our schoolteachers back in the day used to drop a slide into an old-fashioned carousel.

The image would be a memory of me watching Rayya handle some difficult interpersonal interaction by telling the truth, or setting a boundary, or forgiving someone.

You do it this way , she would say.

I do not remember praying to God that year, but I sure did pray a lot to Rayya.

I was not just sorrowful that first summer after Rayya died but also, at times, enraged.

It was not only anger at Rayya’s absence that I was feeling; it was anger at myself for how much of myself I had given away—and anger at what she had left behind for me to clean up.

She had assigned me the task of handling the details of her estate, for instance, which did not turn out to be an easy job.

Rayya had been both contradictory and grandiose with her friends and loved ones about what her bank account actually contained and how she wished her money and possessions to be distributed.

With a furiously clenched jaw, I did my best to clean up the confusion she had left behind and to manage everyone’s frustration—including my own.

The financial gifts that she had promised to her friends I paid from my own account, because her own account was pretty much empty.

I paid off her credit card bills, too—although people told me this was a stupid thing to do.

(“Why pay the bills of the dead? What are they gonna do? Dock her paycheck?”)

But martyrdom is a central characteristic of codependency, and so of course I paid her bills—not generously, mind you, but angrily. Victimly.

“Why am I still down here serving you,” I remember shouting at Rayya in the woods one day, “when you get to float off into heaven and become fucking music ?”

Waves of grief and rage overcame me so frequently during that summer that I often felt like I was swimming in wild surf, barely afloat.

Sometimes I would have no choice but to stop doing whatever I was doing and tumble to the floor and sob, no longer able to support my own weight.

Gigi told me this was called a “bow-down moment.” She said, “You just have to bow down and let it happen. Don’t resist. It will only make it worse.

Let the emotions roll through you. Just breathe. Eventually it will stop.”

Those grief waves felt like they would never stop, but it turned out Gigi was correct: Eventually, they always passed.

But I could not afford to collapse forever, so after each wave I would pull myself back up off the floor, wash my face, and start working again—all the while watching warily for the next wave, knowing that I was losing more energy with each one.

Can a person survive forever at this pace of weariness and productivity and sorrow?

I thought I could survive.

I had to survive.

It was another day, after all, and I still had another three thousand words to write before the sun went down.