Chapter 3: The Truth They Wanted
Jessica Vivian Dueñas, beloved teacher, community member, friend, sister, daughter, and aunt, passed away on May 25th, 2020 at the age of 35 in a tragic car accident. She had a great passion for education and community engagement, and a great dedication to her family. Jessica leaves behind her mother, Amable, her siblings, Sandra, Lorena, Grettel, Victor, and Sofia, and her friends, colleagues, students, and her dog, Cruz …
We have a lot of assignments in treatment designed to teach us to not drink or use drugs, but writing my own obituary wasn’t an activity given to everyone. A tech, this older lady named Lisa, felt I should write it given my “recklessness.” The process of starting to draft it was awkward and in fact painful. The thinking of those “left behind” knotted my stomach as I visualized each crying face. I could imagine my middle school student James. He was usually smiling, often with his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh at something silly he just did or saw some other kid do. I pictured a woman, his mother, walking into the room he’s in and saying, “I’m so sorry baby. Ms. Dueñas died yesterday.”
Suddenly, his almost-shut-from-laughing squinted eyes soften, his cheeks that stood high from smiling drop down, and water wells up so much in his eyes that the single tear he was holding back slowly starts to roll down his face, past his nose, and onto his lip.
“Whatchu mean, Momma?”
She sniffles. “I’m sorry baby.” She leans over to embrace him and at that moment I’m so broken at the thought of another’s pain that I shake my head like a dog does to bring myself back into the present moment. Phew.
I was in the fireplace room. Our women’s group usually did most of our sessions in that space. Today we had to meditate but instead, we were all doing different things. No one actually meditated because who knew how to sit still unless you were drunk or high and basically knocked out of consciousness?
Some women like Denise decided to take a nap because she was still detoxing. She ended up here after her husband found her on the floor next to a shattered bottle of wine. She had just shared in a group that she was a full-time mom in her thirties who loved “Mommy needs wine” jokes until she realized that in fact, Mommy needed wine. I’m not a mom, but I nodded my head as soon as she spoke because I knew that needing feeling well.
Shanika walked over to the bookshelf, pulled a book at random, sat down, and cracked it open. It was nice seeing her back from the other psych hospital. Calm and settled.
On her first day here she was under the influence of God knows what. She had the wildest eyes, looked at me and immediately said, “I know you! Where do I know you from?!” Oh no, no, no no no! My secret! I panicked. Then that same night at our evening meeting when we did our prayer circle to wrap up, Shanika grabbed my friend’s ass in the middle of the prayer with no hesitation. She just latched on. I saw his eyes open wide and then we made eye contact. Clearly he didn’t know what to do; shit, I didn’t know what to do, so I just looked at him, raised my eyebrows, and shrugged my shoulders. It was funny, to be honest. We were trapped in a circle of prayer, so what were we supposed to do?
“I’m sorry to interrupt your connection with God here, but Shanika’s grabbing my ass?” Thankfully the circle eventually ended and off she went. He and I looked at each other and laughed, perhaps a bit uncomfortably.
It turned out Shanika was hallucinating and having a psychotic break. Her breaking point with our facility occurred when she climbed onto her roommate’s bed in the middle of the night and picked at her because she was covered in “ants.” The scuffle caused security to run to the room and quickly snatch her up. Shanika was gone for a few days to complete her detox in a higher-security psychiatric facility.
Those are the type of hospitals that take your bra from you so you don’t stab someone with your underwire. You can’t have shoelaces so you can’t hang yourself. It’s the type of place where techs have to lay eyes on you once every ten minutes even when you’re asleep to make sure you haven’t suddenly died. You’d be in a deeply medicated sleep and abruptly wake up to a flashlight in your face.
I’ve been in those places too.
So to see her back with us in the fireplace room, settled, calm, and quietly reading was a testament to how we can slowly come back from the dead after a few days of being in rehab. She didn’t “recognize” me anymore either. My secret was still safe.
Once we finished “meditating,” a social worker came to work with us to discuss relapse prevention planning. Essentially, we were going to sit there and outline everything that triggered us to get drunk or high, and then a list of ten things to do instead. As I listened to her I tilted my head to the side and scratched my scalp a little bit. I raised my hand.
“Yes, Jessica?” She turned to me.
“This isn’t my first time writing a relapse prevention plan, but I just don’t get how it’s supposed to work. I mean, I’ll be honest, if I want to drink, I’m not going to say, ‘Hmm, where is my prevention plan?’ That just doesn’t make sense,” I said.
She paused. “Sure, that’s a great point! So you put it on sticky notes and you place them all over your home!” Alrighty, I thought to myself, shaking my head.
Inside I wanted to scream, Don’t you get it? I’m addicted to alcohol, so my default setting is drinking! If not drinking were as easy as opening up some sort of almanac reference guide, filling out a handout, or looking at a sticky note, we wouldn’t be sitting here filling in the blanks on this paper in this treatment facility right now, would we?!
Instead, I just went ahead and started to fill it out.
Triggers:
grief, sadness, loneliness…anger, darkness…joy…light…anything! Better scratch those last few items. I didn’t want to keep them there and be accused of being cynical. I knew how these places operated. The social workers keep notes on patients, their behavior, their participation. Good behavior gets sent to the discharge team and puts folks on a go home list. Poor behavior keeps you around longer.
You can’t just leave treatment one day because you think you’re good to go. The only ways out are to either hop the fence and run, break the rules badly enough to get kicked out, run out of insurance, or wait until they let you go, and that is contingent on you finishing the program to their satisfaction.
I didn’t have the energy to run or rebel, and as a state employee I had good health insurance, so my only way out was to comply. I was down to my last couple of weeks and it was nice to be on a little sober vacation. I had actually made friends with some people, but I wanted to go home. However, I didn’t know if I was in fact ready to leave. I just knew that if I kept the social workers checking off the boxes on my discharge list, I’d be getting the green light to leave soon enough. I needed to get out and be on my own, away from everyone. Away from the cigarette smoke in the courtyard, the salt-less meals throughout the day, from the lack of privacy. That was my goal, I wanted to be in complete solitude, whether I was really ready or not.
Originally written by Jessica for Love & Literature Magazine.
Read the previous chapter, chapter 2 here.
Read the next chapter, chapter 4 here.
