Days 25-38
Day 25: Grateful to Ground
June 5, Chicago to Denver
On Monday I ran into Ken Mendez during checkout from HI. We went to grab a bite to eat together and share more of our experience with each other before we went our separate ways. As we sat down to breakfast burritos, I noticed that the café TV was turned to the news of violence in London over the weekend, and I tuned it out, annoyed. The constant chatter of mainstream media doom speak had long since begun to feel like an involuntary fear brainwash. I wasn’t buying it anymore.
Before we parted, Ken M. and I agreed that we would surely see each other down the tour trail somewhere in the years ahead. We embraced, and he headed to the train station as I headed to O’Hare.
Finally, the fuzz and buzz of tour energy in my head began to clear a bit as I drove out of Denver International Airport and toward the mountain vistas that were a backdrop on my way home into the city. I was relieved to be out of the concrete jungle of Chicago, and back to my big sky mountain country.
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| It was a relief to see the blazing blue Bronco on my arrival back to Denver. |
Day 26-35: Pushing Through
June 6-15, Denver
Though I was glad to be home in Denver again for a minute, I was beyond exhausted. Switching between the two worlds of single working mother in recovery and Stateside travelling U2er was losing its charm. I was incredulous as I considered that I would be heading out less than two weeks’ time to once again cross the country by plane and see the band play The Joshua Tree album front to back. U2 would play near the neighborhoods of my parents and three sisters in Virginia on Tuesday June 20th, the night of the summer solstice. I would be there, and this time my little girl would travel with me to see her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. My sister Beth was planning to attend her first U2 show in the Red Zone at Landover, Maryland’s Fed Ex Field with me, on the longest day of the year.
Any internal debate considering whether to go to Philadelphia on June 18 was over. I had no desire. I was finding this spring/summer's cap to the decades-old obsessive drive to follow the band, and that was reassuring.
Looking forward to this trip, my focus was on the intention to make direct amends individually to my parents by taking responsibility for any damage I had done to them over my years of active addiction to marijuana and alcohol, during my upcoming face-to-face time with them. The visit would be the first time since entering recovery that I would see my mother or visit Virginia, the location where I spent a tortured adolescence, and in fact I would stay in the very house where I had suffered such feelings of isolation over 20 years prior. It was in that house that I had first connected consciously with U2 music in 1992, and discovered that I already had known and loved most of their back catalogue, that their music had been playing as the backdrop to my childhood and pre-teen years all along. It was within those walls that the longest love affair of my life had begun. My sister Beth had made that house her home in 1995. I was ready to feel the space around me again, connected to her energy and the loving family home that she had created there. I would even be sleeping in the same room I had once wall papered with pictures of U2. This time, I would have my little girl sleeping there with me too.
Day 36: Flying with Grace
June 16: Denver to Dulles, Virginia
It was kind of fun travelling with my little girl on my third cross-country getaway in 40 days. Beth picked us up from the airport and took us back to her house in Vienna, Virginia. My other two older sisters Julie and Gini also came over that evening, and we sat around the kitchen for pizza and conversation. At some point, I checked my phone for news of the show that was happening in Lexington, Kentucky that night. I was delighted to see that Brigitte Rebecca had become the first fan to grace the tree stage, having been pulled up to dance and walk down the ramp from the main stage with Bono during “With Or Without You”. Her friendly, open smile lit up the stadium and she looked adorable in a white summer dress with her gold flower in her hair.
Watching the video of my new U2 friend onstage with Bono in Kentucky, later on downstairs in the room where I had lived out my lonely teenage days, I was thrilled. As I watched, I remembered wondering during those misery days decades ago if there was any girl, anywhere in the world, who might have felt the way I did about U2… now, 25 years later, I knew her, and she was onstage with the band tonight. Through my connection with her, part of me was onstage that night too. It was a good feeling to find in that old familiar space of my teenage home.
Day 37: Step Nine
June 17: Warrenton, Virginia
When I woke up on Saturday morning, I saw more exciting news on the U2 Friends Facebook feed. David Barry the filmmaker had managed to get Elsha on video chat with Bono in Lexington! What a relief that this had been accomplished. I did feel a twinge of disappointment that I hadn’t been able to connect the two old friends through my phone screen, but more than that, I was relieved that any internally imposed pressure to try again in D.C. was gone. I didn’t want to wait for Bono at the backstage entrance again on the longest day of this summer, not even for dear Elsha. I was pleased for her and David Barry, and for Bono too, who appeared genuinely joyous in the pictures that had been taken of him holding David’s phone to speak to Elsha, and in fact, giving the phone a kiss.
Later that Saturday morning, Beth drove us out to Warrenton, Virginia, to visit my mother in her assisted living facility where she was receiving the support she needed to live with her progressing Parkinsons Disease. When we arrived, Beth took Julie and our Dad out of her private quarters to give us some privacy for me to make my amends. My mother seemed a little anxious as I began to read her my amends letter, and she was willing to listen when I explained that this was a part of my spiritual recovery from the disease of addiction.
A great relief washed over us when I was done.
After I read her the letter, I hugged her, and for a moment, I caught sense of the feeling of being her little girl. As write this six months later, my eyes mist over in the recollection of her arms around me in our first real heart-to-heart hug in decades, and I think I will never forget her voice cracking as she said, “Oh, honey…” and, thanking me, appeared to accept my words without any reservation.
As it turned out, that would be the last day this year that I saw my mother seeing me and knowing so clearly who I am, who I was, and why I was there. Subsequently, in October, when I returned to Virginia again for my niece’s wedding, my mom’s cognition had declined dramatically, and she required a much higher level of care.
The clock reads 3:33pm as I type this entry on December 24 of 2017. Upon the recommendation of her doctors, last month my mother was moved into the higher acuity memory care unit of her Assisted Living Facility, and I have not yet begun to process my grief for her decline. It’s there, waiting at the edge of my heart, for me to face it. I celebrate the miracle that I had the chance to make my direct amends to her before she slipped any further into the disease process. I can’t help but wonder…. had she been waiting for me?
That night, my sister Beth drove back to Vienna, Virginia, and I stayed out at my dad’s apartment in Warrenton to spend some more time with my parents and let them spend a little more time with my little daughter. That night, Julie Grace threw a tantrum at bedtime, then slipped into a fitful sleep next to me. Around midnight, she woke up and started screaming again, inexplicably and inconsolably. After a while, my father came to the door and said, “We have to calm her down”. He picked her up and gently began talking to her as he carried her out to the living room and sat in his big recliner with her. I followed them and laid down on the couch nearby; listening as he soothed her in a soft, gentle voice I recalled from long ago. I dozed off there, and she was mesmerized back into a quiet calm. Soon enough, I was able to take her back to the guest bedroom and we slept through the night. It was a magical moment to bear witness to my father being the father I remember from a time long ago; it's a memory I will always treasure.
Day 38: Father’s Day
June 18: Warrenton to Vienna, Virginia
My three sisters joined me, my parents, and my daughter for some Father’s Day festivities. Before we left his home in the afternoon, I sat down with Dad and read him my amends letter. As we embraced afterward, again, I felt relief to be done with this task of recovery for which it had taken me 18 months to prepare.
So, as Julie Grace and I left my folks neck of the Virginia woods with my sister Beth, I was starting to get a little bit excited for the U2 concert on the docket for the day after tomorrow. It was time to celebrate!
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