She walked the familiar beach that evening, the very one she had walked with her Mom as a child, feeling the intensity of too much loss, not even knowing what to do with her emotions. The young lady's blond hair tussled with the waves and her mind also raved in delirium over all that had occurred that night as the moon gleamed over the angry sea.
Tammy was 22. When Tammy had turned 20, Mom started using again, bad. Nightmare, totally messed up bad. Shooting up, cooking, everything, anything, like back when Tammy was really little, and so worse, way worse. The other side stuff to make money, too.
Tammy stopped, falling too a crouched position as if someone might hit her, covering her head. She rocked back and forth as the waves approached.
"Don't think. Don't think. Just don't think,"she chanted over and over for the longest time, for eternity, until her mind shut up for a second.
She stared out at the ocean.
Glaring at the huge waves as the moon disappeared into the approaching storm, in defiance. Not caring, but daring.
**Bring it on.**
Yeah, right, she thought. You are so strong Is that why you can't breathe? Why you feel like your heart is going to explode, and your brain won't shut up? Because you are so very strong?
She tried to catch her breath. It felt like she was being smothered.
To not think of it. Of that. Of her Mother. Oh geez air.
Breathe. Don't think. Don't think. Breathe. Slow down.
Shit!
Breathe!
Clean,
Mom had been beautiful.
For 14 years, Tammy's Mother had been sober and clean, and MOM. Very so Mom.
Present. Loving. Never perfect, who is, but perfect to Tammy. Tammy did not know what had changed,
what the trigger was, but slowly Tammy saw the drift and shift. The change in personality. and BAM! Suddenly, not slow. but fast, progressive degeneration... This horrid thing on chemicals, this altered state in what was left of her Mother's body did not resemble her Mom, not in character, personality, and not much even in appearance.
Horrible, tragic, nightmarish world of addiction...Tammy was thoroughly lost as to what to do.
The decline was horrifically fast... it was like Tammy's Mom had found a new personality and woven a whole new life in a couple of months.It was a whirlwind of insanity! Then horrible silence.
The coroner said Ms. Torrence, Tammy Torrence's Mother, did not realize that she did not have the tolerance she once had for the drugs, and that the purity of some might have been higher in quality.
In other words, Tammy's mother accidentally overdosed and died.
Tammy stood at the ocean's edge in fury as the storm rolled in, not caring that lightening was striking the very ocean surges at her feet.
She knew her Mother in sobriety and without drugs. This other creature was foreign to her. Her father? Long gone, never really mentioned. Druggie, had wanted her aborted. At a rather young age, very set minded, Tammy decided she also had the right to choose. Her chice was to not have him as a Dad, but instead as a sperm donor.
But her beautiful Mother so destroyed? To an wretched specimen, unreachable? Devolved so rapidly into something she did not recognize? It was beyond anything she could cope with.
Her Mother and extended family had pointedly protected her from the past, when her Mother had used, from that lifestyle, and from even the memories. Indeed, Tammy did not remember when she was very little. She supposed she had blocked out those years. She always knew intellectually that her mother had abused drugs and alcohol when she was small, but since she did not remember that past, she did not know the horrors of addiction.
Until now.
So strange. Now she wished she could remember at least one damn thing from that time. Just a moment, a glimpse from then. A connection between the past and the present. As if it would make things gel.
She imagined herself as a child. Small, helpless. Like right before Mom had passed, she would have had men coming and going to pay for her supply.Tammy thought. Did she do that then, when I was a kid? Where did she put me? When these men came? With a neighbor? The closet? What?
Wind and rain whipped around Tammy, matched by her own rage, mourn and frustration. Yet she did not know who to be angry with. Not God, surely, for her Mother knew she had choices: healing and progress vs stagnation and addiction.
Still, while part of her wanted to be furious with her Mom for her choices, she knew enough to know it was a disease, an illness. So much more complicated than "so no to drugs". Maybe slightly akin to diabetes, maybe. But no and yes. Not so simple as "say not to sugar and carbs", No insulin for addiction. But both so complicated, these diseases.
No comparison, she thought. Nothing to compare it to. Accept hell. If not controlled and tempered, hell. For Mom, for me...hell, just hell.
Tammy sat in that storm for hours. Finally, at about 4am, she returned to go to her room the La Vista. The hotel clerk ran to her side, quite alarmed, as she walked my the desk, drenched, shivering and white as a ghost.
He asked, "do you need a towel? Miss? Miss?"
She stared at him blankly, unblinking, in a stupor.
"Are you alright, miss? What happened?!"
She finally said it for the first time.
"No, I'm not alright. My Mommy is dead."
