Explosions in the Sky
Letter from Texas: A celebration of life, and reflections on recovery.
My wife is from Beaumont, Texas, which is located in the southeastern part of the state, about an hour from Houston as you make your way to New Orleans. With its proximity to the Gulf Coast, Beaumont is as Cajun as it is Texan, which means a lot of locals’ accents fall somewhere in between and you’re as likely to sit down for crawfish as you are BBQ, and when we visit we usually get both (plus Tex-Mex). Beaumont’s claim to fame is it was the site of the country’s first major oil field, Spindletop, the discovery of which led to a population boom in the early 1900s. To this day, the city is surrounded by refineries, their ghostly flames spewing from the flare stacks that dot the horizon.
We passed those flames as we pulled into town last week. Partly due to the chaos of the last few years, it was my first visit since before the pandemic, and our first trip anywhere since our daughter was born. But the reason for this homecoming was a solemn one: We were there to celebrate the life of Danielle’s brother, Chris Thomas, who died suddenly two days after Christmas, at the age of 42.
Chris was a husband and father and a very warm human, a dedicated friend, thoughtful dad, and, like his mom and sister, an animal lover. He was cheerful and polite whenever I saw him, always addressed me as “Sir” in a friendly, har-har way, and during our wedding, when it rained cats and dogs, he was one of the people who got drenched helping to move the ceremony indoors at the last minute. I can’t say I knew Chris all that well, but we did have two things in common: We both loved EDM, with a special affection for snarky techno dude Deadmau5. But whereas I have only ever aspired to translate this passion into DJ skills, Chris actually did, turning his hobby into a long-running Saturday night residency at an indoor/outdoor party spot called Madison’s, where he spun records as DJ Boxxx.
The other thing we had in common is that we both liked to drink. For our own set of reasons, we each drank frequently and to excess and to quell some longstanding pain, named or otherwise. We drank to the extent that the drinking caused problems in our lives, and the problems became hard to outrun.
I haven’t talked much in this space about my recovery, or for that matter what I was like when I was drinking. Here are two relevant stories for our purposes here: Years ago I had the privilege of seeing Chris ply his craft as DJ Boxxx at Madison’s, mixing a set of rowdy trap and EDM, if memory serves, though it doesn’t really: I got so drunk that night that the next morning, as Danielle was driving to the airport, we had to pull over to the side of the highway so I could throw up. A couple years later, during a Christmas visit, I went to an AA meeting in Beaumont, which was about as far removed culturally from the San Francisco rooms I got sober in as you might imagine. But that’s the beauty of AA: That night, no matter where we’d come from or how we got there, we were simply the walking wounded, gathered together to tell stories of our missing limbs, of how we avoided, just barely, the worst of what drinking otherwise had in store for us.
Chris’ official cause of death was “sudden cardiac death,” but that doesn’t tell the whole story. What happened was his wife and 10-year-old daughter had left to visit family friends for a few days over Christmas, but Chris hung back to work, and possibly to drink. A few days into their absence, Chris started feeling ill and called a friend to take him to the hospital. When he was admitted, the doctors discovered he had cirrhosis, as well as a mass on his liver, plus a blood infection, and some kind of rhinovirus. The plan was to admit him, stabilize him, then address each of these one at a time, but within a few hours of arriving his blood pressure dropped and he stopped breathing. During his admission, we learned, Chris had given the hospital specific instructions not to resuscitate him if something happened, but since the instructions weren’t in writing the doctors tried anyway, and couldn’t.
But that’s not the whole story either. The whole story involves childhood trauma and unresolved pain I won’t get into here, because it’s not my place. I also can’t say with any certainty that drinking contributed directly to his death, or if its health effects were just one of several comorbidities. What I can say is the kind of pain Chris carried around with him, and possibly drank over, involves the kind of thing you hear all the time in AA rooms like the one I attended in Beaumont, or San Francisco, or for that matter Phuket, where I marked my first six months. In my experience, sobriety doesn’t make this pain go away, but it helps you make peace with it, and maybe takes the sting out a bit, enough to live with at least. I don’t know whether or not Chris ever made it into one of these rooms, or if it would have helped if he had. But I think he would have found kindred spirits there.
Chris’ celebration of life took place at (where else?) Madison’s, and something like 70 people showed up to pay their respects. Most were friends and family, but some were just patrons who’d seen him spin over the years. They took turns passing the mic around and sharing reflections. I wish I could relay what they said, but I missed most of the stories because I was stashed away in an unused room, our daughter asleep in my arms. Our trip for Chris’ memorial consisted of a number of firsts for R.—first airplane ride (inaugurated by a blowout diaper mid-flight), first trip to grandma’s house in Texas, first exposure to a large group of people, many of whom had that familial urge to poke and pinch and request to hold her (thanks, but no thanks). My job during the event was to serve as baby-minder so Danielle could spend time with everyone. Unsurprisingly, Madison’s was not well-suited to infant care (though I’m sure the frequent turtle-racing is awesome), so when I discovered an unused private bar tucked away up some stairs, I made it our headquarters for naps and nursing. As mourners paid their respects outside, I was ensconced in a comfy chair with R. asleep on my shoulder, the muffled din of party rap coming through the walls. Nearby, a sign read, “Hangovers are temporary, but memories last forever.”
I’m not sure how my drinking might have killed me, but there came a point when I felt certain it would. Perhaps my liver would fail, as doctors had started warning me it might. Or perhaps I’d have an accident with the increasing number of pills I was taking to mitigate the effects of my daily hangovers. Perhaps I’d just get sick of it all and take matters into my own hands, something I thought about daily as I plummeted toward my bottom. The irony of addiction is that the thing that can lead you to die from it is the same thing that can also save you: desperation. One of AA’s many cliches is “the gift of desperation,” which refers to the moment—some call it a person’s “bottom”—when you realize you can’t keep doing what you’re doing, when you have to try something different, one way or the other. For some of us, that means walking into a room. But the reality is desperation isn’t always a gift, and not everyone who experiences it finds help.
Sitting there in that chair in the dark, my infant daughter snoring in my ear, I thought about all this, then started to cry, then wrote a poem. I won’t share the poem, because it sucks, and if you’ve read this far you get the gist: It could have been me. It so easily could have been me. I’m not special, I’m just lucky. Lucky I walked into the right meeting on the right day, that something clicked and I kept coming back. Lucky Danielle stuck with me when I least deserved it, lucky the pills didn’t get me, that my heart didn’t stop. I’m lucky to have been sober seven years now, during good times and certainly bad. I’m lucky—god am I lucky—to have ever met my daughter.
Not everyone is. In AA we say, “We’ll save a seat for you,” and sometimes that’s the best you can do. There are other seats in other programs, other approaches to take. AA worked for me but it may not work for the next person. All I wish for anyone who’s struggling is that they’re able to find the help they need. It’s out there—I promise it’s out there, if you look, flickering like one of those refinery flames, the ones dancing endlessly on the horizon of the Texas sky.
This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading.
Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.
Healings is free for all at the moment. Paid subscriptions are currently paused but we plan to turn them back on pretty soon.
When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. — The Big Book, 4th Edition
Both my sons, like their dad, are recovering alcoholics. My younger son, at age 33, collapsed on a basketball court from Sudden Cardiac Death. Two Orange County Fire Authority paramedics were at his side within minutes. CPR...nope! Lidocaine injection into the heart...nope! Defibrillator...yes! At that point, Brian had been defibbed in a hospital setting some 18 times. Alcohol causes atrial fibrillation. A-fib can be deadly. (My beloved husband died from a massive cardiac arrest two years ago...a-fib) One day at a time for all of us.