Olding
My ‘lil gentleman: Chewbacca
This is Chewbacca, but he goes by Chewey usually, which would imply that Chewey is obedient. I bought Chewey for my girlfriend, but after our seven year relationship abruptly ended in January, I got him in the “divorce”.
Have I mentioned that Shih Tzu’s are recalcitrant? The breeder made no mention of this fun fact, as he continued to discount the price of Chewey in a manner that made me think of the last piece of “fine art” I purchased from a Mexican street vendor.
I often wonder what that breeder does when he isn’t peddling four-legged-pains-in-my-ass. I’ve had less pressure from a timeshare presentation. I’d like to think karma has found him in the form of a malcontented wife.
Despite our difficulties from time to time, the truth is that Chewey has maybe actually saved my life in the year he’s been alive, which looks pretty good on a resume.
German and Austrian psychologists in the early 20th century coined the phrase “Gestaltism” which is summarized as “the whole is greater than the sum of its individual pieces”.
This blog is my attempt to synthesize the many individual lessons I’ve learned through the eyes and actions of, and experiences with, my wise Tibetan roommate. In doing so, I’m hopeful to discover the secret to becoming whole, which has been elusive through 47 years of life. If you get anything out of it along the way, well…that looks pretty good on MY resume.
I recently read an article in Time Magazine’s website, written by Margareta Magnusson, in which she uses the Swedish idiom kärt besvär, translated to English as Beloved Sorrow.
Magnusson, now in her 90’s, goes on to explain in her article how she has embraced this idiom as she’s aged, attempting to see the mounting list of things in her daily routine that are burdensome and painful, as things she can choose to view as beloved.
Is ignorance bliss? Why is Chewbacca happier than his owner?
I also recall an image I’d once seen online somewhere in which a man and his dog are seen on a park bench sitting next to one another. In the image, both man and dog have illustrated thought bubbles with images in each thought bubble. The man’s thought bubble is cluttered with his persistent and cluttered thoughts of everything from money problems to travel plans. The dog’s thought bubble has one image and one image only…the image of the man and the dog sitting on the park bench with one another. The caption of the scene is simple: This is why the dog is happier
As I pondered the lessons that both Magnusson’s article and this image of man and dog were giving me, I started to consider my age. The old adage “the more I learn the less I know” kept ringing in my mind as I did.
On the morning of September 12, 2021 my life was not unlike so many others. I was wrestling with relationship issues, raising two teens, looking to buy a home, and of course dealing with our new world in the time of Covid.
My girlfriend and I had ridden our motorcycles to a small hot-springs mountain town in southern Colorado for a weekend getaway. It was, in many ways, a perfect weekend. We had fantastic weather, great food, cozy lodging, laughter, and intimacy.
As we were ready to head back on Sunday morning, we decided to first have breakfast. I was half way through my eggs Benedict when I received the call which would change my life. The caller ID read “Dad”. Not an atypical phone call to receive on a weekend, and I answered with no sense of urgency, but my father’s words immediately put an end to my normally robust A.M. appetite when he relayed the news that my Grandfather, the man I am named after and one of the greatest influences in my life, was nearing the end of his life.
At 93, Ivan “Marion” Clarkson had been in declining health for the better part of 2021. Contracting Covid in late August seemed to be a fight he was about to win, when things took a sudden turn for the worse over the weekend. After some discussion with my father, it was decided that I would catch the next available flight from Santa Fe, NM (the nearest airport to my home of the last 15 years) to Medford, OR which would give me the painful opportunity to say my final goodbye to the man who had always been like a second father to me.
Racing back home, normally a four hour journey, I had made it to Santa Fe in just three hours. As my thoughts continued to be consumed with the grief I was already feeling, I had long-since dismissed standard traffic laws. My only priority was getting to see Grandad, and no threat of a speeding ticket, regardless of cost, was going to keep me from doing so as quickly as possible. At speeds exceeding 130 miles per hour, I was passing highway vehicles like sign posts.
I still can’t remember what happened in the moment, and I have tried with desperation to recreate my thoughts and memories, but at some point on the afternoon of Sunday, September 12th, 2021 everything went from vibrant illumination to darkness.
After a week of horrific lucid dreams, I finally became self-aware, finding that I was no longer on my motorcycle in a high-speed effort to board a flight, but rather confined to a hospital bed at the University of New Mexico Hospital (UNMH) in Albuquerque.
My first day of semi consciousness in September of 2021
As I awoke to horrific pain and confusion, my eyes scanned my surroundings, and then eventually to my badly broken body. Despite what would later be described to me as having suffered an accident reminiscent to a war-zone catastrophe, I still had both legs and both arms, though they were mostly being held together by more metal than what was left of my demolished motorcycle.
Yet no physical pain would prepare me for the pain I would soon feel upon hearing the news that my Grandfather had indeed passed during the week-long partial coma I was experiencing.
After the initial flood of tears, a flood of emotions overwhelmed me. I was angry. I was in so much physical pain. I was emotionally devastated, of course by the loss of my Grandad, but also over the realization that all of the plans I had intended to act upon in the coming period of my life were no longer experiences I would be able to have.
I wanted to feel absolutely nothing, and that’s when I discovered the magic solution to experiencing just that: nothing. The sorts of drugs I was exposed to during my numerous surgeries at what became “home” for the next three months, fixed everything. I fell in love with each of my nurses, as their arrival to my room became a social experiment reminiscent to the dogs of Pavlov. I lived to receive the next dose of Dilaudid, Oxycontin, Fentanyl, and anything else they were willing to inject or allow me to swallow. It wasn’t just the physical pain that those drugs “fixed”, as it kept me from feeling the brewing PTSD, grief, fear, sadness, loneliness, anger, and rage that were all bubbling beneath my surface. That was a good thing, right?
I became an expert at manufacturing justifications, excuses, exaggerations, and outright lies to receive the next miracle fix for my problems.
Then in February of 2022, the medications started running low. This was no big deal, I thought, because after all I had given up smoking and even alcohol before...how hard could it be to quit narcotics? I’d watched shows and movies about addiction…but arrogantly believed that I was somehow stronger than those people who were too weak to make the right life choices.
THEN I took my last Oxy on a Monday morning in early March. What followed was the stuff of nightmares, the likes of which took me down a path of lying through my teeth to obtain any sort of pain medication I could get my hands on for the next four months.
Following bone graft surgery in June of 2022, and realizing that I would no longer legally be able to obtain Oxy, I was turned on to Tramadol for the first time.
While no Oxy, I found that if I took a high enough dose of Tramadol, combined with my already high dose of Zoloft (a combination, I would soon learn, that would cause me to experience a medical phenomenon called “serotonin syndrome”), I could recreate a very similar feel to what I experienced while on Oxy. But once again, I rationalized, because after all, Tramadol was only a schedule IV controlled substance and had only been added to the list of controlled substances in the U.S. in July of 2014; how bad could it be? It was certainly better than Oxy, right?
In a September 2022 journal entry, I first wrote the words “addiction”, acknowledging that somehow this “safer” controlled substance had gotten its hooks in me.
Home video captures my true essence towards the end of 2022
In December of 2022, I took a trip to Mexico where I discovered Tramadol was legal and didn’t require a prescription. This made sense to me, as the U.S. DEA and FDA had always been overly paranoid about pain medications since the Purdue pharma scandal of the prior decades. So, as one does when they are experiencing minor pain, I bought as much Tramadol as I thought I could cross the border with. Never mind the fact that I was still receiving legal prescriptions of the drug in the United States, of which I began to stockpile for the day when I ran out of my new found supply. (Sidenote: In June of 2023 the Los Angeles Times would report that more than 30% of medications such as Tramadol, sold “legally” in Mexico during the times I purchased them, contained quantities of fentanyl.)
In March of 2023 I went back to Mexico to resupply, purchasing a high-risk quantity of Tramadol, and white-knuckled my way back through customs.
Running out of money to go back to Mexico, and facing my final surgery in late April, it was clear that I would no longer have access to anything I could rationalize as legal narcotics and my anxiety spiked beyond control. Crying in public brought me no shame. Panic attacks waved over me at all hours of my waking day.
It came to this, for me. I had only three choices:
Purchase from the streets
Kill myself
Rehab
I finally asked my girlfriend, who was preparing to leave me, to drive me to an inpatient clinic on May 5th of 2023.
It’s now June 6, 2024. It’s been a year since I exited a rehabilitation facility in northern New Mexico.
As I sit and write this piece, I can’t help but reflect on all of the experiences that got me to this point in my life. No longer with the girlfriend who stood by me throughout both my physical and mental recovery from accident and addiction, and as my last child prepares to head off for college in two months, I’m left with little else to do but contemplate in silence.
I stand in front of a mirror, often, looking at the man within. I don’t recognize him. He has a lot of white hair where red used to be. He has scars and wrinkles. His eyes look sad, or, at the very least, weathered. He looks like a man I used to think I’d never see in my lifetime; beaten, broken, and aimless.
I had no use of my arms nor my left leg during my tenure at UNMH. Thanks to Covid, friends and family weren’t permitted to visit during much of my three months in a hospital bed. I celebrated my son’s birthday, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, being fed by a stranger. I watched a lot of television during this time. One show I’d been meaning to get into was Netflix’s The Crown. One particular episode stands out to me, even to this day.
The first episode of season 3 was aptly titled “Olding”. As is usually the case with The Crown, each episode is masterfully written and directed in a way that somehow transports watchers from general palace intrigue to somehow relating to the recondite world of the royal family.
Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth ponders her mortality
“Olding” opens with Queen Elizabeth (now played by Olivia Colman, as a major cast change occurs after every two seasons in Crown) staring at both her former portrait, in younger form (played by Claire Foy), and her current portrait in a side by side scene that is clearly attempting to “catch the viewers up” to the reality that we have to get used to new actors now.
This moment has always flashed as a memory as I stare at the man in the mirror. I see my Olivia Colman staring at me but my mind projects Claire Foy. Then I inevitably begin to wonder, sometimes aloud, shouldn’t I be blessed with greater wisdom if I’m made to look older? Because here’s the thing…the more I learn, about myself, others, and the world, the less I operate in blissful ignorance. Youth isn’t wasted on the young, contrary to popular theory. The youthful, inexperienced, and unburdened mind is wasted on the young.
Which brings me full circle to my Chewbacca. I bought Chewey for my girlfriend and her kids, about a month after getting out of rehab in 2023. Their dog, Pup, was “olding” (pun is free) and my girlfriend thought it wise to consider having a puppy to better deal with the inevitable loss of Pup. I wasn’t a fan of Chewey when I first saw his image, sent to us by the breeder. He seemed too brown for my liking, as I wanted a blonde. Plus he just kind of seemed lifeless to me in the photo. My incredibly wise girlfriend knew exactly how to hook me, when she suggested he looked like Chewbacca from Star Wars. I’m not necessarily sure I believed it at the time, but as many Gen X boys did, I grew up being a fanbois of all things Han Solo, so the idea of having a personal Chewey seemed pretty cool, even in my 40’s.
Little did I know at the time, but Chewey would turn out to be one of the single most stabilizing forces in my post addiction recovery process. As we instantly imprinted on one another, the way Jacob and Renesmee did in the Twilight saga, we soon became inseparable. I’m not so certain that at times my girlfriend wasn’t jealous of the affection I poured into Chewey often sides taking his “side” over her kids’ in times in which Chewey would growl at them for playing too hard with him.
And then a little more than five months later I would be the proud single father of Chewey, as we packed our bags and said goodbye for the final time to my girlfriend of seven years.
I won’t lie…it’s been a dark time for me, emotionally. I’ve thought about relapsing into drugs or alcohol on more occasions that I proudly will admit. I can thank a multitude of reasons and people for not relapsing, but Chewey might be chief among those reasons. He’s not much of a talker, but man is he a great listener.
Acceptance was the central thesis of rehab. The serenity prayer is still, and will probably always be, imprinted on my brain: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”.
A million dollars for you thoughts
Chewey provides me daily perspective about acceptance. He can’t talk, though that’s not from a lack of barking at me, he has no opposable thumbs, he can’t store up food for times when I’m home late and he needs a snack, he can’t ponder his future, and perhaps most importantly he can’t reflect on his past mistakes. He just IS.
Eckart Tolle writes that to “not be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction”, and at almost 48 I believe every bit of that statement.
I know Chewey is happier than I am, but I also know that it doesn’t always have to be imbalanced like that. As I walk Chewey each night, I stare at him, jealous of a one year old Shih Tzu, wondering what he is thinking about. Chewey usually meets my eyes and I swear he can talk in that moment, because all I can hear is “nothing”.
