Almost Paradise - Part VIII "The Quiet Suicide"

All the glitters is not gold

Post Introduction:

When I complete a Substack post, I go to my newsfeeds to search for the next topic of interest. As my readers and subscribers have come to expect, my topics vary widely from business and politics to religion and philosophy. If the topic captures my imagination enough to warrant 1500 words, I develop it into a future post. Recently, I stumbled upon an article talking about the "suicide belt" of the American Rocky Mountains. Specifically, the article described how suicide rates had quadrupled in America's mountain towns. My research on this topic led me to a recent documentary titled, The Paradise Paradox produced by Podium Pictures and Hall of Fame skier Bode Miller. It is available on Amazon Prime for a nominal fee.

As a lifelong, visitor to many of those resort towns in the "suicide belt" and a recovering alcoholic, I relate to the mental health struggles that many in America's resort towns experience. I feel compelled to share my recovery journey, not because it is ever pleasant recounting the low dark crevices of my past, but in the hopes that my story may help someone who is struggling with depression, anxiety or addiction find hope and recovery. My work on this topic will span multiple posts. If you connect with any part of my story, please sign up for a free or paid subscription. Moreover, if my story compels you into further action, consider donating to one of the mountain town organizations working to expand mental health services and stem the tide of suicides.

It was January 2008, and I was entering the period in my life I dubbed, "three firings and six months." In my last installment, I described the first of those firings from a position I held in Bermuda. As I tumbled toward my rock-bottom, I can only thank God for the speed at which I fell.

Upon returning from "The Deep," I finagled a short-term consulting gig running a club in southern Minnesota. It was through an associate of mine that I had known for a few years. He was traveling to India for several weeks and needed somebody to watch over his interests in his absence. I was to stay in his house and perform those duties. I arrived the day before he departed for India. We spent that time reviewing my task list and catching dinner at the club.

We then retired to his house to watch a little TV and relax. He pulled out a bottle of Macallan – 18 and poured us each a stiff drink. The two of us polishing off that bottle is the last thing I remember before codependent came to retrieve me from his house and deliver me to detox. I never made it into work one day and suffice it to say, that opportunity and friendship promptly ended.

By this time in my addiction cycle, once I started drinking, I could not stop. The binge in Bermuda lasted three days. This particular binge lasted five. That consulting gig constituted firing number two within a two-month period.

Codependent was none too happy with me either. The flow of income from Bermuda stopped, the money that was to be earned from that caretaking/consultant job never materialized and we were at least one month behind on the mortgage payment for the overpriced, tiny house. The three things our meager financial resources where funding at that time were food, alcohol, and the premium on a $1.5 million life insurance policy on yours not so truly.

Dejected, demoralized, and dealing with an extremely pissed off codependent, I left detox determined that I would quit drinking, stay sober for good and find another job. Just as I had always been searching for the right location that would make me happy and that that blissful location would magically materialize into instant sobriety, I was also convinced my drinking problem was related to my employment within the restaurant industry. I concluded that if I was to say sober, I would need a position that did not include me running a bar. After about another month searching for work on Monster.com (this time searching the Twin Cities instead of the world) I found a position as a project manager for a real estate company in downtown St. Paul.

This company had holdings in private clubs, restaurants, office complexes and condominiums. I was specifically hired as a project manager for a boutique hotel they were developing in downtown St. Paul. It was a nine to five, Monday through Friday job working on the top floor of a turn-of-the-century brownstone office building in St. Paul. I dubbed that new position my "dream job" as a paid well, utilized my skills in design, construction, and hospitality without requiring me to get involved with the high stress and long hours of operating an actual restaurant.

I had been sober about a month prior to taking the job and willed myself to keep that mirage going for the first month or so of that position. Codependent was pleased as well, not that I was sober mind you, but because once again, income was flowing, and the mortgage payments were brought up to date. Plus, my position was prestigious and had us bumping elbows with important people at the private clubs this real estate company operated. During this early time with my new position, I managed to stay sober drinking soda water with a lime instead of gin and tonics at my company's social events.

I had proven, at least for a period of time, that I could will myself to stay sober but I was far from recovery. That would become evident as fate through me a curveball about three months into that new position. One of the properties that company managed was a private club on an island in the middle of a lake in Wisconsin. It was a seasonal operation and only accessible by boat during the non-frozen months of May through September. The longtime general manager of that property abruptly quit two weeks prior to opening the resort on Memorial Day weekend. Knowing my resume included an extensive hospitality operation background, the owner moved me from my cushy brownstone office to the island resort. He enticed me to take the temporary position by offering my entire family the caretaker's residence on that island while I was performing the general manager’s duties. This put codependent and my three children, then ages seven, nine and eleven, on a posh and exclusive island resort for the summer. But it also put me back in charge of a restaurant with a full bar.

I was then living the real-life nightmare of Norman Paperman. My day started with the alarm going off at 5:30 AM.  As I was then living on the island and tasked to drive the first boat over to the shore to pick up the morning crew of cooks, caretakers, and servers. Although the resort only held about 50 people when fully occupied, it was a high-end high expectation crowd and catering to their needs as a general manager from ensuring that their breakfast was served in the morning all the way through to the last drink poured in the evening meant long hours. On top of that, my family was living with me on the island which included a codependent who wanted nothing more than to have her drinking partner once again restored now that the finances were back in order. With the stress of the job and the keys to the liquor room, acquiescing to the desire to take up the drink again did not require much arm twisting.

Then tragedy struck. It was approaching near midnight on a mid-summer’s night eve, and the resorters, as well as restless discontent all had their last drinks and were in bed. The phone rang. It was a call from my frantic and tearful mother-in-law announcing that her 42-year-old son had just passed away. He suffered a massive heart attack. Codependent and her brother were very close, and the news was devastating. She flew off to Raleigh the very next day to attend to her mother’s and to her brother's affairs. Our children took to the road overland to Raleigh with my parents, but I required a few more days to set the resort for success prior to my three-day departure for the funeral. I flew to Raleigh on the eve of the funeral.

This was an extremely difficult time for me, one certainly compounded by the fact that I had returned to alcohol, my dark old friend. My brother-in-law was only two years younger than me, and we shared more than a friendship with codependent. We both work stressful jobs; he was a commodities trader in Chicago. We both finished the evening with stiff cocktails; his favorite was martinis. He did, however, smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and had recently put on a significant amount of weight. As I went through the funeral and the interment, through an alcohol induced haze, I was witnessing my own image staring back at me from that fancy oak box. I saw first-hand the fate that awaited me if I did not change my ways.

Now, as you can imagine, since that fateful call that came a week prior and with all the hustle, bustle and traveling to and fro to the funeral, alcohol had become a daily constant. And without the constraints of having to perform my island resort job, drinking became an all-day activity. I had arranged to fly back home to St. Paul just in time to pick up the payroll for the island crew. Barely sober enough to collect the payroll and drive the two and a half hours to the Wisconsin resort, I showed up in time to pay the staff. Alone, exhausted from the Raleigh funeral trip, and securely back on the bottle, I began drinking that evening. By this point in my story, my readers should recognize the drill. I proceeded into the third binge in less than six months. My lack of any memory of those several days was interrupted by an irate codependent waking me up to tell me I must leave the island. She had received a call from my employer demanding that she get her drunk-ass husband off his property. Apparently, the staff became concerned that I was unresponsive to phone calls and knocks at the door, busted the lock, and discovered me passed out on the bed. At least this abrupt departure from a second island job in less than a year did not threaten my passport nor involve a possible interview with the State Department.

For the third time, I sobered up to have "the talk" about my drinking behavior with an angry employer. Showered, shaved and with hat in hand I showed up to my meeting prepared to beg for my job. To make matters worse this was a position I really liked, it included a great income and had the potential for me to expand my skills in real-estate development. I also had great respect for the owner as well. But none of that saved my job, the dignity of which I squandered on cheap vodka and my own lack of restraint. My boss looked and me, and said, "I like you, you are talented, but I have to let you go." At the time he uttered those words I had heard before; I did not realize what a favor he had done me. The rock I was approaching was no longer a fuzzy aperture, I could see it clearly, though I could not quite touch it. But that tag was days, not weeks, away.

But burying my brother-in-law was not enough to make that happen. Being a pallbearer, sweating the morning vodka on a 100° July 1st afternoon while planting that oak box in the ground apparently was not enough to convince me to give up drinking. Quite the opposite, the funeral, the third firing, the apparent fact that once I started drinking, I could not stop, and a codependent that demanded that I be both drinking partner and bread winner, had me believing that my fate in life was to simply drink myself out of my own misery. In an alcohol induced fog, I could see no other way out of that morass.

My children returned from Raleigh with their grandparents and remained with them for the Fourth of July holiday. I returned to St. Paul, with codependent, along with some additional family members that had flown in for the interment and required a drop-off at the airport. To compound the misery I was already feeling, I managed to get a speeding ticket as I approached MSP for the drop-off. Distraught about the ticket, unemployed, and jonesing for a drink, I returned to my tiny, overpriced house with codependent. Finally, after about 10 days of travel, funerals, and firings, the two of us were alone face-to-face in our home. Codependent's mourning for her brother did not reduce her ire towards me for the financial situation that I, once again, placed our family.

At that point in my life, I could see nothing worth living for. I obviously could not stay sober, I was also failing at staying employed and earning an income, and, if I only had a $1000 instead of the $1.5 million life insurance policy on my head, I was still worth more dead than alive. I accepted my fate and was determined to follow my departed brother-in-law into eternal slumber. I never thought twice about the method. It was the drink that brought me to that lowly place, and I was going to let the drink finish me off. I chose not for the quick ending of a flashy swan dive off the High Bridge into the Mississippi river. Nor did I opt for the noisy and messy ending of a gun to my temple. I instead chose the quiet, "Leaving Las Vegas," inspired option of simply drinking myself into oblivion.

I picked up a case of vodka the eve of that sweltering July 1st day, determined to drink myself to death. The goal was to consume as much alcohol as I could until I passed out. Upon each awakening, I would do the same until the awakenings occurred no more. When I started my final "quiet suicide" binge, codependent was with me in the tiny, overpriced St. Paul home. As one can imagine, I have little memory of what transpired over the next eight days while I sequestered myself in my home determined to bring my miserable life to a fitting alcoholic end. What I do know is, at some point during those eight days, codependent traveled to Chicago to assist cleaning out her brother’s apartment. Prior to her departure, she must have noticed that my vodka supply was running low, so she purchased two additional jugs, a bottle of V-8 and a Chipotle burrito and left them on the kitchen counter along with two $20 bills. Although I do not remember how, all that she left me was consumed including the $40.00 which somehow, I converted into more vodka. All this alcohol-induced madness ended abruptly on July 8, 2008, at precisely 8 PM. 

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king. -J.R.R. Tolkien