Guest Blogger: Things That I Am Not by Cheryl from Woman at a Crossroad

I am a lot of things.  Steeler fan, Rush fan, Penguins fan, animal rights activist, political progressive, Star Wars nerd, and some would say royal b*#ch.  One thing I am not any longer is the mother of Kelsey Nicole.  I suppose technically I am still her mother, but I have to use the term in the past tense.  Kelsey died on June 20, 2009 at 5:34 pm.  She spent 23 years. 23 days and 13 hours on this earth, the last nine years of which she struggled with both bulimia and anorexia.

She did not die from her eating disorder.  She had pills in her system that contributed to her heart stopping so the cause of death was finalized as an accidental overdose, but for those of us who knew her in her last days, that’s like saying if a zombie chases you to the edge of a cliff and the only way not to be his dinner is to jump off, then the zombie wasn’t the cause of death.  Sure it was.  Her heart was compromised from years of strain, and she was so weak she had to stop working a few weeks before.  She knew she was very sick, but she didn’t know what to do to get past it.  She couldn’t control it, and I think, looking back on it, she knew this was going to be her last bout with the disorder.  She didn’t have any chances left.  The disease was going to beat her or she was somehow going to beat it, but one way or the other, this was going to be the end of its road.

We called it The Beast.  We thought of it like a living creature that inhabited the house with us and controlled our daughter.  She was many things too:  artist, avid reader, lover of music, beautiful, bright, daughter, sister, cousin, niece and granddaughter.  But the thing that seemed to dominate her over the last nine years was her eating disorder, making it impossible for her to live with anything approaching normalcy.  The marvelous creature who was my daughter was lost somewhere deep inside, and all we saw was this horrible monster that literally devoured her until she was nothing.  Skin and bones, dejected, worn down, depressed and hopeless.  The Beast was a powerful demon indeed.

There were moments where things were less dark.  Kelsey was the veteran of two residential treatment facilities, encompassing three stays.  Her first stay did little more than teach my bulimic daughter how to be anorexic as well as an accomplished purger.  But her last enrollment in a different facility we thought was the ticket to true recovery.  And for a while it seemed as though our optimism would be rewarded.  She still struggled with all the issues that cause young women and men to choose this dark path, and she had many hard days.  But, she was a brave soldier and fought hard at first.  Somehow, though, about a year before that awful day, The Beast went on the counteroffensive and never let up again.

We were financially tapped out after residential treatments, specialists, therapists, nutritionists, paying her rent when we were told it was better that she didn’t live at home where it all began, and then dealing with the fallout her sister experienced as a result of having to live in the shadow of such an all encompassing disease.  As a result, we felt powerless and without any real option as we began to witness her final downward spiral.  Desperate to do something, her little sister contacted the show Intervention and they were interested.  If we could get her story accepted, we had a shot at them paying for another treatment center.  We began to prepare the first step, which is to document her on video without letting her know the real reason why.  Her boyfriend, himself a troubled young man, caught on to what we were truly up to and tipped her off.  In what was not an uncommon swing between accusing us we didn’t care and refusing any help offered, she went ballistic, The Beast, I am sure, pulling all the strings.  Our contacts at the show told us to hold off for a while, let the commotion die down, and when we were ready, they would help us come up with a new cover story.  We never got that far.

In the end, my daughter chose to throw herself off the cliff rather than allow her personal zombie to continue to devour her.  She tried to take it with her, but its ghost remains.  It shows itself in the sad eyes of her little sister, in the dejected shoulders of her father as he stares off into space, seemingly lost in nothingness, but I know who he’s thinking about.  I see it when I look at one of the last pictures of her, with my Mother on her 90th birthday.  I look at that picture and wonder which woman was more frail at that point.

I know The Beast is somehow basking in its triumph when I contemplate all the things we lost that day:  her bright smile, her wit and sometimes caustic, but always strong opinions on just about everything, her art, and her love of her family, friends and her cat Tum-Tum.  So the thing I can never be again is the mother of a living, breathing Kelsey.  She has to live in my heart and my memory now.  Which leads me to the thing I am the most:  heartbroken.

I am a middle-aged, transplanted liberal Yankee living in a conservative area of Texas.  I live with my husband, my college aged daughter, six dogs, two cats and a fish.  I began blogging under the name SteelerFanMom at Woman at a Crossroad when I was trying to concentrate on caring for my aging mother, who had Alzheimer’s and needed an outlet.  My stories centered on her and my adventures in learning to care for someone who could not accept her age and condition.  Then, a few months into the project, my oldest daughter died after nine years of fighting an eating disorder.  Since that time, my blog has taken my readers on a wild ride: grief, dealing with Mother, then the loss of Mother, who passed away in March 2010, memories and self-analysis, all with a little PGH sports talk mixed in.