This photo is one of my favourites and has been for the better part of 25 years. The inspiration for my photo series Earthbound Memories has roots in this photo.
I present The Chicken Lady. That’s what my Gramma called her and that’s what I call her. The Chicken Lady.
All the chatter about the death of Whitney Houston has stirred up a lot of memories for me. Addiction takes many forms. Whether it’s from the outside looking in, or the inside looking out; we can all relate in some way.
This post is about my experiences with friends and family who are lost or dead as the result of drug addiction. I won’t share them all, but I’ll share a few.
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Joe was two years clean when he started smoking crack again. So many nights his girlfriend and I tried to help him. He’d disappear and she’d call me for help. We’d drive around looking for him for days.
It would start when he’d come to her house, kicking down the door looking for money for crack. Afterwards he’d beg for forgiveness and make promises he’d later break. As a friend to both of them, it was torment. I felt powerless to help, unless it was to help pick up the pieces in the aftermath. It was a kick in the gut when we’d find him; seeing the evidence of three to four-day crack binges all over his body.
There was no consolation with Joe. He’d beat himself up in the few days he was sober. We’d tread lightly during that time. And then his pain would grow too great and he’d steal what he could and he’d be out the door again; lost to the streets on another binge.
I asked him one night, “Why crack?” He looked at me and sighed wistfully. “The moment I smoked my first rock, I knew it was what I’d been waiting for my whole life. I’ve spent the rest of my highs chasing that memory.”
Tangled. That’s the word that came into my mind, the day I walked away. I don’t know where Joe is today.
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Peggy was a sweet soul. I miss her more than I can express. Her laugh and her smile would light up a room. Sometimes I think I see her in a crowd of people. I know it’s my mind playing tricks on me. Peggy is dead. She died of an overdose.
Peggy struggled with addiction through her teens and into her 20′s when she finally went clean. Her past was filled with physical and sexual abuse and she turned to heroin to make the pain go away.
Peggy started using heroin again after being clean for so long. She thought she’d be fine with a drink every now and then. Six months later she was, once again, living and breathing a full fledged heroin habit.
She pulled away from her friends. Out of shame? To protect us? To protect herself from our judgments? I’ll never know.
A few years later, I saw her at a café on Main Street. She looked rough. I almost didn’t recognize her. She saw me see her. She closed her eyes and I could tell she didn’t want me to come over. Her pain was clear and so was my heartache.
A year later a mutual friend received news that Peggy had died of an overdose the year prior. It turns out I saw her a few days before she died. It still breaks my heart thinking about that. I wish I’d kicked down the wall between us that day and rushed over to hug her. Whether she lived or not, she would have known I still loved her.
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Uncle Bob was addicted to cocaine for many years. He was ostracized by family members as a result of his addiction. Most of them didn’t want to have anything to do with him. The thing that always pissed me off the most was that none of them tried to help him. None of them tried to support him. They just wrote him off.
Only my immediate family stuck by him and helped him through some of the most challenging years of his life. He quit using cocaine and regained his health, but spent the rest of his life trying to mend the interpersonal damages his addiction caused. His siblings wouldn’t accept him, despite being clean. To them, he was already dead.
He moved away and we’d only see him a few times a year. We spoke often on the phone, but he felt his life was better lived as a recluse.
He died alone in his trailer. His body undiscovered for six days.
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To those still alive, I love you.
When the melancholy blooms, I turn to my Black and White Time Machine for a soft poke to my brain.
Here’s a handful of handsome mystery men; their stories unknown.
I bet he was a smooth talker with smooth cigarettes. What a gent.
A day in the country made easy by those swoon worthy long lashes.
Cigarettes and impeccably coiffed hair. I'm sensing a theme here.
Retro hotties lounging like cats in the sun.
This is Ben. Or so says the writing on the back of the photograph. He's probably the strong, silent type.
These boys are trouble.
With blood too thick to flow, the dormant heart feigned a single beat before its eternal, frosted sleep.
The soft, abstract shapes and lines that result with Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) make me happy. As the world softens, a new dimension reveals itself.
There were a few other people in the Gastown graffiti alley with me and eventually they all congregated around me, curious about what I was doing.
“You’re ruining perfectly good photos!” one guy exclaimed. I explained I was experimenting with movement. I showed him some of the results and he shook his head in dismay. “They’re all blurry. That’s the junk I delete.”
In no mood to explain myself further, I politely ignored him (can one politely ignore another person?), and I continued onward with my “step-step-click-step-step” alley dance.
"Jaws" by Cheryl Cheeks © 2012, Charcoal with Mixed Media
This is Jaws. He’s a goldfish. I couldn’t find a photo of him in any of the old family photo albums, so I did a charcoal drawing and plopped him in a fish bowl and then snapped a photograph, complete with charcoal pebbles at the bottom of the bowl.
I never realized how odd my family is until I shared the story of Jaws, my Gramma’s goldfish, with some friends of mine.
You see, Jaws always accompanied us on family summer vacations back in the 80′s. Every summer, we’d pack up the camping gear and trek off to Tofino and Ucluelet on Vancouver Island for a few weeks.
Gramma would stick Jaws in a mason jar full of water, screw on the lid and off we’d go; my sister and I taking turns holding Jaws in his travel jar. Yes, there was a mason jar specifically for Jaws. She’d take it down off the shelf, wipe off the dust, and Jaws would start swimming circles in his bowl, doing little leaps out of the water. I swear that goldfish got more excited about family vacations than we did.
My sister and I would hold Jaws’ travel jar up to the window so he’d have a nice view of the drive. Upon our arrival, we’d put him in his fish bowl and set it down in view of the Pacific Ocean. Nothing but rolling green and blue waves as far as he could see.
I suppose that makes us strange, my family and I, but Jaws lived for the better part of eleven years.
Do you have any quirky family stories others might consider strange? If so, what are they?
I’ve thought a lot about invisible illnesses lately and how quick we are to judge people without knowing the story behind the way they act or move.
My mother has MS and my father has cancer. I think about all the times people have judged them or pushed past them without ever giving thought to the fact they may be quietly suffering from an illness.
Twenty years of cancer treatments have left my dad with Chemo Brain. For the most part he’s okay, but now and then he has moments where he doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes the way he arrives at point B from point A can be confusing. I’ve seen it happen, where people have judged him for that, and walked away saying he’s stupid. He’s not. Not by a long shot.
My mom’s MS progresses every year. Her mobility is hampered, so you would think her illness is less invisible. But that doesn’t stop people from pushing past her in stores and on sidewalks. Some people even make rude remarks about the fact that she doesn’t walk with ease. This makes me so very angry. She has limited mobility and her balance is compromised as a result. All it takes is a rough shove from a careless stranger on the sidewalk and my mom’s going to fall. It doesn’t seem to matter that she walks with a visible limp. I don’t know whether it’s that people are so wrapped up in their own worlds they don’t “see” her limp or they don’t give a flying fuck about it.
When a person looks fine on the outside, but is struggling daily with pain and illness, it’s hard to explain that to someone. When you can’t see the illness, it’s hard for others to understand.
MS, cancer, Depression, Arthritis, Anxiety, LUPUS. The list goes on. There are countless people suffering from countless invisible illnesses and we do each other a disservice when we don’t stop to consider there’s more to people than we can see.
Stop. Think.
There’s most likely a reason you can’t see for the way a person is acting or moving. This extends beyond invisible illness to all the events that take place in our lives. That woman on the bus who looks miserable and you’re judging her because of the furrow in her brow? Maybe her husband died. Maybe she lost her job. Maybe she was just diagnosed with cancer.
