Angels Among Us

…the ones who never leave our side and the ones that come and go, staying just long enough to help us through a bad time.

I’m not necessarily saying there are actual angels among us – you know, the kind of angels sent straight from God as a spiritual go-between. I’m just saying it’s a little strange that when we most need it, people show up, carry us along, and sometimes then depart, never to be seen again.

Others stay by our side forever.

I got to thinking about this because this one — the one in the photo above, the one on the right with her arm in a cast — came to visit this weekend.

Came from Maine with her wonderful husband, who I love as much as I love her because he is a good and funny and steady man and because he is her life partner. And it makes me feel so good that she got such a winner. It’s no wonder they have ushered three lovely humans into the world.

Even now, when she comes to visit, I get a stomachache from excitement. And when I say goodbye at the ferry, there’s a lump the size of Chilmark in my throat.

She is Eliza. I’d like to respect her privacy, but I have never done a very good job of camouflaging her identity as my best friend. But I don’t intend to say much more today, other than this: among her very best qualities (in addition to being the absolute finest mother I know) are her loyalty, her steadfastness, and her good humor. 

Despite what my mother’s handwriting indicates, Susie is on the left and Eliza on the right.

Someday I will write about this friendship, about this second sister of mine, when I can do justice to it, to her, to us. For now I will only say that it is not lost on me how lucky I am to have had her by my side for literally my entire life – our mothers became friends when they were pregnant with us (my mother having grown up with her dad). I came out first and when she came along six months later, I was waiting for her.

Finish and start of school year, 1979-1980.

Even though we have spent our adult lives living in different states, we have a friendship that was cemented in toddlerhood, never to be broken.

My first sister (the blood relative) is even harder to write about. Eleanor is almost seven years older than I am. Most people, when they hear that, say, oh, you’re probably not close. They be wrong! People forget that when there are only two of you experiencing the same unique set of circumstances (otherwise known as mom and dad), you tend to bond over that pretty tightly. In our case, there was a lot of bonding over hysterical laughter – it seemed the appropriate response to circumstances. We also have a shared language that includes words we’d never use with anyone else. That’s probably a conditioned response to the environment as well.

My big sister Eleanor (on the left) with me.

Some day I will write about her, too, but I will tell you one thing – she took care of her baby sister (still does) like nobody’s business. I should be wishing her a happy Mother’s Day, as she has done plenty of mothering without the formal title.

You are blessed if you have a sister or a friend who sticks with you like this. But I also find it so fascinating and wonderful that people (female people especially, at least in my experience) appear during certain times in your life to support you in the way you need it right then. Of course it does take some reaching out (sometimes a full-throttle “HELP!”) to draw these folks in, but they are out there.

I’m thinking specifically about the four women who materialized around my struggle to get and stay sober. None of them is in my life in a major way now, but I wouldn’t have made it then without them.

The first, my friend Holly (not her real name), answered the phone when I was at my bottom – literally sitting on my bottom on my kitchen floor, slumped in despair over one more day of trying to overcome a great weight of depression that settled on me when I didn’t drink. It was Day Four (of many, many Day Fours, Day Twos, Day Tens – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as counting days but I was doing it, desperately trying to build up some not-drinking time. Sober was not a word in my vocabulary then.)

I called Holly, who was the only person I knew who was in a 12-step program (about which I knew almost nothing). I had just gotten off the phone with a therapist, who advised me, once again, that if I really was going to succeed at not drinking, I’d have to stop trying to do it all by myself.

I caught Holly at a terribly awkward moment. She had, the previous day, been in an awful car accident with her children, though everyone was fine — except for the driver of the other vehicle. He apparently had suffered a medical incident which caused him to lose control of his truck and cross over into oncoming traffic. He collided with Holly head-on. It wasn’t a high-speed crash, and Holly and her kids were safety-belted into their SUV. So they were very fortunate. But the driver, who had his dog with him in his truck, died. The EMTs insisted on taking Holly and her kids to the hospital, where Holly was awkwardly trapped in the waiting room with the wife of the dead driver. The whole experience was traumatic.

When she told me this story, I said, “Oh I’m so sorry to be bothering you, I was just calling about going to a meeting, and that can wait. I can catch up with you another time.”

Amazingly, she immediately said, “Oh, no, no. If you are ready to go to a meeting, you have to go as soon as possible and I will go with you. I haven’t been to one in a while and I need to go. I will pick you up Saturday morning.”

And every Saturday for three months, Holly took me to this meeting and afterwards went for a walk with me in a nearby park. I completely unloaded on her, saying how much I was struggling, and for three months she told me, “Oh don’t worry, it gets much better after three months.”

At three months, I said to her, “Boy, this is still such a struggle.” And she said, “Oh don’t worry, it gets much better after six months.” And it went on like this for almost a year, her leading me by the nose, promising it would get better. And of course it did, but not quickly enough for my expectations!

The second woman, Greta (not her real name), entered my life at a precarious time when I had been going to meetings for a few months and suddenly had started thinking, “Oh, this stuff is kind of crazy. I don’t think I really want to do this. And maybe I don’t need to…” Danger Danger. Out of the blue, Greta appeared at my side after a meeting and offered to be my spiritual mentor. I liked her and felt I could trust her. I immediately began to work with her on the step work that would, in all seriousness, change my life forever.

When I moved to the Vineyard a year later, I had to leave Greta behind, though we had accomplished so much in that year that despite still being pretty loopy, I had some solid ground to stand on.

While I worked with Greta, I had also been trying to solve the triangular puzzle of my stressful job, my aching marriage, and the place I lived in but didn’t feel comfortable in. Between all three, I felt trapped and I didn’t know where the door was. One day my company sent me off to do a course of media training with a well-known culinary agent. (I was still editor of Fine Cooking magazine and about to go on a TV tour for a book we published). Being in the state I was in, I of course let slip a bit of my conundrum to this media trainer. She offered a solution: “Call Mary Hulbert. She’s a life coach I worked with and she’s fantastic. Unlike a therapist, she’ll concentrate on practical ways to reach a goal.”

Mary became my third lifeguard. Without the work I did with her, I would likely have gone crazy bouncing off the sides of the goldfish bowl. She helped me understand why I was taking certain actions and how I could turn those around. Even more important, exercises I did with her helped me identify what I needed to thrive – including joy, beauty, and being in nature. My time with Mary was limited but invaluable.

The fourth woman was in fact, a therapist. She was gifted to me by the couples therapist my (now former) husband and I were seeing – the same couples therapist who had suggested that I go to a meeting. She thought Carolyn (not her real name) would be a perfect fit for me, and she was. I really needed the time with Carolyn to bring all the spiritual, mental, physical and emotional parts together to help me move forward.

That ’s a lot of people, I know! It’s hard to admit I needed that much help, but apparently I did. And it wasn’t only those four women who showed up. In reality there were many more who appeared like angels to see me through and then quietly slipped away.

They weren’t the last either. Looking back, I see angels who surrounded me when I got to the Vineyard, angels who got me through high school and college and New York, angels I work with now. And of course angels who came and never went.

I’m not sure how it works, but I’m a believer.  

Eliza and Susie, May 12, 2023