Chapter 5
Like so many women I know, I learned to compartmentalize in order to have a full life.
It’s a survival skill. I am able to go to my exercise class and be fully present there, switch to being in my classroom and entirely a teacher, send valentines to my children and grandchildren, then go to a gala and be Joe’s spouse without distraction.
I considered it a source of strength. But after Beau’s death, holding everything together became much more difficult for me.
Finding ways to take care of myself while being present for my family was not easy. Deep grief can be isolating.
Hunter was a successful lawyer, teaching at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and serving as board chair of World Food Program USA.
Beau’s death left him unhinged. Joe and I found that our calls to Hunter, then in his mid-forties, often went unanswered.
Day after day, the question hung in the air: Where is he?
“Have you heard from Hunter?” I would say, putting down my phone.
“No, have you?” Joe would reply.
“No.”
“Well, where do you think he is?”
“I don’t know.”
Addiction was not a topic that Joe and I talked about. I think we were partly in denial. Why would Hunter use drugs? He had everything: a family who loved him, a good education, a lucrative career.
Joe and I tried to manage it as best we could. But then Hunter’s daughters came to us asking if we’d help them arrange an intervention. We staged two. The first time, Hunter didn’t show up. The second, he arrived to find his family gathered along with a counselor. He turned right around and bolted.
Ultimately, Hunter found the amazing strength to get enduringly sober in 2019. He credits the support of his new wife, Melissa, with keeping him stable and helping him choose the path of sobriety each day.
As a teacher, I had students who would start smoking pot the moment they woke up and were stoned every day in class.
I could usually tell when they were high, and I tried to talk to many of them about getting help, about reaching out to counselors.
But the answer was always the same: “I don’t need help. I can stop on my own. It’s okay.”
Certainly, when I was teaching English at the Rockford Center psychiatric hospital starting in 1981 while getting my master’s degree, I saw serious cases of addiction, and a lot of suffering on the part of both those with addiction and their families.
I watched attendants put kids in padded cells for LSD flashbacks.
Almost every child in the psychiatric hospital was put there by the courts for attempting suicide.
So many young people I encountered took drugs to dull the pain because of abuse in their homes or in foster care.
Usually, insurance only allowed a two-week stay.
Two weeks. How can you heal a lifetime of trauma in two weeks?
The horror of addiction, for the one suffering and their family, has nevertheless proved a steep learning curve for me. Even now, I can barely say the words “My son was a drug addict.” Barely.
The guilt I feel as a parent is sometimes overwhelming. What could I have done differently? What did I do wrong? What did I not see?
Many people have asked why I never took on addiction as a cause as First Lady. I couldn’t. I really don’t have any answers, even though I deeply empathize with those who love people struggling with addiction. I know the agony of living with the question Where is my child right now, at this moment?
The other day, I was cleaning out a drawer and found one of Hunter’s lighters, and I was instantly triggered. How many times had I seen him using it, obsessively smoking cigarettes?
Generationally, I was raised to stay stoic and contained.
Regardless of how bad it looked, I believed that Hunter would get it together on his own.
That’s something I regret now, not having tried sooner to talk about it.
A lot of people knew how dire the situation had become, but they didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask.
For years, nothing was spoken aloud about Hunter’s addiction—not its effect on him and the family, and not even the grief that had surely compounded the situation.
But it’s funny how things unsaid sometimes have a way of making themselves heard.
In January 2020, I was on the campaign trail in Concord, New Hampshire. My staff and I made a stop at a Riverbend clinic for a roundtable with mental health professionals.
I talked abstractly, as I generally did, about how it was such an important issue, and how my students had made me aware of mental health challenges.
Then a retired doctor there asked me how Joe and I handled mourning our son while also serving the country.
I wanted to give him an honest answer, and so I decided I would tell him a bit about what that time had been like.
“Nobody really knew what we were going through,” I said.
Beau and his family wanted to maintain their privacy, so we’d told no one outside our inner circle about his prognosis.
“We had to keep it quiet. So we never received any sort of counseling ourselves or any help for our family to go through that because it was kept so quiet. And Beau, our son, wanted it that way. He didn’t want the world to know, and nor did we.
It’s a very personal thing to go through, as you well know, and a very tough thing to go through. ”
That’s when, perhaps, on any other day I would have stopped. Instead, I heard myself saying something that had been welling up inside me for a long time:
“One of the things that I had to do and Joe had to do… I was working at the time. I was teaching, so I would go to the hospital very early in the morning before I taught, or I’d go after I taught, or I’d stay there late into the night.
Joe would be in the vice president’s office.
He’d be working. He’d go there at eleven, twelve, one in the morning and stay all night with Beau. We never left Beau alone.”
I remained calm, but I maintained eye contact with that doctor. I felt that he was truly listening, almost asking me follow-up questions without speaking, and so I continued:
“But that, I think, did take a tremendous toll on our family. In the emotional aspect. And the fallout from it. It affected our kids. It affected our grandkids. So we didn’t have any support built in.
Just because of the nature of the office, actually.
And maybe that was a mistake, I don’t know.
It just wasn’t practical. It just wasn’t practical. ”
News cameras recorded the conversation, or I wouldn’t have believed that I’d said all that.
Nobody took particular note of the exchange.
For all the tiny gestures the press made so much of, that full-blown confession of how my family had suffered and repressed, repressed and suffered, went entirely unmentioned.
For that room full of people whose job it was to bear witness to suffering, it surely wasn’t unusual to have someone confess to feeling great pain, nor to second-guess how they’d handled it.
But for me, it was unprecedented to share so much.
When we got back in the car, my aide looked at me in shock. “Whoa! What was that about?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just looking at all those people working hard to share and get better, and all the people helping them, and I thought, What would the family be like if we’d had more of that kind of support since Beau died?”
In May 2019, I was proud to join the opening of a brand-new cancer clinic on Navajo Nation land in Tuba City, Arizona.
Patients from the Navajo Nation often had to drive for hours, with no rest areas along the way, to get chemotherapy.
The journey was so grueling that many chose to forego care.
This new facility would save them from hours of daily round-trip driving to non-Native land for their treatment.
It was exactly the sort of improvement in care that I hoped my advocacy work was helping make possible.
For as happy an occasion as it was, when I walked into the clinic and saw a chemotherapy chair, it triggered me.
I was right back there with Beau, holding his hand.
I had to walk down the hallway and pull myself together before I could participate in the opening celebration.
Today, perhaps, politicians can share that they go to therapy. Maybe it would be seen as admirable. But certainly, back in the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s, it would have been taken as a mark against the family.
Most young people today don’t know the name Thomas F.
Eagleton, but people my age do. He was a senator, and George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic vice presidential candidate for eighteen days before he was forced out because it was revealed that he’d battled depression and had electroshock therapy.
A few years after that, Joe and I had dinner with Tom and his wife, Barbara.
The first time I stepped into their home, she took one look at my super-high, strappy heels with a bow on the front and said, “I see you’re wearing your ‘f**k-me’ shoes. ”
I burst out laughing. Nobody talked like that back then, not in the circles we ran in. I decided two things in that moment: One, I wanted to be Barbara’s friend. She was hilarious and I loved her. Two, I should get a second pair of those shoes.
For the most part, I’ve been able to hold myself together, moving forward without letting anyone see when I’m in pain.
Not everyone is built that way. Some people are just more sensitive.
If they’re sad, they cry in public. When they hit a rough patch, you can see the wheels come off.
I used to think my way was the healthier path. Now I’m not so sure.