In the dream, I was driving on a highway laid out like silver thread between my home and the nearest big city. My husband was seated next to me, smiling, and I could feel the kids safely at home, laughing with their babysitter. It was just before sunset; the day's dying rays were golden on the water and the softly swaying dry grass as we approached the bridge.

My husband looked at me, and for a split second, I lost focus. I stopped looking at the road, and the car simply drifted serenely off the bridge and started plunging down, down before I knew we were in danger. We fell like Alice down the rabbit hole, falling for so long we seemed to hang suspended in the golden air. I felt like one often does feel in an accident: as if I were seeing everything in slow motion and if only my body would move as fast as my mind, I could do something to prevent the inevitable moment looming ahead.  But the water waited unyielding below us. And I knew we were going to die at the end of that long fall. I had killed both of us in that momentary flicker of attention. My children were going to grow up without parents.  I just hoped they would be asleep when the babysitter called and called the cell phones that would ring on without answer, wondering why we were so late.

I turned to Mark to say I was sorry for killing him; sorry that he was paying the price for my inattention. And he lookedsaidthought, "We all make mistakes, sometimes very bad ones." But he didn't blame me. He held out his hand and we sat, holding hands and falling, waiting for the impact that never came, as I woke with a start. I sat up, shivering, as the images flashed on my waking mind in the cold gray dawn, and I assigned the dream the moral: "I am feeling guilty for not paying enough attention, not being present enough, for my kids."

Irrational as I know it is, I have been terrified of driving that highway ever since. The dream was so vivid, that when I enter the stretch of road leading to the bridge I can see my dream self plunging off the side. If I hit an uneven stretch of pavement and the car jolts or swerves slightly, I feel my heart racing, my body taut with anxiety. I fear that at any minute, I might lose focus, lose control and lose everything. It only takes an instant to make a mistake from which there is no recovery.

I was driving that highway today, with my kids unusually occupied with drawing in the back seat, when I started to feel numb with panic thinking about the bridge. My kids' lives depended on me. Other drivers lives depended on me. And am I really to be trusted? My hand could slip on the steering wheel. Or jerk. Or freeze. What if I have a seizure? What if I fall asleep? What if I get a brain aneurysm? What if I suddenly become diabetic right here in the car and my blood sugar becomes unstable and I pass out? What if I panic so much I black out?

Of course, the only real problem was the panic, which was stubbornly refused to respond to either rational thought, meditation techniques or faith. I eyed the traffic, wondering where it might be safe to pull off and breathe, grumbling to myself, "I so need to talk to my doctor about anxiety meds. This is ridiculous. I can't function. What is really going on here? This isn't just about a stupid dream."

And my mind, as if relieved to have finally been pressed with a direct question, brought up an image of my destination: a park that formed a green oasis in the barren concrete, steel and glass of the city. We were meeting friends there, visiting from out of town. But eight years ago, on the day he hit bottom, my husband went on a different kind of visit there: a picnic to that park with one of his... What's the word for it? Lovers seems too intimate, mistresses too urbane, and acting out partners, too sterile. In any case, they met. The picnic was the appetizer, the foreplay, the prelude, the rising anticipation. Rolling the food on their tongues, then wiping their lips, packing the remains and walking, toward her house, her bed. I can see the way his hand slipped down the small of her back as she pulled him close under a tree for a kiss. Right there in the park. For anyone to see.

We were going to drive past the street to her old house on the way to the park. We were driving on the highway Mark had traveled, secretly, back and forth, from her house to our own. Was this panic -- over this highway, over loss, over lack of control, over mistakes from which there is no recovery -- not about the dream but a twisted response to past trauma? Was the dream, perhaps, not really about quite what I thought it was either? Those thoughts washed through me like water, like crystal clear liquid truth, taking the panic and the looming shadow of future annihilation away with them, leaving me staring at an old scar, still sometimes tender to the touch.

Sometimes I picture those who are in the grips of addiction as falling down into a chasm so hopelessly dark that eventually no memory of light remains and so endlessly deep that it can take years of hurtling down, scrapping the rough walls and smashing into rocky outcrops, before the falling ends.

In the happy ending, the recovery ending, the addict lands somewhere -- broken and battered, but safe -- and calls out for help. Hands are extended, light grows, and the addict starts climbing. That's the ending I pray for, every day and in every moment of silence in every 12 Step meeting I attend.  And that's the one I see manifested in so many beautiful lives around me.

But in the other ending -- the one we all fear -- Death sweeps in, swift as darkness, to stopper that cry for help and cut off the ascent before it can begin. Death may come wrapped in a cloak of despair or disease or irreparable physical damage, but it always comes tragically and too early.

And when it comes at just 18 -- as it did for blogger Katie Granju's son Henry this weekend -- it is so unnaturally early, the sharp horror steals my breath like a plunge in icy water.

I don't have the power to erase, or even fully understand, that loss, that grief.  In fact, I didn't know Henry, nor do I know Katie, except virtually and in passing, through another blog I follow.  Yet my heart is with them. Recovery has taught me that we are all connected, that grace shines through the loving-kindness of those around us (often total strangers) and that the knowledge that we are not alone in the darkness can lift us up.  So, knowing that many of my readers know the pain or the fear of losing a loved one to addiction, I ask you to please consider dropping by Katie's blog with your condolences or donating to Henry's memorial fund, which will provide financial assistance for families who cannot pay for drug and alcohol treatment for their children and may be just the light in the darkness someone needs.

On my wrist is a bright yellow rubber bracelet with LIVESTRONG imprinted on it.  I plucked it from a small wicker basket on a table next to a guest book at a memorial service where one of the loved ones spoke about the task of sorting through everything left behind -- the clothes, the music, the souvenirs, the tchochke, the scraps of paper -- and of how each item had meant something to the person who kept and carried them. The meaning they had held was a mystery, forever emptied out of them, and yet the temptation to hold those items, like still fragments of that lost friend, was strong. He spoke of how how he was inspired to value love and live lighter.

Thousands of miles from where I sit now with the bracelet on my wrist, there is a white shingled house with a bedroom that was once mine and remains a shrine to my childhood self. In the bedroom sits a sturdy set of Ethan Allen bookcases painted a soft sunshine yellow, because that was my favorite color when I was three.  The top of the bookcases are open shelves; the bottom, cabinets with slatted doors.  When I was a preschooler, my family moved to a new city, and one day, while my mother was unpacking boxes, I crawled into the bottom of the one of these bookcases, shut the doors, and fell asleep.  My mother spent what must have seemed to her to be frantic hours searching our new home before finding me there, while I have no memory of it at all.

Now too small a space to hold all of me, the cabinets hold (among other things) an old cardboard shoebox filled with odd scraps that formed the butt-ends of my days and ways: a chewed up old pencil, a single crumpled page from a Far Side daily calendar, a bent nail, a quarter and numerous other things I've forgotten. There is also a sheet of notebook paper in the box that explains what each item is and why it is important to me.

Each item was carefully placed in the box and labeled after I spent a summer helping my mother clear out her parents' house. There were shelves and closets full of things. There was an attic and a basement crammed with dusty boxes.  There was furniture and photographs. There were old letters and old bank statements and old receipts and piles of Playboy magazine. There was a child's baseball uniform for a grown man already in his grave, old 78 records with nothing to play them on, a doll dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and a round flowered tin full of tobacco. What ought we to keep? What did it all mean: to them or to us or to anyone?

But far from being inspired to live lighter at the time, I was inspired to document, to label a box of detritus so that someone sifting through it could see the meaning in a bent nail and not wonder at it with a sigh. But as I think of that box, of that crumpled paper and bent nail and all the other things I can't recall, I don't remember the meaning they had myself. And that sheet of notebook paper? It's a letter to me. I'm the beneficiary and the executor of my own estate. And I think, the next time I visit that cardboard box, it may be time to honor myself and let go: to learn that lesson of loving strong and living light.  Well, except that chewed up pencil.  I might not be quite ready to part with that yet.

"I don't want to get up and I don't want to go to school!" my daughter Janie yelled when she heard me chime "Time to get up!" this morning.  ("Well, maybe tonight you will go to sleep on time so you won't be tired tomorrow," I found myself muttering, then added mentally, "And I won't either.")

It was a battle to get Janie's clothes on and a battle to get her out the door.  At the time we ought to be leaving the house, she was clothed, but still hadn't eaten breakfast.  ("I don't want to eat, because I don't want to go to school!")  I weighed the odds and decided just to give up on trying to make the bus and drive her today.  So I plopped her in the back of the car with a piece of toast and we headed off to school, where she managed to run in just in time (and in a considerably better mood after having grudgingly eaten the toast in the car).

On my drive home, a little bird darted out from the side of the road and began to take flight just as I drove past.  There was no time for it or for me to react and it hit my front bumper with a sickening thud.  I stopped and watched, wondering "What should I do?" as it thrashed for just a moment and then lay still before I had time to answer my own question.

On any other day, that bird could have flown low over the street and my car would not have been there to hit it.  If I had decided to try to have Janie catch the bus today (which she might have, though it would have been close), my car would not have been there to hit it.  If Mark had gotten Janie to bed earlier while I was out last night or if I had not gone out and put her to bed myself, maybe she would not have been so cranky this morning and I wouldn't have been on the road.  Or maybe the car behind me would have startled the bird and hit it instead if I hadn't been there.  My little decisions — my small, seemingly random, actions — affect so many other things, but I don't always know how and why.

Last night, while Mark was trying to wrangle Janie in to bed, I was attending a talk by a Zen Buddhist who said, "Things are.  There is a reason that they are.  But we do not know the reason, only that they are and that there is a reason."  There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  I want to know what it is, but it's enough to know that it is.

I strut down the hall,
pull a mint green plastic comb
from my jeans pocket.

Comb whips through hair and...
I fail (completely!) to look
like Farrah Fawcett.

I was one of only five people on the planet who didn't own a copy of Thriller, largely because I like to be contrary; it allows me to feel superior and rebel against alcoholic absolutism by being absolute in a different direction. But because I grew up in the 80's, I couldn't escape knowing every song on the album whether I owned it or not. (And then secretly singing them to myself when there was no one around to see me being anything less than contemptuous of their choices.)

When Michael Jackson's skin whitened and his nose became skeletal, when he was accused of child molestation and and sued for debt, when there were reports that he bought the Elephant Man's bones, when he nicknamed his son Blanket and built an amusement park in his back yard, when the tabloids dubbed him Wacko Jacko, I liked to tell people "I told you so. I always thought there was something wrong with him." As if that were really the reason I pretended to disdain him when he was at the height of his popularity and continued to mock him as his untreated mental illness* played out on a global stage.

But my relationship with Michael Jackson (as with so many people in and out of my life) has changed as my relationship to myself in recovery has changed. Instead of seeing him as someone to mock in order to feel clever and healthy, I started to see a someone who was aching enough inside to have visibly mutilated (or paid his plastic surgeons to mutilate) his body. I saw a talented man who lived imprisoned in his own deep pain, a man who self medicated through fantasy in many of the same ways I had myself. As I came to better understand my own love of Peter Pan and the fantasy of Disney and my own desire to escape into some fantasy childhood, I suspected I better understood his too. And I used to, in my own way, pray for him. I thought about how hard it must be for someone so insulated from the world by money and fame to finally reach a point low enough to break through denial and bring desperation for change, and I would hope that he would finally lose enough to get help.

When I learned of Michael Jackson's death, I felt the same sadness I felt at the death of my father-in-law: the grief that he died without ever finding relief, redemption or recovery (in its broadest sense) in this life. But I am grateful, as I see my own progress mirrored in my changing perceptions of him, that I can finally crank up "Thriller" and spin a bit in his honor.

My daughter, Janie, found the body. Our pet* had been missing for a while, so at first she shouted to me excitedly. She found him! But when I ran to her, it was clear that he was already gone. She looked from his still body up at me and asked, tentatively, "Is he very hurt, Mama?" There was a pause, where I knew that this was the moment I was supposed to do that magical mama thing. I was supposed to kiss the boo boo, mend the tear, put the pieces back together, paste the petals back in place. I was supposed to fix it. I was supposed to make it better. But I had to admit, with tears in my eyes, that he was more than hurt, he was dead. And I couldn't fix that.

Janie's grief was overwhelming and instantaneous. She sobbed until she couldn't breathe and cried until her red eyes were swollen nearly shut. I had to carry her in to the living room and place her on the sofa where she clung to me and wept. Her brother Austen hovered nearby. "I'm sad," he said, in a simple statement of facts, "but I'm not crying." After a while, Janie wanted to sit with the body, so I wrapped it in a towel and we sat together, crying, as we watched its stillness.

I told the children we would need to bury it; the life was gone and the body had to return to the earth now. While Austen accepted and even seconded this idea, Janie was, at first, vehemently against putting the body in the ground. But as she watched it, not moving, she asked what would happen to the body. I told her it would slowly decay and transform, like the dead bird we saw wasting away earlier this spring, shrinking and dissolving to just feathers and bones. If we put it into the earth, it would transform into rich soil and nourish plants. She liked the idea of new life in a plant, so she and I prepared a plant and something to contain the body. She drew pictures of herself, crying, to lay in the grave and a note with hearts and our pet's name to say goodbye. Austen said he would like to do something too. So, he took a Sharpie marker and on the towel I had wrapped the body in he wrote, in block letters, the label: "DEAD ANIMAL." Mark dug the grave and we each threw a handful of dirt on the body before placing the new plant on top.

Over the intervening weeks, each child has continued to process the loss. Janie focused first on death: pointing out dead grass, dead leaves, dead bugs wherever she went and telling me they were dead like her pet. However, I've noticed a gradual shift to thoughts of rebirth. At first, she expressed hopes and wishes for the body and spirit of her lost animal, but more recently she has spent a lot of time tending the plant that sits over the grave, drawing pictures of it, talking about it. Two weeks after the burial, she talks very little about the pet itself, although the loss is still clearly on her mind.

Austen, on the other hand, talks about the lost pet each day. He continues to express, always very matter-of-factly, that he feels sadness and misses the lost animal, even though he continues to appear (to the world at large) not to show it. He talks about how things might be if his pet were still alive: what it might be doing and feeling and thinking at any given moment. And he seems very concerned (in a way that many would find totally un-autistic of him) about how the animal parents and siblings of our pet might react to its loss. He wonders if its mother would be angry or sad to know that it was dead, and he hopes she doesn't find out, so that she won't know the pain. He wonders if its siblings would miss it and feel sad that it's gone.

As for me, I cried writing this post, so I know I'm still grieving the loss — and feeling my children's grief as well as my own.

A month or so ago, I did something I dread and despise: I took a trip on an airplane. When I fly, the joy is entirely in the destination and not at all in the journey. The flight fills me with terror: terror that escalates if the trip is turbulent or if I'm in a small plane where I can feel just how fast I'm rocketing through the air or if I'm seated away from the window, shut in, claustrophobic, with no reference point.

Of course, all of those things happened on one leg of my most recent trip. I missed my connection and lost my carefully selected window seat, and the folks sitting next to the window on each side of me pulled the shades down and went to sleep leaving me trapped blindly in shivering metal. It was a bumpy flight in a small plane, and I could hear and feel the monstrous rush of air all around us. So I prayed and meditated (or tried to) the whole flight. I must have said the Serenity Prayer six million times. And let me tell you, nothing will give you a new outlook on the Serenity Prayer like saying it yourself six million times when you fear that the next moment will bring your violent, fiery death.

I sat on the plane and tried to breathe with lungs that felt like they were constricted to the size of peas and repeated in my head over and over, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference." I'd the first part really hard: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Ok, I can't change whether or not the plane is going to crash. I can't control the turbulence. I can't control when we land. I can't control whether I live or die. Serenity. Serenity. Come on, bring on the serenity!

Then I'd pray the next parts weakly: the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. After all what can I change? The only thing I really care about is whether or not I die. I really, really want to control that a lot. I could wake the guy next to him and ask him to raise the shade or switch seats with me so that I can have a nice clear view of the engine exploding or the ground approaching at 32 feet per second squared, but that's not actually going to change the thing I want to change. So, back to that first part about the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Stupid, useless rest of the Serenity Prayer.

After a few thousand iterations of this, I started to think about how odd it was that I was in a situation where I was completely powerless to change anything, when it struck me that there was one thing I could still change, the one and only thing I could always change: me. I didn't need the courage to ask for I window seat or the courage to leap up and operate the emergency exit if needed. I needed the courage to change me, the courage to overcome my fear of death, the courage to change the way I perceived this flight.

Oh.

Duh.

So, I started praying both the first and second parts of the Serenity Prayer really hard: the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. As for that last part — the wisdom to know the difference — I gave a little burst of gratitude each time I got to that, because saw I'd already gotten that part this time around. And I kept praying until the plane touched the ground, safe at my destination.

I've got plans for tomorrow that are going to keep me away from the computer, and I knew I wanted to squeeze in one last blog post today. So first thing in the morning I began the day right: by panicking because I wasn't sure what I was going to write about. I didn't have an idea! Ack! What if I sat down and couldn't think of anything? Well, you can see (tongue firmly planted in cheek here) how very catastrophic that would be. There I was with the threat of writer's block looming in front of me ominously (and let me tell you, it really knows how to loom: casting a long shadow with its big claws and pointy teeth), when I remembered something I once heard from the very wise Karen Maezen Miller: that the answer will always be there when we need it; we just have to learn to trust that. I see it as a variation on my favorite recovery slogan (and the one I most often need to remember): Let go and let God.

So, given that I had no idea what to write about and I was supposed to trust this (grr, stupid!) process, I decided not sit down at my usual writing time and I went out and ran errands instead. And as I ran errands, I got this weird throbbing headache. Now, I'm an old hand at headaches. I'm prone to both migraines and sinus headaches, so I'm no stranger to pain in my head. But that pain is old and familiar. This pain was new and different. I'd be walking along, feeling ok and then throb throb! Pain just above my left ear for a few seconds. Then nothing for a few minutes. Then throb throb again.

Given the great mental state in which I started the day, my mind went immediately to the next reasonable thought: I'm going to die. I mean, this could be the first sign of an aneurysm or a stroke. After all, I once had a coworker, a mother to young children, who was perfectly fine one moment, complained of a headache a few minutes later, then walked into a meeting and collapsed, dead of a brain aneurysm. It's the kind of thing that is both horribly tragic and completely terrifying. So I walked around thinking, "Could these throbs be the early warning sign of the same thing in me? Could I do something different right now and change things... control the outcome?"

But I caught myself right there: wanting to control the things I can't. I was feeling nervous and anxious about a whole host of things and had fallen down lately on taking care of myself. So for the second time today I was, in a major way, not letting go and trusting things to work out, but instead trying to figure out a way to approach my discomfort that was going to guarantee the outcome I wanted. So I realized that I had a headache. It wasn't particularly bad or painful, just unfamiliar. It wasn't worth consulting a doctor, because right at that moment, I had to admit, it didn't seem at all serious. The next right thing to do was to wait. If it got more alarming, I'd see a doctor. And maybe, as for my coworker, that moment would be too late. But I can't control that.

As I realized this, I began to relax, and as I relaxed, the little throbs subsided and I realized I had something to write about today too. Well, what do you know? The answer really is there when I need it, if I can just let go of my control freaking and trust that.

Many years ago, before we had children, my husband bought me a small fish tank for my birthday. At the time, I wanted a car. I didn't really think he could buy a car, but I was relying on a very iffy public transit system to get to work, so I half hoped. His only clue ("it's pink") did not seem encouraging, but maybe he was buying one used. From a Mary Kay lady. He was definitely very excited and spending a lot of time in preparation and whispered conferences with friends. When the big day came, he proudly unveiled the tank, complete with pink gravel.

Over the years, we've had a variety of freshwater fish, from tropical to ordinary old feeder goldfish. We once had a fish give birth to tiny babies, whose growth was somehow stunted, perhaps from my over-caution in keeping them too long in a small breeding section of the tank. When my son Austen was born, the tank was home to one large angel fish, who had outlived all the rest.

As an infant, Austen screamed -- piercing screams -- nearly constantly when he wasn't nursing, which I did nearly constantly to keep him from uttering those awful screams. He had (even for a newborn) problems sleeping. He was different, more intense, more needy from the day he was born, from before he was born. And I felt like I was living my life clutching a live grenade that could explode at any moment.

In the anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation and sheer overwhelmingness of those early days, the fish tank fell into neglect. The water got murkier as it was cleaned less often. And when the last of the fish finally died, we didn't replace them, but let the tank stand empty. My memories of that time are fuzzy -- events run together and odd things stand out, disconnected -- like one long waking dream. And one of the disconnected, fuzzy memories that's weighed on me over the years was of purposely starving the last of the fish when my son was an infant. I remember lying in bed and willing myself not to get up and feed them. I wanted to be free of them, but I felt awful letting them die. Well, they could eat the algae or they were better off dead anyway, I'd tell myself. I remember the tank getting so cloudy and black that I wasn't sure when they had died. And over the years the thought of that tank haunted me.

I eventually cleaned it up and restocked it with fish. Currently, it houses one lone goldfish, as I never have gotten back into the habit of keeping it up well enough to feel comfortable with anything higher maintenance or less hardy. But as I was feeding that fish the other night, I was overcome once again by that familiar guilt and shame for the fish I'd starved. Or, it suddenly occurred to me, had I? Had I confused a dream for reality? Wouldn't Mark have fed the fish if I hadn't? It was hard to know what happened back then. Everything was such a muddle.

I turned to my husband, who was lying on the bed, and said, "I have this memory of purposely starving my fish when Austen was born. Only I'm wondering now if it really happened that way or if it was a dream." And Mark said, "That doesn't sound at all like anything you'd do." And it was true. I've been known to bring home and tend to everything from wounded birds to baby squirrels to stray kittens. And I'm obviously the kind of person who spends years plagued with guilt and shame at the thought that I might have killed some pet fish. But I was crazy back then. Crazy with post-partum depression and anxiety and the weight of Mark's growing addiction pressing down (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time). I wasn't me. Who knows what the crazy-me did?

If Mark was right and it didn't make sense that I was a fish murderer, then what had happened? I concentrated. Wasn't Angel the only fish left in the tank when Austen was born? He was. I had written it in the baby book (one of the few things I wrote in the baby book); next to "Who was there to greet you when you came home?" I had written "Our fish, Angel." And I hadn't gone out and restocked the tank. When Angel died I left it empty. So what fish could I have killed?

Then it came to me: it was the baby fish I remembered killing, because I remember thinking I couldn't tell when they had died; the water was so murky and they were tiny and good at hiding in the plants. And the puzzle snapped together. I was lying in bed willing myself not to go feed the empty tank again, because the crazy, panicky part of my brain was telling me that I couldn't know what wasn't there. I had been feeding the empty tank after Angel died. Maybe, I thought, those little fish that I thought had died long ago were still there in the plants. Maybe they needed me to feed them. I couldn't know, and I shouldn't starve them.

The guilt and shame melted away, transforming first into relief (I was not a fish murderer!) and then into delight at the metaphor for so many of my relationships: carrying guilt and shame for years because I hadn't perpetually fed an emptiness that I thought couldn't live without me. It's a good thing Mark didn't get me a car; I wouldn't have felt nearly as bad for not putting gas in it when it broke down.