Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1036 Burden in my Hand

Burden in my Hand

By the time we finally saw her, Claire was doped up on post-surgery meds and feeling no pain. Her smile when she saw me and Courtney was huge, and she threw open her arms like she could hug us from the hospital bed, but she was reclined back and there were tubes in her arms and equipment in the way, so all I could do was take one of her hands and squeeze it.

She squeezed back and then nodded off. I'll be honest. I thought for half a second maybe she had expired, but the monitors that showed her pulse and stuff kept on beeping, and if I watched for a couple of seconds I could see she was breathing.

Wouldn't it be something, though, I thought, if she could go just like that? Isn't that what people imagine is the best? Feeling no pain, surrounded by people who love you, and just... go?

Of course when you imagine that scenario, you usually imagine an old person who has lived a long and full life. Someone who has fulfilled their dreams. We sat down in silence around her and my thoughts ran off on this morbid topic for quite a while. If I got struck with a terminal illness that day, would I make peace with my end?

Truth be told I had fulfilled a lot of my dreams. I had been around the world doing what I loved. I'd made money. I'd made the Top 40. I'd made friends.

But I wouldn't want to leave Ziggy, when it really felt like we were just getting started. The ring on my finger felt warm. And I had so much unfinished business. Not emotional business so much as business-business. It'd be hard to accept a fate like that, of knowing my time on earth was done.

Claire hadn't really talked about her own illness in those terms to me. But I had to wonder. Her dreams hadn't been fulfilled. Her marriages hadn't lasted. And some of her kids weren't speaking to her. If that had been me, if I sat around thinking about that for days on end, the feeling of failure and frustration would probably eat me alive from the inside.

Which was probably why Claire's preferred state of mind was to be high as a kite on hashish. Sure, the relief from nausea was a big part of that, but I realized that if I had the choice to drug myself into ignoring reality, I'd do it.

Hell, I had already done it. Maybe not as consciously as Claire, who had nudged the people around her (me, mostly) into setting her up with a constant drug supply and a quiet, out of the way place to use them, but there's no doubt that in South America I had slowly nudged everyone around me into letting me lose my mind.

The ice water in my veins surged again. The people around me in charge of my well-being had really let me do that. Because you know what? They weren't in charge of my well-being. I was. So they listened to me and believed me when I said I was fine or that what I needed was to dig the hole a little deeper.

Until I was down a well and about to drown. If it weren't for Ziggy, and the gold ring on my finger acting like a life preserver, would I have eventually hauled myself out? I decided I didn't want to think about that. I preferred to think about the fact that he had hauled me out. Maybe I'd done the same for him here and there, too. By being partnered, by being connected, it was like the emotional equivalent of having a swim buddy or maybe a mountain climbing partner attached to the end of your rope.

If love is one of the great mysteries of life, I felt maybe I understood it a little better then than I had even a year before. This thing that Ziggy and I felt, this thing that couldn't be seen or measured, that you could even say was just a figment of our imaginations or a delusion, was a force so strong that we changed the courses of our lives to be together.

Ziggy would have already been in Japan on tour–he might have even been there right then–if he hadn't taken the time to move back to Boston with me to get my head back together.