All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

Rayya’s words devastated Gilbert. With Rayya’s affections now gone, Gilbert began to crash emotionally. She abandoned the luxury apartment to Rayya and slept on her friend’s couch, repeating an old pattern of seeking help after a devastating heartbreak. Now untethered, Rayya was free to fully pursue her addiction and invited other people with substance addictions over to use with her. She told friends that Gilbert had abandoned her because being her caregiver was too challenging, an assertion that made Gilbert wild with fury. Instead of acknowledging her own role in entangling Rayya’s life and well-being with her own, Gilbert instead blamed Rayya completely and began to hate her.

In this poem, God speaks to Gilbert, telling her that she has an addiction and that she needs to just listen, take care of herself, and rest. God gently reminds her to stop endlessly judging people and being so cynical. By embracing solitude and self-care, Gilbert will be able to overcome her fears and her unhealthy relationship with her own feelings.

During this terrible time, Gilbert began going to recovery meetings, one for friends and families of people with addictions, and another for people with love and sex addictions. She hated these, as people’s approach to coping with a loved one’s addiction made no sense to her. When people focused on themselves and managing their own lives, it felt bizarre to Gilbert. She was embarrassed and afraid to recognize herself in the symptoms of sex and love addiction, and she found herself judging the messy romantic histories of the other addicts there. While Gilbert did not share in the meetings or engage with the other people very much, she went regularly and took notes. She feels that through these programs “God was dropping clues of awakening” into her mind (241).

Gilbert compares people with active addictions to vampires, claiming that they tend to take and take from others without giving anything back. While she asks the reader to not judge or hate people with addictions, her advice is to cut them out of one’s life if at all possible. This will limit the damage they can do and might serve as a useful wake-up call to the person with the addiction. She recalls how Rayya always advised the family and friends of people with active addictions to cut off contact, since this was the one thing that had motivated her to become clean and sober.

As Gilbert grappled with Rayya’s relapse, she felt as if the Rayya of the past was coaching her on how to deal with the Rayya of the present, which felt surreal. The author could not believe that the one person who had made her feel completely safe, and who had always encouraged her to stand up for herself, was now the exact person she needed to reclaim her power from and stand up to. Gilbert wonders if God had a role to play in this strange and horrible coincidence, claiming that God may have wanted her to learn from this painful experience. Once Gilbert perceived the situation as a “divinely appointed challenge” she suddenly realized that she would have to “face down the vampire” and have an honest conversation with Rayya (249).

In this poem Gilbert tells people with co-dependency to stop focusing on their empathy for others and instead gather the courage they need to not always interfere with others’ lives. Gilbert feels that instead of offering opinions and care that might do more harm than good, codependents should have the humility to recognize that they cannot control or manage anyone else’s life. She feels that over lifetimes people go through experiences designed to dissolve their egos, and she encourages the reader to disentangle themselves from others’ lives and let them come to enlightenment themselves.

Gilbert prepared to tell Rayya the whole truth and extricate herself from their terrible situation. Rayya agreed to speak to her, and Gilbert told her how sorry she was for all the ways she had contributed to their dysfunctional situation, including her dishonesty, codependence, and blurred boundaries. However, she also told Rayya that she could no longer share a life with her. It was up to Rayya how she lived and how she died, but Gilbert had to protect her own life and soul. Rayya was upset, but accepted Gilbert’s news and wanted to know if they were on good terms. Gilbert said they were, hugged her, and left.

Gilbert’s poem reads, “Somebody around here needs to change / And your name is Somebody” (259).

Rayya flew to Detroit to stay with her ex-girlfriend Stacey, who agreed to take her in if she could manage her drug withdrawal and health care. Rayya, who was completely out of options, agreed, and Stacey competently managed and cared for Rayya day and night. Gilbert recalls this stressful period as she anxiously waited for updates from Stacey, wishing she could be with Rayya while also knowing that she couldn’t. While Stacey encouraged Gilbert to take care of herself, Gilbert’s codependence was difficult to overcome. She wanted to be the confident and effective caretaker that Stacey was, and she envied Stacey’s ability to manage Rayya’s moods and condition. Soon, Rayya was herself again, detoxed off of hard drugs and taking enough painkillers to feel okay. Gilbert was enraged when she spoke to Rayya on the phone and heard the happiness in her voice. When Rayya admitted she had no memory of what happened with Gilbert, the author wanted to scream at her. This made her realize that she was not the angel that she wanted to be, but rather was in need of an angel herself. She credits Stacey with being an angel to her and Rayya.

Writing in verse, Gilbert thinks about all the ways in which she tries to manage and control the world, and frames this as the opposite of humility and listening to God.

Once Rayya had detoxed and stabilized, Gilbert flew to Detroit to visit her. She had given up her attempts to manage the situation, as well as her fantasy about their beautiful love story. Feeling humbled, she arrived as Stacey’s houseguest and knew that Rayya was now very near death. Gilbert found Rayya both physically and emotionally transformed. On the outside, she was much thinner and more worn, but personally she was calm and polite. Because of her drug use and illness, she had fuzzy memories about what had happened in New York and where Gilbert had been all this time.

They had an honest conversation about everything that had happened, and Rayya was saddened to learn about all the cruel things she had said and done to Gilbert. Gilbert admitted to planning Rayya’s murder, and Rayya fully understood why she would want to. Rayya felt that if she wasn’t sick, she would go back into recovery and start from square one, but at that time all she could hope for was Gilbert’s forgiveness. Gilbert asked for the same, and the two forgave each other and finally felt at peace. The author feels that judgment and even opinions about right and wrong are all useless; like Rayya, everyone is “running out of road” (277).

As Rayya edged towards death, Stacey’s home became a gathering place for all the people who loved her and needed to visit her. Rayya’s relatives came around more often, and Gilbert, who was also grieving, was at odds with them in so many ways. She and the family disagreed about Rayya’s medical treatment, her procedures, her remains, and her funeral, and Gilbert feels that sometimes she was arrogant and controlling to Rayya’s relatives. Everyone acted out their grief in different ways, and in hindsight Gilbert knows that none of it really mattered, because the end result would always be Rayya dying. As her days dwindled and her condition worsened, Gilbert began to really grasp what she would be losing when she lost Rayya, and she had more insight into Rayya’s fear of death. Even during her last days, Rayya was still able to connect deeply with others; when they went to the mall, she told her life story to a cashier, and they shared a tearful hug.

On Christmas day, Gilbert felt certain that Rayya would pass away. She was weak and dreamy, with no appetite, and having vivid hallucinations. That night she listened to Sanskrit chants and prayed with Gilbert. When Gilbert could not wake her to take her painkillers, she thought she was dying. She, Stacey and Rayya’s ex-wife Gigi all gathered, lighting candles and music and cuddling Rayya. Suddenly, Rayya woke up, asking what was going on, and the friends scrambled to be normal. When Rayya learned that it was the day after Christmas, she wanted to go sale shopping at Lululemon, and they did.

Gilbert wishes she could write something peaceful and positive about Rayya’s death, but the truth is that it was an awful and painful experience for everyone. Rayya was physically and mentally in agony for two days, and while she had all the sedatives and painkillers she possibly could, Gilbert felt that they were not effective. Everyone coached Rayya to let go and surrender to death, but it seemed that she fought it until the end. Gilbert was relieved that Rayya’s last breath seemed peaceful, and she looked so happy at the very end. Honoring Rayya’s request, Gilbert took care of her body until the funeral home came to take her away.

In a poem Gilbert reflects on her inherent sensitivity. Her whole life, people perceived her as being too sensitive and too fragile. She was an observant and easily frightened child who was always interested in nature and the spiritual. Gilbert challenges the misconception that fragile things cannot stand challenge, pointing to birds’ eggs and butterflies as evidence. She celebrates her own inner strength and how she needed it to support Rayya through her long and painful death.

The week of Rayya’s fifty-sixth birthday, and right before she was diagnosed with cancer, Gilbert rented a house on the Jersey Shore for Rayya’s birthday party. She and Rayya baked a cake and were joking about eating it before the party when Gilbert felt another presence in the room with them. She told Rayya that her mother Georgette, who had died years earlier, was in the room with them and wanted to speak through Gilbert. Gilbert was shocked to be used as a voice for this “ghost.” She told Rayya that her mother was full of love and pride and wanted her to eat and enjoy her cake. Both women were convinced that Georgette was there, and through laughter and tears, they ate the cake.

Georgette also visited Rayya through Gilbert one night when Rayya’s chemo was keeping her awake. Gilbert felt that she surrendered her body to Georgette so she could comfort her daughter. As Rayya approached death, she began to see her mother in her dreams. Her mother would always encourage Rayya to take her hand, but Rayya was resistant.

After Rayya’s death, Gilbert visited a medium named Lori, who claimed that Rayya was speaking through her. In Rayya’s voice, Lori informed Gilbert that Rayya’s death was painful because she resisted it so much; she believed it would be the end and that she would be “erased” (305). Rayya expressed her love and gratitude for Gilbert and her hope that they would be able to keep communicating in their own way. Rayya revealed that as she died, she saw her mother’s face and finally took her hand.