THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606230040
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Elizabeth Simpson
LENGTH: 62 lines
I sit here staring at the computer screen but thinking about my kids.
Wishing there were a way I could be with them and make a living at the same time.
And I wonder whether George McGovern ever felt this way as he stood backstage waiting to make another political speech.
I was thinking that because I've been reading his book, ``Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism.''
It's a story that begins with an ending: the cold December day in 1994 when McGovern's 45-year-old daughter, Terry, was found frozen to death in a snowbank in Madison, Wis.
``Death due to hypothermia while in a state of extreme intoxication,'' read the coroner's report.
In the book, McGovern airs laundry most families hide: Terry's journal entries criticizing her father for being too busy with politics to be there when she needed him. Her 68 trips to the detox unit in the last four years of her life. The distance McGovern and his wife had put between themselves and their troubled daughter, hoping to make her more independent.
McGovern doesn't hold back. He opens a vein and lets raw pain flow in hopes of helping other alcoholics and their families.
When I read books like this, I'm always looking for a point where I can say, ``My family is different. This will not happen to me.'' Or some bit of advice that makes me think, ``OK, now I know not to do that. My children are safe.''
Only in this case, it's not as easy as making a checklist with ``Don't run for president'' at the top.
As in the case of most alcoholics, the reasons why Terry kept returning to alcohol are not easy to unravel. Her father looks at the role of genetics, the alcoholism on one side of her family, the depression on the other. Terry's separation from her husband. The sadness that no medicine, counseling, treatment center or AA group could put to rest.
As any parent would do, McGovern returns often to his own role, no doubt drawn there by entries from his daughter's journals: ``Why should I die because my parents were too self-centered to take care of me?''
He wonders if his pursuit of politics took him away too often during a time when his daughter needed him. Clearly, McGovern has a spot inside his heart that will never heal.
``When your child develops serious troubles and then dies, no amount of assurance from friends that you were not responsible for the outcome is entirely persuasive,'' reads one passage in his book.
It is a parent's worst fear that something awful will happen to our children. And that, somehow, some way, we will have contributed. It is a fear we live in from the moment we count our children's toes at birth until we die.
Were we not there at some critical moment? Did we hold them too close, let go too soon? Were we too tough, or not tough enough?
I read these books looking for trouble spots that I can avoid, for junctures that will make the journey smooth. All the while, knowing no one is ever safe. We can only do the best we can and hope for happy endings.
McGovern's surviving four children and his wife at first asked him not to write this book. But he wanted to pass on to others what he learned from his daughter. ``Perhaps most significantly she has taught me that life is not only precious, it is fragile and uncertain - and that we need to love each other more.'' by CNB