Too Busy to Die

Addiction breeds denial, in both the addict and his loved ones. And when that addiction comes wrapped in a busy, successful, ambitious package like Eilene Zimmerman’s ex-husband, a respected Silicon Valley attorney, it’s especially easy to ignore the warning signs. Until it’s too late.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I
turned down the hallway where the bedrooms are located. Peter,
I call again, Peter. I'm coming down the hall to
your bedroom. Okay. His bedroom is at the end of
the hallway. Its door faces me and it's open, but

(00:20):
I can't see anything except a corner of the bed
and a cluttered night table. I walked past my son's
bedroom with its one orange wall and ikea bed, past
Anna's old bedroom, one wall painted deep pink. I am
nearly at his door and start calling his name again
in earnest Peter, Peter. I can see into the room.

(00:42):
The covers on the bed are drawn back, and I
can see the crumpled white sheets. There are a few
tissues in the bed with spots of blood on them.
I'm starting to shake badly as I walk into the bedroom.
Peter isn't in the bed, so I turned towards the
master bath. Then I see him lying face up on
the floor between the bathroom and the bedroom. That's Eileen

(01:05):
Zimmerman reading from her book Smacked, a memoir of white
collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy. Eileen is now pursuing a
social work degree She's the mother of two young adults
and lives in New York City. But when this story unfolds,
Eileen as a journalist wife and an ex wife of
a high powered attorney, raising her teenage kids in San Diego.

(01:29):
They live a lovely life, a privileged life, a life
that doesn't end sordidly on a bathroom floor, because money
and worldly success inoculates us from such things, don't they.

(01:51):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from our selves. I met
Peter when I was looking for a job. I was
twenty three years old. I had a job at CBS
News as an administrative assistant. I had worked my way

(02:14):
up from receptionist, and I got laid off in the
late eighties, and so I couldn't afford my apartment near
Rutger's where I just graduated, and so I moved home
to be with my mother and my sisters, which was
like living in an insane asylum. It was crazy. But
I had to find a job. So I was looking
in the Sunday New York Times and saw an ad

(02:35):
for a recruiter in New York named Peter at Adam Personnel,
So I made an appointment to see him, and that's
how I met him. I walked in and he was
the counselor I was supposed to meet, and he was
really young and very very sweet, and we wound up
talking for a really long time during the interview quote unquote,
mostly about stuff we like to do. He had just

(02:56):
graduated from Cornell and so we had a lot to
chat about. And then he said, I'll you know, I'll
call you with some interviews and things. And I wanted
to do writing, but I got sent out only for
secretarial jobs because typing fast seemed to be my most
marketable skill at that point. And um, from there we
became friends. He wound up quitting Adam Personnel and he

(03:17):
went back to school to be a chemist. I wound
up with a job at a law firm as a
legal assistant, which I got through a friend of Peter's,
and we just stayed friends for a few years. I
moved to Philly to work at a really small arts magazine,
and then one time I went up to Ithaco, where
he was living in New York State, to see his
band play and everything changed. I suddenly I was like, well,

(03:37):
maybe he could be a boyfriend. And it started was
that because you were seeing him like a different side
of him by seeing him as a musician. He was
always kind of dorky and I always felt like, oh,
we don't have any chemistry, and um, he was super
science e but nice. He was very interested in philosophy
of science then and Carl Sagan was his you know,

(04:00):
euro and Darwin and so he was a really interesting
guy to talk to. But I just didn't think of
him as that attractive. But then you know, he's in
this on this like homemade stage and it's of State,
New York, and there's all these people, you know, on
a hillside listening to the band, and he had long hair,
and I noticed everybody else was staying in him, and

(04:21):
I thought, oh, you know, maybe he's kind of cute.
And he was really nice. And so it's one of
those things where suddenly something changed and I started to
see him in a totally different lay. And then once
that happened, I really felt for him. So it took
two years. Do you think he had been biding his time?
Like he liked you? He did he made it very
clear that he wanted to go out with me, and

(04:43):
I just kept saying, like, I don't feel that way
about you. So I was dating some other people, you know,
nobody great, he was dating a few people. I kept thinking,
he's always just going to be my friend. He's just
a friend. I think they call it friend zoning now.
And then that changed, and I think so he was
sort of waiting. I think he was a very tenacious
person and believed he would get what he wanted. So

(05:04):
he did. He just sort of hung in there. What
was his instrument, by the way in the band, bass guitar.
And he couldn't read music. He taught himself by ear
to listen and just copy, and he learned tabs, how
to read tabs. Yeah, so he's pretty good. Eileen and
Peter date for a couple of years. They move in together,
get married. Peter gets his master's degree in chemistry and

(05:27):
begins working at a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Eileen
is features editor at the Baltimore City Paper. They live
in Philly, which is in the middle sort of. After
a few more years, they followed Peter's work to San Diego,
where he gets a job at a very promising startup.
Peter's job was as a bench chemist, which means that

(05:49):
he sits with a group of other bench chemists at
a lab table creating compounds that will be used in
experiments designed by pH d s. Peter's ambitious, restless. He
doesn't want to spend the rest of his life inhaling
chemicals and not even designing the experiments. At this point,
as he sees it, he has two choices go back

(06:11):
to school to get his pH d, which would take
upwards of six years, or go to law school. So
they moved back east to New Hampshire this time, and
it's during the law school years that things slowly, inexorably
begin to change. I didn't realize it at the time,
but Peter also was tired of not having enough money.

(06:31):
We always struggled. His family was really poor. My family
had a ton of financial insecurity when we are growing up.
My dad worked two jobs and we all worked. I
cleaned houses at twelve. We were, you know, not destitute,
but we were kind of poor in a genteel way.
So um, he was sick of it, and he said,
let me go to law school and I'll make some

(06:52):
money for all this education, and I was nervous, but
I was excited for something new. We thought about starting
a family only then I was about twenty nine and
decided to put it off. Things did start to change,
although I think partially it was due to law school,
and I think partially it was Peter and I just
either being in love, didn't see it or didn't want

(07:15):
to see it. And then it became more clear. So
he always, for instance, liked to trip. He loved acid
and everything. And I'm not a big drug person. I
just I think I'm too anxious. I don't want to
be inside my head that long. Yeah, you know, but
he he did. He liked to get high, and he
hung out in Ithaca. Um. I don't know if any
of your listeners know what Cornell is liking up there.
It's kind of a very crunchy hippie. And now he

(07:38):
was back in school, and so it was like grades
and partying, and you know, people took no dose, which
was a stimulant to stay up all night, or coffee
or um, some coke, some smoking, cannabis, and a lot
of drinking, a lot of hard drinking. It seems that
odds in a way. All that ambition combined with the

(07:58):
hard partying. But this is the way Peter blows off steam.
He's very driven in law school. He's going to be
number one editor of the Law Review, and he is
all the while burning the candle at both ends. What
changed was he prioritized the work of law school over

(08:19):
everything else, over our relationship, over being present in any
way with our respective families. And when we had our daughter,
it was the beginning of his third year. And I
even remember we had an argument in the hospital the
night she was born because there were these kind of
pullout chairs the size of twin beds in the hospital.
It was Brigham and Women's in Boston, and he was

(08:39):
complaining that he wasn't going to get a good enough
to night's sleep because he had midterms the next day.
And I was thinking, I just pushed a human being
out of my body, and I'm kind of freaked out too,
And he had invited friends of his from Boston to
come and they brought beer and stuff to the hospital room.
And I was exhausted, and I wasn't a kid, I

(09:00):
was thirty three, and I was freaking out that I
was being woken up every two hours like I had
I was trying to adjust to this whole new paradigm,
and he just wanted to like celebrate and hand out
cigars and party. And then we went back to New
Hampshire the next day and I had said, let's get
your mom or someone to come and help for the
first week, and he said, no, this is our thing.

(09:22):
We're going to do it ourselves in our way. And
I just remember walking into the dark apartment with my
daughter and she started crying, and I was thinking, it's
going to be the middle of winter here in New Hampshire.
All of the friends here are his. I mean, I
knew the law school widows. They called them the ones
that are left behind by law school, but it was
really his world. We were there for him, and I

(09:43):
felt so lonely and scared, and I had some postpartum depression.
But he didn't want us to lean on anyone else,
and so we had to do it ourselves, which meant
me because he went back to school. And I don't
think he ever really prioritized our family again, our kids,
and I think he loved them, but what always came
first was him. Was you know, he was going to

(10:05):
be the best, and he would justify it by saying,
I'm doing this for the family. When you went back
and read your journals, did you have any consciousness of
that or any awareness of that at that time? Do
you think what I noticed in the journals was the
beginning of this kind of pathological relationship he had with money.
Eventually it became the thing he used to have power

(10:26):
over people and to show love. So, you know, if
if I was doing what I was supposed to do,
you know, he'd buy me a computer. But if not,
he would remind me who paid the mortgage. So there
was always this push pull between that. But I wrote
in my journal that I guess we'd had some argument
or some discussion about being tired. We were both really tired,
and he pointed out everything in our little apartment that

(10:46):
he had paid for because I was actually earning more
money because he was working a bunch of part time
jobs and going to school and I was working full time,
and our benefits were through that. And I wrote in
my journal, I said, I don't know why he has
to do that, Why he has to stake claim to everything.
I don't care. And I kept thinking, well, maybe after
law school this will go away. Maybe when we have

(11:08):
more money, he won't feel but it never and he
always felt like his money was his money. And he
wanted me to understand I had nothing to do with
earning it, that being there at law school with him
did not mean I had any hand in his degree
or his success. It was the beginning of prioritizing his
earnings and his career and kind of himself over everything else.

(11:31):
And at the time I just thought it was anxiety
or just our poverty being in law school. So Peter
graduates law school at the top of his class. He
and Eileen and their eight month old daughter moved back
to San Diego, where he again has a job waiting
as a first year associate and a law firm. Now
Eileen thinks life is going to get easier, no more

(11:53):
all nighters. He'll be home and it's the exact same thing,
only he's more depressed. One night, my daughter was like,
I don't know, fourteen months old, maybe not even and
I woke up and Peter wasn't home. I could tell
he'd never come home. So I was panicked, and we
had those flip phones then, so I call him and
he picks up and he says, no, I just slept

(12:15):
under my desk because I have a brief to this morning.
And he got home and we had this big discussion,
and I knew he was fried from like thirty two
hours of being awake, but I just said, I don't
get it. I said, I thought this ended at law school,
these all nighters. You know, you're an adult man now
with the family. And he was incredulous. He was just
kind of like, what are you an idiot? This is

(12:37):
the way it is. It's going to be like this,
you know, until I make partner, which wasn't gonna be
for ten years. And that's the way it was, you know,
And he was just like, you better get used to it.
This is why it's going to be. He started hanging
out with a bunch of younger attorneys that smoked a
lot of pot, and the pot was much stronger than
we had done in high school, and he hadn't really

(12:57):
smoked since then. And one night he called me and
he said, I can't even come home and he was vomiting.
He's like, I'm like hallucinating, like so he stayed, but
he hung out with them a lot, and he would say, like, oh,
after work, we went out for drinks and I started
to think, then he's getting high with them, but I
thought it's pot you know. I would say to him, like,
are you smoking. He'd be like a little bit, but

(13:18):
you know, that's the beginning of the lying. And so
I think that was when he started to think this
is a way of coping. This kind of feels good.
And I think it escalated from there. Not that cannabis
is a gateway drug necessarily, but I think then when
we split up, I mean, he may have been doing
coke and stimulants said he could inhale or adderall, but

(13:38):
I wouldn't have known. I wasn't sophisticated enough. But he
was always tired when he came home. So if he
did them during the day, he crashed when he got home.
Peter's working more and more and more hours. You have
your second child. We have we decided to have a
second child, and Peter's the whole thing was, you know, like,

(13:58):
now I'm a fourth year associate, so in a couple
of more years, I'm going to be up for partner.
And I kept thinking, okay, all right, well we got
through law school and so all of a sudden I
readjusted and I thought, oh, okay, So being an associates horrible.
But in six or seven years he's going to be
a senior associate. He'll be having underlings to delegate workout too,
and then he'll be a partner, and then we can

(14:19):
be like all the other guys, by the way, who
were all divorced two or three times by then, right.
I mean, his direct boss at his first firm was
in his late sixties and he was dying his hair blonde,
and I was on his third wife. So he was
a grandfather and the father of grammar school aged children,
and this was not uncommon, you know, but I thought
that wouldn't be us um, And so that's what happens

(14:40):
is you kind of decide, okay. So we had the
second child, and we moved. We bought our first home
we had been renting near San Diego State University, very
kind of middle class, upper middle class community with good schools,
and Peter just absented himself from family life. There was
a time where San Diego is famous for zoo and
in the summer they have the night time zoo. So

(15:00):
I brought the kids to the zoo at night, which
is very thrilling for a child to be in the
zoo after dark, and we were coming back from some
show we saw there and there was a full moon
and our shadows were in front of us. And my
daughter was seven and she was skipping and she said, look, mommy,
there we are. We're almost a whole family. And we
got home and Peter's in his office in the garage,

(15:21):
and I don't know what he was doing in the
garage for six hours while we were walking around the zoo,
but you know, he should have been with us. So
Eileen is increasingly unhappy in her marriage. But she's grown
so accustomed to a life filled with goal posts. You know,
if we just do this, accomplish that spent these years
paying our dues, if we do these things, will eventually

(15:44):
be happy. She can't imagine leaving Peter. She grew up
in an atmosphere of scarcity, and she's afraid of going
back there. Peter represents security to her. She's put her
career at a far distant second to his. What can
she do? Do you think that that kind of allowed

(16:04):
you to adjust to what was not a happy situation,
sort of like a frog in boiling water, where you know,
you put the frog in the pot and you turn
the heat on the frog never really realizes that the
frog is boiling until the frog is boiled. That is
a perfect and I and I won't even let myself
off the hook that much. I do think there was

(16:26):
a feeling that, you know, I was a freelance writer
working part time because Peter could not parent. He was
busy and exhausted, so he did what he could, but
it was not much, and I knew that that was
the deal kind of, so I did feel like if
I were to leave him, it would be back to scarcity.
I mean, he earned all the money pretty much. I
think at that point I was probably earning as a

(16:47):
freelance writer, and I was also writing for the New
York Times. I was probably making thirty five dollars a year,
so you know, like in Buffalo, New York or Cleveland,
maybe I could make it. Not in San Diego, where
gas was, you know, four dollars ago, and it was
just not possible. And knew it, and he knew it.
Was it something you entertained. I thought about leaving in
law school when things were like that. I just always

(17:08):
felt like, and I think this is on me, but
I think I was raised in my family to believe
that I didn't really have a lot of value. I
have a scene in the book where I tell my
dad I'm getting engaged, that we're getting married, and when
Peter goes to the bathroom, my dad looks at me
and says, don't blow it. And it was clear I
was the lucky one. I believed it. I believed he

(17:28):
was right. When I was little, he used to say, Oh,
it's a good thing you're smart, because you're not pretty.
Jewish families they're so great, all families really. I mean
those like sort of internalized messages, they can be so damaging,
so because they become the stories that we tell ourselves
that have absolutely no correlation to the truth. You know,

(17:49):
you're sitting here with me in this room, and you
know you're you're this beautiful woman, and like, I just
you know, you just think, like you internalize a message
like that, and then it becomes kind of your reality
in a certain Even as you say that, I'm thinking, no, no,
I'm not, like, You're right, It's it just took a
few words, you know. And my dad did a lot
of that ground. He'd call it hey stoop, like a

(18:09):
nickname for stupid, because I had trouble with math, and
so I always thought I'm not good at numbers, and
Peters so and he was so smart. He was a really,
really and probably one of the smartest people I've ever known,
super intelligent about everything, and so you start to feel
like maybe you are lucky. And I felt really afraid.
I felt really afraid to leave. And part of that

(18:31):
was like, who's going to be with me. I'm in
my forties, and am I going to really leave? He's
making half a million dollars a year and I make forty.
I was terrified. And you know, sometimes the misery you
know is better than the misery you don't, So I
think that's what I did. So what was the last straw?

(18:52):
The last row was Peters started having a relationship with
someone else. But I had told him many times. I said,
we need to go to counseling, and we did, but
he didn't show up half the time because of work.
He would say, I can't make it. We have a meeting,
So of course it didn't work. And I remember one
time saying to him, if things don't change somehow, then
I'm going to leave when our son graduates from high school.

(19:14):
And he said to me, if you leave me before
they are grown up, I will never see the kids
because I work so much. And I remember thinking, Okay,
I'm going to have to stick it out until my
youngest can drive, and then he can go see Peter
whenever he wants another, another goal post another. I was like,
five more. I just gotta make it five more years.
And I thought, well, then when we split everything, at

(19:34):
least there'll be more money for me. And then Peter
had an affair and it ended a year later, and
I begged him to stay. I was terrified of him leaving,
and he his idea was that I would allow him
to have this relationship and still be married. And that's
when I thought, you know what, I'm really unhappy he
wants out. Let's have this. So we did. We stayed

(19:54):
married for a while, we stayed connected physically for a while.
It was hard, but eventually we did get divorced. We'll
be back in a moment. Peter moved out in two
thousand nine into a one bedroom apartment a mile and

(20:17):
a half from the office. It seems not to have
occurred to him that this meant his kids would have
nowhere to stay, so then he moved again to a
condo in another beach community, and the following year he
bought his dream house, a gorgeous architectural marvel with a
view of the ocean and the lagoon. His upward trajectory

(20:38):
in real estate helped hide the fact that Peter, the
bench chemist, number one in his law school class, was
losing control. So the way that you write about it
and smacked, there's very much a sense that there's this
downward spiral, yes, that begins to happen. Your kids are

(21:00):
witnessing something. You're witnessing something, but you don't know what
it is. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Because that to me, the subtitle of your book is
a story of white collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy. The
white collar ambition part can really obtiscape so much in
terms of what we can allow ourselves to believe or

(21:22):
not believe about what might be going on. Absolutely, it's
like a perfect cover. I just figured Peter was being honest,
you know, like I didn't see why he would lie,
which maybe is my again my naivete. Well let me
stop you there, though, Like it was it you felt
he was being honest or that because he was successful.
It couldn't be street drugs. It couldn't be I didn't

(21:44):
even consider it was drugs. I just thought like, well,
that couldn't possibly be it. I mean, he's And that's
where I recognized I had these implicit biases that I
hadn't really been aware of because I'm I'm pretty, I'm
very liberal, I'm progressive. I'm studying social work now. And
here I was, you know, my ex husband was this rich, white,
well educated lawyer. I was like, well, he's not going
to be using drugs. That's not what it is. It

(22:06):
must be an eating disorder, or he's bipolar, he's having
a psychotic break, or it's the stress, the chronic stress.
And I knew about all of that just as a reporter,
and I tried to figure it out. But I was
watching him die. We all were this kind of slow,
torturous death from drug addiction and then from this infection
from drug addiction. But I didn't recognize a single symptom.

(22:29):
And it was precipitous. I think it started about fourteen
or fifteen months before he died. So I know from
my research and my sleuthing that he had started ordering
pills off the dark web almost immediately upon moving out,
and those might have been stimulants and supplements, so he's
doing oral drugs. Whatever they were, I think they became opioids, which,

(22:51):
by the way, in addition to being great pain killers,
they're also kind of antidepressants. They make people feel much better.
Some people, so when I take if I could in,
I vomit. When Peter took it, he felt fantastic. And
this is a man that had a lot of anxiety,
who I think was clearly depressed, and this made him
feel better. So he would take those, and then he
always liked coke. When we were younger, I didn't do it,

(23:14):
and then I figured we that was over for him.
We had kids in a family. But I think he
started doing that too, because he would stay up he
was dating, and he would be up really late, or
he'd go to l A to these clubs really late,
and I'd think, how is he doing that? He used
to be like so tired, and he was switching nights
a lot for the kids, So I think that happened
and then he fell in with a crowd of people.

(23:34):
I think from what I could tell, that kind of
kicked it up a notch with him. And decided that
they would try injecting. And the thing is, Peter was
a chemist and really smart and knew a lot about
the body and pharmaceuticals, so I have to believe he
knew how it would affect him. But there's also a
level of arrogance at that point where you feel like
I'm not going to be an adict, like I'm going

(23:56):
to control this, And I think it was much more
powerful than he ever anticipated. Yeah, I was thinking as
you were talking just now, the phrase better living through
chemistry kept on running through my mind, like his history,
his knowledge base, his arrogance, his being smart is being
the smartest, is being the best um and having you know,
both the chemistry and background and this sort of the

(24:17):
legal analytic background, the whole idea that it wouldn't be
bigger than him, that he would be bigger than it.
And I think we see that a lot in powerful
men and women, especially powerful men. Just like if you
look at like Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern,
nobody's going to find out, you know, he's you know
that kind of thing or what we see now. And
I think Peter just thought, I'm not like those other people.

(24:39):
I'm you know I I can control this um and
I think because I probably didn't recognize the science because
I felt like, well, I don't need to be familiar
with these signs. This isn't in my life. That you know,
it is a terrible thing, but I this isn't gonna
happen in my world. So what were the signs? So
he had every one of the signs. And also I
should say people that are struggling with addiction are also

(25:01):
fantastic liars. So he was very good at keeping this
secret from all of us and his family, from his children,
from me, from his extended family. Some of the signs
that he had, for instance, are very common. There's a
lot of weight loss. There's very big mood swings from
euphoria to very deep depression. There's irritability. His skin was
very gray, he was losing his accelerated hair loss. He

(25:24):
was also using meth amphetamine. I found out later on
after he died, so he had kind of the yellowing teeth.
He had a lot of sores on his hands on
the sides of his face from scratching. We oddly enough,
stayed good friends. He didn't have a lot of friends,
and so even after we divorced, he would still kind
of talk to me about his family and stuff. And
he called me one day and said he was having
a terrible problem with constipation, and I said, well, are

(25:47):
you drinking water? Eat blueberries? It's incredibly common with opioid addiction,
is opioid constipation, Like that's what he was having. And
he had terrible, terrible stomach pain because if you're injecting,
you know, opioids and ampheta means it's going to affect
your guests or intestinal tracts. So he was living on
Tom's and I kept saying him, maybe you should stop

(26:08):
eating dairy, you know, It's like, no, maybe he should
stop shooting up. It's really but I decided that it
could not be that. So it was not going to
be that the country was in the throes of an
opioid epidemic. This was two thift Sam Queen noniez Is
best selling book Dreamland about opioid addictions, had just come out.

(26:32):
But it never entered Eileen's mind that Peter could be
an addict. She imagined everything and anything. But I have
occasionally on this podcast talked about a psychoanalytic term I
came across while doing research for my book Inheritance. The
term is the unthought known. The psychologist Christopher Bolas coined

(26:54):
it and describes the unthought known as something that we
absolutely know in our deepest into earreer, but cannot allow
ourselves to think. To think it, to bring it to
the surface of our consciousness is impossible, dangerous, so we
just don't. It certainly wasn't conscious. I mean, I was
shocked when the medical examiner said she thought he died

(27:16):
of an overdose. I was like, are you crazy? You
know I had still even at that moment. I was like, no,
that is not it. So walk me through that morning
and why you go to his house that day and
what happens. So he had been behaving increasingly erratic, and
he wasn't reachable, and when he was reachable, he would

(27:38):
say I'll call you back in ten minutes and it
would be three hours, and he would come up with
something like I, well, I was dehydrated and I had
to get something to eat. And then he would tell me, oh,
and I lost my wallet, and then like I got
a call from a neighbor that found his wallet, and
I would have to call a secretary and say, can
you find him and she's like, well, he hasn't been
in in three days. It was nothing made sense. So
my kids had gone to his house on a Monesday

(28:00):
night and he just had a complete meltdown and was
screaming at them. And he was not a yeller. He
had a very long fuse before he would raise his voice.
Probably I could get him to raise his voice, but
not his kids. He was in his bedroom the whole time.
He would only leave. He left, he would cross the
kitchen to get a brownie out of a pan of
brownies he made, and he'd go back into his bedroom.

(28:22):
And craving sugar is also a symptom of obiloid addiction.
And my son walked in his room to say, like,
are you okay, dad? Because he was really sick. He
said he had the flu. This was going on like
eight months. And Peter got up and vomited onto the
floor and threw a washcloth over it and went back
to bed. My son said, I'm taking you to the hospital.

(28:42):
That's it, and his dad snapped at him and said no,
you're not, Like, I'm not going because he he was
not gonna have anybody find out how old is your
son at this moment. He's sixteen, and Peter even held
she was eighteen. She was home for the summer, and
he yelled at my son, who ever yells at And
he went downstairs to his sister and he said, I

(29:03):
think he was close to crying. And he was just like,
we have to get dad. We have to take dad
to the hospital. And she said, what's the use. He's
not going to go. I think they my son's just
calling an ambulance. And my daughter said, he'll kill us,
like he'll be so angry. So they left it. And
the next morning I called my son and said, is
dad okay? And he said, I'll talk to you about
it when I get home. And I said, look, I

(29:24):
could come up and make him some soup, because you know,
he was all alone. He had some relationships, but nobody
was in his life that much. He said, no, don't
do that. He doesn't want you to come up here.
So he came back to my house and he told
me that he had been screaming and that Peter had said,
you and your mother are making me sick. She's always
telling me to go to the doctor. So that's why

(29:45):
my son had said, don't come up. He doesn't want
any help. So I thought, all right, well, fine, I
want then. And that was then Thursday morning, and then Friday.
We kept trying to reach him and he wouldn't answer,
and I said, no, I'm going to go up there
and I'm going to take dad to the hospital. I
don't care what happens. He's going. And so I drove
up there and I had a book in my bag,
and I was all set for like a hospital stay.
I thought, maybe he's going to be unconscious, maybe he

(30:08):
will have soiled the bed. I don't care. I'm gonna
call nine one one if I have to, but I'm
getting him to a hospital. And then I walked in
the house, which I had a key too, and I
found that he had died. Did you understand as soon
as you saw him that he was dead? No, I didn't.
That's how powerful he seemed. I thought, well, maybe he's

(30:29):
just lying down. And then I went over to him
and I could see his arm with stiff and I
had called nine one one and they said an ambulance
is coming. Do chest compressions. And I couldn't move his arm,
and even then, and I could see his fingernails were blue.
I didn't think he had died. And then I looked
up at his eyes and they had risen out of

(30:51):
their sockets, which, um was obviously horrifying, and I was thinking,
that does not look like someone who was alive. But meanwhile,
I'm standing over this man's almost naked body. He's only
in his underwear in socks, and there are track marks
and holes all over his arms, his legs, his hips.
I see nothing. All I saw was one hole that

(31:11):
had bled out, and I thought, well, that's weird. He
must have cut himself falling down. And I just ran
out of the house to wait for the ambulance. I
just I just couldn't even you know, imagine that it
was anything but a cut. So then it's when the um,
the police come, the detective and one of them tells you, right,

(31:34):
I said. She was asking me all these questions about
alcohol and drug use, and I was like, what is
the point of this? And then I said, well, what
do you think it was? And I assumed, you know,
I assumed at that point he had a heart attack
from working too hard, and she said, um, no, I
think he had an overdose. And even then I was like,
an overdose of what? And she was like I think

(31:55):
it's probably amphetamines. And then I realized, oh, she thinks
he was using drugs, Like that's impossible. It's remarkable what
your brain will do. But it took a long time.
It took several hours for me to understand that, no,
this was what happened. But I think it did seem
to my kids and me that he was too smart
and too powerful, like he had so many resources if

(32:16):
he was unhappy or needed to escape. Why pick this?
Why would you do this when you have kids sleeping
down the hall. So there's a very, to me, very
moving part of your book where it sinks in for
you that he's died of an overdose, and there's a
social worker there, and there's the question of what you're
gonna tell your kids. I'm gonna get choked out people

(32:39):
talking to you about this, and the social worker has kids,
you like sort of ascertained that. So you say to
the social worker, like, what would you do? And her advice,
one mother to another, an incredibly human moment in the
midst of searing pain, her advice was, I would tell
them because really, what other option is there? What other

(33:00):
path to any future healing? This is what family secrets
is all about. So I thought like, Okay, I'm gonna
try this. And then when I did tell them, especially
for my son, who had seen the worst of it
because he was with Peter every other weekend and during
the week um my daughter had been at college, so see,

(33:21):
he had seen the decline and he was lying to
himself too. He was like, oh, it must be you know, Dad,
he's always working. He's crazy, you know, it's this way
he is. Um. He felt completely responsible for Peter's death
because he hadn't taken him to the hospital, and so
when he heard this news that no, he was already
quite sick. You could just see him physically let down,

(33:41):
like he was like okay, okay, so I couldn't have
done anything. And and then I thought, Okay, this was
the right thing to do, because as hard as it was,
it was also oh, now we know what it was.
There was this big secret he was keeping from all
of us, and he was lying to all of us.
But now everything makes sense. And as sad and hard
as that was to hear, I have to say it

(34:02):
was the biggest relief. It was like, Okay, now I
can clean this up and I can move on with
my family. Imagine if Aileen had made a decision in
that moment not to tell her kids. They had already
been kept in the dark because of their dad's addiction,
and now in the wake of Peter's death, Imagine if
their mother had decided to also keep a secret. Secrets

(34:26):
on top of secrets, a house of cards built out
of fear and shame just waiting to blow over. As
a journalist, I really, I do believe the truth is
very freeing. And it's funny because there were some members
of Peter's extended family that did not tell his parents
why he died. And I didn't feel I mean, I

(34:46):
wasn't their daughter in law. I didn't feel like it
was my place. But before I wrote a piece about
this for The New York Times that focused much more
on the legal profession, the Times had decided they wanted
to run some photos of Peter, so I allowed it.
And I called his mo um a few days before
it was going to run, and I said, I have
to tell you something, And honestly she was so relieved.
She said, you know his father, And I kept thinking,

(35:08):
this does not add up, this does not add up.
I mean, he was fifty one he didn't have a
heart problem, and she was like, how do you get
an infection in your heart? You know, you get it
when you have a lot of openings into your veins
and your skin. That secret had been really bothering her
for two years, and now she was like, Okay, I
get it. And it turned out. I think the decision
was made to protect them, was made out of love,

(35:31):
but really it probably caused them more aggravation and pain.
You know, well, it's interesting too, that phrase you used
that she said of you know, it didn't add up.
It didn't add up. You know, there's this kind of rumination.
I think that then starts to happen, you know, people
like lying awake at night just thinking this doesn't make sense,
This doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense. And and
in a way it then kind of boomerangs back on

(35:54):
the person who's doing all the ruminating. You're carrying a
burden because you don't and you don't even know you're
carrying it. And that is such a good description of
what it felt like. Before I wrote that story in
The Times, I felt like I had to keep it
a secret for almost two years. I just I came
up with this line to tell people when they because

(36:15):
I think when someone dies young, you know, it's a
normal human instinct to be afraid, and you want to
think what can I do to fix my own life
so I don't die this way? So to a one,
everybody said, how did it happen? And I said, well,
he was living a very unhealthy life. I just said,
you know, he was working a lot, and he was smoking,
and he was taking tough to sleep and to stay up.
And so I wasn't lying, but I wasn't telling the truth.

(36:39):
And then when I finally did in the Times and
I got mostly positive feedback from other people who've been
through it, it was like magical, you know. I was
just like, oh my gosh, I'm not alone. And also
it started a conversation in the legal profession about you know,
this issue and lawyer mental health, and I it made
me think like we should be talking about this because

(37:01):
he wasn't the only one suffering. It's a beautiful thing
when we have the opportunity to make meaning out of trauma.
I think Eileen personifies this. She takes a tough, tough
experience and shapes it, shares it in order to help others.

(37:22):
But first she needs help. She begins a kind of
therapy called e M d R, or Eye movement desensitizing
and reprocessing. This may sound a little weird to some listeners,
but look it up. E M d R. Eileen is
a huge believer, and so am I. E M d
R is a method that allows the patient to literally

(37:44):
reprocess and desensitize a traumatic memory, not to erase it,
not to forget about it, but to diffuse it, to
learn to live more comfortably with it, to move on. So,
and is that experience part of your decision to go
to social work school? You know, it was part totally

(38:07):
part of my decision, and I had I have and
I had a great therapist who administered it and helped
me through so much of it. But also I think
when I found Peter and I was kneeling by his body.
It may sound odd, but at the time that I
saw that, I realized that he was dead. I thought,
I can't keep doing what I'm doing anymore. Like I
just felt like I'm going to have to change my life.

(38:30):
I was writing a lot about startups and technology for
The Times and other publications, and I just thought, this
doesn't feel meaningful. To me, I think I need to
write about other things, and I think I need to
be more involved with end of life things. And I
just I kept thinking, you know, ex husbands and ex wives,
there's a lot of it's hard to be divorced. And
Peter was my friend and also sometimes my biggest nemesis.

(38:52):
But I loved him, and seeing your friend there like that,
and thinking was he scared? Was he in pain? Was
you know? Was he regretful? Like I thought. I couldn't
have saved him at that point, but I could have
held his hand, so he wasn't alone. But I've always
been an activist, and so I thought, I'm going to
go back to work for social work and think about
end of life care. I guess there's a way to

(39:13):
make up for what I couldn't give Peter because I
didn't see what was happening. I didn't know his secret
and I have. But I wound up my first year.
They said, you know, where would you like to do
your field work? And I said, anywhere with addiction. I
don't want to do addiction. That's exactly what I did,
and it was actually remarkable and rewarding, and I learned
a lot. So that was where I made that pivot.
You know, I think we all know we're going to die.

(39:35):
I've never seen someone dead. I was like, this is
going to happen. Man, that's not gonna happen this way,
and it may not happen tomorrow, but it's like, this
is really going to happen. And so I have to
think really carefully, what do I want the rest of
my time to look like. My friend Sylvia Borstein, who
was my guest during season one of this podcast. If

(39:55):
you haven't heard her episode, go back to season one
and listen to her episode. Don't duck. You'll thank me
later anyway. Sylvia, who is one of the most beloved
teachers of mindfulness meditation in this country, recently told me
a Buddhist parable. A monk is walking through the woods
when he realizes he's being stalked by a tiger. The

(40:18):
monk walks faster, the tiger picks up speed. The monk
gets to the edge of a cliff. There's nowhere to go.
The tiger's closing in, but then the monk notices a big,
thick vine hanging from the side of the cliff. He
jumps off, clinging to the vine. His salvation for the

(40:39):
moment his life has been saved. The tigers up there salivating.
The monk sees that there's one beautiful, big, red ripe
strawberry on the vine. He's looking at the strawberry, and
then he sees that a little mouse has also just
noticed the strawberry and has poked its head from the
cliff where the vine is attached. The little mouse starts

(41:01):
to gnaw on the vine. So what does the monk do.
The monk plucks the strawberry and eats it. We're always
hanging on the vine. I tried to be more present,
and Peter always used to make fun of it, like,
oh yeah, But I feel like Peter and people like
him are kind of running away from the existential reality

(41:23):
because if you're really really busy and important, you're not
going to die, you know, you're you're too busy. And
I thought that. I thought, he's so busy, he's not
going to die. You know, Peter doesn't die, but we
all do. You know, we live in a world where
everyone's always asking me, so what are you gonna do?
Are you going to do social work? And you know,
are you gonna this? And it's like it's so nice

(41:44):
to talk to you. Sometimes I feel like saying, you know,
I don't know. I'm gonna get through this and just
sort of see what happens. But that is an uncomfortable
place for most people to be. They want my plan.
If you compare are your inner life now and say
your state of whatever you want to call it, contentment, happiness, peace,

(42:08):
two where you were when you were, you know, in
that house in San Diego, still married, thinking okay, well
one more goal post. I'm going to stick it out
until until my my son can drive. Um. If you
compare the you now you know, the Eileen now to
the Eileen, then how would you describe your inner state

(42:31):
now as compared to them? I was so lonely. I mean,
I think marriage can be the loneliest place if it's
not a good one. And I remember thinking, this house
is full of people, and I am so terribly lonely.
I felt disconnected from everything, and I was so caught up.
In five more years ten, this will be at she'll
be out of college, and I feel like I have

(42:53):
more space inside me. I feel much more content and
I feel much more at peace, Like I feel like,
you know, the world is can be a somewhat bleak
place right now. I feel scared, but I sort of
feel like I'm just going to be open to it.
And my kids and I will often remind each other
because sometimes my son too. He just graduated from college
and he's like, so I'm going to do this for

(43:14):
three years, that I'm gonna try this, And just the
other night he was saying it, and he said, of course,
I don't know if any of that's going to come true.
And I used to say, remember, Dad, if you would
have asked me. I used to be rehearsing, how am
I going to manage if he has a girlfriend at
my son's graduation, I'm gonna have to where am I
going to sit? But he was dead by my son's graduation,

(43:35):
and I thought, you can plan as much as you want,
but really I just have to sort of go with it.
I feel much more at peace. I can handle it.
I can get through this. I'd like to thank my guest,

(43:57):
Eileen Zimmerman. You can learn more about Eileen's memoir Smacked,
a story of white collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy, at
Eileen Zimmerman dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heart
Media production Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Julie Douglas
and beth Ann Macaluso are the executive producers. Special thanks

(44:20):
to Derek Clements for his help with this episode. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, you
can get in touch with us at listener mail at
Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also find us
on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod. For more about my

(44:41):
book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts
from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,