Sometime in the summer of 2017 I wrote in my journal, “Jesus fucking Christ, please save me.” I was trapped in hell, and I could see no way out. Our beautiful, sunny, two-bedroom penthouse apartment in the East Village – which I had rented for Rayya to make her happy in the last months of her life – had become a dungeon of misery, danger, degradation, drugs. Rayya kept the shades drawn at all hours of the day, not only because the light hurt her eyes but also because she had become intensely paranoid that she was being watched by the police, and that they were coming for her.
And, to be honest, the police might very well have come for her (for both of us, actually), because our apartment now contained thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine – some of which Rayya was cooking down and shooting into whatever veins she could find upon her beaten-down, disease-ridden body, some of which she was freebasing, some of which she was snorting up her now constantly bloodied nose. But most of the coke, as of this moment, she had chopped up and laid out in thick rails on the coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray, a bottle of whiskey, several bottles of morphine and trazodone and Xanax, a stack of fentanyl patches and a cluster of empty beer bottles. And these heaping lines of cocaine she counted, weighed and studied all day long.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” she demanded, glancing up for a moment from her cherished cocaine heaps and peering at me through a blue haze of cigarette smoke – staring me down with hostile eyes that had not, as far as I could remember, blinked in days.
Good question.
What was I looking at?
I was looking at somebody who was supposed to be dead by now – who had been given six months to live over 15 months earlier – but who simply refused to die. I was looking at somebody who had recently gotten kicked out of hospice (who gets kicked out of hospice, by the way?) for being aggressive and uncooperative to the kind, generous nurses and support staff who had been trying to help my beloved partner prepare her body and mind for a “death with dignity” – a death that, at this point, Rayya had utterly rejected in favour of plan B, which was to do enough drugs that she could feel immortal, that she could feel nothing.
I was looking at somebody who had once been the only person on Earth who could make me feel completely safe and loved, but who now verbally abused me all day long, telling me that I was “a fucking shit show of a failure” when it came to taking care of her; that everything I was doing to try to help her was wrong; that I was a “needy little fucking crybaby” who had to “grow the fuck up”.
I first met Rayya Elias in the spring of 2000. I was 31 years old at the time, and married. I was on a certain path back then. Husband, nice house, good job, about to start a family. Except there was a problem with my hair, which was a frizzy mess. One day a friend told me I resembled a young Art Garfunkel, and said I needed to do something about it. She suggested I go see this person named Rayya, who was cutting hair out of a walk-up apartment on Avenue C.
I was dressed that day like a sales clerk at Banana Republic, which is how I always dressed back then. All khakis and cardigans. I remember my outfit clearly, because I looked and felt so different from Rayya, who was wearing black leather pants, a white tank top and motorcycle boots. I have fallen in love with many people at first sight, but I did not fall in love with Rayya Elias that day. In fact, I didn’t fall in love with her for another eight or nine years. But I did like her. She was funny and interesting and exotic.
I remember asking Rayya about the strange coins that were piled up on her windowsill. She said they were her sobriety chips. I’d never seen one before, and she let me handle them. She had a coin for every milestone of her recovery – one day clean, 90 days clean, six months, one year, two years, three years.
She told me she’d been addicted to cocaine and heroin for most of her adult life, but had been clean for three years now. She showed me the scars on her arms from where she used to shoot speedballs. I remember how comfortable she seemed when talking about her former drug use, and how she used the word junkie with a relaxed pride I’d never before encountered. How at home she appeared in her own battered survivor’s body!
“It’s a fucking miracle I’m alive,” Rayya said. She was ablaze with the exuberant gratitude that I now recognize as being common in early recovery. This is the phase some people call “the pink cloud” – when the newly sober addict is high on the joy of simply being free at last from the grime and slavery of their dependency. They don’t need anything more than what they’ve got in the present moment, because they can’t believe they get to even have a present moment. Life feels simple, bright, limitlessly possible.
Rayya didn’t fall in love with me that day, either. I was nothing like her other friends. I wasn’t punk, cool, tough, edgy. There was nothing street about me. Still, she was impressed that I was making a living as a writer and had a relatively untormented relationship with creativity. Why wasn’t I more tormented? she wanted to know. My life seemed like a curiosity to Rayya – just as curious as her life was to me.
If this were a 12-step meeting in the recovery fellowship that I attend on a regular basis, and if I were speaking about my own addiction, this is how I would begin: “Hi, my name is Lizzy and I’m a sex and love addict.” If I wanted to get more specific about the matter, I might add: “I’m also a romantic obsessive, a fantasy and adrenaline addict, a world-class enabler, and a blackout codependent.”
My addiction manifests as a sincere yet deeply misguided belief that somebody outside of myself will miraculously be able to heal me on the inside – thereby making me feel safe, cherished and whole at last. I have spent my entire life searching for that magical person who will see me and save me.
As with many addictions, it can be fun at first, but then it quickly becomes hell. Because here’s how the story always ends up, whenever I fall into desire and obsession to this degree: as my addict brain becomes increasingly tolerant of these abnormally elevated levels of hormones, I will eventually need to score bigger and bigger hits of “reward” to experience the same high I felt at the beginning of the romantic encounter. I will do anything to get that release and relief again.
Soon I am neglecting my own life as I increasingly fixate upon the person who has become my source. My behaviour becomes more dangerous, more desperate, more clinging, more demanding, as I insist that the object of my infatuation keep stimulating the release of the hormones that my brain is now telling me I need in order to survive. If the person cannot or will not deliver the goods any more, I can’t get my craving satisfied. And when I can’t get my craving satisfied, my adrenals will crash. After the crash comes withdrawal. And when I go into withdrawal, I want to die.
The whole time I was getting involved with Rayya – becoming her friend, falling in love with her, being driven to the edge of madness by her awful relapse into active drug addiction – I didn’t know that I was suffering from a dangerous addiction, too, which was leading both of our hearts into treacherous territory. I mean, I knew I was plenty messed up, in terms of my romantic relationships, but I didn’t know I was an addict. And I certainly did not know that, over time, I would become just as addicted to Rayya as she was to drugs.
I ran away from my first husband and toward another guy. We got high as hell off each other for a while, and then we crashed – hard. After my breakup, I quit my job, sold everything and travelled the world, searching for something – anything – that would heal my heart and restore meaning to my life. I met a charismatic Brazilian man who poured love, attention, validation and approval upon me with lavish abundance. We moved back to America and got married.
I wrote a book about my travels. That book became Eat Pray Love. Suddenly I had a shit ton of money. When those big, fat Eat Pray Love royalty checks started rolling in, my distorted thinking informed me that I was undeserving of all this abundance: why was I so blessed when others still struggled? A solution arose in my imagination: I must give all my money away!
For codependents, fostering dependency in others makes us feel safe, valuable and in control. And pretty soon I was hurling cash at people exactly the way I used to hurl my body at them. I paid off the credit card bills and school loans of my family members and friends; I bought them clothes and jewelry and houses; I invested in their businesses; I supported their artistic projects; I paid for their weddings; I sent them on dream vacations, subsidized their therapy, financed their home renovations and covered tuition for their children. I paid the medical bills of strangers, and I bought cars for neighbours who were going through tough times. I invented endless work projects around my home in order to give jobs to various local craftspeople. I tithed to churches I did not even attend.
I was somewhat out of my mind back then is what I’m saying.
During this time, I kept driving into the city to get monthly haircuts from Rayya – coming to know her better as time went by. When some of her friends let me know her marriage to her partner Gigi had ended and she was struggling financially, I said she could move into a converted church I’d bought in New Jersey if she just covered the utilities – and stay as long as she liked.
After she moved in we became closer by the day. She called me whenever she was in trouble, just as I called her when I was in trouble. But it wasn’t only problem-solving that brought us together; it was also delight in each other’s company. Very soon, Rayya became my plus-one for social events and professional engagements. She flew to London to do my hair and makeup for the British premiere of the Eat Pray Love movie – and she also walked the red carpet with me. We went to Mexico together, to Detroit, to Los Angeles, to Austin, to Australia, to New Zealand, to Miami. We went to the movies, to weddings, to Target, to McDonald’s, to Thanksgiving, to Beyoncé concerts, to karaoke, to the Jersey Shore. We met Oprah together.
We tried on bras together, shopped for shoes together, ate Korean barbecue together, made tacos together, watched football games together, got Botox together. We were almost always out there in public now as “Rayya and Liz”. You might wonder how this impacted my marriage, but I convinced myself that there was absolutely no problem here. The way I saw it, I now had a platonic partner who enjoyed attending the sorts of social events with me that my husband disliked, and who also helped to stabilize my mental health.
In March 2013 Rayya published Harley Loco. In October of that year I published The Signature of All Things. For both of us, these books were proving grounds and personal triumphs. Rayya’s memoir was evidence to herself, to her family and to her community that she had the discipline to complete a creative project, and that she – an immigrant kid who’d scarcely been able to finish high school – could really write.
My novel was evidence to a legion of professional and amateur critics that, despite the wild commercial success of Eat Pray Love – a book that had shunted me straight into the chick-lit dungeon of many people’s imaginations – I could still deliver a novel that announced me as an important literary figure.
I travelled all over the globe to promote it, and Rayya often came with me. We were interviewed together quite often, because people were becoming interested in our unlikely-seeming friendship: how had the Eat Pray Love lady and this street-smart Syrian ex-con become so close? My passionate devotion to Rayya – which I thought I was keeping so well hidden – was blazingly obvious in every story. Also, people kept snapping pictures of me gazing adoringly at my “friend” and I would cringe whenever I saw the results.
But I can see now that Rayya and I were both at our most gleaming that year. Me, a happily married internationally famous author. She, a radiant example of the miracles of sobriety. Both of us out there selling our stories.
On 25 April 2016, I got a phone call from Rayya. “Are you sitting down?” she asked, just like people do in the movies. I sat down. “They found tumours,” she said. “Lots of them. Not just in my liver. In my pancreas, too.” The breath left my body and for a long moment did not come back.
I’d known that Rayya was getting a liver ultrasound that day, but I had assumed – as had she – that the results would be not only good but also cause for celebration. Rayya had recently learned that there was an amazing new treatment available for hepatitis C, a disease that had dogged her body for years. Hepatitis C had always been classified as incurable, but recently new medication had been shown to eradicate the virus completely from the liver when taken in intense doses over a period of six months to a year. Before, though, she had to get a liver ultrasound to find out whether she was a good candidate for the cure.
Rayya explained that when the technician had looked at the images on his screen, he had suddenly gone quiet. He’d left the room and called for a doctor, who came in and looked at the images, too. The doctor also went quiet. “I swear, the temperature dropped by about 10 degrees,” she told me later. “Nobody was talking. And right then I knew I was gonna die.”
After we hung up the phone, I lay down on my bed, and I wept and wept and wept. I knew then that I had to go to Rayya and be with her until her death. Everything would have to change. I told my husband the truth at last, about my feelings. And we agreed to end our marriage.
Now I had to tell Rayya. It was a simple conversation. After I confessed my love to her, I asked, “Do you like me that way?” Do you like me that way? I might as well have passed her a note after gym class reading “Check box, yes or no.”
After a long silence, she opened her eyes and smiled. Then she gathered me up in her arms and said, “Baby, my baby. My beautiful baby, why did you take so long to come to me?”
I don’t know whether it’s a normal reaction for somebody to experience a sense of euphoria after receiving a death sentence, but Rayya certainly did. “Everyone spends their lives wondering how they’re gonna die,” she said, “and now I get to know? That’s amazing! It’s done, it’s settled. Why do I feel like this is such great news? It just makes everything so easy.”
Maybe it was because Rayya had already “died” so many times as a drug addict – flatlining in one overdose after another – that the news of her impending mortality did not much frighten her at first.
“Let’s just blaze out,” she said, her eyes brilliant with an elation I had never before witnessed in her. “Let’s just live balls to the wall until I die!” Enthusiastically, fervently, grandly, I agreed to it all.
Of course, I should also probably mention that we were high as hell at the time. If you ever want to see two people go on a wild bender, have them fall desperately in love with each other, make them suppress that love for about eight years, and then suddenly allow them to release their true feelings for each other – and do it against a compelling backdrop of imminent death, where there are literally no more consequences. If at least one of those people (but probably both of them, to be honest) is a sex and love addict, then the ride will become even more outrageous. That was the trip we were on, man, and we were flying.
I began to really pour myself into Rayya – showering her not only with love and care but also with money and resources. I completely took over her life from a financial standpoint, not only paying for her medical expenses and her rent and her bucket-list experiences but also buying her things. So many things! Anything Rayya had ever wanted I insisted she must now have. Had she specifically asked me for these things? I cannot now remember. But I desired her. So I gave it all to her, and fuck the expense: I didn’t care if it bankrupted me.
Do you want a Range Rover? Here is your Range Rover.
Do you want a brand-new piano? Here is your brand-new piano.
Do you want a Rolex and Prada boots? Here are your Rolex and your Prada boots.
Here you go, my love – it is yours, it is yours, it is all yours!
Rayya and I kept that love-addict high going with each other for a few months after we finally came together as romantic partners, which is a pretty good run. And boy, did we have fun. We were able to completely forget about the past, the future, mortality, life itself. They were the most iridescent and heightened few months of my life, and – I believe – of hers. But then, of course, it ended. Eventually somebody has to get out of bed and open the blinds and notice that there are 90 voice messages on their phone and stacks of mail piling up outside their door. There was still a world out there, goddamn it – and that world was trying hard to get Rayya’s attention.
Rayya might have wanted to flame out in a blaze of glory, but a lot of people wanted her to stay. In the end, she caved to her family’s wishes that she fight the cancer and agreed to try chemo. “I’ll do it just to make everyone happy,” she said, “but I know I’m gonna hate it, and it’s not gonna work. So after three months, I’m gonna quit and do whatever the fuck I want again.”
Chemotherapy turned out to be a dark and powerful sorcerer – effective but vengeful. It was brutal. But also, a great trust and tenderness grew between us. As the autumn progressed, our days had become more difficult, but my life’s purpose was radically simplified: I existed for no reason, I truly believed, except to serve Rayya’s needs.
“Never leave me,” she would beg me at night, when she was in pain. “Never go anywhere without me. Never let me wake up in this bed and not find you here by my side.” I promised her again and again that I would never leave her.
“Absolutely not,” was my constant reply. “I’m not going anywhere. I won’t ever leave your side, not even for a moment.” I’d heard of people who got overwhelmed by the job of caretaking a sick loved one, but those people obviously didn’t know how to love people as hard or as powerfully as I knew how to love people. Others might crack or have needs of their own – but not me. Never me! I had no need for rests and breaks, no need for outside assistance. I had the whole situation handled. I had love; I didn’t need any help!
The truth was, though, I was starting to crack.
We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family, and both occasions were precious, boisterous and sweet. We spent New Year’s Eve together in New York City. We got drunk that night, knowing without a doubt that 2017 would be Rayya’s final year on Earth.
On new year’s morning I went for a walk to the East River, to make my new year’s wishes by the water, as I always do. When I reached the water, I wept. Rayya was getting sick again, I knew it. I had noticed that her abdominal swelling and episodes of pain and vomiting were increasing. The cancer was growing again.
As the first weeks of the new year went by, Rayya was often in such deep pain that she could not sleep for more than an hour or two a day. There were some good days during that time. Friends threw Rayya an exquisite birthday party, and she and I had a commitment ceremony in front of our loved ones, complete with flowers and rings and beautiful wedding clothes. But most of the time, we were in torment. Rayya could not bear to be alone in her anguish, and because she didn’t sleep, I didn’t sleep. If I dozed off while she was talking to me, she would become furious, and I would wake up to hear her sobbing, accusing me of abandoning her. Or she would wake me up to tell me, “I just want to go back to bed and cover my head and sleep.”
“OK, baby,” I would say. “Let’s see if we can tuck you back in, then.”
“You just want me to die. You just want to get rid of me.”
Soon we were both shredded – she from physical pain and fear of death, both of us from sadness, exhaustion and lack of sleep. Something clearly needed to be done. That’s when morphine was recommended. And whyever not? Everyone knew that Rayya had once been an opioid addict, but nobody was worried about addiction now – because she was a terminal cancer patient on a death watch.
“Let the dragon roll one more time,” she said when she finally put that first morphine pill in her mouth. And indeed the dragon rolled itself awake. The dragon opened its yellow eyes and lifted its leathery, powerful wings and flew on silent gusts through Rayya’s bloodstream. And instantly, magically, my beloved’s suffering was erased – just as her suffering had always been erased by opioids.
How swiftly that moment of peace came to an end, after the first morphine pill disappeared into Rayya’s system. How quickly the dragon of addiction began to roar through Rayya’s blood, demanding what it always demands – more, more, more.
Addiction: a disease Rayya and I were both powerless over, in our own awful ways. Love addiction, drug addiction, dependency, codependency – it’s all the same thing: a disease so tireless and dirty and dignity-consuming that it will never rest until you’re ruined.
Addiction. A disease so insidious and vile that – I swear to God – it makes terminal cancer look like a day at the beach.
It was in July of 2017 that I came up with a really good idea for what would save me from the nightmare that I was now trapped in with Rayya.
I decided I would kill her.
I am not talking here about a mercy killing, or euthanasia, or helping someone who is in great suffering to have a death with dignity. Rayya, at that point, most certainly did not want to die, and she no longer gave a shit about her dignity. All she wanted to do was consume as much cocaine, alcohol, prescription drugs and cigarettes as she could get her hands on; to monologue about how amazing and powerful she was for defying all the doctors’ prognoses about her “expiration date”; to doze off while smoking cigarettes in bed, until the sheets and pillowcases smoldered from her dropped embers; to pick hallucinated worms and bugs off her hot, itching skin; and to tell me what a total fucking failure I was as a human being for not taking better care of her.
And because she would not sleep, I could not sleep. Every time I shut my eyes, she shook me awake and demanded that I pay attention to her, or bring her something she needed, or listen to speeches about how great she was and how terrible I was.
She wasn’t even really experiencing physical suffering any more, because she was so incredibly altered that she couldn’t feel anything. So, no – Rayya did not want to die. But I wanted her to die.
I came up with the plan late one night when she had been awake for many hours, staring into a mirror with her eye only one inch away from the reflective surface, yelling at the demon that she swore she could see in her eye’s reflection – a demon who, she kept insisting, “lives all the way down there at the bottom of my brain”.
I decided I would do it the next day. I went back to sleep that night in peace, knowing that liberation was finally in sight. I want to make something extremely clear here: when I say that I once planned to murder Rayya, I don’t mean that the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone. I mean that I fully intended to kill her. And I tell this story in all its raw honesty, because I want people to understand how insane codependency can make a person become. I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love. And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me, and because I was extremely tired.
The next morning, while Rayya nodded off in front of the TV, I stole some of her sleeping pills and morphine pills and took them to the park with me. While my fellow New Yorkers went about their business in the beautiful summer light, I sat on a bench, studying and comparing the two medications in the palm of my hand, trying to figure out how I could make the sleeping pills look like the morphine pills so I could trick her into taking a bunch of them.
I would have to be careful about this murder, I knew – not because I was afraid of the police (I wasn’t even thinking about the police, I was so out of my mind) but because I was really, really afraid of Rayya. If she woke up and realized I was trying to murder her, I’d be dead. If I didn’t kill her, she would kill me. So I had only one chance to do the job right.
When I returned to the apartment, my mood was strangely buoyant. I walked in cheerfully, saying, “Hi, honey! I’m back!” Rayya looked up at me from her seat by the coffee table – which was, as always, covered with cocaine and pills and booze.
Without even blinking, and in a voice that was dead calm and sober, she said, “Don’t you start plotting against me now, Liz.” For a long, long time, we held each other’s gazes in silence. In that moment, it felt as if there were a break in the universe.
“Think carefully about what you’re about to do,” Rayya said, in a voice that could not have been more lucid. Then her eyes glazed over once more, and she returned her attention to the coffee table covered with drugs, booze, cigarettes.
Who did I think I was kidding, that I could kill her? Nobody could kill her. Cancer couldn’t even fucking kill her.
Without saying another word, I gathered myself up again and walked back out of the apartment. I wandered through the East Village for the next several hours in a daze, not knowing where to go or what to do now. Then suddenly I had a really brilliant inspiration! Maybe I should take the sleeping pills and the morphine! Wouldn’t that solve everything, with ease and efficacy?
I mean, my life was already destroyed, so why not finish the job? The pills were right there in my pocket; the deed could be easily done. The only question was where to do it. I didn’t want to die on the streets and bother anyone, or make them have to deal with my corpse. Maybe I should walk to the river and throw myself in …
Then I heard a voice in my head – a voice that pierced my confusion so cleanly and swiftly that it could only have come from God. The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.
I stopped walking.
I listened harder.
I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance. That being the case, continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help.
I was sobbing and full of shame and anger as I called these people – tears and snot running down my face right there in public – but I called them anyway. I remember one of them said: “What they say about the stages of grief is true – denial, anger, negotiation –all those things do happen. But they don’t happen in tidy order. They sometimes happen all at once. That’s what’s happening to you and Rayya right now. You two tried to cram an entire lifetime together into a few months, so everything is condensed and super intense. All the joy, all the sorrow. You’re experiencing everything all at once.”
Someone else said: “Here’s what you need to understand about other people’s addictions: you didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it. There’s nothing you can do to manage Rayya at this point, and the more you try to control the situation, the more you will lose. When it comes to other people’s addictions, whatever you try to control ends up controlling you.”
Life doesn’t fall apart all at once, and it doesn’t get healed all at once, either. Sometimes a spiritual awakening takes a minute to sink in, or a few months, or a few years. But something started happening within me, after my day of sobbing conversations in the park with all my wisest friends. Something started turning toward the dim and distant light of comprehension.
Rayya Elias died on 4 Jan 2018. She was 57 years old. As of this writing, I’ve been clean and sober for almost exactly five years. Today, I live alone in my church in New Jersey.
