All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert is a heavy, but also beautiful nonfiction subtitled Love, Loss, and Liberation. Gilbert writes about her late soulmate, Rayya Elias, the drug and alcohol addition she had, and Rayya's death from liver cancer. Also, Gilbert writes about her own sex and love addiction, how her story with Rayya was one of friendship, romance, beauty, rage, and pain, and Gilbert's recovery from her addiction.
Gilbert had to be involved in the dramas of other people, always checking in, helping them recover, being the savior. She would also become wrapped up in relationships, them turning immediately all-consuming. She was a romantic obsessive, an enabler, and codependent. Having money from her book Eat Pray Love gave fuel to the fire, she could afford to gift huge amounts, trying to save others from their problems.
When Gilbert and Rayya didn't know each other well, Gilbert gave the gift of free lodging to Rayya after a mutual friend said that Rayya going through a hard time from a breakup. They became close friends and after Rayya's cancer diagnosis, with a six-month life expectancy, they fell into one another and started a relationship. They went everywhere, doing everything, including drugs and alcohol. For a time it was great, then it wasn't, as Rayya had experience as a drug addict, and had returned to it.
Rayya had a horrible decline back into addiction and covered in the book is how when someone an addict, the things they do and say are said and done by someone else entirely. Rayya herself had years prior told someone that when dealing with a family member who was an addict, they were no longer dealing with them, but with a vampire. They might come back to being a person, but that was up to them alone. People have to want to get clean, they can't because someone else wants them to. Rayya lived twenty months after her diagnosis and Gilbert had to leave Rayya to save herself. She had hit caregiver collapse, with Rayya's drug and alcohol addiction and Gilbert's sex and love addiction supercharging the dysfunction and then collapse.
At the end of Rayya's life, Gilbert was there, and Gilbert in her pain spun into her sex and love addiction, and then confronted it. She notes recovery from addiction of all kinds is possible, but it's hard, and requires constant effort and vigilance. The twelve steps work as long as they're worked at and the rooms of recovery, meetings, sponsors, and check ins are all needed. Gilbert went first a day, then thirty days clean from her addiction, then added on giving up alcohol and then drugs, then a year clean, then five years clean at the time of writing. The book notes that addiction is insidious, and addicts can't do normal things like normal people. Gilbert recounts a story about how an addict will always reach a point where they might relapse, and then have thirty seconds to save their life, and decide to either go to the addiction or run the other way.
It's a beautiful story about both Rayya and Gilbert, but also a rough one, not a story that's puppies and rainbows during someone's final magical, mystical days left on earth. Gilbert includes drawings, poems, and sayings between chapters, including about her recovery from addiction, Give in. Give up. Give over. Towards the very end, Gilbert writes as part of "A Poem for Rayya, Six Years Gone" the statement I had to stay because I'm just beginning. You had to leave because you're done.
