Terry:: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism

by George McGovern

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Raw and riveting . . . A compassionate reminder that every alcoholic was once somebody’s baby.”—USA Today

Just before Christmas 1994 Terry McGovern was found frozen to death in a snowbank in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had stumbled out of a bar and fallen asleep in the cold. Just forty-five years old, she had been an alcoholic most of her life. Now, in this harrowing and intimate reminiscence, her father, former Senator George McGovern, examines her diaries, interviews her friends and doctors, sifts through medical records, and searches for the lovely but fragile young woman who had waged a desperate, lifelong battle with her illness.

What emerges is the portrait of a woman who was loved by everyone but herself. Surrounded by devoted parents, caring siblings, and two young daughters of her own, Terry maintained an appearance of control but was haunted by the twin demons of alcohol and depression. Her story is a heartbreaking tale of her attempts at sobriety, the McGovern family’s efforts to help her—and the failure of both. With courage and compassion, George McGovern addresses a private tragedy with an honesty rarely achieved by a public figure, looking candidly at his inability to save his child. A primer for other families who live with addiction, McGovern’s book is filled with wisdom and an understanding that can come only from sharing his tremendous loss with others.

Praise for Terry

“Harrowing, riveting . . . A family drama of love and loss.”—The New York Times Book Review

“An agonized cry from the heart . . . McGovern’s abiding love for his daughter, and his anguish at the thought of failing her, scorch these pages.”—Newsweek

“Haunting . . . speaks for all families engaged in the private struggles of addiction.”—Washington Post

“The loving chronicle of a daughter who lost her life and a father who could not keep her alive . . . a simple, moving story that would touch the heart of any parent.”—Houston Chronicle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307830418
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/17/2013
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	570,899
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

George McGovern served in the US Senate for 18 years and was the 1972 Democratic candidate for president. He directed the first Food for Peace Program under President John F. Kennedy. A decorated World War II bomber pilot (Distinguished Flying Cross), he held a PhD in history from Northwestern University and taught at Dakota Wesleyan University. He was named by former president Bill Clinton in 1997 as the US Permanent Representative to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2000, he was awarded the nation's highest honor, the Medal of Freedom. He died in 2012 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at the age of 90.

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE
 
“Terry” was what everyone called her. When she was born, we named her Teresa Jane McGovern. She came to prefer being called by her proper name, Teresa, but somehow, almost from the beginning, Terry seemed the perfect name for this engaging, fun-loving, pretty little girl.
 
I had a special name for her: “the Bear.” Over the years, putting an arm around her shoulder, I would proclaim, “The ol’ Bear,” or “Ter’ the Bear.” How this affectionate term originated I’ve forgotten, but perhaps it was because as a toddler she reminded me of a playful cub.
 
Early on, she developed a habit of pulling a tiny piece of fuzz from a teddy bear, or a doll, or a shaggy blanket, and rolling it between her fingers or gently across her upper lip. This was the way she went to sleep as a child—and it continued to the end.
 
June 10, 1949, was a sweltering hot day in Mitchell, South Dakota, as my wife, Eleanor, gave birth to Teresa Jane, our third daughter. Eleanor recalls that delivery as the easiest of our five children, but I still remember fashioning a fan from a newspaper in the stifling maternity ward and trying to cool the perspiring young mother.
 
Forty-five years later, on December 12, 1994, Madison, Wisconsin, was covered with seven inches of snow and the temperature was far below freezing. Teresa left a Madison bar that night, stumbled into the snow, and froze to death.
 
She had fallen before from excessive drinking in every season of the year. But this time, there was too much snow, too much cold, for a fragile body to overcome. How could this have happened? My lovable little girl who had given me ten thousand laughs, countless moments of affection and joy, and, yes, years of anxiety and disappointment—now frozen to death like some deserted outcast? Terry had a multitude of friends who admired and loved her everywhere she had ever lived, gone to school, worked, or played. They all testify to her kindness, her warmth, her intelligence, her compassion, her marvelous wit. Why then did she drink so much and die so young?
 
The blunt answer is that Teresa Jane McGovern was an alcoholic—one of twenty million alcoholics in the United States. She died as over 100,000 other American alcoholics do every year. The difference with Terry was that she was the daughter of a prominent family. She had campaigned across the country in 1972 for her dad, the Democratic nominee for President. The moment her body was identified, her death was news around the world.
 
Every day, three hundred Americans die quietly of alcoholism. Many of them go unnoticed. Some of them have been out of touch with their families for years. There might be a small news item reporting that the police have found an unidentified body in a park or on the street or in a cheap rooming house—or in a snowbank. These people are usually not the subject of public notice or concern. But each one of them is a precious soul who was once a little girl or boy filled with promise and dreams. They are the silent victims of the nation’s number one health problem-alcoholism. They just didn’t happen to come from a prominent family, so nobody notices when they die.
 
In Terry’s case, I could not have escaped, even if I had tried, the avalanche of reporters’ questions. Immediately, I decided to respond openly and candidly about her life and death.
 
Yes, she died while intoxicated. Yes, she was an alcoholic—and had been for much of her life. Yes, we were aware of this and were in communication with her until the last hours of her life. Yes, she was in and out of treatment many times. Yes, she had periods of sobriety during which she fell in love and gave birth to two delightful daughters, Marian and Colleen. Yes, she fought her addiction to alcohol until the day she died.
 
There were other questions I could not answer then and still find it difficult to answer. Why do some people recover from alcoholism while my daughter died despite all her struggles to overcome her addiction? Why did my daughter become addicted at all?
 
I was open about Terry’s death not only because it was virtually impossible to be silent about it, but because I wanted both her life and her death to be understood and appreciated—and I wanted others to gain from the lessons her life can teach us.
 
I write this book for the same reason. I want my fellow citizens and especially my fellow parents to know that alcoholism is a deadly disease that can strike any family—rich or poor, wise or foolish, strong or weak, young or old. Alcoholism is like a thief in the night. It can steal up on you and seize your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness before you comprehend what has happened.
 
Most people can take a drink or two with no serious consequences. Not so the alcoholic, who is powerless to stop drinking once the addiction takes control. Alcoholism will ruin your life and kill you as surely as a raging cancer if it is not properly treated and contained.
 
Terry came to understand all of this. And yet she repeatedly relapsed from hard-gained sobriety into more bouts of uncontrolled drinking. In the end, her struggle to recover failed.
 
I believe, however, that in some respects, she speaks more powerfully in death than she was able to do in life. Both her life and her death have taught me much. 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. I wish that I had held her closer as she was and judged her less by what I wanted her to be. I wish that I had always separated my resentment of her disease and its behavior from my love for her. My father was fond of the old admonition “Hate the sin but love the sinner.” I would add: “Hate the alcoholism—but love the victim.”
 
Terry’s death has given me the wisdom and the inspiration to cherish more those who survive, however perilously. I believe her story has much to inspire and enrich us: her lifetime battle with alcoholism, her remarkable insights into the meaning and travails of life and death, her compassion for all living creatures, her humor and philosophy, her tragic mistakes and suffering.
 
She could always warm my soul or make me laugh or break my heart. Now her body is at rest in Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery in the shadow of a Celtic cross overlooking the nation’s capital, where she spent so much of her life. But her spirit is more real and present to me than at any previous time in her short and troubled life.
 
Since this is my personal story of Terry, I must tell you that the loss of a child—no matter the age, five, twenty-five, or forty-five—produces more grief than you can imagine. And the longer that child has lived, the more memories, associations, and shared history flood your heart and mind. We parents, after all, create our children and are given the glorious opportunity to nurture them. In a sense we see them as an extension of ourselves. 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. You’re going to suffer a thousand regrets and seizures of grief no matter how many times you intellectually agree that it is not your fault.
 
Terry was dealt a doubly cruel hand: the companion demons depression and alcoholism. They were demons that warred ceaselessly against the other aspects of her being—a warm and sunny disposition, a quick wit to make you smile or laugh, a frank and open candor that disarmed you and pricked your pomp and hypocrisy, a keen mind with a sensitivity to literature, art, and poetry, an amazing insight into and concern about the problems of others, a hunger for spiritual meaning, a love of animals, birds, and flowers, and a devotion to her family and friends.
 
She had all of this and more, but after her teenage years the demons were always after her, relentlessly pulling at her stability and happiness. They took turns battering her with sadness and despair, which no doctor or medication seemed able to resolve, and with alcoholic bouts, which she seemed powerless to contain very long. Yet, she persisted through countless AA meetings, numerous treatment facilities, hospitals, detox centers, and spiritual quests, and a thousand counseling sessions. No victim in my acquaintance of either alcoholism or depression ever fought harder or more courageously to overcome these related diseases than did Terry. But in the end, the demons won the physical battle and dragged her battered body to an untimely grave.
 
The life and death of this valiant young woman have taught me more than I could ever have imagined, not only about alcoholism and depression, but about love and life and family and, yes, about loss and death and grief.
 
This book has been a difficult pursuit for me. In the years since graduate school at Northwestern I have done most of my serious writing early in the morning. But this effort to tell Terry’s story has been done mostly during the long nights since her death. I have written every word in longhand on pads of yellow legal-size paper. Those sheets show many small smudges. That is what happens when tears fall onto the page.
 
But writing this book has also been a healing experience. I wrote it to come to terms with Terry and myself. I do not know much about those who believe that we can communicate with the dead. But writing this book has given me a new appreciation, admiration, and love for dear Terry. Terry’s death and my quest to understand her life have also deepened my love for my other daughters, my son, my wife, my wondrous grandchildren, and my fellow human beings.
 
It is my hope that Terry’s life-and-death struggle with alcoholism as related here will help in some way to open the eyes, instruct the minds, and warm the hearts of other strugglers along the way.
 
It is those bittersweet related experiences that compose the story that I tell you in this book that begins with a little girl called Terry.