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Left Out In The Cold Terry Mcgovern's Death Says Something Chilling About How We Treat Alcoholics
BY SHERRYL CONNELLY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, May 23, 1996
Terry McGovern did not want to die. That has to be said.
She was a lovely wo-man, the mother of two young girls, who froze to death in a parking lot in Madison, Wis., on the night of Dec. 12, 1994. She died drunk. Terry McGovern was the 45-year-old daughter of George McGovern, the former senator from South Dakota who ran for President in 1972. She was an alcoholic.
So it could be said she died from alcoholism. And that, irrespective of the 7 inches of snow and freezing temperatures that took her life, is true. But if her death certificate read death by alcoholism it should list a subsidiary cause. And that would have to be society's attitude.
Listen to Tim Grant, a senior vice president of Hazelden, a primary recovery institution in this country. "It used to be we warned people not to kill an alcoholic with kindness. Now we risk killing alcoholics with cruelty."
And then there is George McGovern, a 73-year-old father who, with his wife, Eleanor, did most everything a loving parent could do for a grown child seemingly bent on drinking herself into extinction. Hear the regret: "I wish we had been told that if you follow this course that you would never see your child alive again."
Advised by professional counselors that they should distance themselves from their daughter's problem, that they should no longer provide a cushion for an alcoholic to fall back on, these two devoted parents of five left for an extended overseas trip in the last summer of their daughter's life. On their return, they were perhaps less available to Terry than they had been before.
"When you hear that kind of advice, you are so ready to welcome it. You are so tired and wearied and discouraged," says McGovern. "The thought of being emancipated...well, you figure, `What the hell, we sweated out this girl for 25 years. We're getting older, and we've got a chance for a summer in Europe. Sooner or later, she's going to have to take control.'
"Now, I regret every day of that."
McGovern states plainly in his just-out book, "Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism," that he believes he did wrong by Terry.
But if he did wrong, it was by trying to do right.
Terry was the third of McGovern's children. He tried hard not to have a favorite, but just maybe she was it. She was certainly mischievous but, in keeping with the McGovern tradition, a strong humanitarian. Throughout the book, McGovern's grief for the child he lost is so understandably strong it almost eclipses the woman Terry became.
She was undeniably troubled. As a teenager, she was forced into sex by a disturbed boyfriend, became pregnant and had an abortion. The episode, the alienation from teenage life that it wrought, may have been part of what derailed her. But the truth is that it seems that Terry was already reacting to chemical substances marijuana and amphetamines in a way that her peers weren't.
That wasn't readily discernible, certainly not to her parents, who were genuinely loving and caring. It came out later, in the hundreds of therapy sessions that Terry, as a depressed young adult with abuse problems, engaged in. In her 30s, she managed eight years of sobriety. During that period, she gave birth to two daughters, Marian and Colleen, who were 9 and 7 when she died.
Terry loved her children. She wanted to be a mom like other moms, only better, because she wanted her children to know the kind of mothering her mother had given her. In rehab, fighting for her life toward the end, Terry devoted herself to realizing her kids' wishes for Halloween costumes: Marian was a nun, Colleen was Snow White.
In the last four years of her life, Terry was admitted to a detox center 68 times. She was reaching for recovery. But like a bad skin graft, it wouldn't take. "She did not want to die. But she was increasingly falling into blackouts and total collapse," says McGovern with the perspective of regret-laden distance. "The disease had settled in on Terry."
Alcoholism is cunning and baffling, to borrow from the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous. Untreated, it can defeat the alcoholic. And it can defeat the families of alcoholics. So it's fairly said that the individual and the family confronted with alcoholism are already dealing with more than they can handle.
The experts say that alcoholism is something that happens to people, they don't choose it. It can develop around life's problems or independent of them. Alcoholism is a monster. The question is, is it a monster that can be tamed? The answer is: Not every time. Yet it is always worth trying.