If fighting was “exercise,” the last year of our marriage was a Spin class from hell, but there was a long stretch before that when I truly believed we’d be all right.
At first, the best we could do was pretend to be all right. We didn’t know how to do this, so we just kept trudging forward, walking wounded, trying to look like everything was normal. Everyone has their own way of mourning, and my husband’s way of dealing with anything painful was work. Creating music and playing it for people—that was the only solid ground he’d ever known. A few days before the Oprah interview aired, “Betcha by Golly Wow!” was released. He had recorded the song while I was pregnant and started working on the music video in the aftermath.
His vision for this video involved children, as many of his videos did, dancers in white alphabet unitards that spelled out “betcha by golly wow,” a gymnast, and this whole very charming dance, all cut into a storyline about hurrying into the ER, where I’m sitting on an exam-room gurney in a hospital gown. At the end, when he finally gets to me, we embrace with joy, and you get that we’ve just learned I’m pregnant. It’s beautifully done. Incredibly sweet. People loved it, and everyone has always naturally assumed that this sentimental moment was captured while I was pregnant.
It wasn’t.
It was done in early November 1996, only a few weeks after we lost Amiir.
When he told me about this idea and said he wanted to shoot the scenes at the hospital where Amiir had recently died, I wanted to shake him. I wanted to slap him and say, “Are you serious right now?” The idea of going back into that hospital made my legs feel weak. But he was so earnest about this vision. He wanted to return to a moment when he felt complete joy, complete faith, complete love, and he wanted to take me with him.
I can look at it now and see the sweetness of it, but for a long time, I couldn’t look at it at all. I did it for the same reason I did Oprah: I didn’t know what else I could do to help him. If nothing else, I wanted to be in the same room with him. If that room was Studio B, fine. If it was our bedroom, even better. This man was my family now, and I was his. If he’d asked me to drive off a cliff with him, I would have done it.
Mama had put off the surgery to remove a large tumor from her uterus as long as she could, but I urged her not to postpone it any longer. Having gained a whole new appreciation for Mama, I was determined to be there for her. I arrived at the hospital to find that, because the surgery was gynecological, they had her in the maternity ward. The hospital was hard. This was too much. My husband found me sobbing about it and said, “We’ll get her a nurse. She can go home, and you can be with her.”
The official release of Emancipation was also happening in November, and a huge part of the PR push was his live appearance on Oprah, so my husband went to Chicago to do the live portion of her show. He went on to do as many performances as he could wedge in for the next several weeks. I was relieved to see Emancipation quickly climb the charts—to number eleven in the United States and Top 20 in the United Kingdom. I knew it would do his heart good. So much of his vision for the future was riding on that release and the independent distribution deal he’d struck with EMI.
He left on tour, which was a form of escape for him. Now it’ll hit him, I thought, and I worried about him riding alone on the bus and brooding in a hotel room in the dark hours before dawn. In mid-December, he canceled two shows, which is something he never did. When I went to talk to him about it, I found wine spilled on the rug in the hallway and vomit on the bathroom floor. I knew he was struggling. I knew he was in pain. But I was struggling myself. I never told him about my thoughts of suicide or how close I had come to actually doing it. The moment Mia saved me from myself remained a secret between her and me. I didn’t want my husband to worry about me, but I started to think he knew, because my Vicodin kept disappearing. The prescription would be filled, and a few days later, most of the pills would be gone. I assumed he was hiding them to keep me from hurting myself. In retrospect, I don’t know what to think.