my sister
whose eyes were black as coal
and as bright as a child’s
whose beautiful smile presented itself
behind a wavering lip
whose mind was that of an artist
which saw life too clearly
whose heart was filled with love
and felt it too dearly
whose soul grew weak
like flowers without water
whose spirit will grow strong
in all who remember her
my sister
—poem by Diane Andreoni—
My sister Paula would have been fifty-five years old this year. I’ve always wondered why she chose to die at the young age of forty-two. I don’t think I will ever know the answer to this question. So instead of seeking answers, I’m choosing to honor her memory by celebrating her life. Perhaps her story will help others who are struggling with anorexia, alcohol addiction and depression. And her legacy will live on.
Paula’s happy childhood
Paula was born on November 8, 1960 into our middle class Italian Catholic family. My parents had five children. In our family’s birth order, Paula was the second born after my brother and she was the first girl. She was a tiny baby, the smallest of us five Andreoni kids. She had big, round jet black eyes, dark curly hair and a beautiful smile. She was a happy child, always laughing and drawing pictures. My mom called her “Paula Doodle” because she had a vivid imagination. She drew pictures of silly cartoon characters on the inside pages of her colorful, glossy covered spiral-wired notebooks that she decorated with her favorite stickers. Her doodles looked like long-haired hippy blobs with round “John Lennon” glasses for eyes, striped socks for legs and high-top gym shoed feet that pointed outward like a ballerina’s. She would complete her drawings by scribbling fancy flower borders alongside the page’s holes that the notebook’s curly wire spiraled in and out of.
My parents were a creative couple who had a group of artsy friends. Together, they formed a special club called the North Shore Fine Arts League (NSFAL). Each summer the club would organize parties and everyone came wearing inventive outfits to play along with the agreed upon theme. They encouraged me and my brothers and sisters to express our creativity, too. We did this by entering our drawings into local art festivals with hopes of getting winning ribbons and having our artwork displayed in nearby shopping malls. At home we were always finding ways to be inventive. We used our Easy Bake Oven and left-over candy wax to make realistic looking fake food, colorful costume jewelry and gross looking bugs that we used to scare guests with by hiding them in secret places throughout the house.
One summer we produced plays and performed them on our deck. We charged the adult neighbors a quarter each to sit in the audience. Paula would art direct our theatrical backdrops. She had me, my sister and our friends color different backgrounds on big cloth sheets and hung them from the roof gutters. They were all rolled up and someone was assigned the job of dropping a sheet as the play’s scenes changed.
In our teenage years my two sisters and I were in high school together. Paula was a Senior, my sister Chris was a Sophomore and I was a Freshman. My oldest brother had graduated and was in college. And my younger brother was still in elementary school. I admired Paula and wanted to be a pom pom girl like she was. Before I entered high school I remember sitting in the bleachers during halftime of the homecoming football game watching the Patriettes perform a routine to the sound of the marching band’s music as they played “Baby Face”. Each girl marched onto the field dressed like baby dolls. They were holding large wooden boxes at their waists. Each side was painted a different color and had a cut-out hole in the center of two of its sides that the performers used to hold and turn the boxes in synch to the music. At the end of the dance routine each girl stepped over their boxes and landed in front of a large black and white photograph of themselves as a baby. It was such a great performance that the bleacher crowd gave them a standing ovation. It was at that moment that I thought to myself I want to be like my sister. I admired her talent and creativity. The next year, I entered high school and tried out for the pom pom squad. I was ecstatic when I made the varsity team, which meant I could perform with my sister. That year the Patriettes outperformed every high school pom pom team and won first place in the state of Illinois National Drill Team Association competition.
Paula’s teen-age battle with anorexia
I always thought my sister Paula was beautiful. She had clear bronze skin, straight teeth and a beautiful figure. But she didn’t see herself as I did. Instead she compared herself to the models’ figures in the fashion magazines she read and wanted to be waif thin like they were. Instead of accepting herself as a unique and talented individual, she was overly sensitive about her looks and strived to be a more perfect version of herself. Toward the end of her Senior year in high school, our family noticed that Paula was losing weight. During family dinners she ate very little claiming that she wasn’t hungry. Her and her friends had developed a “popcorn diet” thinking that corn was giving them enough proper nutrition. My parents tried to convince my sister that she looked too skinny and needed to eat. But when she looked in the mirror she saw herself as pretty and thin. I knew she was monitoring her weight because a scale suddenly appeared in the bathroom that we shared. Me and my sister were also concerned and we tried to help by talking to Paula and telling her that she didn’t look healthy. She didn’t listen. I noticed that her pom pom uniform looked too big on her and when she performed she looked frail and weak.
Our entire family was worried about Paula. The year was 1978 and anorexia nervosa was not as public of a disease as it is today. Back then, most families dealt with personal issues inside the home. None of us understood the emotional issues that led Paula to develop a distorted body image and feel the need to dramatically reduce her weight. So my parents chose to seek professional help and took Paula to meet with a counselor. But instead of helping my sister develop coping skills to divert negative thoughts and re-build her self-esteem, the counselor recommended that Paula attend college as planned to maintain a normal routine. My parents listened to the counselor’s advice and allowed her to leave home with the hopes that living on her own in a different environment and meeting a new group of friends might help encourage Paula to eat and gain weight.
Paula’s alcohol addiction
Over the next three years Paula attended college, gained weight and looked healthier. She seemed to be enjoying her new life. She had a new boyfriend and many new friends. However, looking back on letters she sent to her best friend during this time, perhaps she was enjoying it too much. Paula enjoyed socializing, going to parties and drinking. Her grades had dropped and my parents wouldn’t allow Paula to return to school for her Senior year. Back at home, away from her friends and the “party” environment of college, Paula refocused on her academics by attending a community college for the summer. She saved her money from a waitressing job and chose to relocate to a warmer climate to finish her Senior year.
Now Paula was attending Arizona State University and seemed to have a clearer direction of what she wanted to do with her life. Over the winter my sister Chris and I went to visit Paula at her new school. She took us to a local art fair, showed us the restaurant she was waitressing at and introduced us to her boyfriend. She seemed happy. That night when my sister Chris and I were sleeping on the pull out couch, Paula came home late after work and woke us up wanting to party. She was with one of her colleagues. They stayed up all night talking in the kitchen. I guessed she had been drinking because I overheard their random conversations. I don’t think I slept at all that night listening to her. The next morning my sister and I returned home and we discussed our concern about Paula’s party habits but thought she would move on from the college scene eventually. So we focused instead on being happy to have seen our sister and envious that she was enjoying the sunny weather in Arizona.
A year later Paula was still living in Arizona and attending school making up for untransferable class credits. Our family was shocked when one of my sister’s friends reached out to my mom to tell her that Paula was in trouble. She said that her friends were very concerned about Paula’s health and thought that she had a drinking problem. They were organizing an intervention and wanted my parents to fly out for it. My mom went. Looking back I wished our entire family had been there to support Paula. But we didn’t understand the severity of my sister’s drinking problem and felt my mom’s presence would be good enough. Our family finally accepted that Paula was an alcoholic when my mom returned from Arizona and told us that our sister admitted herself into Alcoholic’s Anonymous.
Paula’s sober years
Paula spent the next ninety days following Alcoholic Anonymous’s twelve step program and got sober. My parents talked my sister into moving back home. When our family reunited with Paula we were all very anxious. We weren’t sure how to treat her because we all felt that she might be overly sensitive and self-conscious about what she had just been through. But when Paula returned home we were grateful to see that she looked mentally and physically strong. Her skin had a healthy glow, her spirit was lively and seemed rejuvenated and she had a beautiful smile on her face. She took charge of her life and got a job as a pom pom coach at a nearby high school. It was here that she met her future husband. They fell in love and eventually he asked her to marry him. Our family was very proud of Paula. We felt that she had finally chosen a good path in life.
Over the next seven years Paula and her new husband built a simple life together. She now had a step daughter to raise and she embraced her new role as a mother. She loved children and also became a nanny for some local families. The neighborhood moms’ appreciated how well she cared for their children. During this time Paula’s creativity blossomed, too. She began cooking freshly prepared meals and painted murals on the inside walls of her home. My admiration for my sister resurfaced again.
Paula’s relapse
The course of Paula’s life shifted one evening during a romantic summer boating event that she attended with her husband. She lost her will power when she took a tiny sip of wine and relapsed. Her husband didn’t recognize the symptoms of alcoholism. We all came to learn that my sister was a master at hiding her drinking. After a bit of detective work my sister and I learned that Paula had mixed alcohol with 7-Up and carried the plastic bottle in her purse sneaking sips when she was in the bathroom. Soon her drinking began to get out of control and she started to have seizures. Paula’s husband reached out to my parents and asked for their help. Over the next ten years my parents admitted Paula into five different addiction centers. But she never got sober again. She didn’t want to. She ran away from a couple of the centers just so she could find her drug of choice, “wine”. Our family came to terms with the fact that Paula was a serious alcoholic and she would steal, lie and manipulate us and her friends just so she could drink. Paula claimed that she couldn’t stop her demons and alcohol was her way of coping to escape them.
I’m not sure anyone can really understand the mind of an alcoholic. I know me and my family tried to, but we were not successful. We tried to help her in our own unique ways, but no one was able to reach through to her. Me and my sister met with Paula to talk with her. We naively felt that if we had a one-on-one conversation and told her how concerned we were that she would listen and change her behavior. I remember saying to Paula, “You’ve got to be honest with yourself about what will make you happy in life.” But she had already silently made her choice. She was determined to drink herself to death.
Paula’s depressive defeat
At this point my sister was wafer thin again and drinking all the time. She didn’t even try to hide it from us anymore. She walked away from everyone that loved her. She left her husband and her step daughter to live on her own. She became a Starbuck’s barista. Her customers loved her and gave her big tips, which she used to buy wine. Eventually she got fired from her job because she came to work drunk. She was seriously depressed and began talking about ways to end her life. She attempted suicide by taking an entire bottle of night-time aspirin. My parents took her back into their home for a while, but when she started to have seizures again, they realized that they couldn’t handle the stress of trying to take care of her anymore. So they did the hardest thing a parent has to do in life and told Paula she would have to leave their house. They asked her where she wanted to go and she told them back to Arizona. When my mom put my sister on the airplane to fly out west she felt helpless. She tearfully confided in me that she feared we might not see Paula alive again.
"Great Souls Suffer In Silence"
—Friedrich Schiller—
Paula landed safely in Arizona and began a new life in an apartment that my parents and her ex-husband arranged for her to live in. We were all hopeful that she would have the willpower to stop drinking and regain control of her life. But over the Christmas holidays we received a call from Paula and when I talked with her I sensed from the slurs in her voice that she had been drinking. It was extremely painful for our entire family to let go of Paula. But at this point in her illness we realized we could no longer help her. If she couldn’t find a way to help herself we knew she was at risk of dying. In fact, she had been warned by many of the doctors at the addiction centers she stayed at that if she didn’t stop her drinking she would die. She couldn’t stop.
A couple of months later my parents got the call that my sister was found dead by a cleaning lady in the apartment building she had been living in. She died from a combination of alcohol and over the counter sleeping pills. After my sister’s death my mom was never quite the same. It seemed as though a part of her soul had died with Paula. Each member of our family dealt with Paula’s suicide differently. For a long time I felt guilty from not being able to save her. But I came to realize that Paula didn’t want to be saved. She made her own choices in life. And they eventually led her to a perfect storm of anorexia, alcohol addiction and depression. The last choice she made was to end her life.
Remembering Paula Lee Andreoni
Today I often wonder what my sister would be doing with her life if she were still alive. I think of her everyday. Sharing Paula’s life with others has helped me heal. One of the most rewarding experiences I have had was volunteering at the Red Cross Detox center in Dharamsala, India teaching male addicts life coping skills and building their self-esteem. My goal was to make the men smile and help them identify their dreams. On my first day I shared Paula’s story with the men. They felt grateful to hear about her life and sad to know that she had died. One of the activities I had the men do was to make clay sculptures of what their addictions felt like to them; then I told them to smash it with their hands. Next I had them make a sculpture of what their life would be like without their addiction. One man, Vinod, made a diamond sculpture. When I asked him what it meant to him, he told me, “Life is like a diamond with the spirit of all the gems.” The guys and I learned from each other everyday. Together, we agreed that everyone has negative thoughts and emotions. How people differ is how they choose to deal with stressful situations. Those that react to their emotions more positively have better actions. I was proud of all the men for working hard and creating goals that would help them reach their dreams. They showed tremendous courage. After one month my volunteer work came to an end. On our last day together the guys sang me a song and I gave them each a personal note. As I said my good-byes I imagined Paula’s soul shining bright like diamonds in the hopeful eyes of all the men, and it made me feel happy to know that my sister’s legacy was beginning to live on.
