Caring for Little Kawai
Elinor Meadows, ex-wife of Walter Becker, discusses her book about life with their son after his brain-altering drug overdose.
But they don’t love you
Little Kawai
Not the way that I do
Not the way that I do
—“Little Kawai” by Walter Becker
Shortly after dawn one day in July 2005, Elinor Meadows was enjoying the morning birdsong outside her home in Maui when the phone rang. On the other end of the line she heard the sobs of her ex-husband, Walter Becker, who was 5,000 miles away in New York City. A wave of white-hot panic shot through her body. Something was terribly wrong.
Becker was hoarse from grief, but he managed to explain that their 20-year-old son, Kawai, had overdosed and was in a coma at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. “I heard myself saying in a voice I barely recognized as my own, ‘I’m coming. I will be there as fast as I can,’” Meadows writes in Kawai, her powerful memoir about the years she spent caring for her son, which was published in March.