Alone

The image below is a stairway in my house. It’s the stairway I came charging up to take the last few steps toward an altered world. The image that catapulted me into that world was my daughters lifeless body in the middle of a flurry of active EMT workers, Police, and various state officials. It was a sight I never wanted to see and a world I never wanted to enter! I could only scream amidst the frenzy “Is she dead”, over and over and over.

To the right of the image is a hole in the wall about halfway up the stairs. It was where I decided to punch the wall as an expression of my anger, disbelief and, I am sure, fear of what I was about to see.

That hole has existed on that wall for just about four years now. In a few weeks that hole will be patched, painted, and will no longer exist. The hole that exists in my heart doesn’t go away!

My wife asked me a few times if I wanted to patch the hole, I just couldn’t. In some strange way, I wanted it there. I guess like those makeshift memorials we often see on the road where a loved one died in a car accident. I always asked myself, “Why would you want to remember the place where they died”. I suppose somewhere in that answer is why I just did not want the hole covered. In some strange way, it helped me.

The grief process is a slow process, I do not say we heal because I am not sure we do, but we must move forward.

Overcoming addiction is like that, it’s a process, I don’t think you heal but you must move forward to wellness. If you love someone fighting an addiction you must move forward with them, more on this at the end of today’s post. I realize that’s easy to say, and every situation is unique.

I mentioned to a friend the other day that most recovering addicts end up in multiple stays at residential or outpatient programs. Each one is a step toward wellness, but thanks to fentanyl, greed, and plain old evil people, that can be very costly. People die! Let that sink in.

I do not classify people as evil very often. I feel most people are good but sometimes stuck in doing some bad things. Honestly, I don’t know what else to call someone that knowingly cuts marijuana, bootleg pills, opioids, etc. with a substance (fentanyl, or carfentanil) that is known to be the major cause of the rise of death by overdose yet do it anyway. Please save any pushback about well the addict doesn’t have to take it. If you say that please understand there is a huge difference between using or even abusing drugs and being addicted. Read “Inside the Brain of Your Addicted Loved One” to understand this in a deeper way.

The hardest story my daughter ever shared with me was just after she had once again completed a treatment program, it may have been her second or third. She was trying to hold things together and re-engage into life sans heroin. As a part of that, she restarted working at a retailer (working was important to Lauren, it was an area I wish I had figured out more ways to let her do it safely) in a local mail. One day she ran into one of her sources who promptly asked “Where have you been, I haven’t seen you”, LaLa explained that she had been in rehab and was trying to stay away from drugs. Their reply was to hand her a few bags (.10 grams each usually) and say “This ones on me just in case”, bastard!

A little earlier I mentioned that we should move forward with our loved one in the throughs of fighting an addiction. Realizing, of course, that every situation is different, and all the details need to be weighed, not counted, I was struck by a quote I read in In Vincent Van Gogh’s biography “Vincent grew up in an atmosphere of constant jeopardy and contingent love.” His father was quoted as saying “A single wrong step can put one on the slippery path, with devastating consequences for all”. WOW, that is a hard expectation to live up to. One of the children said after leaving the home, “How much are we to love pa and ma, I am not nearly good enough for them.” (Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh, and Gregory White Smith). WOW, how could you not feel anything but isolated and alone in that kind of atmosphere?

A loved one fighting addiction needs to know they are not alone watch the two videos on this page to see how important this is ‘This is skid row’: What two current heroin addicts want you to know | CNN .

In the words of Ally from the video mentioned above “Nothing good is going to come out of this.”

Especially if I leave my loved one alone in the fight.

This weeks featured image is called “Twins on the Tide” by Brooke Shaden