Losing the Battle With Addiction
Bill Webb
May 31, 2007
I haven’t lost anyone to addictive disease in quite a while. One of the advantages of being an “old timer” is that most of your close friends are either addicts* with pretty good sobriety, or else people who don’t (usually) do potentially fatal things. There are, of course, sponsees—newcomers whom one has agreed to help through their days of early sobriety—but I seem to have the ability to avoid serious emotional entanglements there. Fact is, anyone who invests a lot into addicts who are early in sobriety is setting himself up for a lot more pain than I want anything to do with.
Because of this, it’s easy to lose your feel for the immediacy of this disease of addiction. It’s easier than perhaps it ought to be to forget that every day, in thousands of places, the specter of addiction reaches out and forever disrupts someone’s everyday existence, rendering their world different forever after.
This was brought home to me once more over the past couple of weeks via e-mails from one of my beloved twin nieces. I’m exactly 17 years and one day older than them, and their godfather as well, so they have always had a special spot in my heart despite circumstances that separated us physically for most of our lives.
This particular niece—whom we shall call Ari since that’s close to her real name—married into a family with its share of members who are less than inclined toward sobriety. One of these was a 20 year old nephew, who two weeks ago accidentally shot himself, handling a gun while impaired. The best thing that can be said of the outcome was that he was an organ donor and he lingered long enough for that to be practical. There is no reason, so far as I’m aware, to believe it was anything but chemically-induced carelessness.
How do you respond to a loved one who asks you to help make sense out of such a tragedy? I have never met my niece’s husband, little say the rest of her relatives by marriage. I didn’t know her nephew, and know little about his addiction except that it seems to have progressed quite rapidly, as it does among the males in some families. I was not, therefore, in any position to offer platitudes even if I had been so inclined.
How do you address a plea for help in understanding the irresolvable? This, with “Ari’s” permission, is what I wrote.
Dear Ari,
Unfortunately, there is no sense to be made of addiction; it is a chaotic force, unpredictable in its course and in the ways it destroys lives.
Perhaps it might help to remember that no one wakes up one day and says, "Hey! It’s a nice day today—I think I’ll become an addict! All of us thought we could control it to begin with, and all of us were blind-sided by its power.
I tell sponsees over and over that when we’re using we suffer from chemically-induced insanity—that we were literally not in our right minds—and still they are often unable to forgive themselves for what they have visited on themselves and others. How much harder it must be for those who have not experienced the power of drugs and alcohol first hand to understand the mindless compulsion that shapes every minute of an active addict’s life.
You can be assured of some things: Jamie loved you all, difficult though it may have been for him to show it. Somewhere beneath the person he had become, there was still the child, adolescent and young man that you all learned to love—and as long as you can remember the real Jamie, the addiction didn’t really win, because you still have him with you.
Why don’t you write him a letter? Tell him how you feel about what he did. Tell him how angry you are. Tell him how much you love him. Tell him how you intend to remember him—not as the messed-up doper, but as the real Jamie. And tell him how sorry you are, but that there was nothing that you could do to help.
Love,
Uncle Bill”
Was it enough? Probably not. Was it the best I could do? I think so. Do I owe Jamie a debt of gratitude for reminding me how deadly this disease is? I sure do.
Jamie, this one’s for you.
I use the words “addict” and “alcoholic” interchangeably.
Copyright © William E. Webb, 2003 - 2007
All Rights Reserved
Because of this, it’s easy to lose your feel for the immediacy of this disease of addiction. It’s easier than perhaps it ought to be to forget that every day, in thousands of places, the specter of addiction reaches out and forever disrupts someone’s everyday existence, rendering their world different forever after.
This was brought home to me once more over the past couple of weeks via e-mails from one of my beloved twin nieces. I’m exactly 17 years and one day older than them, and their godfather as well, so they have always had a special spot in my heart despite circumstances that separated us physically for most of our lives.
This particular niece—whom we shall call Ari since that’s close to her real name—married into a family with its share of members who are less than inclined toward sobriety. One of these was a 20 year old nephew, who two weeks ago accidentally shot himself, handling a gun while impaired. The best thing that can be said of the outcome was that he was an organ donor and he lingered long enough for that to be practical. There is no reason, so far as I’m aware, to believe it was anything but chemically-induced carelessness.
How do you respond to a loved one who asks you to help make sense out of such a tragedy? I have never met my niece’s husband, little say the rest of her relatives by marriage. I didn’t know her nephew, and know little about his addiction except that it seems to have progressed quite rapidly, as it does among the males in some families. I was not, therefore, in any position to offer platitudes even if I had been so inclined.
How do you address a plea for help in understanding the irresolvable? This, with “Ari’s” permission, is what I wrote.
Dear Ari,
Unfortunately, there is no sense to be made of addiction; it is a chaotic force, unpredictable in its course and in the ways it destroys lives.
Perhaps it might help to remember that no one wakes up one day and says, "Hey! It’s a nice day today—I think I’ll become an addict! All of us thought we could control it to begin with, and all of us were blind-sided by its power.
I tell sponsees over and over that when we’re using we suffer from chemically-induced insanity—that we were literally not in our right minds—and still they are often unable to forgive themselves for what they have visited on themselves and others. How much harder it must be for those who have not experienced the power of drugs and alcohol first hand to understand the mindless compulsion that shapes every minute of an active addict’s life.
You can be assured of some things: Jamie loved you all, difficult though it may have been for him to show it. Somewhere beneath the person he had become, there was still the child, adolescent and young man that you all learned to love—and as long as you can remember the real Jamie, the addiction didn’t really win, because you still have him with you.
Why don’t you write him a letter? Tell him how you feel about what he did. Tell him how angry you are. Tell him how much you love him. Tell him how you intend to remember him—not as the messed-up doper, but as the real Jamie. And tell him how sorry you are, but that there was nothing that you could do to help.
Love,
Uncle Bill”
Was it enough? Probably not. Was it the best I could do? I think so. Do I owe Jamie a debt of gratitude for reminding me how deadly this disease is? I sure do.
Jamie, this one’s for you.
I use the words “addict” and “alcoholic” interchangeably.
Copyright © William E. Webb, 2003 - 2007
All Rights Reserved
Print
Email
