Addicted Like Me (24 page)

His last stay in the hospital really scared him, but I knew I couldn't be sure how long the scare would last, so I had my dad transferred to a Phoenix hospital near to me. While he was there he spoke to counselors, cried, talked, even attended recovery meetings. It was the first time in a long time that I felt like I could actually exhale. When I went to visit he had a little more light in his eyes. I just remember feeling hope on his behalf. He would tell me he wanted and needed to be sober, and that this was his chance to start fresh. These were old promises again, but at some point every addict who recovers says the same things and really means them. This is what makes it difficult to draw a line between yourself and the relationship you make with an addict. My dad was saying things that I had always wanted to be true for us.

During one of my visits, he told me that he wanted to start reading the
Big Book
again, the AA guide. He didn't have one, so I went to a recovery bookstore and bought him a copy. I liked being able to help lead him. I had bought him the book along with a bookmark of the Serenity Prayer, the prayer for alcoholics that was brought to the attention of an AA cofounder, who liked it so much it became a key part of the AA movement. I placed the bookmark neatly inside the pages of the
Big Book
and opened up the front cover to write my dad a note:

I felt like I was carrying hope to my father as I walked down the hall to his room. If he decided to apply everything in that book to his own life, he would make it. I'll never forget the surprised look on his face when he saw that I was back so quickly to see him. I was so proud to be able to give him a book that had been so crucial in helping me to get sober and learn to say no to our family legacy. I carried a message to another suffering alcoholic who just happened to be my dad, and after he was released from the hospital, it seemed like he was really ready to start this new life. He joined a home meeting group in Cottonwood, and this time he got a sponsor. During phone calls, my father would list the things he was doing to get involved with sober people and places. He was attending counseling a couple of times a week to help him monitor his medication for depression. This was for the pain he had to face as a result of his divorce from Marie. He also shared his hardships with me. He was frustrated at that time that his counselor had not released him back to work. He loved his work and was devastated he would not make a quick return to it.

He felt lonely and understimulated is what he said. I could tell over time that my dad was sinking deeper and deeper into a depression. He desperately wanted some kind of joy in his life, but that was something he was going to have to build up on his own. When
I realized in my own recovery that I had no idea what produced happiness for me other than my addictions, it was pretty shocking to realize I knew so little about my joy. My father didn't learn about his joy. He continued to talk about the things that were removed from him, like Marie or his work. I was constantly trying to suggest help through his counseling and medication since he was approaching recovery that way. He said neither was working anymore, which then led him back to thoughts about suicide. He called the suicide hotline so often at this point that the prevention line staff began to call me to express their deep concern.

I was trapped by the whole situation with my dad because of the role I chose to play as the hope that I wanted him to take. He wouldn't do it for himself, and I thought I could change that. I just wanted him to hold on long enough because I thought his medication might start working and then give him enough relief from his anxiety and anger that he would begin thinking more clearly. It was just a couple of weeks later when he called to say he was coming to Phoenix for a visit. I was excited to try to keep encouraging him, given the low place he had reached. I had it all planned out. It would be a great opportunity to bring my dad to my meeting, introduce him to my support group, and just get a meeting under his belt because he had given his up. When we arrived at my meeting, I cried and shared and spilled my heart out. These were the people that had given me the strength to carry through when I didn't think I could. My father got a taste of what I had been so fortunate to hear and experience. Instead of shaking my father's hand, they just pulled him in and gave him a great big hug because they had
heard so much about his situation already. They told him everyone was happy he came.

As the meeting started I felt such a sense of peace. I was right where I was supposed to be, and so was my father, and both of us at that moment were outside the legacy of addiction that had controlled so much of our lives. It felt fair that my dad could also know the progress I had known. During the meeting I looked over at my father, though, and noticed that he couldn't stop shaking. He was showing signs of alcohol withdrawals. He had tremors in his hands, and he seemed jumpy and nervous. In the car ride there, I had noticed he looked very ill. He was pale and was thirty pounds lighter. My dad needed to hear so much of what everyone was saying at that meeting, and yet none of it erased the obvious fact that my dad had not chosen to make the beast of addiction powerless or made the choice to end our legacy of addiction. I had done that, and I couldn't do it for him no matter how much I wanted him to know the changes that came after such a success. Life for him on life's terms was still the life of an addict.

The day he left to go back home, we returned to reality. My dad told me that he was so lonely living in the house by himself, and that he didn't have anything to do because he was still not released back to work. He told me that his home was probably going to be foreclosed on, because he didn't have money to pay the mortgage. I asked him to please stay with my fiancé and me for a while. My dad and I had had a great night just before that. Ryan had come over and we had sat on the kitchen counter, keeping my dad company as he cooked us a spaghetti dinner. It was one of the
best times that I had had in a very long time. My dad, being the funny guy that he was, had us laughing all night. We didn't want to leave the table, we were laughing so hard that our stomachs hurt. I didn't want him to return to Cottonwood, where none of that was waiting for him. I tried at every step to make my father's life improve. Making his life on my terms didn't work. When I offered to let him stay, he told me that he wanted to get back home, because he was supposed to be starting work again soon. That wasn't true. He wanted to be free to stay addicted.

We compromised by buying him a few toiletries and a couple of cartons of smokes before he left. He asked me for a couple of dollars as well, so that he could buy a few TV dinners to eat once he got back home. I moved into the role of the parent, feeding money to the addict-child. I gave him a hundred dollars because I couldn't bear the thought of him going without. There was a sad mood among us all when my father said goodbye. As I hugged him he squeezed me tighter than he ever had before. It was as if he didn't want the hug to end, so I held on as long as I could. I waved goodbye to him, thinking that might be the last time I ever saw him again. His life could only go on repeating our legacy. He called to say that he had one of the best times in a long time with Ryan and me. I told him once again that I wanted him to stay with me for a while, but I didn't press the issue too much. I told him that I loved him, too, and that I had to let him go, so that I could get to work. I grabbed my cell phone during work the day after that and saw that I had missed four calls from my grandfather in Montana. I instantly knew something was wrong with my dad.

First I tried to call my grandfather, but there was no answer at his house. Before I could call anyone else, I got a call from my mother. She asked me where I was, and I said I was at work. She told me to stay there and that she was on her way, but I wanted to know right then what was going on and argued with her until she would say. My mom hesitantly confessed that my father was dead. I was running through the halls at the bank where I worked after that, and I was crying hysterically, and I remember people stared. I tried to unlock the security door at the back to get to the employee lounge, but I couldn't see through the tears in my eyes. I couldn't stop shaking enough to unlock the door with my keys. A coworker saw me panicking and ran over to let me in. After she let me in, I tried to walk to the lounge, but my legs gave out, and I collapsed to the floor, where I lay and cried and cried. My coworkers knew about the things I faced with my family. Nobody had to ask what happened when they saw me on the floor.

My fiancé arrived soon after. I threw my arms around him and cried even harder. He just held me and let me cry until I could stand on my own. A few minutes later my mother arrived, and we all cried together. I realized that my brother, Ryan, was the only one who hadn't heard. The entire drive to his home, all I could think about was my father. How did he die? I really wanted to know what happened. I dreaded knocking on Ryan's door when we approached it. I hated to tell him that our father had hit the bottom that all of us had hit but decided to let it drop out beneath him and freefall into death. Ryan already knew that with addiction, the choice at the end is always extreme: to
recover for good or let the addiction kill you. He saw our tears when he opened the door, and his expression turned to dread. We didn't waste any time telling him what had happened to Dad, and we cried a little more. We all just wanted to know more details, so I called my grandfather to find out how it happened. It wasn't shocking news, but it was painful. My father had shot himself in the head. I wished after hearing that that I could lose myself to the instinct I had to numb myself to everything, but I knew if I did I would end up like my father, and our shared legacy of addiction would be death.

I couldn't believe how overwhelmed I was with grief. It doesn't help to know that an addict is always making choices that may lead to death. I always knew that but still couldn't understand how my father could choose to take his own life. Knowing what can happen to an addict is not the same as understanding why it has to happen, I realized, especially because by then I had been able to change life's terms so that it didn't have to happen to me. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't understand why he killed himself. That dream little girls have about having their father walk them down the aisle had been taken from me just months before I was to be married. This was the time in my life when I really needed a father to share my happiness. I had to have some kind of truth to help sort out my head, so I went to a meeting.

As the meeting started, I didn't say a word about his suicide until it was my turn to speak, but when it was, I broke down and told my story. I was experiencing such stress and such grief that I
can't even remember what I said. I was consumed with hopeless-ness and anger. It had been left up to my brother and me where we wanted to bury my father. After the meeting, I was going to have to sort through the additional emotions of this process. Ryan and I decided that the only thing that felt right was to bury our dad in Montana, alongside my grandmother. She had died by this point, and in Montana my dad could also be buried close to Jason, the brother I never knew. He was the first in our immediate family to die as a result of our family addictions. Attending my father's funeral was the hardest thing that I have ever done. He was the second person to go. Maybe it would have been easier if he had died some other way, a car accident perhaps that wasn't his fault, or from a heart attack. Any ordinary thing would have been better for me than to face the anger I felt at his choice. He took his own life, and we were left to deal with the messy consequences. At the end his own addiction remained the most important thing in his life, and just like always I was a casualty along the way.

This was salt on a fresh wound and almost too much to bear. It felt as if my father had been brutally murdered, except I didn't have anyone to turn my anger toward. He was his own murderer, and his mess spilled over into many lives, from mine to my brother and mother's lives, to the life of my grandfather, and into my world of recovery, into my meetings, into talks with my sponsor, and into the community where I shared my grief.

During this whole time, everyone tiptoed around me. No one knew what to say, so sometimes people didn't say anything at
all. My sponsor opened up her home to me in the event I would need her. She helped me do the work I needed to deal with the anger at my dad's addiction, and at addiction as a disease. I had to work through the pain. She helped me learn what my bottom line was with my feelings and helped me to face them and to not run from them. That bottom line was the fact that I never thought that a parent could kill himself. A lot of things in life seemed like an option for even a terrible parent, but not that. My shock to discover that this was not the case was not going to be the thing worth giving up my sobriety for, however. I was determined to not let the tragedy ruin my life. My terms were made to recover. My father's terms for life were made to die.

Addiction is a disease capable of killing anyone. Somewhere in every family legacy, someone has to break the cycle. I am that someone, and so is my mom. Every one of us is that someone when we choose the hope that makes our beast powerless.

AT ONE POINT or another, your kid will be faced with an opportunity to use drugs and will probably be given that opportunity by a friend. At this defining moment, the decision that your child makes is one of the most important, because it may be the choice that changes his or her life forever. Teens often don't see the link between action and consequence, and yet more teens than not repeatedly report that they have experimented with drugs or alcohol. None of us can know who will or will not succumb to addiction, or when. It could be the first time your kid chooses to try drugs that a long-sleeping addiction wakes up and takes hold.