Two weeks into the job, we get a phone call. “I hate my boss,” he says, but his voice is not full of bitterness or contempt. It is shaky and sad. “He spends all day yelling at me, telling me I’m worthless. I hate this. I hate life. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what, Ben?” I am holding my breath.
“Recovery. I can’t do recovery anymore.”
I don’t know how to respond to those words, so I try to say something positive, something hopeful. “Sweetie, do you remember the time when you were feeling so discouraged about life, and I said ‘This too shall pass’? And you responded, ‘This too has meaning.’ I thought that was so wise and wonderful.”
“I’m tired of your philosophy, Mom,” he says and hangs up.
I stare at the receiver for a moment, remembering something else Ben said just a few months ago on a phone call from Gray Wolf. “What if I used just now and then? Would you still love me?”
I walk out to the garden and talk to Pat. There’s not much to say that we haven’t said before. I go back to my office and email Ernie. He is always honest with me, and I’m struggling with the whole concept of “letting go,” which feels too much to me like abandonment. I’m hoping, I write in the email, “to do the right thing.” I’m hoping Ernie can help me wrap my mind around the concept of letting go and figure out how to “do” it. I wonder if it’s truly possible for a parent to deeply, wholly “let go” of her own child.
Ernie’s response does not contain the gentle, reassuring words I am seeking.
“Letting go” does not mean abandoning: letting go means relinquishing control. But did we really have control? Usually not, which is why letting go is so important: it is the surrender of a fantasy, and we are better off living in reality . . . not pretending or striving to possess the chimerical. No?
Those who really “surrendered” and have “gotten it” are usually not that certain of themselves. You speak of your “fear and trembling.” It is Ben who must experience the “fear and trembling,” and there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to help bring that about. Except, of course, allow him to live with the consequences of his own actions, which, if I can believe you (and I do), is exactly what you and Pat are doing.
You write that Ben called you “in utter despair”—I doubt it. It is too easy to cry for help at the moment of helplessness, yet feel in control again the moment our fingers feel the rope tossed to us.
“Hoping to do the right thing.” The better phrase—and, more importantly, “thought”—is to make the effort to “do the next right thing.” ’Tis time for bite-sized, baby-steps, one centimeter at a time.
Be brave! According to some statistics, the best realistic estimate is that only 15 percent of alcoholics get into recovery. Tough odds, but if I can do it, surely so can Ben.
With a very real love,
Ernie
I don’t know why Ernie had to add that part about fifteen percent. He wants me to “be brave” and face the fact that Ben might never get sober? And then what? Panhandle? Sleep under bridges and park benches (that age-old image of the late-stage drunk)? Get hepatitis? Cirrhosis? Choke on his own vomit? Die of an overdose? Commit suicide?
It happens. I know it happens, right here, right in my own community, because I read the obituaries, and I hear the stories from family members and probation officers. A fifteen-year-old boy commits suicide just hours before he’s scheduled to go to treatment. An eighteen-year-old is shot dead by a gang member because she can’t pay for the drugs she’s been using. A woman in her thirties, a teacher and loving mother of two children, dies of a raging infection from repeated methamphetamine injections. A twenty-five-year-old dies of a heroin overdose in his parents’ basement minutes before Thanksgiving dinner, the needle still in his arm.
I know these mothers and fathers. I cry with them. I try to find the right words to say to them. I am silent with them. I know I might be one of them someday. And I know that no words anyone can say, no actions anyone can take, will ease their grief. I even help them write their children’s obituaries. One mother, whose nineteen-year-old son hung himself in her basement—he had been sober for almost a year but relapsed just weeks before his suicide—tearfully gave me this advice to offer parents: “Don’t give up. That’s what I’d want parents to know. Don’t give up. You can’t ever give up.”
How does “don’t give up” square with “let go”?
And what about Ernie’s advice to be brave? I’d like to know how I steel myself for the possibility that Ben may be one of the eighty-five percent who doesn’t recover from drug addiction. How do I prepare for the phone call that will come one night or early morning, from the police or the coroner or whoever calls when people die in car accidents or overdoses or from sleeping outside in the freezing cold? Sorry, Ernie. I know you are trying to help me, I know you love me, but those are not words or images that build up my courage. They make me want to crumple up into a little ball and give up with one last final sigh. Maybe that is what letting go is all about.
A week later, Ben is fired for mouthing off to his boss. He calls us from a pay phone on the highway and asks us to drive to the coast to pick him up. Over the phone line, I can hear the cars whizzing by, and I have to strain to hear him. He says he’s been drinking a lot, ten to twenty beers every night, making a fool of himself, getting into fights with his friend, arguing with his boss. “I told him to fuck off, and he told me to pack my bags.”
I call Pat at his office. He’s been working on his syllabuses for next year’s classes and spending his days in the Palouse fields to the north of us, searching in the wind-blown silt for pig fossils buried sometime around 750,000 years ago.
“Shit” is all he says.
We drive to the coast and back in one day, six hours each way. Why do we keep rescuing Ben? I don’t have an answer to that question except to say letting go is one tough road to follow. We know what we should do, what we’ve been told to do. If he’s been using, he’s not welcome at our house. If he shows up, we’ll call the cops. And if he insists on coming home and agrees to our no-drug-use-no-backtalk rules, he can find his own way back to Walla Walla.
We don’t do any of that. We pick him up and bring him home.
“I guess I really am an addict,” he says after we’ve been on the road for a few hours. “I thought I could go out and drink, just have one or two beers. But I can’t. Every time I drink, I get drunk.”
I think about a story my friend Jack, in his seventies and twenty-plus years sober, told me over coffee one day. “So,” he says in his Irish storyteller voice. “I’m at this AA meeting, and this huge lumberjack of a guy walks up to the front of the room to collect his one-year chip. He stands in front of the microphone—it’s a big meeting, a few hundred people—and everybody in the room can tell he is terrified. He clears his throat, tries to say a few words, stops, clears his throat again. The room is dead quiet when, finally, he says, ‘If you don’t drink, you don’t get drunk.’ And with those eight words, he walks back to his seat. I turn to the fellow next to me. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ I say, ‘he just read the entire Big Book to us.’”
Every time I drink, I get drunk.
So when are you going to stop? we want to shout at him, because we have no idea what happens next. We’re done. No more treatment, no more “after care” or continuing care or whatever the hell you want to call it. No more money. That’s our bottom line. This is our bottom.
I think about all the advice I’ve offered to parents of youth involved with the Juvenile Justice Center. I even started a weekly parent support group. I’m so full of suggestions for others and yet so unable or unwilling to heed my own advice. Worse, all those suggestions and recommendations seem to me now like mushy, meaningless, directionless nonsense. More than twenty years ago, in Living on the Edge, the book I coauthored with Ginny Lyford Asp, we wrote these words of advice for family members:
Overcoming the doubts and fears that come from living with the disease of addiction takes t
ime, understanding, and persistence. But they can be overcome; and they must be overcome if you are to escape the pain of the past and the fear of the future and begin to live in the here and now—the only place in time that makes any difference. Living in the here and now also means letting go of fear and anticipation about the future.
The word must blares out at me. Who was I—who am I?—to tell anyone what they “must” do? What a total imposter I was—a thirty-seven-year-old with three children under four years of age, masquerading as an expert, giving advice to other parents before I have even one little bit of experience raising a child with a drug problem. Once again, I think about God, if such a One exists, zapping me with a lightning bolt.
In Teens Under the Influence, Dr. Nick Pace and I wrote:
Rules are rules, and parents need to be clear and consistent. Clearly state the rules you expect your children to follow, establish the consequences that will be imposed if the rules are broken, and list the privileges your children will enjoy if they follow the rules.
Have I been “clear and consistent” with Ben? If so, why am I picking up my self-proclaimed drug-addicted son and bringing him back home, when I know—I know, I know, I KNOW—that I am breaking my own damn rules? Easy to write a book, huh? Easy to talk about boundaries, eh? Easy to use the word must, which is a twin sister to should, which is a really shitty word, yeah?
Ben creates a “Contract for Living at Home.” At the top of the list, he writes “All subject to compromise or change.”
Weeks 1–3
1.Stay at home unless leaving for an AA meeting, counseling, or work (if I get a job at that point)
2.No cell phone
3.No hanging out with any friends unless okayed with you first
4.Willingness (throughout the entire time) to do anything asked (cleaning, yard work, anything)
5.90 meetings in 90 days
6.Work to pay rent
7.With anything, you may ask me to leave home
Weeks 4–6 (or whenever)
1.Drug tests whenever
2.8:00 p.m. curfew
3.Finding my own counseling (or helping to)
4.No money unless I buy something with it (with your approval)
5.A certain amount of money placed monthly in bank
6.Regular attendance of AA and other therapy
7.Daily work therapy around the house
8.Breakage of contract means hitting the road
9.Getting a sponsor and doing Twelve Step work
Rules
1.Anything you ask will be done
2.No defiance, anger outbursts, or anything like that
3.No contract breakage
4.No friends over unless first approved by you
5.Pay rent
6.Curfew
7.Drug tests
8.Working a program
9.Fun trips with y’all
10.Ninety meetings/ninety days
11.Restrictions of phone, etc.
12.If contract is broken, I will move out
He doesn’t drink or use. For a day. He goes to an AA meeting. Two days. He goes to another meeting. Three days. Two meetings that day. On day four, he spends a few hours on my computer, working on an email to his aunts Billy and Debbie. “This is your nephew Ben Spencer writing,” he begins. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news, but the bad isn’t that bad once you’ve heard me out.” He tells them about the drinking and how it got worse and worse, how he let everyone down—his parents, sisters, relatives, friends, everyone.
So I sat down and started to think. I tried to picture what my ideal life would look like, and when I got the picture in my head, it sure as heck didn’t involve any of the things that were happening. I haven’t used anything (pot, alcohol, or cigarettes) for more than three days, and I’ve been going to meetings every day since I’ve been home.
When I look back at what just happened, I realize that it was supposed to happen that way. If I hadn’t screwed up that bad so quick, I would still be drinking and lying about it. And I’m so tired of being the one who screws up. I’m tired of being the one that makes an idiot of their self. I want to be proud of being Ben, and the only way that can ever happen is if I never use anything again. It’s kind of cool. I was thinking about how some people can use drugs and alcohol responsibly, and I just thought and kind of laughed to myself that that isn’t me, and it never will be.
Sober days stretch into sober weeks. He contacts a counselor and sets up weekly appointments. Every day, he attends the noon AA meeting at the Congregational Church. At first, he complains bitterly about “an old fart” who tells the same old story every day, day after day. “It never changes,” Ben says, tossing AA’s Big Book on the couch. “He’s driving me crazy.” But the next day and the next, Ben goes back to the same meeting, and after a while—two weeks? three?—the old man’s story begins to make sense. Because it is the same old story, and it is Ben’s story, too—the classic story of “the way I used to be, what happened, and the way I am now.” It’s a story of grief, shame, loss, and despair, altered through time and sobriety to a story of forgiveness, mercy, fellowship, and love.
“I’m getting used to his ramblings,” Ben says with a self-deprecating grin. “I kinda like that old fart.”
One evening after dinner, we hear a great horned owl hooting in the tree in our backyard. It’s a perfect place for an owl to perch—fields on all sides; birds flying here, there, and everywhere to nest for the night; rabbits hiding in the tall grass with their big ears twitching, sensing danger from above, wondering whether to make a run for it across the wide green lawn.
Ben and I decide to see how close we can get to the owl. We walk slowly to the tree, holding our breath. The owl stays put. We walk a little closer. The owl swivels its head to look at us but doesn’t move. Slowly we lie down under the tree, looking up at the owl, which stares down at us once or twice and then, unconcerned, gazes out at the fields watching for movement. We don’t say a word. The light is dropping down, the night is coming up, the owl is waiting and watching, the sky slowly inks out, the rising moon throws shadows over the lawn and the fields, and suddenly, without a sound, the owl sweeps away, wings stretched, off to dinner.
Walking back to the house, Ben puts his arm around my shoulders. “I never realized how sweet and simple life can be when you’re sober,” he says in a near whisper.
In midsummer, he gets a job working in the boiler room at Whitman College’s physical plant. Pat talked to his friend Dan Park, the plant supervisor, who knows about Ben’s struggles and agrees to help him. Dan pairs Ben with Gary D’Agostino, a crusty, straight-talking, hard-living boiler technician. During those long days in the boiler room, learning how to work with his hands, Ben talks to Dag about his drinking and drug use. Dag is a wise old mentor, having some experience with drugs himself.
“I love that man,” Ben says at dinner one night. “I want him to be the best man at my wedding.”
Toward the end of summer, Ben decides not to go back to the University of Washington. “I don’t want to go back to Seattle,” he says. “I want to be close to home, have dinner with you guys on the weekends, keep working at the physical plant with Dag. I think I’ll apply to Whitman—it would be cool to be able to stop in and shoot the bull with Dad now and then.”
In early August, just three weeks before Whitman’s fall semester starts, Ben submits his application. Although it’s months past the application deadline, a few incoming students have dropped out, and the director of admissions encourages Ben to apply. In the “personal supplement” section of the application, Ben writes about his new-found sobriety—three weeks now—and his desire to give back to the world and his community. His dream, he writes, is to create a recovery community at Whitman, start a weekly AA meeting on campus, and meet with administrators at the college to talk about starting a sober interest house at Whitman.
“I’d be notorious on campus for creating good times without drugs,” he writes, “teach
ing students that you can have more fun than you ever imagined without getting hammered.”
In his final paragraphs, he tells the story of the owl.
I wanted to write about a spiritual experience I had the other day. For the last couple of nights, my parents and I have been sitting around talking, eating dinner, or watching the television when suddenly our dogs start barking. Every night, we look out in the back yard to see this two-and-a-half-foot tall great horned owl sitting in a tree in our back yard. We always go out to watch the owl for ten to fifteen minutes before it gets tired of its perch and flies to another location.
The other night when I was coming back inside, I went up to my mom before we reached the door and told her how happy I am to be sober, because when I was using alcohol and drugs, I wouldn’t have appreciated something like an owl in our back yard. I’ve thought a lot since about those words.
Maybe what affected me most deeply is not so much an appreciation of the owl, or the beauty of the way the mountains and wheat fields look in the background at that magical time of night, but more an awareness of being awake for the first time in my life. And I can’t imagine that awakening continuing, helping me to achieve the goals I have set for myself, in any other environment than the one-on-one, friendly, intellectually stimulating environment that Whitman College has to offer.
That same week I get an email from Steve from our family group at Wilderness Treatment Center. His son relapsed. “We are back at Step One,” Steve writes. “I’m sorry for the bad news, but I need some words of encouragement.”
From Linda in Texas, Susan and Tim in West Virginia, and Kathy and Pat in Walla Walla, loving words arrive in emails long and short. “Hang in there,” we say. “We’ve been there, too.” “He’ll make it.” “Our hearts ache for you.” “He has the tools.” “Relapse happens, and it is not failure.” “He’ll find his way.” “Remember—take care of yourself. Take care of YOU.”
The Only Life I Could Save Page 20