Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

by David Sheff

I contend with two simultaneous, opposing monologues,

I would be furious and relieved, both, because I had already buried him.

“I want to remember him the way he was, that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather’s dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister’s grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school.”

misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company.

it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever.

At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

This rehashing in order to make sense of something that cannot be made sense of is common in the families of addicts, but it’s not all we do. We deny the severity of our loved one’s problem, not because we are naive, but because we can’t know.

our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself. I chose the perilous but essential path that allows me to accept that Nic will decide for himself how—and whether—he will live his life.

“Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.”

custody arrangement: “I am always missing someone.”

Drugs shield children from dealing with reality and mastering developmental tasks crucial to their future. The skills they lacked that left them vulnerable to drug abuse in the first place are the very ones that are stunted by drugs.

But addicts bring up these problems not to clear the air or with the hope of healing old wounds. They bring them up solely to induce guilt, a tool with which they manipulate others in pursuit of their continued addiction.”

“It was so sick, I started laughing,” she says. “I laughed and cried at the same time. That’s when it struck me that I can’t take my life as long as I can still laugh.”

It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people.

Frisbee for the golden snitch. I am present, but I am absent. Parents can only be as happy as their unhappiest child, according to an old saw. I’m afraid it’s true.

Your reward for your hard work in recovery is that you come headlong into the pain that you were trying to get away from with drugs.

Once again: I wished in secret for a kind of lobotomy.

have glimpses of the grandeur and the miracle, even as I feel the inexorable slide of time. The children growing up, with both the sadness and excitement of it. Mostly the inevitability of it. I feel it all.

The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle. The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.

But you know, I don’t think I will be so scared to die. I think it’s like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home.”

It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.

John Lennon said: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”

I love him and always will. But I cannot deal with someone who lies to me.

Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid—terrified—to lose Nic, but I have lost him.

“Insanity is the insistence on meaning,” wrote Frank Bidart in a poem. Yes, but this human brain of mine requires meaning—at least an approximation of meaning.

But Nic’s illness is bigger than his best intentions—his desire to do right by himself and others.

So much about this disease is grieving. Grief is interrupted by hope, hope by grief. Then our grieving is interrupted by a new crisis.

It must be harsh enough to bring him to his knees, to humble him, but mild enough so that he can, with heroic effort and the good that I know is inside him, recover, because anything short of that will not be enough for him to save himself.

Please God heal every ravaged person in this room, the dear ravaged people on this planet, these dear, wounded people. I look around at them. They are brave. They are here. However they got here, they are here. They are here and so there is a chance.

Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.

There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.