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

by David Sheff

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

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself. 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.

Like addicts themselves, the families of addicts are everything you would expect and everything you wouldn’t.

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.

We divide the china and the art and our young son.

Inconceivably, in an instant marked by the scratching of a pen on coarse paper, I sign away half of my son’s childhood. As bad as it is for Vicki and me, it is worse for Nic.

“Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Kaholic, first name Al?” “Sure, kid.” To the crowd: “Is there an Al Kaholic here?”

Lmfao y wasn't i this clever as a child

“Is there a John there?” After a beat: “No? Then where do you go to the bathroom?”

Why tf did i laugh at that lmao

Though it may be the best we can do, I loathe joint custody. It presupposes that children can do just as well when they are divided between two homes, each defined by a different parent and different step-parents and sometimes step-siblings and a jumble of expectations, discipline, and values that often contradict one another.

My advice, pleading, and anger fall on deaf—stoned—ears.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

Part of me believes he’ll follow through and seek help, but a bigger part knows that he won’t.

Depression is a plausible explanation and easier to accept than a drug problem. It’s not that depression isn’t serious, but unlike drugs, it is not self-inflicted.

I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry, each emotion darkening and distorting the other. It is a bleak and hopeless feeling. I may know it well, but it is no easier to bear.

Finally I call the police and hospital emergency rooms, asking if he is in jail or if there has been an accident. Each time I call, I brace myself for the unthinkable. I rehearse the conversation—the stolid, disembodied voice, and the words “He is dead.” I rehearse it to prepare myself.

For now, however, all it takes is a visit to the Internet where, for thirty dollars plus shipping, I purchased a thick how-to book called Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture. The revised and expanded sixth edition of “the classic text on clandestine chemistry” has a disclaimer on the title page: “sold for informational purposes only.” This information includes step-by-step instructions on manufacturing a variety of forms and quantities of meth, plus advice about evading law enforcement.

Lmfao just casually givng information about evading the police

The Oregonian published an exposé by reporter Steve Suo that reveals that the government could have contained (and could still contain) the meth epidemic.

Noooo why would we save ppl from addiction when we could profit off of them!!

until the government takes on the pharmaceutical companies, the war on this drug will remain something of a joke.

The government maintains that overall drug use is down in the United States, but it depends where you look.

The room has Nic’s smell—not the sweet childhood smell he once had, but a cloying odor of incense and marijuana, cigarettes and aftershave, possibly a trace of ammonia or formaldehyde, the residual odor of burning meth. Smells like teen spirit.

Scott Peck said that the sickest and healthiest people are in therapy. Which are we?

He looks at me and says, “Everything.” Tears flow.

:’((((

“There’s evidence that people who become addicted, once they begin using, have a type of compulsion that cannot be easily stopped or controlled,” she says. “It’s almost like breathing. It’s not a matter of willpower. They cannot just stop on their own or they would. No one wants to be an addict. The drug takes a person over. The drug, not a person’s rational mind, is in control. We teach addicts how to deal with their illness through ongoing recovery work. It’s the only way. People who say they can control it don’t understand the nature of the disease, because the disease is in control.”

The people in the circle are different, yet we are all the same. We all have gaping wounds.

Nic admitted that he sometimes wished that he had any other illness, because no one would blame him.

Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has said: “I’ve studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more recently obesity. There’s a pattern in compulsion. I’ve never come across a single person that was addicted that wanted to be addicted.

Here’s a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully.

As much as a child’s birthday is important to a parent, as much as twenty-one meant to me, a year in recovery means more.

As the vet injects Moondog with something that puts him into a deep sleep, tears come from me, too. His breathing is labored. A second injection, and there are no more breaths.

Crying in the club :(

Sometimes it feels as if nothing short of a lobotomy could help.

Same here my dude

“You’re thinking about Nic,” he says. I nod. “I’m sorry. I was just reminded of him. I remember when he was your age we were here.” Jasper nods. “I think about him a lot, too.”

Seriously who's cutting onions in the break room right now :'(

Sometimes it startles me that life goes on, but it does, inexorably.

Jasper responds, “I don’t think he wants to do them, but he can’t help it. It’s like in cartoons when some character has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The devil whispers into Nicky’s ear and sometimes it gets too loud so he has to listen to him. The angel is there, too,” Jasper continues, “but he talks softer and Nic can’t hear him.”

:’(

“I was sober for eighteen months,” he says. “I got cocky. It’s this trick of addiction. You think, My life isn’t unmanageable, I’m doing fine. You lose your humbleness. You think you’re smart enough to handle it.”

The therapist says that parents of kids on drugs often get a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome made worse by the recurring nature of addiction. For soldiers back from battle, the sniper fire and bombs are in their heads. For parents of an addict, a new barrage can come at any moment. We try to guard against it. We pretend that everything is all right. But we live with a time bomb. It is debilitating to be dependent on another’s moods and decisions and actions.

I have come to learn that my worry about Nic doesn’t help him, and it harms Jasper, Daisy, Karen—and me.

Nic has discovered the bitterest irony of early sobriety. 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.

They rode for hours and talked about the program, AA, the twelve steps, and how difficult it is to open up to the world, but how much there is to gain when you do.

I hope that means more than this stupid note and these eight dollar bills.”

Why cant i stop fucking cryyyying omfg

Some of the times when Nic wasn’t all right it got so bad that I wanted to wipe out and delete and expunge every trace of him from my brain so that I would not have to worry about him anymore and I would not have to be disappointed by him and hurt by him and I would not have to blame myself and blame him and I would no longer have the relentless and haunting slide show of images of my lovely son, drugged, in the most sordid, horrible scenes imaginable. Once again: I wished in secret for a kind of lobotomy.

Somehow I want to get back to normal and yet I don’t. I don’t want things to go exactly back to normal. That is, I do not want to get back to the normal of worry about Nic.

All in all, the temptation to take another gulp of Felix Felicis was becoming stronger by the day, for surely this was a case for, as Hermione put it, “tweaking the circumstances”?

Ummmm is this a harry p spoiler????

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.

“A using addict cannot trust his own brain—it lies, says, ‘You can have one drink, a joint, a single line, just one.’

We are nearing the end of Harry Potter. Professor Dumbledore died. He is dead. More than one of the children we know cried for hours when they read this—Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s protector with whom these children grew up, is dead.

OK WTF I DIDNT GET THERE YET, THROWING THIS BOOK OUT

I don’t believe in evil any more than I believe in God. But at the same time I know this: only Satan himself could have designed a disease that has self-deception as a symptom, so that its victims deny they are afflicted, and will not seek treatment, and will vilify those on the outside who see what’s happening.

“Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

I wish for a catastrophe, but one that is contained. 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.

I wish for a near miss for Nic. I pray for a near miss.

“In my first group, a counselor asked me why I’m here. He asked, ‘What’s your problem?’ “I said, ‘I’m a drug addict and alcoholic.’ “He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s how you’ve been treating your problem. What is your problem? Why are you here?’ ”