Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 20 - September 21, 2018
The thought that often strikes me nowadays is how little we know about what goes on in the lives of others. The face we show to the world is rarely the one we wear in private.
Track marks, unmistakable, crisscross her flesh. My sweet girl who would lay her arm across my lap and plead, “Tickle me,” is marked with the telltale signs of heroin use. I feel all the air rush out of my lungs, and in its absence, the truth hits me again like a sledgehammer. Why did I have to see this, so undeniable, to finally understand what had been going on? The changes I could have noticed but didn’t: her sweet personality shifting from loving to moody. Just a teenager, I said. Friends that changed, the new people she hung out with, her hair, which she had dyed, pulled back, and stopped
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I wonder if she is still in there, that girl. She must be. I must find her, uncover her, release her. I can’t reconcile my daughter with the person nodding off in front of me.
“You are only as happy as your most unhappy child.”
That night, I sob for the first time in a long time: for the loss of the child I knew, for all my hopes and dreams that may never happen, for my own life, which will never be the same. It’s all too much. I weep for her as well, and I know that, miles away, she is crying, too.
Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came,” because it is about the importance of speaking out: First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me. This is not okay, and I need to keep reminding people that stigma is what
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“Tell your children you love them, because ‘it might be the last thing you say to them.’”
I can hear the pain and desperation in his voice. He is nothing like I expected. I want to cry, not only for him but for all the misconceptions that I, and others, have about those who suffer with this disease. I picture his father at the back of the room in the Learn to Cope meetings and imagine Gabe as a child playing baseball, bringing home his spelling test, doing a cannonball into a pool.
Moving...
I could see she was covered with vomit as she ran into the kitchen to get a knife from the drawer, first threatening to stab herself, then waving it at me. I reached out and smacked her across the face, something I had never done in her twenty-four years on this earth. I cannot begin to express how much I needed to slap her. In fact, I have never wanted to slap anyone so much in my life. She crumbled to the floor crying that she wanted to die. “Why won’t you let me go?” she begged. “If you love me you’d let me die.” I thought about it in that moment: How selfish am I? This poor child is in
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“Listen to me, little girl: I couldn’t love you any more than I do, but I need to start loving myself just as much. I cannot do this anymore. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you or that I won’t help you when you are serious about getting help. It also doesn’t mean that I won’t section you and make sure you are put somewhere safe if I think I can. What it does mean is that from this moment, I am going to start to put as much energy as I’ve put into saving your life into saving mine. This is killing me and your father, and I don’t want to go down with you. Do understand that? This is literally
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Viktor Frankl meant when he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, my favorite book, “When we are no longer able to change a situation … we are challenged to change ourselves.”
After heroin, homelessness, and jail, death didn’t scare me. Life scared me, happiness terrified me, because that can be taken away. Misery became comfortable and predictable.”
I have learned that I am powerless, and always have been, to help my own daughter. The only person I am able truly to help is myself.
On a constant alert for her or anyone who needs my help, I had forgotten to live my own life. Her addiction was heroin and mine was motherly love, both of them killing each of us. It was a race to see who would go first.
For those born with a lurking, insidious disease, the only known cure is no first time. Beyond that, the treatment is love. So much love that it is beyond comprehension until you have been to the other side of it. And then, even then, all too often, it’s not enough. But there is no harm, no foul, in love. You do not have to enable, or fix, or even be subjected to the horrible effects of the disease, but you can still let your love be known. No matter what happens to my sweet daughter or any of the other beautiful souls I have had the pleasure to know, I will never regret giving them love. I
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Every day is a gift. Every day is a new beginning.
