Addicted Like Me Page 18

  I felt the worst that I had ever felt, like no one could understand this kind of pain. I felt like I had let everyone down and most of all myself. I rested for the next couple of days, trying to get a hold of John the whole time. When I was finally able to get him on the phone, he told me he never wanted to see me again. I wanted to know why, but that was a request for him to give me something in return again, and of course it didn’t work. I wasn’t welcome to call him, John told me. After that phone call we never talked again, which is when my feelings of anger, resentment, and sadness over John became evident, because I had no way out of that low place. I already looked the part of a junkie at the very bottom. It was only a matter of time before I was going to say screw it all and get loaded to numb the pain. I had lost so much weight because I couldn’t eat, and I had black circles under my eyes because I would stay up all night wondering why John refused to love me. Before I made the decision whether or not to stay sober, I decided I would call the director of the twelve-step program. I hoped I would be invited to a meeting.

  If I didn’t do something soon, I was going to turn my addiction to useless love back into my addiction to drugs and alcohol. I needed to be surrounded by people who were making choices that led to happy, joyous decisions that were free from the influence of destructive people like John. When I called the offices and asked for the director, I was put straight through, and it was a relief to hear that the director was not surprised to get my call. I asked if it was okay if I came to a meeting, instead of waiting to be asked. The director told me to make an appointment first, to talk about my return, but that meeting didn’t happen for a week. My heart was already at the meeting, so the week was the longest wait. When the director saw me at our appointment, it was obvious I had been through hell. I hadn’t used, though. I told the director so and explained all that had happened since I departed from the group and told him about losing my baby. He couldn’t believe I had stayed sober. “To be honest with you,” he confessed, “I am not sure that you actually did.” Staying sober was the one and only thing I had going for me. It was at that moment that I realized that it didn’t matter what the director’s opinion of me was, or what anybody’s opinion of me was. The fact was that I knew what I had been through, and that I had been responsible for my failures and also my success moving past that. Nobody could take my sobriety away from me, except me, and I hadn’t.

  The director eventually offered me the invitation to a meeting that I hoped he would. A celebration was actually on the schedule for people that had lived at the residential house, and my mom was planning to go, so I went to that as well. I didn’t know if I would go at first. If I showed up, it was possible that no one would want to talk to me for fear that I would make them look bad because I had been previously asked to leave. This wasn’t a what-if fear like I had sometimes felt in the past. This fear was caused by the challenge it would be to confront the self-image that I had created in the group. I went back and forth in my head about whether or not to go, but in the end I decided that I would. I was so nervous on the way to the celebration, and I put up all my walls before walking in just in case I felt unwelcome. “Come back,” said the founder of the program into my ear. He had turned his attention to me after I arrived, but before I could even hug him I broke down sobbing, and he threw his arms around me and held me tight.

  There was a different kind of strength in me after this day. I made a deal with myself that I would never bend or break my principals again for the benefit of being with a person. It felt easy to say that I wouldn’t, no matter how important the person was to my life. What I didn’t know at the time was how much this promise to myself would be challenged as future events continued to unfold.

  CHAPTER 13

  MY LIFE ON LIFE’S TERMS

  ONE OF THE MOST amazing gifts of sobriety is the ability to experience your own life in all its hardships and glories. The challenges are what make life so rich, because to overcome a hardship is a success that changes the way life feels. Being with another person cannot create that evolution inside. I definitely couldn’t say that when I was walking around loaded, with my head in a fog. When the man I am married to today asked me to be his wife, I remember thinking, How did I go from thinking that I wouldn’t live past eighteen to having years of sober self-confidence and being about to marry the man of my dreams? My dad was not able to find out that life becomes this rich. He had recently been released from prison when he and his new wife, Marie, came to see me in the hospital. He was sober since his incarceration yet he continued to depend on his addiction to others.

  He met Marie when he was in prison. She was his drug and alcohol counselor. Because of that conflict of interest, upon his release Marie chose to quit her job. They built a new house and got married. My dad continued to attend his twelve-step meetings while he was on probation. He had finally begun to make good choices for himself. Our sobriety dates were just within months of each other, and over the course of the next five years we worked toward our sobriety, self-discovery, accountability, and trust together. I began to visit him regularly and looked forward to our time together. He was actually quite charismatic and funny and I enjoyed spending time with him. We were finally a team. I finally felt like I was getting the chance to build the relationship with him that I’d always wished for—all because we were finally sober together. But then my dad stopped going to the meetings. One Easter holiday I called him, and as soon as he answered the phone I could tell something didn’t sound right in his voice. He didn’t sound like the happy-go-lucky sober father I was expecting to hear on the other end of the phone. He began to tell me that Marie had left him for another man. He was devastated, he said, sobbing. He told me he didn’t want to live anymore and that he had tried to kill himself. Those words were the last thing on earth that I had ever thought I would hear my father say. I fired questions at him, one after the other, about what he had done.

  This was his challenge, and yet it felt like I should save him. Why? I tried so hard to hold it together for him because he needed me, and because it was breaking my heart that he should be the loneliest person on the planet while I was with my fiancé and our families, celebrating Easter as a group. A sense of fairness is part of my character, and I don’t want anyone to suffer. That didn’t mean I knew how to apply what I had learned about letting addicts deal with the consequences their addiction creates. At that moment the only thing that I knew to do was to go to my father. The rest of the day was really hard. After I arrived at my father’s house, I felt an overwhelming sense of fear and sadness that I had almost lost him to suicide. As I learned more about the details, these two emotions only deepened. His house was empty because all Marie’s belongings and her half of the furniture were gone. There wasn’t much food. Together we made an Easter dinner for my dad to eat after making a trip to the grocery store.

  Over the next six months, my father tried to kill himself six more times. Because things fell apart with Marie, his recovery fell apart. His life revolved around getting Marie back and making calls to a suicide hotline. I spent countless hours on the phone with my father, trying to talk him out of further attempts on his life, and countless hours driving back and forth from Phoenix to Cottonwood to visit him in the hospitals where I discovered him after he ignored my advice. It seemed like every couple of weeks I would get a call from a hospital telling me that my dad had once again tried to die. I constantly lived in fear that the next phone call would be the one that informed me my dad was dead. To stay strong at that time, the only thing to do was attend as many meetings as I could. I was lucky to have a safety net of friends and fellow recovering addicts who were able to give me a sense of sanity, hope, and guidance. Everyone in my support group knew what I was going through, so it felt good to have a place to come to, where I could vent, cry, and heal. Because the tragedies in life arrive unexpectedly, it is crucial for recovered addicts to keep accountable to a community, sponsor, counselors, and friends. My father went the opposite direction
and isolated himself. His conditioned worsened, and I received a call from the hospital to inform me that he had been put on life support.

  My first thought was to pick up Ryan. Both of us were in stable places, and in the past we used to work as partners when hard times came. Then, we did drugs, but now we knew how to face hard times with different options. It was harder to handle what we saw with these options than I expected. The nurse made a point to prepare us before she allowed us to see our dad. She said we should be ready to see a lifeless body that was supposed to be our dad, with dozens of tubes coming out of him. Tears started rolling down my face when I saw it was true. Our father was in a coma. He had slit his wrists and slit his throat and received a stomach pump after arriving at the hospital to get rid of all the pills that he had downed. As I looked at all his injuries, I felt awful for believing he might have just been trying to get attention with his suicide attempts. He might have really been serious about ending it for good. I informed my grandfather about this concern, and he instantly left Montana to be with his son.

  While my father was in the hospital, I stayed at his house with my grandfather. We were the same, but my dad had changed by the time he came out of the coma. He was delirious and didn’t know where he was or what had happened. We had to help him learn to walk again and even learn to eat. Returning to his house after days of that, which were just so discouraging, was made even worse by the way my father had been living before his suicide attempt. In the living room there were half a dozen stains on the floor from the vomit he had thrown up convulsing from the overdose of pills. Then I found the makings of a noose hanging from the ceiling in his garage, which had paper covering all the windows. Later my father would tell me that he had first tried to hang himself before slitting his wrists and throat and then consuming a couple bottles of pills.

  Through all of this, I was heartbroken most because of his relapse. I was forced to think about the legacy of our family addiction. Why had I been able to stop repeating that story at the same time my dad was being drawn back in again and again? Obviously he was back to drinking because that was the way he knew how to cope with losing the women he was addicted to. The alcohol was his only support after they left. Without choosing to try again each time he stopped going to meetings, my dad never found a sponsor or a community of people that believed he could hope for himself. The hope is where the personal power is. I finalized my thoughts about the legacy of addiction when I opened up his fridge and saw nothing but beer. There was his support group. I knew the only option for me was to dump every bottle out. I didn’t even blink because that beer was calling my name the same way it must have talked to my dad. With all that stress, I was at one of my weakest points after getting sober. The chance of getting drunk could not be an option for me. Every single time my father had the option to hope he could make a different choice, he had said pass me a bottle instead.

  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: Dad,

  Never let this book get dusty. It will save your life! You are a miracle!

  Lauren.

  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 do
ne 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.