On Monday morning, January 30th, 1978, my twin brother was found dead in a motel room, not many miles from the home we grew up in in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. John had checked in the Friday before, paying for three nights lodging, and spent those last days of his life writing increasingly incoherent poetry, calling and hanging up with the suicide hotline, and overdosing on vodka and Valium. At 26, my brother was in the late stages of his addictions. Several years later I also lost a former boyfriend to heroin overdose.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb where buying me a cocktail dress when I turned 18 was normal to the community where cocktail parties and daily drinking was commonplace and expected. Being angry, hurting, rebellious and lost, I never wore that black cocktail dress and rejected martinis and cocktail parties. Instead I escaped into other drinks and drugs and denials and distractions from my broken heart.
On June 19th, 1984 my life as a clean and sober person began. I had no idea how terrifying and difficult it would be to surrender over time into allowing the bottom of the whole world as I had known it fall out from under me. But this was what was required - it was a world that needed to go. This new doorway and way of living that I could not imagine those many years ago beckoned me. And everything - EVERYTHING - changed.
As a permanency caseworker with Child Welfare, I am witness daily to the tragedy of parents losing their children, sometimes permanently, because they were lost in addictions - to substances, unsafe relationships, gambling, anger, violence, criminality, etc., etc. - and unable to safely care for their children...
No doubt, we all have stories we can tell of loss and tragedy as the result of addiction. Yet as I have progressed in my nearly 30 years of personal recovery, healing, and awakening, I have come to recognize that addiction is but a symptom of something much bigger. It is increasingly clear how we can lose ourselves to family, religious, and/or cultural rules which in some way ask us to not talk, not trust, not feel, not be.
I have never met an addict - to substances, sex, unhealthy relationships, caretaking, consumerism, fundamentalism, anger and violence, gambling and criminality, righteousness and scapegoating and projections, work or exercise or starving, etc., etc., etc. - who does not have a broken heart. How many of us have experienced in ourselves and/or others the subtle or blatant message to shut down, shut up, shut out?
How can we increasingly recognize and commit to walking paths of no harm, healing, awakening? How can we move into more loving inward and outward space of holding ourselves and other beings with love and compassion? This is always my deep prayer - that we may awaken. Because, as we do, everything changes.
Bless us all ~ Molly
****
FACT: 1 in 4 deaths is attributable to alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drug use.
In Memoriam—Donald H.
In a blink of an eye, you realize that drugs are really a part of your life. I thought that since I didn't do them, they could never hurt me. That is until last week when I received a call that someone I loved very much had overdosed. He was so smart, creative, funny and lovable. He was the person in my life who was always up to do whatever or go wherever. My heart will ache eternally. - Whittney S.
Source: Partnership for a Drug-Free America®, www.drugfree.org
Drug-related deaths have more than doubled since the early 1980s. There are more deaths, illness, and disabilities from substance abuse than from any other preventable health condition. Today, one in four deaths is attributable to alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use.
No comments:
Post a Comment