The hustle and bustle of the new school year had a special significance that fall, if you could even consider it autumn given the relentless heat and humidity in Florida during September. Tommy was reentering high school for his senior year, a fresh chance to leave his chemical demons behind and move on with his life.
Jessie and I arrived at her middle school for orientation. The past nine months had been particularly difficult, not just because of Tommy’s continuing struggles but also due to a sudden illness in our family.
On the day of the previous Christmas Eve, Mary and I were summoned to her doctor’s office for a consultation. The doctor delivered the bad news. The lump in her breast was indeed cancer, and she would require surgery as soon as possible. Merry Christmas!
We decided to wait until the afternoon of Christmas Day to sit down with our three sons to share what was happening. We told our young daughter later and in a different way.
Whether or not Mary’s diagnosis impacted or triggered our most sensitive son’s rapid descent into full-fledged opiate addiction is something we’ll never know. It certainly cannot have helped. During this period he was already smoking a lot of marijuana, and we suspected he was using other drugs. We continued to uncover hidden pipes made of pens and empty sockets, as well as bongs made from plastic water bottles. We had shifted from being parents into being detectives. We became obsessed with stopping his behavior and ensuring he was keeping his word when he denied using. Urine drug tests from Walgreen’s, seemingly a profitable product given the high price of the kits and pervasiveness of the problem, became a staple in our home. In ill-fated attempts at deterrence, we would require a surprise test on any of our sons at a moment’s notice, particularly Tommy.
“Where have you been, son?” I asked him one night when his huge black pupils seemed to be blotting out way too much of his corneas.
“At Austin’s house playing video games,” he lied.
“Time for a drug test; you know the drill.”
“Really, Dad? This is stupid, but it’s your money.”
He complied, but not really. Much later we learned that Tommy was beating the tests by keeping a medicine dropper full of bleach, easily obtainable from our laundry room, in his bathroom at all times. Even when I walked into the room behind him to observe him peeing into the sample cup, he deftly would slide the dropper up into the long sleeve of the shirts he always wore and then squeeze its contents into the cup along with his urine stream. Opting to stand behind him rather than stare at his genitals while he filled the pee cup, I never noticed this clever trick and would have never known about it had Tommy not confessed it during one of his recovery attempts.
Meanwhile, we continued to ratchet down the screws on his social life each time we caught him doing something wrong, which was frequently. A particularly low point occurred when I received a call from a close friend on the morning after our family had attended a small social gathering at his home. Their son, a few years younger than Tommy, woke up to find most of the money in his piggy bank missing, and he suspected Tommy. I told my friend that I’d check and call him back, then marched down to Tommy’s room with dread. I woke him up and confronted him.
“Did you steal money out of Bruce’s room last night?”
“No, why?”
“Don’t lie to me, did you take money or not?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is it?”
“Here,” he said, sliding open a drawer to reveal the exact amount missing.
“What is wrong with you? What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. I needed money and didn’t think he’d miss it.”
“You mean you thought you could get away with it, right?”
“I guess.”
“How many times have we talked about the importance of always being honest, never stealing, and respecting other people’s stuff?” I asked. “If there is anything I can’t stand, it’s lying, cheating, and stealing. Lately you’ve been doing all three. What is going on with you? What is it you need so badly that you would steal for?”
“Sorry, I made a mistake.”
“Get your butt out of bed and get dressed. We’re heading over to Bruce’s house so you can return the money and apologize.”
Bruce and his parents accepted the apology and money with great grace, going out of their way to diffuse the awkwardness of the situation.
“He’s a good kid who just made a mistake,” Bruce’s father said. “Hopefully, he’ll learn from this.” Sadly, he didn’t.
The embarrassing visit was the first of many times Tommy’s problem would strain friendships, regardless of the kindness and understanding usually shown at first. I didn’t blame anyone for not trusting him and not wanting a teenager who would rob a younger kid’s piggy bank in their home. Over time this added to Tommy’s isolation, as we became hesitant to even put him in such situations. Much later we’d adopt more of a bunker mentality, becoming defensive or resentful toward friends who seemed to look at Tommy the wrong way or make a careless comment. Unless you’ve walked in our shoes, we’d think, who are you to judge? Today we recognize that everyone has personal challenges in their lives, whether they choose to share them or not, and have developed thicker skin, especially when it comes to our children.
Although the telltale signs of drug abuse were there, particularly stealing and lying, we figured we were dealing with the usual teenage rebellion and not a descent into hard drug addiction. We took away his teenage lifelines, the cell phone and the car, and essentially had him at a point just short of house arrest.
Recognizing that his self-esteem was likely the core of the problem—he was acting out to escape from internal pain—we connected him with a renowned local therapist. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over the next two years, it seemed to be working for the first couple of weeks.
In uncommon wisdom for a young man who had suffered and overcome many tough issues himself—substance abuse, thankfully, not among them—our eldest son, Paul, offered this perspective during one of our countless moments of despair: “You have to decide what the most important boundaries are, make him sign a contract on those, then let him start fresh,” Paul advised. “He’s been grounded for so long now that he can’t see any way out. He just wants to live like a normal kid, going out with friends. He’s ready to give up.”
Given the hindsight of the hell yet to come, we probably should have listened. None of us can turn back the clocks to know what might have changed, if anything, and dwelling on past regrets is as unproductive as obsessing about the future. But within days of Paul’s warning, Tommy had again vanished.
Walking hand-in-hand with Jessie into her new school in September, I somehow felt fresh hope. Following two successful surgeries in early January and a few months of exhausting radiation treatments, Mary was back to her usual whirlwind self as three of our four children adjusted to the end of sleeping in during the summer and resuming the routine of early morning classes.
For ten-year-old Jessie, the end of summer included a sparkling new school to explore. This, the first of her middle school years, would be spent in a modern building next to and towering over the old dark-brick neighborhood elementary school where she’d spent the previous six seasons of learning.
Jessie had mixed feelings about the change.
“I don’t like it, Daddy,” she said with a sigh. “I miss my old school.”
Change can be a difficult thing, particularly for a girl who had witnessed far more than her share of strife during her brief ten years on the planet. As we wandered the halls exchanging greetings with friends and teachers, her apprehension disappeared, and within minutes she was dutifully labeling her school supplies, signing her name to every item. As we completed our rounds, her nostalgia returned.
“Can we visit my old teacher?” Jessie asked. “Pleeaase!”
As we walked hand-in-hand down the sidewalk from new to old school, my daughter’s mood brightened noticeably. The warm hug she gave last year’s teacher spoke to her yearning for stability, familiarity, and the known versus unknown.
A few miles away our youngest son, Barry, also embarked on a new beginning, but one mostly lost in the chaos of our current family life. As a tenth-grader he stepped into classes on the big high school campus for the first time, walking the halls Tommy had walked before and would very briefly walk again. Shouldering a stigma created by his older brother, tempered by his success as an athlete, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and persevered, just as he always seemed to.
For Tommy, the conversations about fresh chances and new beginnings had apparently fallen on deaf ears. His mind clouded by the substance he had snorted that morning, he wandered the halls reconnecting with old friends and aimlessly drifted from class to class without taking a single note in his planner.
By now, making money at his restaurant job and trying to find a way to get his own apartment were the primary things on his mind. His sights were set on getting out as quickly as possible. With the drug-retarded judgment of a twelve-year-old, the high school senior was certain that he could make a go of it on his own, free from the restrictions of a temperamental father and controlling mother.
“I’m saving up for an apartment,” he said several times. “It’s time for me to go out on my own. You don’t want me here, and I don’t want to be here.”
“Son, do you have any idea how much it costs to rent an apartment? You’re still in high school; this is silly.”
“It’s my life, you can’t tell me what to do.”
“Until you’re eighteen, you are our responsibility, and we have the legal right to insist you live by our rules.”
“That’s why I need to get out of here,” he said, deploying the familiar circular and manipulative logic we grew to understand was closely tied to his level of drug use. “You won’t let me do what I want here, so I need to move on.”
“Where do you think you’ll get the money for two months’ rent up front, working at the restaurant?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Sure you will.”
The illusion of Tommy successfully completing high school while living at home was short-lived. We could never have imagined then how many times the scenario about to take place would repeat itself. Our son’s return to opiate use engulfed our entire family and created a lingering fog of tension that surrounded every waking moment. As usual, my wife and I continued to disagree over what to do.
At meetings of Nar-Anon, a support group for the families of addicts, we had heard about the madness and manipulation that addicts desperate for a fix resort to. Yet neither Mary nor I fully recognized how much it consumed both of us and negatively impacted our other children until much later. Between Tommy’s behavior and our desperate attempts to change it, our son’s addiction sucked up nearly 100 percent of the entire family’s energy.
One of our toughest challenges was trying to fall asleep at night worrying that the call would finally come that our beautiful, loving second son was dead or in jail. In time we would actually pray for the latter option, since it seemed the only one that involved him being alive and not able to use drugs. Sadly, not even jail stopped the drug use, as we later learned.
Every time the phone rang our hearts sank, certain that it was the police or a friend with bad news to report. Tommy was like a ghost that summer, appearing occasionally but vanishing again just as quickly. When his whereabouts were unknown, the familiar bickering between Mary and me would return.
“How can you sleep knowing he’s out there?” she demanded.
“I’m over this, we have to let him go,” I replied.
“What do you mean let him go, just let him die?”
“There’s nothing we can do, and we cannot go on like this. The stress is unbearable! I’m convinced it had a lot to do with your cancer.”
“He’s my baby, and I don’t care what you do, but I’m not giving up.”
“I didn’t say give up, I said we have to focus on our other children right now. Everyone is suffering.”
“They’re fine, it’s you that needs to change. You’re eating and drinking way too much.”
“Oh, so now it’s about me, what a surprise. You just love to blame others but never look in the mirror on how much stress you create by trying to control every little thing any of us do.”
“So it’s my fault Tommy’s messed up; I’m the one that drove him away!”
“That’s not what I’m saying—”
“That’s fine,” she interrupted, “go pour yourself another drink.”
There were times we wondered if our then twenty-five-year marriage would survive the utter desperation we endured on a daily basis. We would also sometimes find ourselves swapping roles, similar to a good cop, bad cop scenario.
Mary would go through a period of smothering Tommy with love while at the same time trying to control or track his every movement. I had reached a point of resenting his presence. It took me months to overcome this anger and resentment and shift toward forgiveness. Years earlier I’d shown up on my father’s doorstep to forgive him for all he had put me, my mother, and my siblings through, and I was overcome with the peace and happiness that God granted me through this simple act. But it took considerable prayer and the encouragement of new friends in a small weekly men’s group to thaw the hardness that had engulfed my heart. Forgiveness and acceptance, the pillars of faith in Christ, were instrumental in our family’s sanity and survival through the madness of Tommy’s addiction. But it took years to truly get there.
Rarely were Mary and I on the same page at the same time. Every time she was ready to offer another chance, I’d be ready to shut the door, and vice versa. We would continue this pattern for years, through countless battles and dangerous rescue attempts to save our son, before we finally were able to become unified in our resolve to never give up. Although we remain somewhat divided regarding how we choose to practice our faith, we are stronger and more united than ever as parents and life partners.
One of the most difficult lessons a family of an opiate addict on the hamster wheel of destruction must learn is that the person they love has absolutely no regard for the impact their behavior has on those around them. They may appear pretty much the same, and even now and then show glimpses of the person they once were, but only one thing dominates their every thought—the next high.
Having come of age in the ’70s, neither Mary nor I were strangers to smoking pot or dabbling with other substances. The idea that the wacky weed was a gateway drug had always seemed silly and simplistic to me, and I’d long believed that alcohol was far more damaging to the human body. Apparently my late father, Dick, reluctantly agreed with this view.
“How could you do this to Mom and Dad,” I had self-righteously demanded of my older sister when she was caught with a bag of pot at sixteen, something she has since reminded and teased me about. Over my mother’s ranting and crying, I can still clearly recall my father’s take. “The biggest problem I have is that it’s illegal,” he said.
Much later in life, having won his battle with alcoholism without ever attending a single meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, my father told me the story of his late-life encounter with marijuana when he joined a younger couple at their home for Thanksgiving. The saddest days for a man like him who had sobered up too late and already lost his family must have been spending holidays alone. This particular Thanksgiving, my father said his friends kept disappearing into the bathroom together for short periods. Perplexed, he decided he’d had enough.
“Hey, why do you two keep going in there,” Dick demanded. “Are you trying to hide something from me? Just be honest, you don’t have to hide anything from me.”
Knowing that the gig was up, Sally said, “I’m sorry, Dick, we just didn’t want to offend you. We’re just smoking a little pot.”
“Well, hell!” Dick replied. “I might as well try some.”
So at sixty-five years old, he got high for the one and only time in his life. He didn’t care for the experience.
“I didn’t like it,” he told me years later. “When I have a cigarette, it’s my cigarette. I don’t like the idea of someone else’s lips being on it. Plus, it made me go right to sleep.”
On the rare occasions that one or more of his three children were able to visit my father around a holiday, it was typically for an hour or two at most. For one thing, none of us cared to be in a house where cigarette smoke constantly filled the air and over time managed to turn everything, from furniture fabrics to curtains, a putrid shade of yellow.
My wife and I now chuckle about the first time we took our eldest son to meet him when Paul was just two. With Paul toddling toward him, my father put his lit cigarette in between his lips, and then stretched out his arms to pull him up to his lap.
“Dad,” I exclaimed, “put the cigarette down first!”
These brief visits, alone or with members of my own family, were the most conflictive experiences of my life. On the one hand, I felt sorry for the old man and down deep still loved him. On the other, I detested this imposing monster who had berated his family, womanized openly, and treated my mother so poorly. Guilt would drive me to his doorstep, and then anger would make me want to leave again, almost from the second I stepped inside.
Childhood experiences with my father also had given me nasty glimpses of addiction; the hell we were now mired in because of Tommy made its destructive power crystal clear. Whether it is an addict’s drug of choice or whatever they can put their hands on, their desire to get high trumps everything else. To satisfy this overpowering need, the addict will manipulate and take advantage of anyone they encounter, regardless of whether that person is a close friend, family member, or stranger. They will lie and steal and even prostitute themselves as a means to that one and only consuming end—to snort, smoke, or shoot up.
Tommy’s worsening condition was particularly tough for our cheerful ten-year-old to grasp, especially because the person using was her favorite brother with whom she always shared a special bond. He was the one of her three siblings who had always treated her with the most kindness. Among the many painful things we endured during that first summer of denial was the devastating impact on our young daughter.
“What’s wrong with him, Daddy?” Jessie would ask. “Is he going to get better? Does he not like me anymore? Did I do something wrong? Is he going to die?”
These questions only scratch the surface of the confusion our daughter experienced that awful summer, just a few months after dealing with the fear of losing her mother to cancer. Having watched her mom complete radiation therapy, this bubbly and beautiful little princess began to change. Her wonderful, positive view of the world was ripped from her, and she learned far too early that life is fragile and that even the people you love the most might be taken away suddenly.
The manifestations of these changes in perspective were small. And sadly in the chaos that was siphoning every ounce of our energy and focus, at first we missed the signs. Candy wrappers tucked behind the couch. Sassy comments made toward her mom. Awkward comments of concern expressed from friends over her insatiable appetite. Before long, occasional temper outbursts were added to the mix. Indeed, the addiction our son struggled with hurt every one of us as we fought to cope with the dark forces that had swallowed our family.
All this led to an escalating conflict between the mother who gave birth to the stranger now residing in our home and myself. Neither of us was ever going to give up on our son; however, we each coped with the madness differently. The only thing we did agree on was that we were rapidly reaching the point where the needs of our other children, not to mention ourselves, could no longer take a backseat to the problem sucking all the air out of our home.