Tommy and I paddled our kayaks into the saltwater cove where the manatees were known to gather. There were at least eight of the sea cows splashing in the shallows, breaching partly out of the water. They seemed to be engaged in a game, rolling across and around each other. As we paddled closer, they swam toward us in curiosity, perhaps hoping we’d have something to feed them. They were much larger than we’d realized, and they bumped our kayaks as they swam right under us, rolling onto their backs to look up at us through docile eyes. A couple of them pushed their large snouts out of the water just inches from the kayaks, snorting water out as they got a closer look at the strangers now in their midst.
It was just a few weeks after the Six Pack encounter, and he looked relaxed and happy during my visit. Tommy had wanted to go fishing, but lacking time, boat, and tackle, we settled on renting kayaks instead. It was an idyllic morning with blue skies and big, white fluffy clouds. Best of all, we had the lagoon to ourselves with the exception of the marine mammals, sea birds, and fish who lived here.
I stopped to pull my phone from the plastic bag protecting it, wanting to capture the moment with a picture of my son. Living near the beach with his grandmother seemed to have rejuvenated him, and he looked healthy. Just as I positioned my iPhone to snap the picture, a bottlenose dolphin surfaced just a few feet from Tommy’s kayak, and I was able to capture both in the frame. The boy who had always loved dolphins seemed full of joy, at least today.
He worked at local restaurants by night and surfed by day. I helped him attach a special surfboard rack to the side of his scooter, and he became quite a sight riding down the streets and beach, his curly hair flying out from under his backward hat, his tattoos glistening from the salt and sweat. His tan deepened.
“Hobo brown,” he said one day with a smirk.
The slower and laid-back pace of the ocean town suited his personality, and he seemed to be in a good place. The stress of his jobs and grandmother would overwhelm him at times, but he mostly spent his days communing with the ocean, playing music with friends, or cooking in restaurants. There was the occasional girl in his life, of course, but even his attitude toward relationships had changed.
“I’m not interested in a relationship at this point,” he told me. “I’ve had enough of that. I want to figure out where I’m going first.”
He told his brothers that he never planned to get married or have kids and that he saw himself playing the future role of crazy and fun Uncle Tommy to their kids. Most of all, he loved the peaceful beauty of the beach and ocean, discovering the spiritual connection he had sought but never found. Paddling and surfing for hours, meditating as the sun rose over the water, and quietly observing birds and marine life, he had finally found peace.
For nearly a year, things seemed to finally be clicking for Tommy. He had new friends, was making money, and best of all, was surfing and meditating on a daily basis. It seemed that finally he might find his path forward.
All this changed with a call he received on a fateful Friday afternoon. Sarah, the girlfriend he had once loved so deeply and shared so much with, had died from an opioid overdose.
The news devastated Tommy. He left work early and proceeded to flood his Facebook page with picture after picture of the two of them. When our eldest son, Paul, called Mary to alert her, we immediately knew that he’d become depressed, and we hoped that his circle of friends would provide the support he needed. Mary’s brief conversation with Tommy did nothing to ease our worries.
“He’s really down,” she said. “This is crushing to him.”
“I know, but he has a great group of friends and has to learn how to get through the ups and downs of life,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do unless he wants us to go there or he wants to come here.”
“No, he says he’s fine and doesn’t want us to come,” she said. “He’s with his friends, and they are comforting him.”
“I’ll go see him tomorrow,” I promised her, then called him myself.
“I’m so sorry, son, I know how hard this has to be.”
“She’s gone, Dad, it’s my fault.”
“No, son, it’s not your fault; you haven’t even seen her in months.”
“You don’t understand. She has been trying to contact me for weeks, and I blocked her calls and messages,” he said between sobs.
“You had to cut off contact to stay clean and rebuild your life.”
“I know, but it’s not fair. She was the love of my life.”
“Can I come over now or tomorrow?” I asked.
“No, I’m okay. My friends are here, and I’ve got to work tomorrow.”
“What about Sunday?”
“That works.”
“I’ll come over that morning and call you on the way.”
“Okay.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay, just really sad.”
“I understand. Stay strong, son, you’ve worked too hard to give up. This is one of those horrible things that life throws at you, and I know you are in a different place now and can overcome it. I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
I later learned that Tommy spent a long, tearful evening with friends and on Saturday called in sick and pawned his first item to get enough money to buy drugs. When I arrived on Sunday to walk with him through a natural area of the beach, he seemed fine and appeared to be rebounding from the devastating news.
He blamed himself for first introducing Sarah to Oxys years earlier, for abandoning her in his efforts to preserve his own life, and then for turning his back on her toward the end. They had been completely codependent, unable to separate from each other even when both knew they should. It was all too much for him, and he convinced himself and us that the stress of living under his grandmother’s roof was only adding to his problems.
Desperately wrapped up in his struggle again after nearly one year clean, we reluctantly agreed to help him move out and rent a room from a friend. We had no idea he had resumed using. We also didn’t realize that the friend he was moving in with also was likely using, was married with a young child, and had his mother living there as well. On the day we helped him load his bed, dresser, and clothes into my friend’s borrowed trailer, we nearly gasped when we laid eyes on the decrepit house he was about to move into. Only slightly better than a clapboard shack, the house was one of several old and poorly maintained homes along the rails, presumably built originally to house railroad workers. As we navigated the trailer to the best spot to unload the furniture, a shirtless old man sat on a dilapidated porch across the narrow street, eyeing us suspiciously while chain-smoking cigarettes. A cute young boy with curly red hair and wearing just pajama bottoms came running out of the house into which Tommy was moving to greet us.
“Hi, Tommy, who are they?” he asked.
During introductions I couldn’t help but notice horrific burn scars across the boy’s chest. We later learned that he was being homeschooled by his mother, did not attend the public elementary school just two blocks away, and was recovering from lice.
Inside the house was a disaster, full of cats, kittens, and a couple of dogs. The place was filthy and completely cluttered, which Tommy blamed on the fact that his friend and family had just moved in and hadn’t yet had enough time to unpack. Mary and I sensed immediately that drug use had to be a big part of the puzzle, having by now observed similar unmitigated messes in other places we’d visited or retrieved Tommy.
We wished him luck and drove home, certain that this would be a very short-term arrangement. It was. Tommy, who had begun using again on the day after Sarah’s death, soon got into a fight with his friend’s mother over a late rent payment and was asked to leave. While attempting to network at a business conference in Scottsdale, my phone rang over and over. It was Tommy.
“Dad, can you rent me a U-Haul? They threw all my stuff out on the porch in garbage bags, and I have to get everything out of there before it rains.”
“Tommy, I’m out of town and am not going to be able to do this for a couple hours, will that work? What about Grandma?”
“She won’t help me.”
“Give me a little time, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Within hours, a U-Haul truck was secured via my credit card, and Tommy and a friend got his stuff out of the rotting house. Since his grandmother refused to let him store his furniture in her garage, he spent the next twenty-four hours aimlessly driving around trying to figure out what to do, racking up one hundred miles on the rented truck. The next day he took the furniture to a friend’s shed and returned to his grandma’s house to resume residence on her sofa bed. His brief shot at independence over, Tommy fell further into depression.
Within days I received a frantic call from Dona.
“I’m really worried about Tommy, he’s not himself and I’m afraid. He’s irritable and slept twenty straight hours on my couch.”
“Who are you talking to?” I heard Tommy ask in the background.
“I’m talking to your father,” she shouted. “Now he’s asking me to loan him ten dollars because his car is out of gas.”
“That’s not true; stop exaggerating, Grandma,” I heard him yell in anger.
“Look, I can’t deal with this. Can you talk to him?”
“Put him on the phone,” I said.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Tommy said, crying, his voice barely audible.
“You relapsed, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you try to overdose?”
“Yes.”
“Tommy, do you realize that dying is the worst thing you could ever do to your family?” I asked, fighting back tears. “We love you so much, and you’ve been doing so well.”
“I just couldn’t see any other way out,” he said, still crying. “I dug the hole so deep this time that I just didn’t know how to get out.”
From the time Sarah died three weeks earlier, Tommy had lost it all. He’d returned to drugs, lost his job, lost his place to live, sold his most prized belongings—his guitar and surfboard—and was ready to die.
“I’ve got to think at this point that it’s not only the drugs but that there are other issues making you feel so depressed that might be treatable,” I said, grasping for anything that might convince him to stay at his grandmother’s house and not walk out the door as he was threatening to do. “Do you think that there might be more to this than just the drugs?”
“I don’t know, Dad, I think maybe.”
“Will you wait for me? I can be there in an hour.”
“I don’t know; you guys have done so much for me. I don’t deserve to live. I’m a failure. You would be much better off without me.”
“Tommy, that’s not true! We love you and will never give up on you. Please, don’t give up on yourself. We can get through this. Okay?”
“I don’t know, just let me go!”
“Tommy!” I said in as stern a voice as possible without losing a compassionate tone. “I’ll be there in an hour, and we can talk about this in person. Okay?”
After a slight pause he answered. “Okay.”
“Hang tight, try to eat something. I’ll be there as fast as possible. We love you!”
A little over an hour later, Tommy and I were in my truck and heading back to Orlando to a new treatment center that Mary had found. This one combined a full psychological assessment with the drug recovery program, and seemed to take a more clinical approach than any recovery and rehab centers we’d encountered. Still panning for a golden nugget that might save our son, we reasoned that maybe his inability to stay clean was rooted in psychiatric imbalance, not just physical dependency.
By the time Tommy’s relapses had hit double digits, I’d concluded that brain chemistry and underlying mental imbalances had to be major ingredients in the complex stew that leads to addiction. Why do some in the same family with similar genetic predispositions toward substance abuse become addicts while others don’t? Why are some addicts able to overcome and have clean, productive lives while others can’t? How can some folks simply stop smoking, drinking, or drugging cold turkey and never touch their crutch again without any programs, meetings, or outside help? Brain chemistry is a powerful piece of the mix. Everyone is different, and in considering the struggles faced by my son, brother, and late father—coupled with the countless stories I’ve digested about other addicts over the past several years—I’m convinced that our individual wiring is a leading factor in addiction to drugs, food, sex, or any excess. The brain is the last frontier for modern medicine, yet we’re essentially in the Stone Age when it comes to truly understanding it.
In Tommy’s case, psychological testing had been conducted a year or two earlier, diagnosing him with social anxiety disorder and mild depression. It was impossible to decipher whether these conditions were preexistent or related to the rewiring of brain circuits that five years of hard drug use had caused. The dilemma is even greater when considering potential treatment using medicine. How can you prescribe pills to a pill abuser? What if we were just giving him something more to abuse or something that would kill him by interacting with the Oxys he was injecting?
The chemical-imbalance issue combined with his drug abuse thrust Tommy into no-man’s-land when it came to finding a doctor to help us sort things out. Most psychiatrists refuse to even see a patient with a history of drug dependency, not to mention that getting an appointment for a new patient can often take months. The demand far outstrips the supply of doctors, something that was exasperated by repercussions from the pill-mill problem and Big Pharma’s prowess at peddling pills for every ailment imaginable.
The long-term vexing problem of how and whether to treat Tommy’s social anxiety and depression had now resurfaced. On our drive back to Orlando, he agreed that it might be time to try medicine, although because he was still coming down off opiates, there wasn’t much coherent thought coming out of him that day. Instead of traveling to Barry’s campus for a planned weekend visit, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of another facility discovered in our latest foraging for a panacea.
Within the first thirty minutes of our arrival, I sensed this was a mistake. On the ten or so previous occasions when I’d checked Tommy into a detox facility, the process was the same—private interview with the patient, payment terms arranged, and then the patient taken to a bed inside fifteen to twenty minutes maximum. This time we found ourselves still waiting to see someone after three hours! The center apparently had no clue how to deal with individuals coming down from heroin or pills.
The first sign that we should have left shortly after arrival was the thirty-something woman who appeared more like fifty who was pacing the room and swearing at any staff person who came in or out of the locked doors.
“How much longer?” she cackled. “I’ve been here for two hours!”
Clearly also coming down and, like my son, beginning to experience nausea, cramps, and extreme irritability, the woman was fit to be tied. Except for stepping outside a couple times to bum and smoke a cigarette, she became louder and more belligerent as the clock kept ticking. Eventually, she was kicking furniture around, cussing, and threatening to leave. The tension she added to the waiting room impacted Tommy almost immediately, especially given his condition and acute sensitivity to the environment and those around him.
“Dad, this is BS, let’s just leave,” he said several times.
“No, son, we have to stick it out,” I insisted.
I went back to the check-in window several times to complain and explain that you can’t expect someone coming off opiates to sit in a waiting room for hours. I demanded to speak to a doctor or anyone in charge. The college student working the front desk was kind and tried to get someone to come up front, but no one did. Adding further insult to our experience, a pair of uniformed first responders entered escorting a teenage boy who was absorbed with a game on his cell phone. Within five minutes, a nurse came out to take him inside, and the two men left. So if I had him arrested or brought in by ambulance, he would be seen right away? I thought, more frustrated than angry. After what seemed like an eternity, at least they took the other woman back, and we didn’t have to listen to her rants anymore.
But before long a worse agitator entered the picture, a hard-looking man that sat two seats down from us. I heard him offer Tommy the worst possible information, given that by now Tommy was itching constantly, sweating, and beginning to suffer from cramps.
“If you haven’t been here before, it’s Friday, so the doctors have left for the weekend,” he said. “They won’t be giving you any real meds for the withdrawals.”
Hearing this, Tommy predictably decided we must leave and said that if I didn’t take him out, he’d walk out and find his own ride.
Again I marched up to the window and asked to speak with a supervisor, and again no one came out. I convinced Tommy to give it a little longer.
Nearly three hours from the time we arrived, a very young attendant, likely an intern or medical student and moving the speed of a snail, shuffled over to let us know we could not have the evaluation-for-admittance interview until Tommy filled out about thirty pages of medical history, questionnaires, and related paperwork.
I couldn’t help myself. “Are you kidding me; we’ve been sitting here three hours and now you give us all this paperwork that we could have completed long ago? Does anyone here have the first clue about opioid withdrawal?”
The woman did not apologize; she simply stared vacantly at me, the type of “I don’t give a damn” stare that Tommy had when on opioids, a look that drives me nuts. Then she slowly plodded away and disappeared, the buzz and slam of the heavy security door sounding her exit. Despite his protests, I insisted he complete the reams of paperwork, and Tommy angrily scribbled on the pages, practically breaking the point of the pen as he slammed it against each new page on the clipboard.
About twenty minutes later, the same woman returned and decided she could not accept some of the pages left blank or containing illegible scribbles.
“All questionnaires and paperwork must be filled out completely before you can be screened,” she said.
I tried to hand her the papers and explained the torture they were putting an addict through who was in severe pain from withdrawal, and she again gave me the blank stare as if to say, “I couldn’t care less about your son or you” before slinking away.
About forty-five minutes later, having wasted nearly four hours in that useless place without seeing a doctor, I agreed with Tommy that enough was enough and we left. I peeled out of the parking lot and Tommy said, “Dad, calm down, you’re going to kill us driving like that.”
For the second time we would detox our son in the comfort of the home he grew up in. Hours earlier I’d insisted that Mary drive the two hours north to be with Barry for the weekend as planned, as much for his sake as my own. The communication channels Tommy and I had opened nearly a year earlier had remained open except for the three-week period between Sarah’s death and now. Having just the two of us home during his first day of detox seemed like a blessing.
“Son, what do you need?” I asked as we drove home. “You’ve been through this enough times now that you know what will get you through.”
“I need cigarettes,” he said. “Also, some Gatorade to help me stay hydrated.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, there is one more thing, but I’m afraid you’ll get mad.”
“What?”
“A little bit of weed. It’s the only way my mind will shut down long enough to help me sleep.”
“What about withdrawal medicine, like they give you in detox centers?”
“That would be good, but it’s not essential.”
With that I swung by a convenience store to pick up cigarettes and Gatorade. I called Mary to let her know I would not be coming and to fill her in. A neighbor friend of Tommy’s swung by and left a pipe and small amount of marijuana behind a chair on our porch. Fortunately, my daughter Jessie was out with a friend, and we arrived to a dark and quiet house.
I set Tommy up on a couch in our rec room where he would have a television and easy access to an outside area where he could smoke as needed. I got him a vomit bucket, pillow, and blanket. As he lay down, our dog, Mo, immediately jumped up on the couch and curled up next to him. If any combination of our six family members is together with Tommy present, Mo will always be found next to him. If left outside Tommy’s door, he will cry to be let into his room and refuse to leave his side in the morning. It’s as if the small dog senses the innate kindness in Tommy’s soul. They are inseparable, and Tommy regularly tries to convince his mother to let him take Mo to live with him, but she refuses.
When Jessie arrived home late after seeing a movie, I gave her an honest account of the situation. At first she reacted in anger.
“Why, Dad? What the heck!” she said. “Why is he here? He’ll only steal from us or hurt us again!”
“Jessie, calm down, you have to understand.”
“Understand what?” she replied, becoming sarcastic. “Help me understand.”
I explained that the only hope he had was the love and support of his family and that no matter what he was our family, and we could not turn our backs on him. She began to cry, then ran toward the room where Tommy was resting.
“Jessie, no,” I called. “You’ll wake him.”
There was no stopping her, and as I turned the corner I saw her sitting on the couch embraced in a hug with her favorite brother.
“I love you, Tommy,” she said between sobs. “Don’t die!”
She then headed to her room and collapsed on her bed, still crying. I tried to reason with her, distraught over her continued sobbing.
“C’mon, Jessie, take it easy.”
“Shut up, Dad, leave me alone!”
Irritated, I foolishly responded with an ill-timed teaching moment. It had been a long day.
“This isn’t about you, Jessie, it’s about Tommy,” I said. “Don’t go putting something up on social media or telling all your friends. It will not help him to get a bunch of phone calls or have some of his drug friends find out he’s back in Orlando.”
“Oh, so you want me to cover it up,” she snapped. “Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass the family.”
“That’s not my point.”
“Then what is your point, Dad, that I’m too immature or stupid to not blab?”
“Jessie, why are you making this a fight between us?”
“Look in the mirror.”
“That’s not fair. This is tough on all of us. All I’m asking is that you respect his privacy. He needs our love and understanding most of all.”
“I understand. I’m sorry.”
Both of us calmed down. I hugged her, told her I loved her, and urged her to try to get some sleep. She had an important standardized ACT test early the next morning.
I walked to the other end of the house to check on Tommy. He was lying on the couch, Mo curled up next to his chest, and resting peacefully. For the first time since I’d picked him up that day, his mind seemed calm. His demeanor was totally opposite from the nasty, on-edge temperament I’d experienced during hours in the waiting room. It struck me how much better this arrangement was than further isolating him by pushing him into a hospital with strangers for a week. That would have been another short-term way to kick the can down the road and pay $5,000 for the privilege!
About seven years after the stressful rescue of our son from an abandoned building, I finally understood that there was no combination of meetings, medicines, doctors, therapists, or programs that were ever going to save our son. Only unconditional love and acceptance from his family would have a chance of succeeding. A major bridge had been crossed in my mind. Now I had to figure out how to help Mary and my kids see the light.