To each her addiction
In 2006, a study estimated that 22.6 million Americans over the age of 12 were dependent on either alcohol or drugs: 15.6 million were classified as dependent solely on alcohol; 3.8 million were classified as dependent solely on illicit drugs; 3.2 million were classified as dependent on both alcohol and illicit drugs.
My trip away from home exposed all of my loved ones addictions in stark terms. A sibling wasting away from a morphine addiction that masks her pain. I don’t know pain, I don’t want to know pain, but metaphorically I want her to embrace her pain because trying to survive pain free has created a hollow existence that is shadowy and lean. She weighs 80 lbs and her hand shakes when she is not falling asleep sitting up. My stomach lurched on seeing her in this light. She was a lioness. A barracuda at times. And now she sits in a cavernous living room in a dreary subdivision ordering from QVC and taking an array of pain pills to make sure she feels no pain.
Mother clings to a cup that holds her cure when she’s in the truck, in the house, anywhere – she’s disrupted from her routine of drinking so she actually clutches the cup for fear it might vanish into thin air. The more she drinks, the more she doesn’t have to suffer the reality around her, much less digest a daughter who has given in to slow death.
A friend begins her drinking early in the day and seeks other remedies as the afternoon progresses, but we’re all having fun here right? No harm done.
What should I do? I’m healthy. Should I intervene? Could I intervene? Would I intervene?
You only have control over your own actions is what I tell and retell myself, but lying in bed upon returning I wake to the horror far greater than Kurtz could ever have known in the Belgian Congo, this is the quiet desperation, this is how people cope.
So I reinvest in my vision to live well, to love well, to be happy. But a friend reminds me this morning on our bike ride, “remember Rachel, it’s in our genetic makeup, so we have to have a strong will to fight against it.”
And I pledge again to a better life and to be grateful for who I am and who I’ve become, to live by a code – grace under pressure as Hemingway best laid it out, to not look for meaning where it doesn’t exist, and to rail, rail, rail against the dying light.