Substance Abuse

I have had substance abuse on my mind of late. And today, I read something that my friend Melissa Dalton-Bradford posted:

"What I can tell you is that the sorrow of losing one of your children is almost unbearable. It is sad beyond any measure that I had imagined. . .If you have a troubled or addicted daughter or son, do not ever imagine that you or your child might be better off if death were to steal her or him away. Death is devastating and final and agonizing for a parent. There is no way you can avoid a full measure of painful regrets and might-have-beens. . . You’ll be sad, and you will hurt when you lie down to sleep, when you awake in the night, when you rise in the morning, when you go to a beach where she swam, when you drive past her school, when you hear her children laughing, when you see a Christmas tree, or whenever you recall her dancing eyes, her lingering embrace, her glorious smile when she saw you at the airport---or her anguish when she fell from intoxication. I’m especially sad on June 10—her birthday—and on December 13, when she died in the snow."
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—George McGovern, My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism

I clicked on the link to the article that Melissa posted with this quote, which led to a Washington Post article from 1995. Perhaps my younger readers are not acquainted with George McGovern, a South Dakota born member of the Democratic party who ran for President in 1972--that was Nixon's last hurrah before the Watergate scandal broke. McGovern had political wins and political losses, but no loss was a greater blow to him than the ignominious way in which his alcoholic daughter Terry died. The article describes so well how difficult it is for an entire family to deal with substance abuse. You love the person so deeply; you appreciate all of their wonderful qualities; but dealing with the issues that their substance abuse carries is so difficult.

In case you don't want to read the entire article, here is the crux of what the author, Laurel Blumenfeld, describes, through her conversation with Terry's brother, who also was unfortunately dealing with substance abuse himself:

Quote: I can numb the pain, says a voice.
"It doesn't sound like an evil voice. It sounds like a friend, telling you the truth."

Teresa's younger brother, Steven McGovern, is describing the voice of alcohol, as it whispers to you when you are feeling tense or dissatisfied or empty: Here's your old pal, I can get you through this.

"I have experience with this," he explains.

Like Teresa, Steven has struggled for years with addiction. He has weary wrists and the wise, bombed eyes of a veteran. He talks about it, gentle and slow. He sits in his father's study, where a chair seam leaks bits of white stuffing.

"My sister, I love, is dead from this disease."

The catechism of recovering alcoholics is that they suffer from a disease, not moral frailty. But it is more complicated than that. It is true that alcoholism tends to run in families, and that all kinds of people become alcoholics, including brave people and strong people. And yet it is also true that you recover not through conventional medicine, but through what amounts to a colossal act of will. So if alcoholism is a disease, it is not simply a disease: It is, on some level, a terrible seduction.

"At first," says Steve, "it sounds like the solution to all your vague unnamed fears. Then the fog clears. And the voice is laughing at you."

Gotcha again.

You're left standing alone, among the destruction. You realize it took 20 years of your life. You're sober, you feel itchy, shaky, your chest squeezes and it's hard to breathe. Your body is crying for it."

End quote.

This. This is substance abuse. For many it is alcohol, and for many it is another drug of choice. But one substance or another, the "terrible seduction" that it is remains. 

I, myself, am very lucky. In my family, there is no history of substance abuse. While not all Conrads and not all Hancocks choose to live the Word of Wisdom of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as I do, there is nobody that I know of across several generations of my extended family who is an alcoholic or a pothead or addicted to painkillers or whatever. The people in my family who choose to partake of controlled substances seem to have an at-will ability to take it or leave it. Substance abuse does not seem to run in our family. (We get CANCER instead. Hurray!?)

However, this is not true of my husband's family. He is, in fact, a person who depends on pain killers. I have hoped and wished and prayed that he could overcome that, but here we are; he cannot get through the day or the night without them. He is not an abuser of pain killers; he sees a doctor and adheres strictly to the regimen that he is placed on. He is super careful, because he knows that he is tip-toeing on a razor blade, and he doesn't want to fall. I am very glad that he stopped with the alcohol and the marijuana before I met and married him, though I do know that he definitely got into that particular trap, along with his brothers C and K. Had he not, I would not have married him. 

However, when I married him, I was pretty naive about alcohol and drug abuse. I mean, I had learned about them in school, right, but did I really know anything about it? I may have thought I did, but I really didn't. I was 22. That is really young. I didn't even know what I didn't know. Worse, I didn't know that I didn't know that there was so much I didn't know. I didn't know how deeply imbedded this problem can be in families, but now that I am looking at generations of my husband's family--forwards and backwards through time--I can see that it is a bigger problem than I ever thought it was or could be. 

And I admit, it is very, very hard for me to understand--I just don't see the attraction. Like, people who are drunk or high--they just seem stupid to me. They don't seem funny, or cool, or in any way attractive, and they do dumb things, and sometimes gross things--why would anybody want to do that to themselves? 

It is the Duggar line, not the Layton line that demonstrates a problem with substance abuse. Let me just start with his maternal grandfather, his mother's father, who died in an alcohol-based auto accident. When he died, leaving a young family, a widow and five children, I do not think that he left a family who was as much bereft as they were relieved. Living with him was not fun. Mind you, I am sure that his family loved him--just he kept making bad choices that negatively impacted all of them. From not enough money to live well to living in fear, it was just kind of not a great life. Also, he was super controlling, and always worried that his wife was going to misbehave, since he had a habit of misbehaving himself. Like, the lives of his wife and children were not made WORSE when he died; it got BETTER. And that is kind of a sad statement. 

My husband's mother and two of her brothers, along with their mother, fully embraced the gospel brought to them by missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Two brothers may have joined the church, but did not fully embrace the gospel. One of those two lived a perfectly respectable life. He probably was a social drinker, and he could do that. He didn't get the gene for inability to cope with alcohol. The other brother, however, was an alcoholic. He lived a hard life, riddled with divorce, unemployment, homelessness, jail time, and all the hard things that seem to go with prolonged substance abuse.

When I met and was dating my husband, his parents had kindly allowed his Uncle G to live in their motor home. It was parked in their yard, and was hooked up to their utilities. That way, they knew that Uncle G was safe, but also kept him and his habits mostly apart from them. There were still issues, because he just had a hard time handling life. Eventually, he left--he continued to live in ways that were the direct result of his substance abuse problem until his death two months short of age 70 in 1997. 

My husband's substance-abusing brothers C and K thought Uncle G was funny. They thought it was funny that he couldn't hold a job (sometimes Grandpa would let him work for him to help him get by) and they maybe didn't even realize that they were going right down the same path. Uncle G's only son was following that same path. It was the path of jail time, divorce, unemployment, homelessness, etc. I don't know. It isn't a "funny" path to me; it isn't an attractive path. It is a sad, sad, sad path.

When Grandma L died, the two brothers, C and K, sang the woe is me song. The other five children in the family all had jobs and owned homes. Poor C and K! What would become of them? So all the other five signed papers to turn the house over to C and K so that they would "own" it and have a place to live. This house, at 7503 S. 3200 W. is now valued at over $400,000. I am not sure how much it was worth in 2015, when they were given it, but it only took them two years to trash it and lose it to the bank. And nobody was surprised because, though you want to give people the benefit of the doubt, you also don't expect a tiger to change its stripes. Even if you HOPE for that change.

This is all to say that when I was raising my children, I warned them that substance abuse is a heritable problem. So, you are playing Russian Roulette when you first decide to abuse an addictive substance. Will you be one of the people who has a genetic predisposition to be enthralled by the terrible seduction, or will you not be? There is no way to know. To stay on the safe side, since you know that you are a part of a family where substance abuse is a terrible, seductive trap for some people, you should never, never, never, try it. Just say no.

In Grandma's family that she grew up in, three of the children chose not to play at all--better safe than sorry. One of them played, and he could not be enthralled. Another played, and he was enthralled, and then trapped. In Grandma's family that she raised, while all her sons played some Russian Roulette, most of them came out okay. Two of them absolutely did not.

I had hoped that all of the children I raised would choose not to play. That was not the case. Two of them decided to play, and it has been sad to watch. They have had ups and downs. Sometimes were more down than up, and now (fingers crossed) more up than down.

Now I hope that my grandchildren will choose not to play, but I know that some of them have played. Some of them want to play--like, it interests them to play. Hard for me to understand. I just hope that those of them that decide to play don't become enthralled and trapped. For one of them, the substance of choice with which to play the game is actually poisonous to them. Like, not in the jail time, divorce, unemployment, homelessness way, but in the "this is going to kill your body through ill health" way. 

I love all of my grandchildren. I wish them all the very, very best that life can offer. I know they will have hard things, too, of course, because that is what life is like. It is good and bad. It has ups and downs. It has many, many hard things in it. But the way to get through all those hard things is less hard if a person doesn't complicate it by imagining that substance abuse will make it better. That is just obscuring the truth, and adding another layer to what is already hard. 

If you are a person who won't get addicted, maybe the substance will allow you to momentarily forget the problem--which is after all, still really there. And maybe if you are that person, the momentary forgetfulness will give you a brief respite before you tackle the problem. But if instead you are the person who WILL get addicted, and you don't know because this is genetic Russian Roulette, after all--then what? Your brief respite turns into a lifelong battle.