I think a lot about what it means for a parent to lose a child. And not only that, what it means for a child, or an adult, to lose themselves. I remember how before we went to college, some of my friends sat in a circle and said we doubted we would ever drink. And I remember, then, only a few years later, sitting in a group of women in their forties, fifties, sixties, as the lone twenty-year-old, not wanting to be there, wishing I didn’t have to be there, I was there to take notes, listening to one of the women talk about how her relationship with all her children was ruined. How she was not allowed to drive anywhere on her own except to work, from work, for groceries, for doctor’s appointments: that was it. How every time she got into a car, she had to blow into the ignition interlock. How one time it malfunctioned and she sat there, in a haze, in panic, almost tasting the inside of the jail cell again.
Every group became a question of what had been lost the week before. Sometimes, what had been gained, but mostly, for awhile at least, what had been lost. Can you imagine? To have lost everything, and still be there, still halfway through your life, trying to get it all back.
I remember the man who would later break me introducing me to my first drink. He gave me water, gummy vitamins, he told me to take it slow. And I remember, later, him laughing as he told me of how once, another college friend got so drunk he woke up vomiting into his jeans. I remember how we all laugh.
I think of those books, those memoirs, we read in high school. For health class. Or whatever. About a parent who loses a child. About how the parent never believes the child would have touched whatever it was they touched that killed them. And sometimes it’s like science fiction. That would never happen to me, you think. And it does. Sometimes it does.
I think of a line in a memoir I’m reading. The author, an alcoholic, goes to a therapist. She talks about the long spans of time, the several hours of each night, that she cannot remember. She laughs about them. They were just a thing that happened. She looks at the therapist. And the therapist looks gutted. And the author, she says, she asks, she asks what? She says, everyone blacks out. And the therapist says no. No they don’t.
What I am trying to tell you is that you cannot talk about this political administration without talking about addiction. You cannot talk about college without talking about addiction. We fail people every day. We forget about them. We black them out. This administration is a walking, talking blackout. In a blackout, you haven’t passed out. You are still functional. You can sing karaoke, you can cook, you can do your best impression of Frank Sinatra. You are still functional. But you forget. This administration still goes on. Each day it goes on. And yet it forgets. It forgets about the addicts. It forgets about the twenty-year-olds sitting in groups. It forgets about the kid from your first year in college that died in their dorm room.
I don’t want people to wake up with their heads in their pants anymore. I don’t want us to break each other then introduce each other to our first drinks, setting the stage for using those drinks to deal with the break. I don’t want us to blackout on the people that need us. The healthcare bill, the one being introduced by the Senate, it blacks out on addicts. It destroys people who are already trying not to destroy themselves.
I remember, once, leaving the clinic, crying. I kept saying “I didn’t try to.”
No one tries to. Addiction is not a choice someone makes. It starts and then it goes on, whether we want it to or not.
Under the GOP healthcare bill draft, the addiction treatment mandate that covers 1.3 million Americans would be dropped. It will brutalize the states already undergoing the opioid crisis.
So ask yourself. Some people don’t try. Addicts don’t try to be addicts. But ask yourself, Can you still try? Can you call? Can you notice? Can you talk to that one friend who’s in trouble? Can you be a little nicer? Can you stop laughing? Can you talk about it? Can you stop believing it’s science fiction?
Several years ago, I went on a date. I asked him what he did for work. His house looked like a mansion. There was everything in there you could ever imagine. He was in his twenties but he could have been running his own business for all I knew. And he was. He said “I hustle. Everyone hustles.” I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know he meant that he sold drugs.
No they don’t. I don’t want any of us to lose ourselves anymore. If the only time we talk about drugs and addiction is when we’re hustling weed to college kids, then we’re not talking about it at all.
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