I wonder what I did wrong?” the woman said to me. She was thinking about her adult son who, even as she spoke, was incarcerated in the county jail.
“Everything bad that he ever did,” she explained, “was caused by alcohol.”
It’s a familiar story. To many people. To me. I nodded as she spoke.
Just a few hours later, my own son called me from his drug rehab center.
“This is the best drug treatment center I’ve ever been to,” he said. “The staff is the best, the facility, even the food.” He laughed as he said it.
I wouldn’t know, but he would. This is at least his sixth tour of duty in rehabilitation. In a recent letter, he asked rhetorically, “Who knows how many times I have been to rehab…it must be north of 20.”
He knows the process, and he always excels.
“He sent a picture of a sketch he did,” his girlfriend said in a text to me the next day. “And I just spoke with him. He’s doing well, wants references to draw Sounds like Ike again.”
Sounds like Ike again.
I know what that means: warm, engaged, interesting, smart. And making plans. When he’s clean, the world is good and the future full of promise. When he’s high, not so much.
“I’ve failed at everything in my life,” he said to me recently, a couple of weeks before rehab. A sure sign he needed help.
Like another man about his age whose father is about my age. The father wrote me the day before my son called: “My son is near you, in NC. He is on drugs and refuses to leave due to a toxic relationship with a woman there. He’s living out of his truck.”
I did not know this story even though I’ve known the father since college. He, like me, is a minister; and I’m sure he’s thought or spoken or cried the words the mother said quoted above.
“I wonder what I did wrong.”
There is no answer to this question. It is not really a question. It is a confession, a complaint, a cry from the heart. It is what we parents have in common. Deep guilt and despair and sadness.
Mostly sadness.
“I’m 35 years sober.” A friend posted on Facebook a month or so ago. And I paused my scrolling for a long time and looked at his picture. I looked because he is a lively, engaged, accomplished person. A professor, no less. But mostly he is a sign for the millions of us who watch our children struggle and fall and get up again and fall again.
“Please pray for him,” my old college buddy continued in his Message to me. “We’re trying to get him into treatment, but he refuses to get help.”
Refuses to get help.
This may be the worst symptom of this terrible disease. It certainly is the worst condition for the watching, hoping, praying parent.
There are lots of us: watching, hoping, praying parents. I know a few and so do you. You may be one of us. If you are, I’m sorry, and welcome to the club. Talk to me about it if you wish. Or write. I don’t have any answers or recommendations. I do have lots of questions and not a few stories of failure, frustration, and the broken heart. And anger. Lots of anger…at the addict, the system, the seller, the enabler, anybody, everybody. At times, at life itself and its fundamental unfairness.
But mostly we hope; it is the least I can do. I hope that sometime before my son stares at my lifeless body just before he lowers me into “the cold, cold ground” (John Prine), he will gain the mastery over this insidious disease, so that before my time I don’t have to watch as they lower him into that same cold, cold ground.
“All will be well,” he wrote at the conclusion of his letter, invoking a famous saying from the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. He repeated it twice and flourished with the addendum. “May it be so. May it be so. May it be so.”
Indeed. May it be so.
(March 2022)
