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| The following is from an email my wife and I received from an acquaintance
in Portland, Oregon. I am publishing it with her permission. I think it is important for all of us to realize the effect substance abuse can have not only on the abuser but also on the family.
This woman deserves our sympathy and prayers. It could be any one of us.
Teens could also benefit from reading this. Ken Dillenburg
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IT'S POSSIBLE, EVEN PROBABLE ...
"I'm a total freak of the universe and I'm going to die very soon."
My oldest son is very ill.
It's possible even probable that I will never see my oldest son again.
This week he takes a change of clothing, a sleeping bag, a tent, a food stamp card, a debit card
with $6,000 in the bank, and himself away.
He is an alcoholic. He is an alcoholic for more than 25 years.
He drinks and drugs in high school. The drinking starts at St. Matthew's Day Camp when he is counselor there,
tastes beer for the first time and likes its effect too much.
He drinks and drugs in high school and becomes an Eagle Scout.
He drinks and drugs in college and graduates with honors.
(He does rehab at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica during college.)
He drinks and drugs and gets a scholarship to law school with a score of 98% on the Law Sat
(Law School Admission Test) without any preparation.
He arrives in Oregon crazy on meth and yet gets a job and his own place within a month.
He drinks and drugs and always works until one day he's fired and the crazy so-called balanced
world he creates for himself falls apart.
In the past year he almost dies twice: once hallucinating up and down the fire stairs in my building
and then suffering extreme seizures when I go to Vermont in fall.
After a week in ICU almost dead from these seizures and later by a few weeks he gets a DUI.
He goes into the city funded Hooper Detox Center and from there to De Paul Society's
residential rehab facility
where they exchange alcohol for a daily megadose of Seraquel.
He stays at De Paul for five months! Five months without so much as a walk into town.
His housemates are felons, transsexuals, and ordinary men like he.
When he comes out in late spring he is changed. He stands up straight. He has color in his face.
He engages in conversation.
And the night of his final requirement to wipe away the DUI charges from his record, the night after
his final urine analysis, he starts drinking again.
All this time, from fall to spring I underwrite the expenses to keep his condo with the knowledge that when
he finishes treatment he needs a place to live.
All this time. And on the night of 13 July, the night of the day I give him a check for his expenses
until he finds a job, the night after his final UA, he uses that money, my money, to get drunk.
And that night he sends me an email telling me I am a Monster.
No more.
"I cannot be part of your life until you are sober for a year." That is what I tell him.
"Can you loan me one more months expenses?" No.
He sells his condo for 1/3 of what he pays for it and after the mortgage is paid has only a pittance, $6,000,
from his inheritance of some so many thousands of dollars from his father who dies in fall 2003.
And still, and yet, he cannot, he will not acknowledge that drinking is the cause of his problems, rather than the
solution to facing the world as it is.
"What shall I do with Dad's golf clubs?"
"What shall I do with Quinn's surfboard?"
"What shall I do with the three Tivoli radios?"
I only listen to the message machine. I do not respond.
I know, though, that he is "crazy."
I know that he's always been "crazy."
I know that the only way he can function is to drink.
I know that drinking will kill him, if not now, when?
I hear the terror in his voice when he says, "I'm a total freak of the universe and I'm going to die very soon."
I think that already to me he is dead. But he's not dead yet. Yet.