Can I Really Forgive Him for Dying?

Pushing myself through the rituals of Friday morning, thinking about Ethan, I had an unsettling thought.

Forgiveness.

Last year my goal for the New Year was to find a way to forgive someone in my life that I was struggling to love or forgive because the pain that person inflicted was ongoing. Through a lot of prayer, I was able to do that by focusing on the positive things in my life that were there because of them -- even if those things happened years ago.

When I saw someone's post on Facebook earlier this week about forgiving someone to achieve peace, I thought, yes, I nailed that one.

Then, yesterday morning out of the blue I realized I still have a lot of forgiving to do and at the top of that list right now is Ethan.

Although I learned a lot of lessons about love from him over the last seven years, I had not yet embraced the lessons of forgiveness.

Several years ago when I found him sleeping in his car in my driveway one morning, God drove home to me a lesson about love. Ethan was screwed up and not living the life I envisioned he would live; he wasn't living life to its full potential; he was wasting the gifts of talent, intelligence, love and support. Yet I still loved him with every fiber of my being. In that moment, I realized how the love we read about in the Bible -- the love that God feels for us when we mess up, sin, don't choose the path that He lays out for us to a full and happy life -- is real. There is such a thing as unconditional love, even when we aren't close to one another or denying its existence.

I loved Ethan unconditionally and did my best to make sure he knew it.

And time and time again I forgave him for the things his addiction made him do. I forgave him the physical and emotional havoc he left behind sometimes, because I loved him. Even while I did my best to limit his ability to cause physical pain, I didn't expect an apology after he called on a rant or neglected something that was important to me. I accepted that was the way he was and I was just glad he called again. I accepted and forgave every emotional blow in the hope there would come a time when things would be better and we could put it all behind us.

Until the other morning, it felt like I had done enough forgiving.

Then I realized I have to forgive him for dying. Even though he's beyond all need of anything I can ever give him, I have to forgive him for me. I have to forgive him every stupid mistake and bad choice that put him on the road to dying alone in his apartment. I have to forgive him for shutting us all away so often that no one missed him for days. I have to forgive him for squandering the life I fought so hard to give him.

Just as, at some point, I have to forgive myself for any way I may have failed him (a bridge I'm not ready to cross, and yes I know I did my best), I have to forgive him for things that ultimately slipped out of his control.

I have to forgive him for becoming an addict, because I know that once he found the drug that spoke to him, it was as powerful and insidious as Satan in the Garden of Eden. It whispered to him in lies and promises about special knowledge and gifts, special visions and experiencing the world in a way he could not without it. It made him feel things the real world didn't deliver. I cannot understand addiction and that desire to escape and I'm glad, but I have to forgive him for being overwhelmed by it.

I have to forgive him for not fulfilling the potential I saw when the doctors pulled him from my abdomen and placed him in my arms, a big, healthy, beautiful baby boy. I have to forgive him for disappointing my dreams, for not being able to find himself again and for not sticking around to take care of me when I get old.

Where time and again I've felt some version of survivor's guilt because of the families grieving a lost child who had done nothing wrong, who was caught up in some horrible tragedy of time or place or birth, I have to forgive him for no longer dodging the fate that had for so long been waiting. I have to forgive him for involuntarily choosing not to be part of our lives when he could have been, because now he cannot choose.

Ethan often said he wished he could die, and I have to forgive him for those thoughts and for finally having that wish granted.

I have to accept that he was doing his best to make his way through a world that was more painful to him than it is to me, a world that somehow didn't make his heart sing the way it sometimes does mine. I have to accept that while having people who love and need me is sometimes enough to get me through a day, it wasn't enough for him. I have to accept that he didn't always feel he had a purpose and that being without a purpose leaves you vulnerable to things you cannot control.

So today, in writing this and acknowledging the things I hadn't forgiven, I'm taking what I hope are the first steps toward letting those hard feelings go. Not because he needs me to do so, but because in order to live and breathe freely again, in order to have peace in my heart, this is what I need to do.

Already I feel lighter and I think the journey toward forgiveness is underway.

I've Already Been Grieving A Long Time

When my son, Ethan, was found dead in his apartment two weeks ago he had been dead for several days.

Even though Dec. 15, 2013, may wind up being the date on his tombstone, what really died that day was hope. What died that day were the hard to kill dreams that someday, somehow my beautiful, talented boy would find a purpose in life that no one else could give him and quit killing himself a little bit at a time. What died that day were my still harbored hopes that he'd get clean and become the man he always dreamed of being.

Although there is no indication his death was suicide, Ethan had been killing himself for a long time and, little by little, the people that loved him had been forced to let him go. All we had left were our hopes, our dreams, our prayers, and when he was clean and in the mood to be sociable, little glimpses of the Ethan we so wanted all the time.

Addiction may end in death, but it is in reality a lot of little deaths. The death of personality, stability, contact, interaction, early dreams, relationships, health and so much more.

I've been saying goodbye to Ethan for so long, that I thought this last goodbye would be only a little more difficult than many of the others. I was wrong, the finality makes it far worse, but the fact remains that while it's another level of grief, I've been grieving a long time.

Ethan was a wonderful, caring child who never wanted to hurt anyone. He turned into an angry teenager who demanded my attention on his schedule, my support for his demands. He was verbally and emotionally abusive when it was just the two of us at home. He punctured his walls and doors with knives and fists, and had no regrets for breaking things that weren't his. Although he couldn't support himself or make all of his own decisions, he refused to comply with any standards outside of his own. Household chores (taking out trash and emptying the dishwasher) weren't done. He overloaded the dryer until he burned it out and I started doing his laundry. A HAZMAT suit would have been needed to enter his room. Still, sometimes we connected although I couldn't get him to see life from a different point of view; one where he needed to be responsible and think about a driver's license and job, where he needed to think about school as a step toward his dreams, one where he would always need to follow someone's rules to get ahead.

When he turned 16, he decided that since he was legally an adult in North Carolina, that meant he no longer had to do anything I wanted. He was, by God, grown. The drug use, which I think had probably only been spotty until then, undoubtedly increased. That was the year I feel like I began to lose my son. The young man I interacted with at times bore only a passing resemblance to the boy I had raised.

I've been grieving him for seven years now.

People who have never dealt with addiction cannot understand that special kind of pain. It comes from forcing yourself to let go, to realize that there is nothing within your power that can be done to change them. It comes from accepting that they must make the change if it is to be made.

You force yourself to stop running to their rescue, to stop giving them money (although I was always willing to buy food), to stop trying to tell them what's wrong because all it does is make for an angry conversation without changing them. You may stop mentioning their addiction, they'll lie or defend it and it's just another barrier that keeps away those few stolen moments of happiness.

You quit expecting them to behave like a non-addict. They often don't show up for family gatherings, they don't see the need to work, they don't bathe or do laundry. They don't answer the phone. They don't have regular contact with anyone. Their health deteriorates.

And each time you realize they won't do that little thing, you grieve. You grieve for the person that they were once upon a time, the person that they sometimes become again in your mind.

In the last two weeks, I know I've grieved as much for the Ethan who should have been as for losing my son. If you've not dealt with addiction, you cannot understand. I'm not grieving some perfect son, but the boy who slipped slowly away from us a little bit at a time. I realize sometimes when I beat myself up over something that I didn't do, that it was probably only the Ethan that has been largely gone for seven years that would have wanted to do that any way. That even in the moments between planning it and accomplishing it, he might have become someone who wasn't interested.

I've grieved over not taking more advantage of the sober times, not making more effort to pull him back into the family after he had forced or scared us away. I've grieved over not making the time to share his successes. I've grieved over hopes and dreams and all the "what ifs" that I can dredge up sometimes.

And then I remember him high in a fit of anger, when my normally docile lab suddenly stepped between us hackles raised and a threatening tone to his bark. I remember garbled conversations, the fact that he couldn't be counted on even with an advance invitation and a car at his door, the fact that I never told him he could not come to my home if he was straight, the fact that there were months at a time when he had a license and a car, but didn't choose to spend time with me.

And I grieve again for what we lost in bits and pieces to the drug that finally pulled him under one last time.

I Cry Every Day

I cry every day.

People ask me how I'm doing, careful about the question as if I were fatally ill, not someone still struggling with death. They know an honest answer won't be good, but they ask because they care although they may mentally cringe at what I may say, or at even asking the question. It's not just me who doesn't know how I'm supposed to act, it's all the world around me that doesn't know how to treat me.

I know at some level that it would be easier in so many ways to just quit. To wear the same clothes day after day, to sleep on the sofa with the TV muttering its distractions, to totally forgo life and just allow the grief to consume me. But while the grief occasionally swallows me whole for long minutes of time, I can't do that. Even though the addiction often wouldn't let Ethan think of anything except himself and getting high, I know the boy/man that I loved and who loved me would not want me to do that.

So I try to go on, not as though nothing had changed, but as though I were OK, because most of the time I am.

But I cry every day. Not just once, but repeatedly in moments when I find myself with nothing else that needs to be done, or when I sit quietly for too long and my mind begins to pull up fragments of memories, like a squirrel digging for acorns in the leaves.

There's a big hole in my heart, but you cannot see it and a doctor would probably never miss it unless he asked the right question. Then my heart would stutter along as it seems to do periodically throughout the day, a pulse that has nothing to do with the pace of my body, but with the faltering of the breath in my chest, the sudden streaming of tears down my face.

My clothes still seem to fit, although I think I've eaten three good meals in the last week and a half. I eat when I need to fix a food for someone else, or when someone else prepares food, because although I'm hungry, there is nothing that I want. Food is a wonderful idea, but one I only manage to embrace about once a day. My diet is mostly coffee. I need lots of coffee to wake me up in the morning, when daylight is a long way off but my eyes are open and so I must begin my day. Then more coffee after lunch to keep me awake with the girls, to be sure that I don't nap and sacrifice sleeping at night to the exhaustion that sometimes threatens me at 2 p.m. I usually manage to eat a little dinner, when my husband is home and the girls are ready to eat as well -- their appetites unimpacted by the grief that fills me. After the girls leave, I begin chasing sleep with the same zeal that I use all day to avoid it. Alcohol helps. A glass or two of wine and my eyelids are heavy and I can turn off the television and escape my reality for a few hours.

I try to convince myself that I need to exercise, to drink the quarts of water that I used to consume every day, and that to get moving and embrace old routines will make me feel better. But those things just don't seem important right now. I'm not going to feel good, so why bother? The disrupted schedule of the back to back holidays means I have to be self motivated, and right now I'm just not.

But aside from the liquid diet and my general apathy toward a lot of things, I think I'm doing OK. I'm feeding dogs and chickens and the cat and rabbit and gathering eggs. When the girls are here and going strong, I'm pulled from the brink of whatever pit of gloom may be threatening me and carried by their energy. When the sun is warm and the wind doesn't blow too hard, I want to be outdoors and moving with the dogs(it just isn't the season for much of that).

Most of the time I can keep my grief simmering in a pot on the back burner, but there are moments when I'm alone that the pot boils over and for just a little while it's really messy. I'll be coasting along doing OK and some random thought of Ethan will pop into my head, quickly followed by the bone-shriveling reality that he's gone -- not just mad and not speaking, not just out of minutes on his cell phone, not just high and not in the mood to talk -- gone from my life for whatever remains of it.

When I sorted his video games one last time before donating them to the local homeless shelter, I touched his treasures and my heart broke. Then I felt something in the side pocket of the gym bag where they were stored and pulled out a toothbrush and half a tube of toothpaste and that pushed me over the edge. The little losses and reminders, the bits of him that will always be part of me are sometimes just too much.

In those moments, I understand the despair that sends mothers to emergency rooms or drives them to lock themselves away from the world. In those seconds, I grasp how people lose the will to go on and are beaten down by grief. In those minutes, I'm often huddled with dogs who are not always my own and who lick the tears from my face and press against me with warm bodies, sensing some pain they do not understand but seek to ease. In those times, once I'm able to breathe again and trying to pull my head above water, I turn to prayer or the words of the songs that echo in my head to comfort me.

My prayer is often an angry one filled with questions and pain. On Christmas morning, however, I managed to thank God not only for the gift of his Son but for the 23-year gift of my own. Because despite all the pain and the fact that I do not like how the story of Ethan's earthly life ended, he was a gift that I might not have been given and I have to remind myself of that sometimes. I'm struggling to find acceptance and it comes in brief moments of clarity that I cling to when the tears come back again.

Perhaps, with the passage of more time, this wound will be less tender and the tears won't come quite so often. I won't start my day with this self-imposed therapy session where I often rip the scab from whatever healing I've managed and poke at the weeping pain beneath. Or perhaps, the scab will gradually be replaced with tender flesh and a scar that I'll touch gently forever. But right now I know I'm going to cry and working my way through it in words seems to help me wade out of the pit when I fall in. It gives me something to cling to, to remember. It's a free therapy session where the prompt isn't a psychologist's questions, but a blank screen.

If you ask, "How are you?" The answer is that I think I'm doing as well as I could be. The fact that I hold it together doesn't mean it's not even more awful than I imagined, it just means I don't see any other option.

And although you will probably never see me do it, I cry every day.

Wading the Ocean of Grief

"When the waves are taking you under
Hold on just a little bit longer
He knows that this is gonna make you stronger, stronger
The pain ain't gonna last forever
In time it's gonna get better
Believe me
This is gonna make you stronger"

I realized last week, two days out into this journey, that this kind of grief is like an ocean.

Sunday I was on the shore and the ocean was just something to look at and consider.

Monday I was struggling to stay on my feet through what often felt like the force of hurricane waves. By Tuesday I recognized the grief came in waves that would almost consume me, then subside for a time. They were irregular and storm driven, not the paced, rhythmic waves of a normal tide.

However hard the waves of grief come on me, that is how they feel. It's like I'm walking along the beach, maybe even enjoying a break in the clouds and a ray of sunshine, when a wave comes out of nowhere and suddenly I think I'm going to drown. I feel my ability to go on sliding out from under me like the grains of sand pulled out to sea by an outgoing wave. And once the waves hit, I know that I'll be pounded for a while before I'm able to struggle free of the water again.

So far none of the waves have pulled me so far out to sea that I cannot find my way back to my feet and back to the sunshine, but I'm still walking in the water's edge. I cannot get away from the grip of the sea.

I don't remember this sort of all consuming pain when my grandmother died. I loved her, but she'd had a long good life and I know she was ready to go. She'd had time to make peace with those around her and we had a chance to make peace with her. If there were things we wanted to say, because she had been ill, we had a chance to say them. Although her actual death was a surprise because her health had seemed to be improving, it was something we could accept.

Losing Ethan is a whole different level of grief. Losing a child, through a long illness when you have to accept that barring a miracle it will be over, through a sudden tragedy that takes the healthy child you hugged a few minutes earlier, through the series of small deaths brought on by addiction when it seems that you've said goodbye to bits and pieces of your child for years, is something we just aren't prepared for. There's no reasonable expectation that we have in our minds that yes, we'll be outliving our child. Ever. In any version of reality.

Then it becomes our reality.

A path we had tried not to even look down becomes the path we have to walk every day for the rest of our lives. Right now it's a dark and scary place where I look for glimpses of light just to keep moving.

It is prayers that keep pulling me along, because although people keep telling me I'm strong no one is strong enough to do this on their own. It is three little girls who drown me in a different kind of wave -- one of noise and motion and fights and cuddles -- and keep that dark sea of grief at bay. It is the kindness of friends and strangers who care about me, or who have felt a variation of my pain and want me to know they understand and that while I won't forget, in time it will get better.

When I began writing two months ago, this is not the story I expected to tell, but this is a story that seems to resonate. While we put on our "normal" faces and go about our lives, too many of us carry grief, or fear of this grief, down deep in our souls. Facing it makes my pulse race and my eyes stream, but I cannot push it away. If doing this lets someone else know that they aren't alone, then perhaps there is a purpose to it. Perhaps walking this dark path at the side of a stormy ocean we cannot see is easier together than alone, even if we cannot reach one another's hands. Perhaps knowing there is someone else on the path will make the walk a little easier.

It feels at times wrong to share my pain and let strangers inside the wall I feel I must build to hold myself together. And then a message from someone I've never met tells me they've been down this path and that they want to help me, or that they've stood on the beach where I was a week ago and they are as afraid of the waves as I am, and I know this is what I'm meant to do now.

That everything we've been through won't be for nothing if I can help someone else, if we can somehow save someone else from the journey Ethan took.

Somehow, like everything else in life, it will make me stronger and prepare me for something I need to do. I just wish to my soul that there had been another way to do it.

'Don't Cry For Me Down Here'

Yeah, when I get where I'm going
There'll be only happy tears
I will shed the sins and struggles
I have carried all these years

And I'll leave my heart wide open
I will love and have no fear
Yeah, when I get where I'm going
Don't cry for me down here

Melvern Rivers Ii Rutherford

Getting ready to go bury my child yesterday, this song as sang by Brad Paisley began playing in my head. Not word for word, but the chorus. Funny how my country roots have been showing this week.

I fumbled for the right things to wear -- somehow I'd never purchased a wardrobe for burying my son -- finally settling on black pants and a dark shirt, the black leather coat I bought the winter I was expecting Ethan and couldn't button when I was pregnant.

We were running late driving the 30-minute route from our house to Galax. Of course, I was riding shotgun, and the roads were more familiar to me so I might have made better time, but I was reasonably sure they wouldn't start the procession without me. His sister and her family were caught in traffic on the interstate, so I was glad we went the old roads. An accident clogged northbound traffic all day, but she was at the cemetery about the same time we were.

Traveling through Galax, I put my head down to pray for the strength to make it through yet another tough day. I had no more uttered the prayer than my mind was filled with a vision. It was Ethan, stretched out in the floor, but there was a figure of light above him and it reached down toward him and pulled him free of his earthly shackles. He rose up with a light of his own, and his face was split by the biggest smile I've seen in many years. I knew that he'd shaken off the addiction, the pain, the suffering that only he could understand and that he was free. God had sent me what I needed to know and the strength to get through the day. I could miss him, but I couldn't want him back in those bonds.

His best friend and that young man's mom, who had like Ethan and I battled the same addiction, were the first people I went to at the funeral home. They were Ethan's second family, just as in many ways my house was his second home, for years. He has a family, escaped the addiction, had to make the difficult decision to not spend time with my son, and I just wanted him to know that he did what he had to do to survive. I wanted him to know that some of the love I can no longer give Ethan will be his as he goes forward.

I cried with his mother, who had known both the little boy and the angry young man and, like me, loved them both. I am sure there was a part of her that shuddered at how close she came to being where I was at, a part that mourned and was also thankful that she wasn't bearing the full brunt of it. Had the roles been reversed, I would have felt that way as well.

The drive to the cemetery was peaceful and the weather was warmer than expected. The leather coat went in the back seat by the time we reached the rural cemetery where Ethan was going to join generations of his ancestors, my grandparents, and a whole sea of people I didn't ever know. My parents plan to be buried there. The view is rolling hills, trees and fields of cattle. The sun was shining bright as we gathered around the grave.

I expected a small, sad gathering of family members who could get away from work, maybe a few folks from the Hope House where he lived a while (they agreed to be pall bearers) and some people from his church. I was totally overwhelmed by the number of people who were there. It was rush of activity to get us seated and everything ready for the service.

My chair almost toppled down hill when I sat. My first thought was how funny it would be to just fall over and topple the whole family like dominoes down the hill -- how Ethan would love it.

The pastor from the church where Ethan had found the only job he liked, but where he still couldn't manage to stay on track, knew the young man that he spoke about. He said that he knew we were all asking if we could have done things differently, and the answer was yes, because we are all fallible. That nothing could separate Ethan from his God, including the demons who drove him. We shared a few stories and a prayer and the Vince Gill song "Go Rest High On That Mountain" was played. We gathered in a gusting wind and released 23 bright colored balloons into the heavens.

After that, I had a chance to see who had come. I was even more blown away than I had been at the sheer number. There were people from Virginia who knew and cared about him, many of whom I never got to meet. People from North Carolina who knew and cared about us. People who came just for me and brought love and support and an outpouring of grace that I never expected from the time we've spent together. Family that I hadn't seen in years and years. The love poured out on me at the side of my son's grave wrapped round me like a warm blanket and helped carry me through the afternoon.

While the gravediggers finished their work, several of us gathered in the old wooden church and sipped coffee. E1 and E2, who had hardly got the chance to know their uncle, ran the aisles and played, freed from the need to keep their good clothes nice for the ceremony they did not understand. E3 cruised the pews and complained about the disruption in her eating schedule.

Before we left, my husband and I walked back to the grave topped with holiday flowers. We knelt and prayed individually, then stood and prayed together. I thanked God for giving me Ethan and for the blessing that was his life and the lessons I learned from him. I wished I could have kept him longer. I questioned why his life had to follow the course it did. I asked if there was any way to let him know how much he was loved and missed.

Of course, there was food and conversation at my mom's house following the ceremony, more noise from boisterous little girls, a drive home in the cooling afternoon to resume the routines of life, late night texts from a sister who is now an only child and beginning to feel that loss more keenly.

This was the day I buried my son, still with no answers as to how he died, but I think, thanks to a gift from God, some understanding of why. The time was not right for me, or for his sister, or for the many people who cared about him, prayed for him, and held onto a hope that one day he'd be all they knew he could be. The time was right for Ethan, walking with God, to be free of the pain of this life and get on with what comes next.

From a day that I expected only sadness, I found the closure I did not think I'd find. I found a peace that may make it easier to deal with the sadness. I found the strength everyone had said I had, but I found it did not come from within, but from without from those same friends who gathered around me and from the God who made the decision I still wish He had not made.

Living with Addiction

I live with addiction.

I'm not an addict, but I'm surrounded by it and some days feel overwhelmed by my lack of understanding and inability to control it in those I love.

I give credit to Al-Anon, where I spent a lot of tearful nights a dozen or so years ago, for allowing me to come to any kind of terms with it. It was there I learned a lot of lessons that still require reminders, all these years later, even though they have been drummed into my head by life.

Although I may not completely grasp how someone can do something that so plainly wrecks their lives, at least to my "sober" way of thinking, I understand it is not as simple as choosing to stop and I realize that they do not see the behavior with the same objectivity as the people around them. The compulsion whispers to them in a special, seductive voice that only they can hear. If I began to lose that sense of understanding, all I have to do is get into a conversation with someone who is high and have them tell me all the wonderful things about what they are doing. Seriously, I could share the text messages if I needed to do so.

Addiction is not a choice. It's some quirk in genetic programming that can cripple generation after generation, or land on one sibling while leaving another free. It isn't about a lack of self control, or about loving the substance more than you. It is about seeing the world through a different perspective in which that substance plays an all important role as a friend and comforter and is not the barrier to a complete life that the people around them see.

It can be food, video games, gambling, the internet, pornography, medications, alcohol or illegal narcotics. It can also be tobacco and caffeine, although people generally don't let those addictions interfere with life, although tobacco, at least, bears some of the negative effects of other addictions. Whatever it is, it controls the life of the person addicted, keeping them away from loved ones, affecting their ability to work, causing mental and physical ailments or injuries, always hurting those around them. It can cause people to lie, cheat, steal and kill, sometimes unintentionally.

For the people around an addict, it can cause a special kind of insanity. There's the emotional roller coaster of good days/bad days. Sometimes an addict can go days or even weeks without succumbing to their addiction. It's so easy to think, "They're better. They're doing so good." It can be a game of control -- pouring out the alcohol, or trying to drink a bigger portion (as if they would not get more) or flushing the drugs, disconnecting the internet. You feel like you should be able to fix the situation, more so because the addict will probably tell you it's your fault. It's a vicious hamster maze of a life.

Although I still deal with addiction in multiple family members, in various stages, with varying degrees of severity and to varying substances, I encountered the harsh realities of life with an addict with my second ex-husband. Suffering from abuse of all types from people around him as a child, he had turned to alcohol and narcotics to escape himself. I didn't marry him thinking I could fix him - I was unaware of many things that he kept hidden until our marriage was unraveling, and I thought he could put aside alcohol as easily as I did. I did not realize it was a way of life for him, or that he frequently needed more.

During our marriage I explored all the options of that hamster maze from one dead end to another. I paid for a stay in rehab, two totaled cars, and multiple trips to the courthouse. I suffered domestic violence, more afraid of him when I made him leave than I was when I could monitor his level of use. During one of his stabs at sobriety, I went along to the AA meeting and discovered Al-Anon next door. I discovered a certain level of insanity among many of the long-term members of that group as well who lived with practicing alcoholics. Women who lived with men who set fire to their homes, who could never be counted on for anything. I discovered I didn't want to follow that path and was finally able to throw in the towel.

He moved away and remarried, but I doubt he was ever successful at changing because he probably never really admitted the depths of his pain or faced his addiction. Recovery for an addict means admitting they aren't in control, when often they think their use is the one thing they do control. It means admitting weakness and asking for help, from professionals, from a "higher power," from other former addicts. It means giving up an old "friend" that would always make things "better," changing where you go and what you do, adopting a whole different way of life. I cannot imagine how tough that would be. He killed himself several years ago, something he had regularly threatened to do -- painful evidence that he had not been able to change.

Now those lessons of Al-Anon still come in handy and after living with them so many years, they are a little easier to exercise. I accept the limitations on my relationships that are brought on by addiction. I try not to provoke pointless arguments in which I know what what I'm saying will be transformed into condemnation, although sometimes just an expression of concern and love can be seen that way. I try not to provide support that enables. I try to avoid people who are using because my sanity is more precious than being in their presence. I still love and care, but I don't beat myself up over not being able to express those feelings the way I would like. While I don't cut them out of my life, I do focus on the positive people around me instead.

I know in the weeks ahead that shell of composure may well be tested by the sometimes forced gaiety of holiday gatherings where not everyone shows up sober. Often it creates too much drama to ask them to leave, or I'm not the hostess and instead may need to make my excuses. I also know I'm far from alone in looking at the holidays with a degree of trepidation for that reason. Far too many of us deal with addiction in the people we love and admitting we are helpless in the face of that addiction doesn't make it easier to tolerate. There are times when we have to just walk away and times when we may have to show someone the door. We don't have to sacrifice our happiness for theirs.

If you're in that same boat, I hope you can do what I hope to do and build your holiday around the other people in your life. I'll focus on family members who don't bring along their addiction like a knife they may slip into your heart when you're least suspecting it. When they are included in the gathering, I won't leave myself open for a cutting word or ugly display.

And if you're dealing with addiction, from either side of the coin, get help. Don't suffer in prideful silence thinking your problems are so unique, your addiction so terrible -- underneath the pain and the layers of lies, there's a common thread to be unraveled. Talking with other people who are unraveling that thread and walking the same path can help. It can bring sanity and it can you help find freedom from addiction -- whether you are the addict or the person who loves one.