Losing an Addicted Child -- Guilt Joins Grief

In my local network of grieving mothers there are a disproportionate number of us who have lost children to drug overdoses.

Most, if not all, were unintentionally fatal.

My son's autopsy, for example, says accidental overdose, although I know for a fact he intentionally overdosed, regularly. He just never expected to die from it.

For a while we wrestled with whether it might have been intentional, as he had made cryptic phone calls to family members during his last contact. But then again, when he was high most of his phone calls were cryptic in that we couldn't understand what he was saying or talking about.

Two facts blew that scenario out of the water. First, everything was always someone else's fault, so he would have been sure to leave a note with plenty of blame to be shared by everyone who he felt ever let him down. Second, his drug use had resulted in a certain level of psychosis in which he believed himself immortal. The fact that he had survived multiple Near Death Experience (NDE) overdoses, which are actually sought instead of being the frightening thing most of us would espect, and a car accident that should have killed him, only served to reinforce that idea.

All my personal baggage aside, loving and losing an addict, particularly when that addict is your child, carries a load of guilt and grief that is probably a common denominator.

The guilt can span a wide range of issues and is something I wrestle with in different ways regularly. At the same time, I expect I'm not alone when it comes to parenting and losing an addict. If you've walked that path, I want you to know you're not alone.

These are the questions we struggle with when guilt manages to find it's way into our thoughts. These are the questions we should be able to banish, but so often cannot.

"Why didn't I know?"

I knew he was using at the time he died, although I'm sure there were many times that we were together and he was high and I didn't know it. Initially, I thought he was just being a teenager and later I could no longer tell the drug moods from his own because I had lost the real person that lived in his body. I knew the drugs could kill him and I had told him as much, as kindly as I could and as often as I could. Sometimes I screamed it at him with tears. Sometimes it was a silent text message on his phone. Always it was with pain in my heart and with a belief that he would get better. I knew, but I didn't know, because I never really expected him to die. I thought he'd hit bottom and find his way back to living, but that never happened. I didn't know the reality of how that phone call would feel.

"Did I do all I could to help him?"

I never "sent" him to rehab. We all offered at one point or another, I think, to take him. We researched places and talked to him. But he never thought he had a problem, or at least a problem that he needed help to quit. Like any addict, his addiction controlled him and lied to him. He could quit for six months, so it wasn't a problem -- in his mind it was a choice. He wasn't even convinced it was a bad choice because he thought it made him smarter, godlike, better in some way. I suppose there might have been a way to force him into rehab, but it would have been a waste of energy and money. No one gets straight until they are ready to do so, as friends who have managed repeatedly tell me.

"What did I do wrong that caused it?"

That's one of those beat myself up questions that I tend to wrestle with way too often, even after I've successfully put it away time and time again. There's a million things I wish I'd done differently, but the simple fact is that I don't know that any of them would have made a difference. If that sounds like letting myself off the hook, then it's because I need to and so does any other person wrestling with that question. Despite addiction in our family tree that was not hidden, my son made the personal choice to experiment with drugs with his friends. They tried several things before he stumbled on the drug that did it for him and at least one of his friends and they became addicted. I don't think either of them came from bad homes or that as parents we considered each other's sons bad influences. Our boys grew up together and made bad choices together. My son died and I'm thankful her son was spared.

I could have lived somewhere else, taken him to church more, stayed in an abusive marriage to give him a father, not remarried, had a job with regular hours, put him in private school, more carefully monitored his activities, but all of those things are an illusion of control and I know it. I did the absolute best I could and if it was wrong, it was still his choice what to make of it. Parenting, at best, is often an illusion of control as though it were actually up to us how our children "turn out."

"Why couldn't I be enough?"

This one is tied closely to the previous one, but is more personal. If you love an addict, when they fall into addiction you feel like you should be able to love them out of it. That they choose the addiction over you, although in reality it isn't their choice. Even when I think I did the best I could with my life circumstances, I wonder if I gave enough of myself. Did I tell him how wonderful he was? Did I do enough to build him up? Did he know to the center of his being how much he meant to me? And if I did and he did, how was that not enough?

I caught myself with that guilt nagging at me the other night on my way home from the gym (alone in a car is a bad place to be sometimes). That's when my old Al-Anon training managed to raise its head and remind me that it wasn't up to me to fix anyone. That I had loved an addict before and managed to release the feelings of responsibility for his addiction and I had to do the same with my son, no matter how hard it was to do so. Reminding myself of that painful reality will eventually help free me.

As a sidenote, my first addict was my second husband, whom I'm often convinced God sent my way to prepare me to survive Ethan. Otherwise, I have to consider it all just a horrible waste of time and money. He went to rehab, but he didn't deal with his issues or overcome his addiction. I tried to do the things he wanted to do thinking I could make him happy and he'd quit. I bought into all the mind games an addict can play and was manipulated into being someone I wasn't a lot of the time. Al-Anon taught me that his addiction was his own and that I didn't control him. It also taught me that I'd know when I had had enough. I did, eventually find the time when I sent him on his way. (I'm sure he continued on in the same manner with his next wife. I didn't hear from him again until I got word he'd killed himself -- still wrestling with demons he could never let go.)

There's another kind of guilt I sometimes feel when relating to other mothers who've lost their children. Although no one believed my son had committed suicide, he did bring his death on himself. Sometimes I feel guilty because so many children die of disease while fighting to live, or are swept away in a tragedy no one saw coming. But while our circumstances of loss vary, how we feel afterwards is the same.

Grief at losing a loved one isn't unique. No matter how they left us, we are struggling to live with the loss.

There's a hole in our lives that is supposed to be filled, a person we're supposed to be able to reach out to and grasp with our hands, arms we should feel around us, a voice we should hear, even a smell that we'd recognize in a crowded room.

Grief at losing a child has a special edge. It's a loss out of sequence, as though there were rules to death. It's a future that we imagined that will never come to life, a family tree we expected to spring from our child wilted and cut down, leaving a wound in our lives that will never heal.

Sometimes Love Requires A 'No'

Ever since I first said "No," to Ethan's addiction, I've struggled with balancing that "no" with mother's love and plain Christian charity.

Any mother or father who's ever had to turn away an addicted son or daughter's request for anything ranging from a few dollars to a place to stay for a few nights, or months, has felt that pain. Couple that with handing a few dollars to the homeless person on the corner who may well be using it to feed their own addiction, but doing it because of a desire to show Christ's love, and you'll get an idea of what I'm struggling with.

Add on the sudden death of that child who you've denied time and again -- not love or necessities, but other things -- and you can look for a boatload of guilt. A big ol' boatload of guilt.

In Sunday school this week one of the class members talked about loving without the "buts." Setting aside prerequisites on love and just loving, how he'd been able to do that with a person he was having trouble with and help that person, and I was in imminent danger of leaving class in tears.

Days later, I was still grappling with myself over whether my love had not been the quality it should have been. But there are no coincidences.

When an older gentleman who I've known for years called Wednesday needing a strong back (thinking of my husband) to move some items out of an office, I volunteered pointing out that toting 80 lbs. of granddaughters has given me a fairly good set of muscles. The deal was lunch, and during lunch I raised the subject with him as he's a sober alcoholic, a retired substance abuse counselor, and an Episcopal priest who has known my family for years and attempted to counsel Ethan at one time.

"I think you probably did for Ethan all he would let you do," he said, "because you're independent and I think you raised him to be independent."

Well, yes. He was right on those points. Pretty much the only things I turned him down for were allowing him to use and live under my roof (or a roof I provided) and his last request for a Playstation 4, an outlandish gift under the best of circumstances, but one that given the circumstances has plagued me all the same.

"I always saw these 45-year-old men who were calling their mothers to use their social security to bail them out," he continued. "When I was showing my ass and called my mother to go my bail, she told me to use my wonderful gift of gab and get myself out, that she wasn't responsible for my drinking. When I got sober, I thanked her for two things: the gift of life and making me take responsibility for myself."

His words brought me some comfort. Had Ethan ever managed to get straight, perhaps he would have been thankful for the same things.

Although he never achieved the independence he so craved, Ethan owned his addiction. He had a certain sense of warped responsibility about it. He shoplifted dextromethorphan rather than use money my mom occasionally gave him. He quite likely committed food stamp fraud to swap his food for drug money. He worked an odd job now and then if he needed money for pills. Sure, he'd use food stamps and take rent and utilities money from my mom (after exhausting my reserve of help), but he owned his addiction.

Still, it hurts that I couldn't do more for him. That he didn't ask for the normal things, like a good phone, new clothes, or his computer fixed -- the things I could have given him and been glad to do. Despite efforts not to, it bothers me that people probably judge our relationship not knowing the facts and decide I didn't love him enough.

Was I not a good Christian when I didn't do more? I don't know. The prodigal son's father never chased him down when he was living with the swine to make life better, so the only example I can find anywhere close doesn't say I was.

Still, when I give money to one of the homeless people I see so often in Winston, when I pray for them, it's in the memory of Ethan and who he might well have become had he lived life on the path he was taking. It's my love for him and for them as people who have their own struggles that makes me dig into my wallet instead of turn away.

Do they always use the money wisely? That isn't the question. The only question is whether we give in love.

And still wrestling with this question in the evening, I realized something else. Sometimes, even with love, the answer is "no."

We don't always give our children or anyone we love everything they want, addictions and other struggles aside. Sometimes we have to say no for their own good or because we simply cannot.

Sometimes, in this Christian walk, our answer is no as well, whether we are being asked or doing the asking.

If the answer were always yes, then I would have had the healing touch I sought and Ethan would still be with me today.

My limited, human, mother's love was right sometimes to say "no," because even with infinite love, the answer, sometimes, is still "no."

Wrestling with My Guilt And Losing

When you lose someone to suicide or drugs, when they push the self-destruct button on their lives, it's much like a blundering suicide bomber has invaded a family gathering.

While they are the only ones who die, what's left are the walking wounded. We shuffle around one another trying not to step on someone's feelings and all suffering from the same emotional trauma. For the most part, we don't talk about our pain, or in this kind of death our guilt, because we know everyone else is hurting, and so what has already wrecked us becomes a wedge in our family.

We're all mourning the death of someone else -- a son, a grandson, a brother, a nephew, a stepson -- and at the same time each and every one of us thinks 1) that we should have been able to do something to save them or 2) someone else in the family should have done something differently. It tears us apart in a hundred different ways that go beyond the fairly simple fact of a death.

This morning I realized that often times by putting my thoughts into words I've been better able to deal with them, even if I wind up being repetitious, so I'm taking a stab at guilt -- beyond anger to remorse and a black tide that wants to swallow me whole.

Rationally, Ethan was an adult, free-minded individual who made his own choices. Telling myself that simple fact over and over does not change how I feel.

There are times when I'm drowning in regrets over things that, even had I done them differently, come with no guarantee of a different place today. Hindsight is not, as they say, 20/20.

So to get them off my chest, to perhaps find a measure of freedom from them, here's what I regret today, the questions that plague me:

Why did I let his father off the hook? No child support and no visits. Why didn't I force him into one and nag him into the other? Two weekends when Ethan was big enough to care hardly count as being a father. They lived only a few miles apart the last couple of years, yet... no, this is where I want to blame someone else and this is my guilt I'm wallowing in.

Why didn't I realize he was different in ways that needed help? Why didn't I recognize that the hesitancy and reluctance to enter a lot of situations meant there was something going on in his head that could have been corrected? Why didn't I force him to take some of the Duke TIP programs that would have stretched his mind beyond local friends and the boundaries of his school and home? Why didn't I insist on the AP classes when he started high school, so that he might have found more excitement in learning? Why didn't I do more to broaden his horizons beyond the two close friends who later traveled the path of addiction with him? (And now I remember encouraging him to go home with other kids after school and during the summer, I remember the arguments over AP classes, I remember how quickly he fled from the TIP brochure, how he sat silent during counseling sessions. I remember his joy in excelling at skateboarding with his friends, wild sleepovers when they were as normal as boys could be with dirt and sweat and random mischief.)

Why didn't I realize when he called me at work and I was on deadline and what he wanted to talk endlessly about wasn't even important to him, that there was probably something on the autism spectrum going on in his head? Why didn't I see that neediness for me and his general asocial behavior as a symptom of something more than just a teen uncertain about his direction and unwilling to follow the herd? Why didn't the counselors he did spend time with see through his brilliant bullshit and help me find the real problem?

Why didn't I realize that his friend wasn't experimenting with drugs alone? Why didn't I keep his room clean so I would have quickly found the evidence of what he was doing? Why couldn't I find the time to spend more time with him, even if it meant forcing him out of his world and into mine more often? Why didn't I learn to play the video games he liked once he cast aside the ones I could handle? (And I remember the fights, trying to clean his room and learn the games I couldn't understand, the frustration of watching who he was becoming.)

Why didn't I find a way to make him come home and do what he should have been doing at 16? Taking driver's ed, going to class, getting a job? (I tend to forget how hard I tried when I'm on my guilt trip.)

Why didn't I make him go to rehab? Never mind that I know it doesn't work until the person going wants it to work, and he claimed he never wanted to stop and never asked for help. At least I'd have the bills to assuage my guilt.

Why did I make him move out after graduating and finally getting his license? Why did I think making him take responsibility for himself would help? Why was I afraid I'd wind up like some of the murders I covered with a grieving son crying because he was drunk or high and shot his mother? Why do my most vivid memories often include his rage and my fear, and my uncertainty still over what might have happened?

Why couldn't I make him see what a wonderful, beautiful, delightful person he was when he was drug free? Why wasn't that enough to make him want to become that person all the time?

Why didn't I see him every chance I had? When he was in jail? When he lived only 10-15 minutes away? When I could have seen him or held him, why didn't I go out of my way to make it happen?

Why didn't I drive and get him more and take him to do things? Even if it meant a 30-minute drive and him deciding he didn't want to at the last minute, or not even coming to the door, so that I could just turn around, at least I'd know I tried.

Why didn't I say yes, I'd buy him anything he wanted for Christmas, even though he was virtually homeless and needed to be worrying about something other than a PS4, the last time we talked? He still wouldn't have gotten it, but that last conversation would have held a different place in my memory.

Why didn't I say do a welfare check or have it done myself when my mom was worried about him nearly a week before he was found dead? He was probably already dead, but at least I could have seen him to say goodbye.

Why couldn't love save him? Why couldn't I? Why weren't my prayers enough for God to heal him? Was I so bad that what I sought couldn't be given? Did I do something that punished my child in his life and me with his death?

There it is, my guilty questions that I pull out regularly for self flagellation. When I look at them rationally, there was really very little I could do differently. The boy/man I was dealing with wasn't some malleable person to be easily pushed and pulled in the direction I wanted him to go. I wanted him to think for himself, to be an individual, to make his own choices so they would be his to celebrate or regret. I did not know that although he proclaimed himself a loner, he was in fact a part of a very small, unhealthy herd and craved their support and companionship even more than being true to himself. I often think now that the failure to be true to himself was what killed him, what drove him to escape himself and travel a dark and ultimately lonely path to destruction.

When I look back at these things I have to remind myself that they didn't happen in vacuum where only he and I existed. When he was young, I had a tough demanding job that meant long hours but also kept a roof over our heads and food on the table. Then I was struggling with losing my career and trying to build a business to help pay the bills I'd always had money to pay. For years now I've worked 7 days a week and had no vacation. I've become a grandmother and been responsible for the workday care of three small children. I have a home, a husband, a yard, and in good years a garden.

I didn't know the hourglass of his life was going to run out before I had time to get through the other stress in my life. I always thought he'd get tired of the way he was living, instead of deciding that was the way he was going to live until he died.

I never thought he'd be gone at 23 and that all the love and life and laughter that he brought to every family gathering, that he could muster up for special occasions, would be gone.

I don't want to admit my powerlessness over life and death, and so instead I choose to wrestle with my guilt occasionally. I hope one day to put more of it away, but there will always be a bit left because I am his mother, and a mother takes care of her children, somehow, beyond rhyme or reason or even rationality.

That's the legacy of his death that I'll carry to my grave.