It Went Without Saying (eBook)

ONE

The Beast Is Real

JOYCE: On the day Jamie was born, I promised her I would protect her from the evils of the world. I would be her shield from harm. What I came to realize was that I could never protect her from the demons she created in her mind—the demons that became real and almost consumed her.

When Jamie was ten, she became enthralled with the movie Poltergeist, a horror movie about a beast who took a little girl, Carol Ann, from her living room while she watched TV. Jamie loved that movie. She watched it over and over. She was particularly taken by the strange little psychic who helped the parents rescue their daughter from the beast. The woman had a voice so peculiar that one had to strain to understand what she was saying. Jamie could do a perfect imitation of that voice and she loved to tease me by mimicking one of the psychic’s speeches.

She would say, “I don’t know whatever’s over this house, but it’s strong enough to punch a hole in this world and take your daughter away from you. It keeps Carol Ann close to it and away from the spectral light. It lies to her, it tells her things only a child would understand. It has been using her to restrain the others. To her, it is simply another child. To us, it is the beast.”

“Stop, Jamie,” I’d say. “It’s horrible and scary.” But it was a little prank she loved to play. And we could laugh and dismiss it because, after all, it was just a movie. It wasn’t real. But something extremely powerful and terrifying really did reach into our lives and take our daughter away from us. And there was no way to dismiss it. When Jamie was 14, a beast took hold of her life—and it was real, very, very real.

The Beast had a name. Its name was Addiction.

As I look at Jamie now, I can hardly believe how close The Beast came to taking her forever, how it almost destroyed her. It is painful to acknowledge how she lied and stole and cheated and hurt everyone around her. Mostly, it’s painful to remember how often she hurt herself while we tried in vain to save her. And while it’s almost unbearable to reveal this, I must admit that at the end, we started to plan her funeral.

I always believed that love was powerful enough to cure anything. I thought that if you loved someone with all your heart, that love would be reason enough to want to live. I deeply believed my love was strong enough to keep my daughter alive. But I was wrong. The Beast that was consuming her didn’t respond to that love. In fact, it was repelled by our love, as a vampire is repelled by light. At the height of Jamie’s struggle with The Beast, she told us our love was killing her. The more we told her how much we cared for her, the louder The Beast spoke to her of unworthiness.

So we came to the point of surrender. The strongest tool I knew seemed to have no power at all. I finally realized that if I really believed in unconditional love, I would have to surrender to it. I would have to surrender to what I understood to be God’s will. I had to find the strength to believe that our love is only a shadow of a more perfect love. I had to trust that she would be loved in ways I could not imagine. It didn’t come easily, but I finally began to accept the fact that my love wasn’t keeping her alive. I finally understood that only she and God could decide her destiny. The only choice I had to make was how I would walk through her choice with love in my heart.

Over time, I came to know that I was just as powerless as Jamie was over her addiction. It was not something I wanted to admit, but I had to. When I took the first step and admitted I had no power to save her, Jamie was free to decide for herself if she would live.

For all those years, I thought my actions, my will and my dedication to her were keeping her alive. I thought it was my intention for her to be well that was giving her life. Now I know it wasn’t. It was a higher power.

JOHN: I never dreamed it could happen again. I thought it had already occurred and I was free of it—like having the measles and not having to worry about getting them again because you’ve already had them. That is why I was so surprised when it took over our lives. When it did, I did not want to know.

I had already been through the ravages of alcohol and its impact on the lives of a family. I wanted to avoid a replay of that scenario and somehow create this fantasy of a family that I had wished I had when I was young. I was determined to have that family, despite the experiences that were indicating that something was amiss.

I find my childhood experience of alcohol difficult to describe. I know I hated it. It always got in the way. It overpowered me and particularly my father. It came between us without ever saying a word. I resented the way he greeted the Melrose Whiskey when he walked in the door after a hard day’s work. I yearned for him to pick me up or stoop down to me and hold me in his arms the way his hands cupped the shot glass as the whiskey seemed to please his senses. I ached for him to look into my eyes and say, “Let’s play some ball” or “Let’s just sit together for a while.” I became jealous of the potion that seemed to ease him. It seemed to give him something that I could not. That was the beginning of “I am not enough.” I carried that sadness with me for a very long time.

When alcohol revisited my home during Jamie’s adolescence, one might think I would have recognized it early and put an end to it by saying, “Not on my watch and not in my house.” I didn’t. It played itself out in a similar pattern.

I was unprepared to meet the challenge. Ever since I was young, I had watched how my mother coped with this intruder. She made excuses, minimized its damage, found the good in the man and remained afraid to confront the situation. Unbeknownst to me, my mind was already encoding a road map of how to deal with this situation if and when it was to occur in my life.

When the unwanted guest appeared at our doorstep, my mind automatically went to that imprinted mental road map. The important thing to know is that my mind did not think about how to close the door on this guest. It went to how to deal with the guest while it was in my house. It went downhill fast from there.

It got so bad at the end of Jamie’s using that we forced ourselves to face the possibility that she could die. I remember being terrified of the phone’s ringing late at night, because I was sure that it would be the call telling us she was dead. As with Joyce, I knew that we had to let go. I had to let go of the things I wanted for her, my hopes and dreams for her life. Most important, I had to let go of my fears. I was so afraid of life without her. I didn’t want to live with the relentless judgment I would place on myself for her death. I told myself that if I could let go of that terror, I just might be able to have a moment of peace. From that peace I could build another moment of peace.

Something Was Not Quite Right

JAMIE: I was born in love. I was brought up with love. I was surrounded by love. My parents, my parents’ friends—everyone loved me. I was loved enough for three people. From the outside looking in, there was nothing wrong. I had a really great life. But from the inside looking out, there was always something wrong. There was always something missing in me—something that wasn’t quite right. Something was telling me I wasn’t okay, that I was different. From a very early age, I didn’t like who I was, and I remember it so clearly. I was an only child, and it had a huge effect on me. Because both of my parents worked, I felt I was alone, even when I wasn’t physically alone. It wasn’t something that was obvious to the adults around me.

I used to set the table for an extra person—for the brother or sister that everyone else had and I didn’t. Every year, I’d ask for a brother or sister for Christmas.

I look back now and I think I wanted a sibling so badly because I thought that if there were someone else, my parents wouldn’t always know that I was to blame when something went wrong. More important, I wanted someone who understood me, someone I could live with and understand back. I also wanted so badly to love and be loved, I thought that a sibling would help. I was already looking for outside answers to fill an inside void.

When I was young, I didn’t know how to talk about how I felt; so I kept it all inside. Whenever I got upset or sad or mad, I would shut down. As a good friend says, I went into lockdown. I could feel myself stuffing the pain way down deep inside. I became very good at making it all disappear. My parents would ask if there was something wrong and I would always say no. But I could contain my feelings for only so long. The next time a stressful situation came up, I would explode. My anger would be so strong that I would become destructive and hurt myself and others.

So the cycle started early. I would shut down, contain my feelings until I exploded and became destructive. Then the self-loathing would start and I would repent over and over again. That behavior was well anchored by the time I was two.

In recovery, I can see that I behaved as an adult exactly as I had as a child. If something was wrong, I ignored it, covered it up and hid it— whatever it took to avoid feeling. When the behavior became wrapped around alcohol and drugs, it was recognizable as addictive behavior.

What I know now is that addiction is simply a behavior that covers up the...