Substance Abuse - Not A Personal Choice

The call came in at 1:35 AM.   

There was a time not so many years ago that a call at this hour would have brought a chill to my heart as I tentatively reached for the phone with both fear and desperation rising in my throat.  Emotions that any parent of a young person struggling with addiction knows all too well.  But since David's death from substance abuse some seven years ago I no longer fear these nocturnal disturbances to my slumber because they hold no power over me.  I have had the worst from life in losing a child and so I gladly let the call go to voicemail to be retrieved in the light and the hope of a new day.

The next morning, as I sat on the edge of the bed listening to the message from the night before, I knew from the first halting words that heartache and suffering were at the core of the call.  It was the voice of a close friend of Dave's calling to tell us that the 16 year old younger brother of a mutual friend had been killed in a car accident the day before.  And while the scope of this tragedy was considerable for Dave's friend it was really more the painful memories it conjured up within him, goodbyes left unsaid, self-recriminations over lost chances, unspoken words that haunted him still ...all these had prompted his call. 

Now after seven years they all came cascading out...dislodged by a new grief that caught him unawares and took him back to a time and a place that he had kept from everyone and especially from himself.  He reminded me of the day at Dave's "calling" when he kept getting in and out of the receiving line, afraid to face us because he would not know what to say.  He recalled that I had finally chided him by saying that he could not just keep getting in and out of the line and that I finally took him into my arms and said simply "don't worry...there are no words" and walked him to the casket so he could say his good-bye.  He shared that he had never been able to express how deeply David's death had affected him and that he thought of him every morning when he looked at the tattoo he'd had done in his memory.  We talked for an hour and at the end agreed that it was only the beginning of many more conversations.   

I often speak of the many truths I have learned from David's death. One of them is that people who suffer from the disease of addiction often defend their actions by proclaiming over and over that it is a personal choice they make to abuse drugs and alcohol, that it their right to do so and that their actions affect no one other than themselves.  Of course they are wrong..their choices affect those they are closet to and who they love the most.  And when they run out of time, like Dave did, it affects their friends and loved ones forever.   

When I hung up the phone that morning not so long ago I also marveled at one of the other unspoken truths which I have known in my heart for a long time, that so many of David's friends still hold his memory as a great treasure just as we do.