Battle Mortale

Posted by fxckfeelings on April 1, 2013

Since we now live in a mostly-online world where everything is a loss/”fail” or victory/”for the win,” it’s normal to regard death as the ultimate fail since we’d give almost anything to prevent it from happening to ourselves and those we love (although if it happens to our worst enemies, it’s a win situation, even if most of us wouldn’t even admit that in Youtube comments). In reality, we disrespect our humanity by considering ourselves defeatable by something we don’t control, and what we do with ourselves and our family and friends when someone is dying or otherwise afflicted is what makes us great/gives us p0wnage of mortality, at least for a little while.
–Dr. Lastname

After 15 years of homelessness, prison, jails, rehabs, psych meds, medication management, horrific poly substance abuse, and occasional hopeful stints of sobriety, our son overdosed two months ago. He was 30 years old.

All the years of fear, guilt and depravity notwithstanding, his father and I miss him terribly. I won’t go into the efforts (financial, emotional, time) to get/keep him sober that consumed our entire family for the last decade. Lets just say our son’s use of his drug of choice, heroin, has been the 24/7 of our lives. I could write a book about police cars in the driveway, family sessions I’ve sat through with green rehab “counselors” who appeared to be clinging tenuously to not using themselves, and the finer points of being frisked by zealous prison guards.

Some days, like today, all I can remember is what a horrible slog it’s been. Other days I remember my son’s big, kind heart when he was himself, his ability to read a room, and the way he only talked when he had something to say.

I’ve examined our family life over and over, and I had pretty much come to grips with the past, and the present. The future was plainly jails, institutions, or death. I knew all this, and had many sleepless nights to steel myself for the inevitable.

Of course when the inevitable arrives, it is a total sledgehammer to the heart and mind. The worst part is this: his father and I had kicked him out of our home (again) where he was living (again) because he was shooting Xanax. He actually got the Rx for Xanax from the same doctor that prescribed his Suboxone (why heroin addicts should not be prescribed Benzodiazopines is another post). Later that night he died of an overdose from a lethal mix of Xanax and heroin.

So, he is dead, after we pushed him out in an argument. No goodbyes, no “I love you,” just unkind and hurtful words.

In a way I feel this was our son’s final selfish act, leaving me a lifetime of guilt and replaying that night he left over and over in my mind. I feel I’ll go crazy if it doesn’t stop. I don’t want to live this way for the rest of my natural life.

[Please note: We usually edit submissions for length and clarity, but we felt this was so well-written that it should be left almost entirely intact. If the author ever follows through on her threat to write a book, we would read it.]

The usual way we judge ourselves as parents is by the way we help our kids survive and grow, even if we can’t make them happy. That standard is usually fair, unless your child suffers from a disease that nobody and nothing control, from doctors and medication, to the child or the parents who feel responsibility for his/her survival.

The toughest thing in the world then is to judge yourself properly when you still can’t stop your son from dying, unhappily, in the midst of drug abuse and conflict. It’s a mix of every kind of hell, because you feel you’ve failed, that he failed, and that the universe has failed everyone involved.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where nice kids get addicted to horrible drugs, nice parents can’t save them, and part of the illness of addiction is that the kids fuck up again and again, and you can’t keep them at home when they do. One of the few things you can do to help them, and preserve the safety of your home, is to push kids out, at least for a day or two, when their behavior is out of control.

Like every last-ditch treatment, it’s risky, but less so than the alternative. While you’re probably angry when you do it, you don’t do it out of anger; you make him leave because it’s the only thing that might help. Professionals in a sober house do the same sort of intervention, and for the same reason. Ultimately, you have to honestly consider whether you would judge yourself any more positively if he’d died peacefully of an overdose in your house after you’d wished one another a pleasant good-night.

You would probably be racking your brain trying to figure out what signs you’d missed, or whether you could have saved him by checking on him before you went to bed, or whether you could have gotten through to him by pushing him out of the house and being less “co-dependent.” When your son dies, you are going to second-guess yourself forever, but just because you instinctively feel guilt doesn’t mean you did anything wrong.

Let’s put aside the unavoidable self-torture and consider the values that matter when you care for a son with a terminal illness. If you ask yourself whether you hung in there and continued to love him in spite of many failed treatments and legal crises, the answer is obviously yes. You’d have the same answer if you consider whether you were able to preserve in your heart the sense of who he was, as a person, apart from his addiction. As often happens, death didn’t let you share loving feelings with him, but you did something far more important: you loved him through your patience and willingness to tolerate pain without end if it could do him some good.

What you should now confront is not the sadness of losing him, but the horrible self-judgments you’re inflicting on yourself. If this self-judgment is part of the addiction disease, it’s the part of the disease you must now fight, because you don’t deserve it; you deserve great respect.

After all, you don’t judge your son and consider him evil and unworthy for being overtaken by a horrible disease; you know that he fought hard but was ultimately outgunned. Since you fought by his side, you should give yourself the same respect for doing your best against an impossible foe.

Honor his memory, and the heroic fight you engaged in as a family, by rejecting addiction’s corrosive, negative thinking and by respecting who he really was and how you never quit. That way, you achieve the most meaningful possible success; giving his life, and your shared struggle, meaning.

STATEMENT:
“My son’s death will never stop haunting me with a sense of total failure and guilt, but those are simply symptoms of addiction that I must continue to fight in order to preserve the deeper truths about his loving personality and our love for him.”

Now I’m losing my battle with cancer, I can’t face anyone. When my first malignancy was discovered several years ago, I was determined to beat the disease, so I was proud of the treatment I endured, and I made it my business to let people know that I was a cancer survivor—not a victim—and raised a lot of money for research. I know my family was proud of me. I asked for no pity and I pushed myself as hard as I could. Then, three months ago, I learned the cancer had come back and there’s no real viable course of treatment available, and it’s destroyed me. All the shame and self-pity I thought I had beaten have come back to haunt me and I can barely drag myself to work. My goal is to stop feeling like such a loser— I don’t want to give up, and I can’t believe that’s my only choice.

You’d think that cancer is the one disease that’s hardest to blame yourself for since most cancers have nothing to do with hard-living, bad decisions, or “not taking care of your health.” They’re a perfect example of the way that life often sucks and, when it does, part of its essential sucky-ness is its random unfairness; one day you’re planning your career, the next day you’ve got cancer and it’s all about getting treatment, feeling like shit, and wondering what you want to do if your time is limited.

Unfortunately, however, it’s basic human nature to make believe we have control of awful things, even if that means we have to blame ourselves for them, which is why we define victory over cancer as survival and urge people to take pride in doing so. While it’s a good way of encouraging them to tolerate painful treatment and raise money for research, it’s an unfair comparison, because when a large, powerful army randomly decides to destroy one unarmed guy, that’s not warfare, it’s just a brutal assault.

Sure, people are armed with the best cancer treatments, but they don’t always work and no one controls who’s going to be unlucky, so, once you adopt this language of war, victory, and survivorship, death means you lose. It’s bad that cancer can take our lives, but we make it much worse by defining such deaths as defeat when the fight was so unfair to begin with.

Change your definition of what it means to win this war by thinking about everything that’s important in your life, other than cancer, and make sure you include the basics, like friends, family, work (if it matters), passions, and being a good person. Then ask yourself how well you’ve pursued these basic values in spite of cancer, considering only the things that cancer made difficult to accomplish and ignoring what it rendered impossible. That’s how you measure victory.

Remember, you don’t beat cancer by living forever or dying from something else; you beat it the way you always beat death, by finding values to live for and pursuing them in spite of the way life is fucked up. The more fucked up life is, the greater your achievement when you do something that matters.

That’s why oncologists don’t go home depressed every night, and good friends don’t regret hanging out with you when you’re sick. There’s nothing that warms people more and is better at reminding them what’s important than being around a good person who doesn’t let dying keep them from being the same good person.

So stop telling yourself the unfair lie that you’ve lost your personal war on cancer. In reality, by continuing to stay connected and doing something meaningful, despite your fatal illness, you win a bigger battle than most of us have fought that day. Every day you prevent cancer from interfering with your values and self-respect, you’re a hero.

STATEMENT:
“I can’t help feeling weak and helpless now that I know I’ll never be cancer-free, but I never let cancer stop me from forging ahead with my life and that will always be my goal: to live fully until I die, from whatever cause, at whatever age. I’ve had to deal with many other limitations I couldn’t control, and this is one more. When it comes to what I do control, I’m determined to give it my all. That’s my gift to everyone who’s in the same boat, which, in the end, everyone is.”