Witness to Addiction

Jon left us a perplexing legacy. He was brilliantly intelligent, wickedly funny, creative, witty, sensitive, generous, extremely loving and tender, loyal, helpful, physically strong and capable, mechanically skilled, interested in the world and the universe, insightful, and welcoming. He was also deceptive, undependable, erratic, maddening, sometimes a thief and a bully, and an accomplished liar. He did not always fulfill basic obligations. His addiction made him an enigma. Those of us who loved him stood on shifting sand, never knowing which Jon we were going to encounter or whether we would see him at all.
Jon’s early teenage curiosity about drugs became a fascination that grew to an unhealthy habit that metastasized into an obsession that eventually brought on a ravenous and fatal illness. Drugs, which he thought would expand his consciousness and his world, instead constricted his life and trapped him. He took drugs, and then they took him. By the time drugs were not pleasurable or desirable to Jon anymore, his brain was so used to them, so dependent, so mis-wired, that he had to keep taking them. Jon was extremely sick when he died. Over the next year, I would read a great deal about new knowledge being discovered in brain science. Jon’s body and brain had been damaged by addiction in ways that today are physically measurable and traceable in addicted people. Neurons, conditioned by drugs, leapt across synapses in his brain in new patterns that became so entrenched and habituated that deep cravings for more drugs would never leave him. He became a tormented and tortured man. Essentially, he lost his freedom of choice, and no longer owned himself.
Jon never bargained for drugs to win nor believed they could claim him so thoroughly. Living as a carefree, fun-loving bachelor after high school, he often told us that he would settle down at some point, get married, and get a “real” job. He estimated that these things would happen by the time he was 35 – a horizon that then seemed to him very far away. Meanwhile, however, he said he wanted to have as many adventures as possible, including some experimentation with drugs and alcohol. Nearly three years before his death, when his drug use had morphed into addiction and Jon had completed a successful stint in inpatient adult treatment, I talked to him about my fears after a close young friend died of an overdose. “I am quite a resilient strong person,” I wrote to him. “But there is one thing I am not able to do – stand at the grave of one of my children. No – I cannot do it. I CANNOT bury you so don't even skirt around the edges of things that can kill you .”
He responded that he would be fine – he was in control. “Mom I can’t take the image of you reflecting on [our friend’s] death and thinking of me. PLEASE don’t do that. It may all seem reckless and crazy to you but there are strictly adhered to precautions. And backups for the redundancies. It may be hard to believe but I was always very careful. I value my life Mom…I hate the thought of you worrying. It kills me...I promise you I will be ok…I don’t want to be an addict…I’ll be ok.”
However, he wasn’t OK and “it” wasn’t OK. “It” (his addiction) clawed at him as a savage beast. It stung him viciously. There are no precautions and redundancies in drug use. Jon was carried away on a flood tide of evil that he always thought he could control, but which he found to be wild, unrestrainable, and overwhelming. He talked about the malevolence of drugs many times, but he did not realize the strength of the riptide that would take him under. Foolish choices made in immaturity combined with the chance factors of susceptible genes and body type to produce in him a fatal compulsion to pursue poison. His death was profane, as was the addiction that caused it.
For many years prior to Jon’s death, our family, Lara, and other close friends tried to warn him. We pleaded, threatened, helped, withdrew help, lectured, brought in professionals, reasoned, prayed, and sometimes just begged him to stop. We did everything under the sun, and in doing so, lived a journey with him that was at once remarkable, terrifying, wondrous, confounding, and essentially beyond belief. None of us understood addiction nor walked in his shoes when he went into dark parking lots or sought out people with slumped shoulders and evasive eyes. “Why?” we would ask. “Why not come back to us – to life and health and dependable schedules and a daylight life?” He had once lived inside my body and my heart had beat for his; however, the fact that I had had him, did not mean that I could have him. I was never in control, even when I thought I was. Even as I stood in his path waving my arms and jumping up and down frantically, I could not stop him as he ran past the red flags. Jon had an outsized illness, and, in grotesque bites, it ate him alive. Every one of us who loved him would have given all we have if it could have been different. The hardest truth for a parent, I learned, is that love is not enough. Love can’t fix a fatal disease, reverse the laws of biology and nature, or stop a raging infection in its tracks. If it could, Jon would still be here, for we loved him that much.

After Jon left us, my heart was just as blown away and destroyed as his, yet mine still beat and I had to function…I resolved I would try to write his story – to be his “story holder,” to honor him, although never to honor some of his choices…I would bear witness to the horror and the joys we had lived...I would ponder and preserve what I had seen, learned, felt, and experienced. My remembrance would be fierce. Perhaps, I hoped, our story could help to lessen the stigma of addiction and suicide, bring about the recognition of addiction as a medical brain disease, praise Jesus Christ, and have lessons for others.