Someone special passed away recently. Not having seen them for about 18 years didn’t diminish the shock and the pain.
Grief is always surprising, the way it ebbs and flows and hits in different ways, distinct only to the person impacted. The sadness that enveloped felt secondary. As in, I felt it for their family and their beautiful kids. The kind of grief that feels not quite yours to hold, but the weight of it still surprises you. The weight of it still shocks you with its breathless despair.
What happened next was perhaps not surprising. The well worn path is never far, no matter how close or how far you feel you’ve traveled from it. Often it feels like only stepping slightly sideways. As if you were always walking parallel to the path, just in case you needed it. Or perhaps like a half turn – when you thought you’d travel far enough away from the path – you’re surprised at it’s proximity behind you. As if, as far as you’ve travelled, it wasn’t enough.
Still it surprised me. And if I’m honest, really scared me. And if I’m really, really honest, truly began well before this.
How easily I slipped back into the well traveled parade with startling velocity and intensity. How seamless it felt to succumb. How it appeared as if nothing had ever really changed. How the helplessness of that realization felt like a new kind of submission. What was the point of trying when it was always this close.
Excuses. Excuses. Excuses, these are. And yet – it’s the deepest fear of anyone in, approaching or even contemplating any type of recovery.
What if something happens and I can’t come back this time?
Then someone else passed away. Someone more public. Someone who had only just published a memoir a year before detailing their own journey with addiction.
Matthew Perry’s announcement hit me in the gut in a whole new way. His passing hurled at me the exact fear I had been dancing from and ignoring and pretending wasn’t lingering there. Whispers of the ghost always lurking in the basement.
Here we are, just a half-step from the path. Always. Some paths are more well tread and more deeply scarred from the travel. Some are just starting to have smooth, slippery edges, the groves gently sliding you back like wheels in a bumpy rut. But we are, always, closer than we think. The glass of wine we enjoy after a hard day, that evolves into a shocking bottle in the most imperceivably gentle and seemingly natural way. We are all nearly there, if it’s there at all. We are all one horrible piece of news from it.
Laura McKowen explained this far better than I could in her recent essay regarding Matthew’s death. She explained the visceral response she had to his memoir the year before and how that response made so much more sense after his passing. She writes:
What I understand now is that my intense reaction came from the fear of what lives inside of me, too—of what was and is still possible for me, too—on the other side of an invisible line. It’s nearly impossible to describe addiction to someone who hasn’t been there, and it’s equally impossible to describe what it’s like to be in recovery. Because it’s not as though once you’re sober, you join the world and live like everyone else; you don’t. In recovery, you are both more alive and closer to death than other people all the time because your particular plot of land, the place where you live, is affixed to the edge of a canyon. If you lose sight of that fact for too long or at the wrong time—which is easier to do than it should be—you risk falling in. This is just the truth of it.
Laura McKowen, Matthew Perry: A few thoughts from the edge of the canyon, Nov 3, 2023
And I felt it too. His story had a tragedy to it that felt far too familiar. Too recent. His description of his journey seemed soaked with the weight of a struggle from which he was not truly free. And as she also said: we don’t know his story. Perhaps he had been sober for a very long time. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he had everything to live for, and all the resources and reasons to stay, but just didn’t make it out in time.
And anyone who knows how that feels, felt it in their breath-stopping addiction soul.
This isn’t about an aha moment. This is about continuing to be open and honest and soul crushingly vulnerable about the fact that: I don’t know if I’ll make it out in time. I don’t know if I will, instead, become another sad story.
But I know I have had a sprinkling of amazing sober nights. Nights with a new found clarity about how much better they were. Crystalline moments of rapt attention to my surroundings, basking in the joy of being present. A recent one in particular, I spent small glorious moments looking into my daughter’s eyes as she told me a very long story at bedtime. I listened and watched in her eyes the excitement of having my attention. The joy of her mom being present.
Her eyes were bright blue and sparkling and she smiled at parts of her story, and held her hand over her mouth when she laughed at the punchline, as she always does when she laughs, with her eyes half closed and her nose crinkled.
And I told myself, as I got lost in her eyes instead of the story that I could not recount if I tried:
You do not want to miss this.