there was a cold rain falling straight down!

November 8th, 1988. My father delivered me to Maple Cottage Detox in New Westminster. We stood outside the big old oak doors and waited for someone to come and admit me. On the grounds of Woodlands School, this place looked ugly and lonely and sturdy. All these years later I am able, barely, to consider what this moment must have been like for him...

He was seventy one years of age then, and likely hoping his third born son would be, consistently, a source of pride. Of joy. We didn't speak as we stood in the rain. We didn't need to speak. I was broken, and my father, too, must have felt something torn in this sad shared event.

I was less than one hundred and twenty pounds. My last stop before getting sober was not alcohol. It was methadone. I had been drinking street-bought methadone for months. With orange juice. I had been dancing the dance of I-don't want-to-face up. Just as fast as I could. Now it was time to pay the band.

My marriage was done. A brief affair-but no regrets because it allowed for the birth of the baby who is now a beautiful and bright young woman named Megan. Some dumb and poorly articulated dream I had for family life was ashes in my mouth and at my feet. It's twenty two years later and in that time I've gained a measure of understanding. Then...

Just cold cold rain and fear and grief.

There was such sickness in making my way back to the world; back into my body, back to some semblance of feeling and reasonably clear thinking. Months and months of sleeplessness and the blackest depression. All the while, slowly, imperceptibly, progress, roots of a better life making their way down into the earth. It takes years to recover and it is never done. The doing of it. The living of it. And in my case the road has not been straight. There have been relapses and there have been re-fresher courses in those bleak institutions where we go to rid ourselves of the poison.

There is a saying: addiction leads us to the institution, to the graveyard, to insanity.

Is addiction, to alcohol or the other substances, a disease? Of the body? Of the mind? Of the spirit? There is no blood test for addiction. There is just a script, a slow growing cancer that reaches into every corner of your existence. Is it a disease? I think so...

It's twenty two years later along the path. Enumerating my blessings, the grace and good fortune re-gained, is not a blog post, it's a book. Yesterday, on Facebook, some folks I know wished me well, and so this short piece of writing is a thank you. And a remembering. This is the week of lest we forget.

If you are suffering, if you know someone who is suffering, well...there is hope and another option. One day at a time...