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Introduction

Most people who compulsively seek to escape through drugs do so because they find their consciousness unbearable. That’s the real source of addiction.

—Maia Szalavitz

My son was born into a family cursed with substance abuse. I use the words addict and alcoholic often in this collection, but it’s not without awareness that those words often color too deeply how we see someone. If I say my son and I come from a family of alcoholics and addicts I must also say that we come from a family of workers: carpenters and builders, waitresses, warriors and mechanics, gardeners. We come from a family of politicians and jocks, musicians, book-lovers, drug dealers and dreamers. We come from a family of good cooks and risk-takers, a southern family as proud of its southern roots as it is of its dark handsomeness. But the thing that ties most of us together is a propensity for drink and drugs.

I was raised in New Orleans, a city known for its excesses, a city I left at 27, moving to Dallas with my son’s dad before he was born, hoping to escape the fate of others in my family: an alcoholic father dead at 59 of cirrhosis, a brother dead at 23 of a drug overdose, another brother at 41; an aunt dead of overdose at the same age; a nephew dead in his twenties from risk-taking behavior; grandfathers and grandmothers, and great grandfathers and great grandmothers who lived shortened lives, some developing cirrhosis in the throes of alcoholism. A brother-in-law addicted to crack, stabbed to death during a drug deal gone bad. Other relatives are still active substance abusers.

It didn’t help to move. Gray, my only son, born in 1984 in Dallas, died thirty years later, in 2014, of a heroin overdose. He’d struggled for many years with alcohol and drug abuse. I wrestled myself with both drugs and alcohol, though alcohol was the hardest of the two to give up. My last drink was in January of 2010. Although I used drugs in my youth, mostly marijuana, LSD, miscellaneous pills when I could get them, and cocaine, culminating with spending part of a year shooting up cocaine, I, like most, walked away from it. I do not know exactly why I walked away from it, though, given the family predilection, but the experience of shooting up dope has given me great compassion for those who do not walk away. My greater problem was alcohol, which I used for many years to become someone I could not be without it; three essays in this collection, “To Drink a Glacier,” “Call of the Bagpipes,” and “The Third Step,” illuminate my continuing struggle with alcohol.

No one needs to tell me that genes have complex roles in addiction. I can see it with my own eyes and feel it in my own body. The question I ask myself every day, though, is how did I manage to survive, and my son not. The title essay of this collection, “Fifty Miles,” examines that question, though the reader will find no hard-and-fast answers in that essay nor in any of the other essays.

So why read these essays if I offer no answers, when our culture clearly seems to need them?

It’s hard to imagine anyone living in the United States who doesn’t know of, or has not been affected by, the current epidemic of opioid overdose deaths. A surfeit of numbers and statistics have been offered to bring the crisis home to the general population: 142 Americans die every day of drug overdoses; more people die of overdoses than die in traffic accidents; overdoses are the leading cause of death for those under 50 in the United States; heroin overdoses tripled from 2010-2015; drug overdoses claimed the lives of 72,000 Americans in 2017, a 10% increase from the previous year. The White House panel charged with examining the opioid epidemic asked the President in 2017 to declare a national public health emergency, stating that “America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks.”

Statistics and documentary reportage are helpful, but they are not enough, as William Carlos Williams reminds us in this well-known excerpt from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower:”

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

While I respect the work of statisticians and journalists, and have often relied on their work in my own research, it’s my belief that the current opioid crisis is part of a larger spiritual crisis. I understand addiction as a kind of cancer of the spirit, and keep in mind Carl Jung’s observation that alcoholism (and, I would add, addiction) is at least partially caused by a spiritual thirst. The “merely rational” will never fully address problems of desire for Spirit that one sees in the alcoholic or addict. This is one reason why, for me, lyric essays, poetry, and literature speak more fully to the thing that stole my son, brothers, and father, than statistics and journalism. To heal from those kinds of losses, we need stories and poetry. As a writer, a recovering alcoholic, and a grieving mother, I need lyricism to feed my own spiritual need.

Many books and articles have been published in the last few years focusing on addiction, and offering solutions based in science, including, most notably, Gabor Maté’s flawed but compelling In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, and Maia Szalavitz’s insightful Unbroken Brain, both of which challenge traditional notions of addiction and treatment. One of my hobbies, as sad as it may seem, has become to read memoirs about addiction and recovery. Enough of these memoirs have been published in recent years to fill several book shelves, including my own favorite, Michael Clune’s lyric memoir of his addiction, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, although I also admire David Carr’s more narrative Night of the Gun. Perhaps the memoir that comes closest to my own project is David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, for obvious reasons, although Sheff’s story is structured, unlike mine, more as a cohesive narrative. His choice to privilege narrative makes sense, since he comes from a journalistic background, while my background is poetry, thus my bias towards lyricism. Sheff’s son, Nic, survived to write his own two memoirs of addiction, Tweak, and We All Fall Down.

My story is not like any of these memoirs, however, in that my son did not live. He could not write his own memoir because he did not survive to write it. I could not write about his road to recovery because he did not, in the end, recover. We like happy endings in America, and the ending of my son’s story is not happy, because he dies, although I live, and this collection is also very much a story of my own survival and healing.

Gray was diagnosed with ADD when he was very small, and wound up taking Ritalin and later Adderall for most of his life, which were the drugs he first abused as a teenager. When he was around nineteen I completed and tried—half-heartedly, it must be said—to publish a memoir about raising a son with ADD. The few publishers and agents I sent it to were uninterested mostly because there was no happy ending, although I would argue I held out hope in the end. The drugs prescribed to help with his ADD had helped a little in the short run, but eventually Gray experienced all the severe problems we had been told he’d experience if we didn’t give him the drugs. I thought it important to show the dark side of the stimulants we give ADD-diagnosed children, especially those children who come from a family with a history of substance abuse. I soon gave up trying to publish the manuscript because just a few months after I finished it all hell broke loose. I had to have Gray committed for drug and alcohol abuse, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well as drug use disorder, and everything else in my life fell to the side. The essay “Do No Harm,” is excerpted from that unpublished manuscript. In this essay, I highlight the role of schools and our cultural bias toward drugging young children.

This collection, like that unpublished manuscript, does not have a happy ending, if by that we mean survival of its main character, my son. But this is a book about hope. Many of the pieces here are about the ways I stayed sane, or tried to, while Gray was creating and living in ever darker worlds, and then how I worked with grief after he died, specifically through traditional arts such as crochet, and through travelling, gaming, teaching, and writing.

I learned to crochet at my mother’s lap as a child, and have worked with yarn most of my life. “It’s Come Undone: Crocheting and Catastrophe” traces the ways in which I used the craft of crochet to find peace and a sense of usefulness when things seemed hopeless.

I’ve always taken succor from the natural world. My first poems were celebrations of that broken world of polluted lakes, crawfish-filled ditches, wondrous blackberries that pricked fingers but tasted like summer sun, and the seductive Mississippi that surrounded me as a girl growing up in Louisiana. I tried to share this love of nature with Gray, and some of the essays mention the camping trips we took when he was young. Later when I had the opportunity to take him to Europe, I did, thinking perhaps to broaden his horizons, hoping that a new landscape would jolt him awake, as it often did me.

After he died I continued to travel, often to the Netherlands, as my second husband is Dutch, and to France, where a beloved artist’s retreat in the Languedoc area, La Muse, had provided solace and inspiration in the past. Pieces collected here are also inspired by visits to Peru with students, as well as Florida and Wyoming, where I went for artist retreats. Grief does not remain home when you travel, but being in different landscapes allows new lenses on that grief. The cycle of life and death is ever on vibrant display in the natural world. If you’re lucky, walks and hikes in the natural world can offer ways to understand your changed world, insights, and encouragement to continue living.

The longest piece in the collection, “Parking Lot Nights,” an essay inspired by video games, is also partly about travelling, as I would argue that playing certain kinds of games, especially role-playing games, can function as a kind of travel. I’ve been a gamer much of my adult life, thanks to my son, and this essay traces my relationship with Gray through gaming, and offers some discussion about the ways in which video games might offer metaphors through which we can connect with each other in surprisingly profound ways. The essay also looks at the ways in which gaming helped me both grieve and heal.

Writing is a key tool in healing, and a couple of pieces address that explicitly: “Essay in Search of a Poem,” for example, which traces my attempts to write a poem too soon after Gray’s death. Underlying all these pieces, though, even the ones not explicitly about writing, is the need to find a writing structure that houses grief honestly, especially in the second section, which was written in the aftermath of Gray’s death. The pieces in the second section are, for the most part, shorter, because they were written closer to the death, when any attempt at narrative seemed like a lie. The early pieces in this section, especially the first really short ones like “First Days” and “The Amaryllis Bud,” function more like fragments, prose poems, if you will. Anyone who has experienced tragedy knows that all one can do for a time is wail, and it seemed important to acknowledge that.

Many of the travel pieces are also in this section, and eventually the reader can witness me able to reflect more calmly, rifling off new landscapes to explore the landscape of grief inside.

The final piece of the second section, “Memory, Ever Green,” written in Paris, is built around memories of my father’s life, and asks questions about how we might best remember those we love who have destroyed their lives with drink or other substances.

The decision to make this book a collection of essays rather than one unbroken narrative was one I thought about for a long time. Wouldn’t there be a larger audience for an uninterrupted narrative, one that moved inevitably through beginning, conflict, resolution, the traditional art of story? Maybe, but to camouflage the way in which grief and healing moves in fits and starts, as well as the fits and starts of a life caught in addiction seemed to me the most profound of falsehoods. Some of the pieces in this collection were written before Gray died, and I did not want to go back and change them to reflect my knowledge that he would soon die. It felt more honest to let them stand as genuine moments in time.

It also seemed wrong to try to make all the pieces seem as if they were written in one voice. Depending on what the essay seems to need I might write in first, second or third person. Sometimes the essays are excruciatingly personal and other times I use a more distanced approach. There’s at least one poem in the collection, depending on how you define poetry. I haven’t tried to project a single voice or a single narrative, as we don’t all speak and think with one voice. Sometimes I’m an angry mother, sometimes a grieving one. Sometimes I write as a poet, sometimes as an essayist. Sometimes I privilege lyricism, sometimes narrative. Sometimes I write as a teacher, sometimes a critic. I am always writing as an alcoholic. I am all of these things, just as my son was a musician, a passionate lover of science fiction and video games, an angry young man, a depressed young man, a loving young man, an alcoholic, and an addict.

Although AA was important for me in the early days of my own recovery, and though I still cherish the friends and community I found there, I couldn’t complete all the steps (see “The Third Step” for one take on why), so I took what seemed useful and left the rest. One of the things I did take from AA, however, was the message of Step 12: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” Having personally experienced the ways in which writing could encourage healing and assist with recovery, in 2007 I co-founded, with Sarah Shotland, Words Without Walls, a program that sends MFA students and faculty into jails, prisons, and rehabilitation facilities to teach creative writing. I teach myself as part of the program in Sojourner House, an in-house rehab center for women who are mothers. “The Ink That Binds: Creative Writing and Addiction,” the final essay in the collection, was inspired by teaching in this facility.

My son once said to me that he didn’t think he could be creative (and by that he meant write music) without being high. This made me sad because I know a great number of writers (including myself) who are in recovery and still able to be creative. Facilitating a group that supported each other in creative fellowship, a group that could then go on to share with others, seemed a good way to “pass it on.”

This collection tells two stories, one of a fall, and one of healing, and is yet another way, I hope, of passing it on.