Saying hello to my SR friends
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Kansas
Posts: 10,182
Saying hello to my SR friends
Life has been incredibly busy what with my last semester of college in full swing, and still adjusting to having Amber back home. So, I don't get to hop over here much at this time.
One of my classes for my second degree is Comp II, and our first essay was a personal essay. I wanted to share my essay with all of you because it is an important story in regards to my own recovery. It was a very emotional experience for me to write this, but I found it cathartic too.
Sending lots of warm hugs to all my SR friends!
June 10th, 1986 was the end of my descent into hell, and the beginning of a journey that would teach me how to fill that void I had felt all of my life. I was sitting on the edge of a bed at the dealer’s house, a squalid rental replete with crusted dog feces all over the floors, mold-filled dishes in the sink, and naked light bulbs in the ceiling, casting a harsh light that added to the ambience of pain, lost souls, and despair.
I had found a used syringe on the nightstand, having no idea who had used it prior, nor did I care. Whoever shot crystal meth in that bedroom earlier that day was of no concern to me. Rubbing the side of the tip of the syringe against my fingers, I felt a jagged burr, located a used-up matchbook lying on the filthy matted carpeting, and picked it up to use the striking strip to file the needle smooth. My six-foot frame was carrying 109 pounds that day. I remember my father remarking one day a few months prior that I looked like someone from a concentration camp. I was also a few weeks pregnant, most of my veins were blown all to hell from the daily IV use of meth, and I was extremely weak.
I swabbed my arm with alcohol, tied it off with a belt, and prayed I could hit a vein. Those were the only prayers I had been saying for a long time. God had been tossed off into the ditch in my mind and soul like an inconsiderate motorist flings a McDonald’s bag carelessly out the window while driving down the interstate. I felt the familiar roll of the ether taste in the back of my throat as I loosened the belt with my teeth, and waited for almost instantaneous, blissful relief from the pain and agony of life. Instead I experienced a gut-wrenching, deep emotional pain that can only be likened to a thousand demons ripping my heart and soul to shreds. At that point, my life became completely and utterly unbearable to me, and I clearly remember saying in my head, “God, I’m tired of living this way.”
The events that happened the rest of that day were nothing short of miraculous. My husband at the time had completed a 30-day inpatient rehab a few days prior, went right back to shooting dope and drinking whiskey that day, and had been gone ever since, a pattern I had become accustomed to over the past five years. Along with the insanity of active addiction living in our home, there was also violence. The more dope he shot, and the more whiskey he swilled, the meaner he got. More than once I should have gone to ER, but knew he would beat me that much worse when I got back home.
I left the dealer’s house and went home to almost equally appalling living quarters. There were holes in the walls from many of my husband’s psychotic, drug-induced rages. The house reeked of sweat, fear, and rage. The only plan I could summon up to end this miserable life was driving down a highway until I finally passed out from my weakened state. Surely I would end up going off the road, rolling the vehicle and dying. There was a problem though, a big problem with that plan. An eight year-old girl would be coming home soon from school, and I had no right to take her life too. I had enough presence of mind to call a babysitter I used from time to time, and I asked her if she would watch my daughter while I went shopping. I felt no guilt over my bold-faced lie to that lady, only relief that my daughter would be somewhere safe until my family was contacted after my death, and then they would take care of her. A calm washed over me like I hadn’t experienced since childhood, when my mother would sit and hold me during thunderstorms, assuring me it would all be okay, stroking my hair and rocking back and forth rhythmically in the big swivel rocker. It would be over soon.
After picking my daughter up from school, I dropped her off at the babysitter’s just as nonchalant as if I were indeed off to stock up on groceries for the week, and perhaps stop at the gas station to fill up the tank. She put her arms around my neck, kissed me on the cheek, and said “I love you Mom” as she got out of the car. My heart was bleeding in the knowledge that that beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl hadn’t had the kind of mother she so deserved. It bolstered my conviction that everyone was much better off without me in the world, including her.
Why I decided to go home for a bit after that rather than turning the car towards interstate and hitting the gas pedal to carry out my plan, I can only attribute to the loving hand of God, who was busy putting things into place for a very different ending than I had already written in my mind. I parked the car, went inside, and just stood in the middle of the living room, looking around at what my life had become. And then God’s angel walked in the front door.
He was a wild-haired, heavily tattooed, twice convicted felon. I had watched this hardened criminal pick up an iron bar off of a barbell set and smash the kitchen cabinets to splinters because he had been up for so many days on meth that he was psychotic. His steely blue eyes were usually empty, void of any ‘human-ness’ after being gone on a drug binge. He had held a knife to my side, thrown me down the basement steps, body-slammed me to the floor, and beat my head into walls. I had been his whipping post and punching bag for what seemed like forever by then.
When he walked in the front door and saw me standing in the middle of the living room, he said in a soft voice that I had never heard come from his lips the entire five years we had been together, “Get in the car. I’m taking you to rehab.” He was perfectly lucid. It almost seemed a scene from the movie The Body Snatchers. It looked like him, but that’s where all resemblance ended. I was exhausted, defeated, and dying. I followed his lead, and went out to the car. He drove me the two hours to the rehab, checked me in, hugged me, and left.
I never went back home; I never went back to him. God’s loving hand was still working, and things fell into place so that I could stay in the same town where I started my recovery, and had a strong support network in place. I knew I couldn’t go back home because I would either die from relapsing, or he would eventually kill me. Three days after he took me to rehab, the ugly threatening phone calls started. He wanted me back home, to leave rehab. The old him was back, just as ugly, angry, and desperate as he was before that fateful day.
In 1998, I received a phone call, a call from a man I never expected to hear from again even though I thought of him often over the years, and questioned why I embraced recovery and he chose to walk away from it. We had been divorced for over a decade. It was like hearing a ghost from the past on the other end of the line. I felt unsettled.
He apologized for bothering me, but he felt it was a call he needed to make. Then he dropped the bombshell. He asked, “Have you ever been tested for AIDS?” I felt queasy, not for any ramifications for me, but I didn’t want to accept what he was surely going to tell me. I had been tested for AIDS when I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, who was born just before my two year celebration of being clean and sober. I told him I had. I braced myself. “I’m in the clinical stages of AIDS now, and I wasn’t sure when I contracted HIV until I called you,” he said.
Now he knew the answer to the questions he had been carrying around for too many years. He hadn’t given me AIDS because he contracted it while sharing needles with someone else while I was in rehab, and I never went back to him. I got goose bumps while also feeling extremely nauseated. God’s angel was dying. I thanked him for the call, wished him the best, and hung up because I still couldn’t grasp all the emotions that were running through me like a flash flood heading down a gully.
More years passed, and I often thought of him, praying to God that he would find some peace in life before the dreaded AIDS virus beat his body into submission and subsequent death. Then that other phone call came in the spring of 2006. It was my mom.
“Was your ex-husband’s first name Tim?”
“Yes Mom, it was,” I replied, trying hard to accept that she had used the dreaded past tense word.
“Would he be around 47 now,” she continued.
“Yes, he would.”
She had read his obituary in the Salina Journal.
I asked if she would please send it to me, and she agreed.
God’s angel was a junkie, and now he’s dead.
There isn’t a day go by that I am not filled with gratitude for the gift of recovery, and the gift of an angel in the form of a junkie who was there for me on the day that I needed an angel the most. I know God’s taking good care of that junkie now.
One of my classes for my second degree is Comp II, and our first essay was a personal essay. I wanted to share my essay with all of you because it is an important story in regards to my own recovery. It was a very emotional experience for me to write this, but I found it cathartic too.
Sending lots of warm hugs to all my SR friends!
God’s Angel Was a Junkie
June 10th, 1986 was the end of my descent into hell, and the beginning of a journey that would teach me how to fill that void I had felt all of my life. I was sitting on the edge of a bed at the dealer’s house, a squalid rental replete with crusted dog feces all over the floors, mold-filled dishes in the sink, and naked light bulbs in the ceiling, casting a harsh light that added to the ambience of pain, lost souls, and despair.
I had found a used syringe on the nightstand, having no idea who had used it prior, nor did I care. Whoever shot crystal meth in that bedroom earlier that day was of no concern to me. Rubbing the side of the tip of the syringe against my fingers, I felt a jagged burr, located a used-up matchbook lying on the filthy matted carpeting, and picked it up to use the striking strip to file the needle smooth. My six-foot frame was carrying 109 pounds that day. I remember my father remarking one day a few months prior that I looked like someone from a concentration camp. I was also a few weeks pregnant, most of my veins were blown all to hell from the daily IV use of meth, and I was extremely weak.
I swabbed my arm with alcohol, tied it off with a belt, and prayed I could hit a vein. Those were the only prayers I had been saying for a long time. God had been tossed off into the ditch in my mind and soul like an inconsiderate motorist flings a McDonald’s bag carelessly out the window while driving down the interstate. I felt the familiar roll of the ether taste in the back of my throat as I loosened the belt with my teeth, and waited for almost instantaneous, blissful relief from the pain and agony of life. Instead I experienced a gut-wrenching, deep emotional pain that can only be likened to a thousand demons ripping my heart and soul to shreds. At that point, my life became completely and utterly unbearable to me, and I clearly remember saying in my head, “God, I’m tired of living this way.”
The events that happened the rest of that day were nothing short of miraculous. My husband at the time had completed a 30-day inpatient rehab a few days prior, went right back to shooting dope and drinking whiskey that day, and had been gone ever since, a pattern I had become accustomed to over the past five years. Along with the insanity of active addiction living in our home, there was also violence. The more dope he shot, and the more whiskey he swilled, the meaner he got. More than once I should have gone to ER, but knew he would beat me that much worse when I got back home.
I left the dealer’s house and went home to almost equally appalling living quarters. There were holes in the walls from many of my husband’s psychotic, drug-induced rages. The house reeked of sweat, fear, and rage. The only plan I could summon up to end this miserable life was driving down a highway until I finally passed out from my weakened state. Surely I would end up going off the road, rolling the vehicle and dying. There was a problem though, a big problem with that plan. An eight year-old girl would be coming home soon from school, and I had no right to take her life too. I had enough presence of mind to call a babysitter I used from time to time, and I asked her if she would watch my daughter while I went shopping. I felt no guilt over my bold-faced lie to that lady, only relief that my daughter would be somewhere safe until my family was contacted after my death, and then they would take care of her. A calm washed over me like I hadn’t experienced since childhood, when my mother would sit and hold me during thunderstorms, assuring me it would all be okay, stroking my hair and rocking back and forth rhythmically in the big swivel rocker. It would be over soon.
After picking my daughter up from school, I dropped her off at the babysitter’s just as nonchalant as if I were indeed off to stock up on groceries for the week, and perhaps stop at the gas station to fill up the tank. She put her arms around my neck, kissed me on the cheek, and said “I love you Mom” as she got out of the car. My heart was bleeding in the knowledge that that beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl hadn’t had the kind of mother she so deserved. It bolstered my conviction that everyone was much better off without me in the world, including her.
Why I decided to go home for a bit after that rather than turning the car towards interstate and hitting the gas pedal to carry out my plan, I can only attribute to the loving hand of God, who was busy putting things into place for a very different ending than I had already written in my mind. I parked the car, went inside, and just stood in the middle of the living room, looking around at what my life had become. And then God’s angel walked in the front door.
He was a wild-haired, heavily tattooed, twice convicted felon. I had watched this hardened criminal pick up an iron bar off of a barbell set and smash the kitchen cabinets to splinters because he had been up for so many days on meth that he was psychotic. His steely blue eyes were usually empty, void of any ‘human-ness’ after being gone on a drug binge. He had held a knife to my side, thrown me down the basement steps, body-slammed me to the floor, and beat my head into walls. I had been his whipping post and punching bag for what seemed like forever by then.
When he walked in the front door and saw me standing in the middle of the living room, he said in a soft voice that I had never heard come from his lips the entire five years we had been together, “Get in the car. I’m taking you to rehab.” He was perfectly lucid. It almost seemed a scene from the movie The Body Snatchers. It looked like him, but that’s where all resemblance ended. I was exhausted, defeated, and dying. I followed his lead, and went out to the car. He drove me the two hours to the rehab, checked me in, hugged me, and left.
I never went back home; I never went back to him. God’s loving hand was still working, and things fell into place so that I could stay in the same town where I started my recovery, and had a strong support network in place. I knew I couldn’t go back home because I would either die from relapsing, or he would eventually kill me. Three days after he took me to rehab, the ugly threatening phone calls started. He wanted me back home, to leave rehab. The old him was back, just as ugly, angry, and desperate as he was before that fateful day.
In 1998, I received a phone call, a call from a man I never expected to hear from again even though I thought of him often over the years, and questioned why I embraced recovery and he chose to walk away from it. We had been divorced for over a decade. It was like hearing a ghost from the past on the other end of the line. I felt unsettled.
He apologized for bothering me, but he felt it was a call he needed to make. Then he dropped the bombshell. He asked, “Have you ever been tested for AIDS?” I felt queasy, not for any ramifications for me, but I didn’t want to accept what he was surely going to tell me. I had been tested for AIDS when I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, who was born just before my two year celebration of being clean and sober. I told him I had. I braced myself. “I’m in the clinical stages of AIDS now, and I wasn’t sure when I contracted HIV until I called you,” he said.
Now he knew the answer to the questions he had been carrying around for too many years. He hadn’t given me AIDS because he contracted it while sharing needles with someone else while I was in rehab, and I never went back to him. I got goose bumps while also feeling extremely nauseated. God’s angel was dying. I thanked him for the call, wished him the best, and hung up because I still couldn’t grasp all the emotions that were running through me like a flash flood heading down a gully.
More years passed, and I often thought of him, praying to God that he would find some peace in life before the dreaded AIDS virus beat his body into submission and subsequent death. Then that other phone call came in the spring of 2006. It was my mom.
“Was your ex-husband’s first name Tim?”
“Yes Mom, it was,” I replied, trying hard to accept that she had used the dreaded past tense word.
“Would he be around 47 now,” she continued.
“Yes, he would.”
She had read his obituary in the Salina Journal.
I asked if she would please send it to me, and she agreed.
God’s angel was a junkie, and now he’s dead.
There isn’t a day go by that I am not filled with gratitude for the gift of recovery, and the gift of an angel in the form of a junkie who was there for me on the day that I needed an angel the most. I know God’s taking good care of that junkie now.
Nature Girl
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: By The Lake
Posts: 60,328
This has touched my heart more than you will ever know, Freedom.
Thanks you for writing that, thank you for sharing it here, and thank you for sharing your recovery with all of us.
Big Hugs
Thanks you for writing that, thank you for sharing it here, and thank you for sharing your recovery with all of us.
Big Hugs
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Kansas
Posts: 10,182
Thank you all so much for your kind words.
There are times when I sit down to type out a part of my past, and it isn't just my hands on the keyboard, if that makes any sense.
You just never know what form one of God's angels may take in your life.
There are times when I sit down to type out a part of my past, and it isn't just my hands on the keyboard, if that makes any sense.
You just never know what form one of God's angels may take in your life.
Currently Active Users Viewing this Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
