I go back, this time to a swankier neighborhood.
A handsome woman with auburn hair cut short, wearing a silk blouse, cardigan, and wool pants, says that she is a doctor. Deeply sad, she admits that for more than a year she conducted surgeries while high on meth. She initially tried it at a party. “I felt better than I had ever felt before in my life,” she says. “I felt as if I could do anything. I never ever wanted to lose that feeling.
Fentanyl is fifty times stronger than heroin. Another concern is an opioid called carfentanil, which is as much as one hundred times more potent than fentanyl. According to the New York Times, an amount smaller than a snowflake could kill a person.
The devout are not spared.
The most ubiquitous form on the mainland is crystal, which is often manufactured with such ingredients as decongestants and brake cleaner in what the DEA has called “Beavis and Butt-head” labs in homes and garages. Mobile, or “box,” labs in campers and vans, and labs in motels, have been discovered in every state. In 2006, Bill Maher quipped, “If Americans get any dumber about science, they won’t even be able to make their own crystal meth.
It was so sick, I started laughing,” she says. “I laughed and cried at the same time. That’s when it struck me that I can’t take my life as long as I can still laugh.
As much as a child’s birthday is important to a parent, as much as twenty one meant to me, a year in recovery means more.
From them, I learned another lesson: that I can accept-in fact am relieved to accept-a world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white. There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.
I also know that parents have discretionary recall, blocking out everything that contradicts our carefully edited recollections – an understandable attempt to dodge blame. Conversely, children often fixate on the indelibly painful memories, because they have made a stronger impression.
It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people.
The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.
What about people with high cholesterol who keep eating French fries? Do we say a disease is not biological because it’s influenced by behavior? No one starts out hoping to become an addict; they just like drugs. No one starts out hoping for a heart attack; they just like fried chicken.
I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.
The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle. The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.
Don’t confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.
I have always assumed that vigilance and love would guarantee a decent life for my children, but I.
I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayer seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war – endless and brutal war – disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addiction, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers. Here is one more. Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic. The.
I keep a box in which I store his artwork and writings, like his response to an assignment in which he has been asked if you should always try your best. “I don’t think you should always try your best all the time,” he writes, “because, let’s say a drug atick asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs.” Another assignment that goes into the box is.
At the same time, the statistics are useful in a sobering way. They inform us that our adversary is formidable and they guard us against irrational optimism.
I wish someone had shaken me and said, “Intervene while you can before it’s too late.” It may not have made a difference, but I don’t know.