Addition and Elderly.

My Mom’s Journey and Our Failure.

The memories surface like minnows in the shallows of Kinderhook Creek, where I once stood as a little boy, Hills Brothers coffee can in hand. My mother is everywhere today. Perhaps it’s the cold weather keeping me inside or the hours spent cataloging twenty years of journals and blog posts. Whatever the reason, this morning finds me swimming in a familiar blue.

Her brilliance was something to behold, though she often concealed it beneath a carefully crafted fa?ade of the “dumb blonde.” It was a mask she wore like armor, but behind it lay one of the keenest minds I’ve known. She could craft the world around her, not the other way around. She could be merciless. When I bought my flock of sheep, I named one of my toughest ewes after her. Seriously.

I see how we failed her. When addiction retook hold of Mom, we responded with embarrassment rather than empathy. We’d “give her the hook” at family gatherings, yanking her away like a struggling vaudevillian act when her behavior threatened our veneer of normalcy. Our pride mattered more than her pain.

The “tough love” approach haunts me now. How could I have believed that forcing her to “hit bottom” was anything but cruelty? Therapists and counselors preached this gospel of suffering?—?as if multiplying pain could somehow turn it into nothing.

She despised Alcoholics Anonymous, and who could blame her? We thrust our fragile mother into dark church basements, surrounded by well-meaning but untrained peers, and called it treatment.

Dr. Balsam, her primary care physician since her twenties, enabled her addiction under the guise of medical care, dispensing “mild” opioids with the authority of his white coat. The combination?—?the high and the medical validation?—?proved irresistible to Mom. She was addicted to opioids. Years later, after we finally pulled her away from his care, he was arrested for drug dealing.

The disease that would ultimately take her life received little real healthcare. Instead, she got judgment, isolation, and half-measures masquerading as treatment. Her death nearly shattered our family, leaving my siblings and me spinning.

Looking back now, I understand the helplessness of it all. There’s nothing I can do to change how addiction hastened her end, nothing I can do to alter our misguided responses. But I can remember her fully?—?not just as someone who struggled with addiction, but as the brilliant, complex woman who was my mother. She wanted help. She sought it out.

Now in her 70s, mom was left waiting for hours in the emergency room. The detox unit, when she finally reached it, felt like a prison.

The staff confiscated her cell phone and kept her under lock and key. Her roommate, a young woman in withdrawal, filled their shared space with screams and desperate cries.

It looked more like an asylum from another era than a modern medical facility. It certainly did not help a woman in her seventies deal with complex medical conditions associated with rheumatoid arthritis and poly-substance abuse. Of course, she left. It was a madhouse, not a quiet, safe space to detox.

We say addiction is a disease, yet we treat its victims like criminals. So many people do not know about medications that can help with alcohol and opioid use disorders.

What is truly horrific is not what happened. No, the horror is that it was so unnecessary.