Dear John:
Several months before you left us I heard through the family grapevine that you had “fallen off the wagon.” We had become close after you came out of St. Josephs. You came to the loft a lot more and just like daddy and Aunt Netie; you would stop by to see me for a cup of coffee and chat. You were so excited about the prospect of being able to go back to school to be an auto mechanic or for air conditioner repair and I remember you discussing the pros and cons of both. It was such a gift to see you sober and loving you after years of watching you struggle.
Taking the forum at Landmark was a milestone in my life. It gave me the gift of seeing you for the person you really are as opposed to how I judged you. I learned that it was me who needed to change not you and once I recognized that the barrier that once stood between us didn’t exist anymore. You were not sober at the time I had my epiphany. I remember you coming to my Landmark graduation and how difficult that was for you because you worked such long hours. Dried pieces of tar were still embedded in your hands from the roofing job you did that day. There was a hint of alcohol on your breath that I could smell within the Paco Rabanne aftershave. I could even hear the rolling empty alcohol bottles in your carry bag when you placed it under your chair. None of these things mattered. I wasn't judging you anymore. I knew the effort it took for you to come that night and it meant the world to me that you came. Both of us were taking steps to heal our relationship. I will always be forever grateful to you for taking my extended hand and to Landmark for showing me the way.
After you came out of Saint Josephs, I understood more about you and addiction and I was doing work on myself as well. I felt like we had created a bond and closeness that I had not achieved with anyone else in the family. You struggled with many obstacles in order to create a new future for yourself. The side effects from the medications you were taking were horrible. Little by little I watched you clean up your life, your parking tickets, your relationships, and you were keeping to your committments and being your word. The courage you displayed in facing your past was inspiring. Your optimism about the future you were creating for yourself was causing me to look at how I was viewing my own future. And then, something happened and it is in the "not knowing" that will haunt me for the rest of my days.
You stopped calling and returning my calls. I heard through the family grapevine that you had a slip. I wanted to be a support to you. I wrote you letters and left them at Tommy’s house in case you stopped by there for a visit. Maybe you read the letters, maybe you didn’t but you never responded. I felt terribly hurt. I took it personally. I thought you and I had an unbreakable bond, and it was devastating to me to learn otherwise. I thought how can you not get that I am here to help you through this especially after how far we had come in our new relationship.
I wanted desperately to remind you of what you had achieved and how far you had come this time, further than ever before. I wanted to comfort you with the knowledge that a slip is just a slip. I wanted to help you get over this temporary setback but all the best intentions in the world could not change the fact that I could not get you to take my extended hand.
I believe it might have been two or three months that passed. I was going through my own stressful time in life which triggered a bad relapse of ulcerative colitis. I lost a lot of weight and a lot of blood and was bedridden for several weeks in a lot of pain. At my sickest point you phoned me. You heard I was ill and you wanted to come by and have coffee and see me.
Here is the irony and what is so painful about the next part of this story. With the onset of my illness I was forced to take stock of my own life and as part of that process I believed I had to put a hundred percent of my energies into healing myself which was not a natural or easy place for me to step into. What I lrealized was that I was so busy trying to fix everyone else that I was not seeing what needed to be fixed about myself and my own life.
I can’t say there wasn’t a little residue of hurt left when you did call but I can say with all honesty there was no anger. I told you I loved you for calling to check in on me but that I wasn’t feeling up to seeing anyone right now. You said, “Please, I won’t stay that long, I promise, I just want to say hi.” In thinking I was finally doing the right thing for myself said, “John, I’m not angry at you. I’m really sick and I don’t have the strength to deal with anything else right now. I hope you understand. I promise once the bleeding subsides I will call you.” I could hear the disappointment in your voice and it was difficult for me but I stuck to my guns.
That was my last chance to see you. I did not know it at the time. That is the irony of life we never know when its going to be the last time for anything. It’s the moment-by-moment choices we make each and every day that make or break us. Each year that you are not here I am reminded of how I took seeing you again for granted. I didn’t have to say no to you and I wish to God I had not. I feared that day that I would try and take on your problems if I saw you and I knew that I wasn’t in any condition to do so.
But you weren’t asking me to take on your problems. You were asking to come by and visit me. You just wanted to see me. Who knows, maybe seeing you that day would have helped to heal me, but I never gave you that chance. Maybe it was my day to be on the receiving end of an unexpected gift that came by surprise but I was not living in the moment or going with the flow of life. My mind was set in stone about what I thought I needed to do and in the process I missed one of the most important opportunities of my life.
The open wound I carry bleeds every year on this day reminding me that despite what I have come to learn the hard way, I still continue to make the same mistakes. I don’t stop to value each decision I make as a life and death decision which it is. I take for granted that the people I love will be there when I reach for them. I still find myself fixated on a point of view sometimes unable to see the gifts in other possibilities in the process. And yes, I continue to swim upstream at times thinking I know the way in lieu of going with the flow of life.
More than anything, I am so sorry I did not take the hand you extended to me that day because since you have gone all I do is imagine how great it would have been had I done so. I see the possibilities of what having a less rigid mindset might have provided the two of us, and the scenarios are endless and unfortunately all too late.
They say that every tragedy has a lesson equal in significance to its heartbreak. The tragedy of losing you has provided multiple lessons and its time to incorporate them into change.
This could be my last chance.
You are on my mind, and in my heart always.
