Loving Someone You Can't Save - What Addiction Couldn't Take

A brief note before you read: This is my personal experience of loving someone through addiction and losing her to an overdose. It includes references to substance use, death, grief, and family trauma. I am not an addiction specialist or therapist. I’m sharing what my family lived through and what I learned along the way. 
 

Three months before Kelly died, I did something I never imagined I would do.

I stepped back.

Even now, writing those words stops me for a moment because they don't tell the whole story. I didn't stop loving my sister, and I never stopped praying that this would somehow be the time she finally found her way back for good. 

I admitted that I couldn't keep living in the middle of Kelly's addiction anymore. Every time the phone rang, my stomach tightened. Every time she didn't answer, my mind went somewhere terrible. I loved my sister deeply, but I was disappearing right alongside her. 

The night before, she called while she was driving, and I knew almost immediately that she had been using. I begged her to pull over. I begged her to tell me where she was. I promised I'd help her get home safely if she'd just stop the car.

She wouldn't.

She wouldn't tell me where she was. She wouldn't pull over. She wouldn't call an Uber. I sat in my home two hours away, completely helpless, imagining every possible outcome and knowing there wasn't one thing I could do to change what was happening.

The next morning I called her while she was clear-headed.

I told her I loved her with everything I had. I also told her I needed to step back for a while. Years of counseling, Al-Anon meetings, research, and conversations with professionals had all pointed toward the same painful conclusion. I had learned that I could not keep shielding her from the consequences of choices I could not control.  It hurt my heart, but I also knew I was protecting it.

I hated every word that came out of my mouth, and I also knew they were coming from a place of experience, and I meant every word.

She listened. She said she understood and didn’t want that for me either. She honored my request.

We didn't stop speaking altogether. Every couple of weeks, one of us would check in. We'd catch up about the family, her business, and mine. We ended every single phone call with “I love you.” Then we'd hang up.

Our relationship had changed. Our love hadn't.  

My family and I could sense that something was different. This wasn't the Kelly we'd watched struggle before. The drugs seemed stronger, or they were affecting her differently. She was spending time with people none of us knew. She had become more secretive, a little more difficult to reach, and our conversations with her left us more worried.  We had already walked through interventions. We had celebrated periods of sobriety, one that lasted seven years. We’ve also lived through relapses. We knew addiction could be relentless.

Still...

Every one of us believed that Kelly would be one of the people who made it. I wanted her to become one of those women who, years later, stood in front of a room and said, "I almost lost everything, but here I am."

She deserved that story.

Instead, we received another one.

Three months after I stepped back, my mother called to tell me Kelly had overdosed. By the time I reached Phoenix, she was gone. 

For a long time after Kelly died, I couldn't quite believe it.

She was too alive.

Too funny.

Too curious.

Too full of opinions, ideas, and dreams.

How could someone who filled every room she entered...not be here anymore?

Then came her funeral.

More than a thousand people came.

The church was filled long before the service began, and people just kept arriving.

I looked around that sanctuary and realized Kelly had somehow brought together people who would never have known each other otherwise. A businessman in an expensive suit sat beside a man who had arrived on a motorcycle. Someone else had ridden the city bus. Rock climbers hugged people from AA. Neighbors stood beside river guides. They had almost nothing in common except one extraordinary woman. 

Kelly.

Story after story poured out that day. People laughed, cried, and told us how she had changed their lives. 

Others shared moments our family had never heard before. Listening to them, I was reminded how much larger Kelly’s life had been than the years addiction consumed. At the end of the service, “Landslide” began to play.

Someone reached for another person's hand.

Then someone else did the same.

Soon people were standing shoulder to shoulder around the walls of that church, holding hands as more than a thousand voices sang together.

I can still see it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

I can still hear it.

Then everyone went home. 

My mother never really recovered from losing Kelly.

She and my stepdad loved taking long drives together. Those drives became a kind of therapy for them. They'd pick a direction, find a little café, try a slice of pie, and make a day of it.

She told me that sometimes she would turn her head towards the passenger window and the tears would fall. She knew he was hurting too, so she turned toward the window and cried where he couldn’t see her face. 

Three years later, my mom was gone too.

Heartbreak is not listed on a death certificate, but I believe I saw what it did to my mother. 

When I hear stories about people who found recovery, I don't feel envy. I feel joy. Every single person who finds their way back is a miracle worth celebrating.

I only wish Kelly had been one of them.

When Landslide comes on the radio, I think about that baby lying on my belly and the little girl practicing Lamaze breathing. I remember searching through cupboards after she “organized” my kitchen, and I see her sweeping the dirt around her campsite while the rest of us laughed.   I remember the river guide who kicked her broken toe back into place and went right back to unloading the raft. 

I remember my sister. 

That’s who Kelly was.  

Addiction was part of her story.         

It was never the whole story.

Love is ALL there is,

Diana