The Broken Heart of Addiction

How many times can a heart break before it can't be repaired? She felt like Humpty Dumpty. She fell off the wall one too many times and couldn't get back up again. The pain! Oh, the pain that she felt when her world shattered into a million pieces for what seemed like the millionth time. She lay there waiting for help, help that never came. Help was around her, like the soldiers around Humpty Dumpty, just milling around, shaking their heads and whispering that there was nothing to be done, nothing that could be done.

Living in secrecy for over 20 years, protecting those around her who fell off their own walls over and over and over again. She did her best to pick them up over and over and over again, each time drowning a little more and each time not sure if she'd be able to get up again. The guilt for not being able to save them from their addictions and disorders, for choosing the wrong set of genes for them, for the relief of being able to pretend that everything was ok when there was distance, for believing that this time was different, this time all was going to be ok over and over and over again until she couldn't believe her own pretense anymore.

She lived in fear of visiting one or all of them in jail and not being able to tell them everything was going to be ok, they were going to get better. She lived in worse fear that someday it would be too late to say it's going to be ok, you're going to get better, I believe in you. She lived in fear that she'd be lying on their graves, begging God to give them back, to give them another chance, wondering what she could have done to save them. As hard as it was to bear, the most horrible words she heard recently were, "It was only too hard to bear when she was gone". The pain, oh, the pain of facing reality...too much, just too much.

Addiction does not just hurt the one who is in the middle of it, headed for rock bottom, full speed ahead. It hurts the mother, it hurts the child(ren), the siblings, and the spouse of the one in the spiral, the spiral going down, down, up a little, and then further back down. It hurts everyone who cares, it makes it more likely that the children, the innocent little children, will someday be in a spiral of addiction themselves some day. Where does it stop? When does the pain stop? When does the heart hurt so much that It just can't beat anymore?