Fam.
Scott died this morning.
Yesterday morning, at this point.
I found out an hour before I had to get Ara to her 8th grade graduation at 5pm, and I immediately called her therapist.
Do we tell her?
Do I pretend?
Which will do more damage?
She’s already been through so much.
We let her have the night.
She got awards: Top 10 GPA, and the 8th graders and teachers collectively voted her the most “R” (responsible) in their school values (Excellence, Responsibility, Integrity, Commitment).
She is goals.
But I know she could feel that something was off with me.
I hope she forgives me for waiting to tell her..
There’s no playbook for this.
I’m broken for my baby girl, and for myself.
Turns out, the flip side of years of disappointment and anger is that
…through everything,
…we never gave up on hope
…and…love.
We loved him.
Before sobriety, I know it was never his intention to live past 30.
He got sober the first time in treatment, and we (everybody!) could see his relationship with life change.
His relationship with living.
One of the best things about Scott is that when he was healthy, we’ve never had a fiercer advocate. He adored being a father.
Being Ara’s father.
The next time he tried to get sober it was so hard to fully comprehend that he might not make it.
We, as a family, had slowed our pace to a crawl
Standing still
Ara and I looking back constantly
Ignoring our own lives
Aren’t you coming?
We’re waiting
You just have to reach out and take our hands
We’re right here
We waited for years.
He never came.
He couldn’t.
Scott loved Ara more than anyone or anything on this planet, and I know (more importantly, *she knows*) that the disease of untreated addiction is the only thing that was stronger than his love for her.
Nothing will break your heart more than a 9 year old pleading to her father to go to treatment.
Except that same baby when she was 8.
Or when she was 7.
So we left. And honestly, even though it felt differently at the time, it was less us leaving him and more…us saving us.
Saving her.
Even though she’s my Al-Anon blackbelt, and she has taught me so much: what if she thinks this is *her* fault?
A judge prevented him from contacting her. Obviously, it’s not her fault.
But there’s no playbook for something a brain knows and a heart can’t wrap itself around.
Intellectually, I know it’s not my fault.
But.
How impossible it must have been for him to have lived with all this.
(I couldn’t have.)
I guess he couldn’t either.
And I’m not saying that it was his intention to die.
And definitely not in the way he did.
I just know that in addiction, futures are dire, in the sense that that left untreated, there isn’t one.
It doesn’t make it easier to live with.
Neither of us would have ever wished this for him, or even, on our worst days, on him.
And we had a lot of worst days.
So did he.
I guess we didn’t realize how much we were waiting for him to get better.
I guess we thought he always had more time to come back to her.
I bet he did, too.
I bet he did, too.
So, listen to some Sublime,
look at the ocean,
and please give our baby girl a big squeeze in your hearts.
There is no playbook for this.
