THE CRUCIBLE OF TRUTH

Whether or not you are religious, Easter time holds the same promises for everyone:  It holds the promise of renewal, the promise of hope and the promise of new beginnings; and within very the season it inhabits, it holds the evidence of survival and the promise of new life.  No matter how long or harsh the winter has been, there comes the lush transfiguration in the organic countenance of the planet to make us all feel strengthened and lighter.

Now while courage and renewal are not necessarily synonymous, there is a level at which they are required to conjoin if true resurrection is to be the result.  It is a level where honesty prevails and where there are no dark corners; a level that reveals the most vulnerable truths about ourselves and our lives and which is also as utterly and devastatingly terrifying as it necessarily and profoundly liberating.

It is the level that nails you to the cross.

Up until now in this spiritual, silly, narcissistic, humorous, indulgent, querying and candid blog-journey; I've skillfully (subjective opinion) danced around an area of my life that in many ways is my life but for reasons that will become obvious to any reader shortly, has remained deep in the soft, holding cell at the frayed and care-worn center of my heart.

If you go there, you will find every cell, fiber and microcosmic tissue throbbing harmoniously with the unifying thrust of unconditional love protecting the essence, image of and ultimate hope for my son, Griffin.

My son is a drug addict and has been so in one degree or form since he was about eighteen years old.   In late August he celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday under the same conditions in which he has celebrated all but one of his birthdays since 2007:  as an inmate in a state correctional facility.

Given that he is a man of extremely high intelligence, he managed to fund his addiction by a cleverly-executed scheme of prescription fraud.  This is what he was sentenced for.  Again.

The first time around he spent eighteen months at different correctional facilities in two states and several counties satisfying the various infractions in each; but at no time in any facility did he receive any sort of rehabilitative counseling or aid.  None.  And they wonder why recidivism is so high.

Two years ago in the pre-dawn hours of Halloween he was released from the county jail, yet just over one year later he was on his way back in.  For the first few months he was doing well, but over time as those same buttons were being pushed and still without  any recourse to viable coping methods, he slowly retreated to the only form of consolation and escape that he has known:  prescription pain medication.

Griffin is a charming guy; a massive charming guy standing nearly six foot six and weighing in around three-hundred and sixty pounds.  He was a huge baby and a huge child, although a very congenial and loquacious one and I would often have to warn him not to speak to every single person, down every single isle, about every single thing, every single time we entered the Supermarket.

Because of his size people assumed he was always much older than he was, which put a certain amount of pressure on him from a young age.  When people assume you are five and yet you behave as though you are two and a half, they tend to draw some unflattering conclusions about your emotional maturity and mental capacity and unfortunately, many had no reservations about voicing their asinine opinions and observations right in front of us.

People can bring astoundingly damaging energy to the function of opinion.


If Griffin has one weakness of character, it would be his incessant desire to please and an even greater need to be loved and admired.  He is a Leo, after all.  But for as far back as he was aware, he was not able to live up to those desires, and the harder he tried, the more abjectly he would fail.

When he was very young, his peers were afraid of him due to his massive size and exuberance and had a tendency to run from him.  Bringing him to the nursery school playground would sometimes evoke  scenes similar to the ones where Godzilla enters Tokyo and sends diminutive Japanese denizens scrambling frantically in every direction.

 As he grew and the other kids realized that he in no way regarded his physical presence as an advantage and a tool of intimidation, they took the opposite position and he became the goat.  He was a sweet, affable, sometimes gullible and gentle giant; just what the predatory types like to consume whole.  Nothing makes a small bully feel more empowered than by taking a larger kid down.

He played baseball and basketball in elementary and middle schools and excelled at both; especially baseball where he still holds the record for home runs hit clean out of the local ballpark and into the woods.  But because his size so greatly exceeded the height and weight requirements of the Pop Warner Football league, he was not able to participate in the one sport most suited to his monolithic frame.

That all changed when he reached high school.

By this time, too, he was so eager to find peer acceptance that I do believe he would have taken up wing-walking or bull running if it would have earned him their regard.  But he didn't have to do anything that risky.  All he had to do was to be big, put on a helmet and knock people down on the football field; simple as that, and he did so readily.

Suddenly, he was a hero and with his brilliant mind, gregarious nature and quick humor he quickly became one of the most popular kids in school.  However, within his own mind absolution did not fully come and the reality of his earlier years kept him a prisoner of disbelief and insecurity and feeling as though he still needed to be continually vigilant in his quest to please or he might just as suddenly find himself once more the target instead of the bullet.

But for the time being he was the largest bullet any high school coach in the history of the school had ever seen.  Not only that be he was fast, and scouts from colleges all across the country were coming to take a gander.  He was a mammoth,  treasured, testosterone-fueled commodity.

So, when he hurt his shoulder during a fall practice in his senior year and the team doctor (who had formerly been so for a professional football team in another state) began prescribing him injections of steroids and pain medications, the ramifications escaped our notice.

Sadly, they didn't escape Griffin's.  What these jock-cocktails provided most was a steady emotional lift with an undercurrent of invincibility and euphoria.  He was happy and a part of the team, only now if anyone didn't like him, he didn't care - not consciously anyway.  What he gradually discovered was that as long as he was under the influence of these substances, he felt good about himself.

Then, when news of Griffin's bad shoulder was leaked to the colleges courting him, one by one they dropped their offers and as the offers stopped, so did the attention.  By graduation day the glory days had ended, but not his dependency on the glory drugs.

In the years after high school I watched my son disappear.  He had a few unsuccessful attempts at college, culinary school and a variety of fairly respectable jobs but all were undermined by his increasingly insatiable dependency on chasing happy. 


 It wasn't happiness he was after.  Happiness is a state of being; a subjective emotion that wraps around our outlook like a sacred ribbon around our best day.  Griffin was chasing some sort of safe boxed thing:  a stagnant puddle of compartmentalized indifference;  a chunk of calm ringed by bursts of artificial joy;  a hollow parody of self-confidence.  He had never fully known happiness and the congenial rush from trustworthy peer support, so he didn't really know what to look for.

Of course, over time all the concomitant ills of addiction came into play:  the nearly pathological lying, stealing,  manipulating, chronic irresponsibility and connivance.  He was no longer recognizable by habit or attitude and after a couple of suicide attempts, neither were we.

Our lives had been voluntarily hijacked because we could not turn away and all that we had emotionally, financially and prayerfully went into trying to help him find his way to a point of peace and a place where he could start over.

Ultimately, only Griffin can heal Griffin, and for a long time that did not seem as though it was ever going to happen.  No matter how sincere his wish nor valiant his efforts, without long-term professional rehabilitative help, the healing would not take place and all the half-starts and nearly-theres were simply not good enough.

I've discovered that if a pattern continues long enough and you are able to fool yourself into believing that you are in control while in reality you are playing both sides of the game, eventually you will become buried by not only your addiction but by your deception, as well.  Soon every single out-breath you release becomes toxic until nothing whole and good can stand in your presence and those who try to do so either become victims of your declivitous game at self-destruction or they become casualties of your indifference to anything except satisfying your pharmaceutical craving.

But as anyone knows who has by fate or circumstance been beguiled into courting hopelessness, there really is no such thing and the saying, "Where there is life, there is hope." could not be more true or more worth believing.

Griffin has been incarcerated this time around since early December; and while the deep sorrow attendant to his situation as a recidivist addict and offender and the purgatorial consequences of his actions never leaves me for one minute, I can honestly say that at this moment I am not only filled with hope for his recovery, but I am filled with pride as well.  I am also filled with great happiness because he has been accepted for admission to the two-year inmate drug rehab program and will finally get the intensive help he needs and deserves.

He is ready for it now.  For the first time he is facing and assuming full responsibility for everything he has done to bring about his present fate.  This may not sound like much, but denial is a huge part of addiction, and I have heard him blame everyone but the Pope for his problems in the past.

I still grapple with ragged grief over the situation in general and missing him in particular.  On my visits I am not able to hug or hold him or come any closer then the bullet proof glass partition will accommodate and our conversations are over a phone receiver.  We have come to greet and leave one another with the ritual of pressing our hands together and matching them up against the glass that separates us.  Even though he is a man, his giant hand remains that of my child and as it engulfs and extends well beyond the silhouette of my own, I am reminded only of the corresponding enormity of his great and loving heart.

 But his heart suffers physically now, too.   As a result of his years of excessive abuse, he has developed cardiac arrhythmia and has already had two mild heart attacks; one before he was taken into custody and another a couple of weeks ago.  The concern for his health has driven me to my knees more than once and keeps me firmly grounded in prayer and awake deep into the night with predictable regularity as I barter with God and the angels and any celestial intercessor who will listen for the restored health of his body and his soul.

 And, of course,  there is still the pathetic ignorance and prejudice from people who routinely expose their profound insensitivity by malicious gossip and impudent judgments all based on their smug belief that because it has never happened to them or to one of their kids, they are immune from and above all moral prosecution for their craven tongues and are righteously defended in the eyes of the world and of their God.

Sadly, they pass this loathsome trait down to their children as my daughter experienced the other day at her job as a hostess in a local restaurant when the son of a former friend of mine entered with a buddy.  He recognized my daughter and they chatted offhandedly as she seated them.  But as he was leaving, he stopped at her station by the door and inquired about Griffin.

Being the honest soul she is, she told him the truth about her brother's incarceration adding also that we were very encouraged because this time he was finally going to get help for his problem.  He responded in full voice and without the slightest compunction that he stood also in front of her supervisor and co-workers and said, "Your brother is a real scum bag.  No offense."

No offense?

She was quite naturally stunned and felt a retort was out of the question because she was at work, so she said nothing but goodbye.  Then she fell into tears.  Her boss was more than understanding as were those co-workers within earshot, and they all rallied round her until she regained her composure promising covert retribution on her behalf should he ever show his face there again.

Composure, as a form of emotional rebounding, is something that I have come to master over the years with frightening acuity and could probably teach a college-level course on both the subject and the techniques.  It is only unfortunate in that it has become a necessity rather than a choice.

For a long time I could not look at a ball field or a large boy or a young family in church or any such reminders without it bringing my son into my thoughts with such searing regret, guilt, longing and shame that I could barely breath let alone hold back my emotions.

But with the years came strength and also a resolve not to let the darkest aspects of this lesson infect the rest of my hope with that kind of fruitless anguish.  Slowly, I developed a strategy of disengaging when these black holes were opened and to defer my reaction until a more private circumstance afforded me the opportunity to express my anguished heart.

What other productive options do I have?

I am committed to love and lift my magnificent son out of this wretched pit of abuse, self-sabotage and transgression just as he did for me.

Twenty-seven years ago I was spiraling out of control on a chemical vortex of drugs and super-charged apathy after leaving a grossly ill-conceived but blessedly brief, nine-month-long marriage of violence and abuse.

At twenty-five years old and in the aftermath of yet another one of my many compendious failures, I had no hope and saw few options and had returned to the derelict risk-taking of my teens with brash abandon and little regard as to whether I lived or died.

That is a pathetic tale all it's own, but the fact is that in the throes of this crash-test of my sanity, I became pregnant and from the moment this reality became known to me, so did another life-saving conception.  The birth of PURPOSE.  Suddenly, I had a goal and a purpose and a reason to rededicate myself to seeking the transcendent in life, and I named him Griffin.

Today my son and I have a victory to chase and there is nothing in heaven or in hell that is going to prevent me from finishing this formidable journey with him.

And as for those with distain who sneer and try to hold my son down in the muck of their pond-scum judgment, shame on you!

Oftentimes the most magnificent recreations are made of shame and ash.  This Griffin will soar again.