An Easter Miracle

A story of addiction, recovery and family

It is a truism in storytelling that the most personal stories are the most universal. I'm telling this very personal story because the core themes are universal, they are lessons I have had to learn the hard way, and by sharing them they might help others in similar situations.

The last three years have been some of the hardest of my life, as I've wrestled with my mother's slow, and then increasing spiral downwards, with addiction and trauma, self-destructive behaviour that brought her close to death on multiple occasions. We thought we'd lost her several times. And yet this last Easter Sunday, it seemed to me that, miraculously, things had changed.

This story brings up all the timeless questions about the human condition that will be familiar to anyone who's wrestled with family members in the grips of addiction, and is encapsulated beautifully in the serenity prayer read out at the start of Alcohlics Anonymous meetings: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.".

What are our responsibilities to others? How much can we really help others, and how much must they help themselves? Also tied into this is the question of what are our responsibilities as family, to live our own lives versus helping others? And in this fragmented and atomised age, what are our responsibilities and expectations as children to our aging parents, none of us know any more.

This story begins with my father's death just over ten years ago. I spoke about this in a talk I put out on Rebel Wisdom in 2018, it was a shock that came out of nowhere. He was a fit and healthy 63 year old who was living a wonderful life with my mother, retired and travelling the world, loved cycling, deeply immersed in theatre and the arts, and he was suddenly diagnosed with stomach cancer in August 2011. He was dead by December. My parents had been married for 40 years, and were as close as they had ever been at the time of his diagnosis.

I also talked about how the three months of his illness turned into a hugely powerful process. I had had a very difficult relationship with my father, but I had done a lot of work in various personal growth processes trying to process and untangle that relationship. I was then able to express my gratitude and love for him finally in the last months, and in the wake of that, contacted all his former colleagues, friends and family to ask for their tributes, which were read to him by my mother. Some magic happened that I was able to help catalyse only because I'd done the growth work myself to heal my relationship with him internally. He also had the courage to face death head on, and not deny or avoid the reality.

These two factors played out in the outside world in a magical outpouring of goodwill towards him from everyone around him in the last months of his life that helped him appreciate what he'd meant to others, and shift the self image of seeing himself as a failure, when he was far from that.

As a reticent Englishman I feel very uncomfortable making myself the centre of any story, but I tell this story about my father often, and at a key moment on our men's retreats as a way of explaining why we do the work of self examination, honesty and emotional processing, because I know that it can cascade out to our relationships in meaningful and profound ways. I would not have been able to show up for my father in the way that I did if I hadn't worked through my resentment towards him. It's why I'm so passionate about this kind of work more than anything else in the world.

This story has always had a real impact on others. And this is why I tell this story now about my mother. I have sent it to her and she has is happy for me to share it.

It was only after my father died that it became clear how much this quiet and unassuming man was holding the family together, and over the next ten years it slowly, and then quickly, fell apart. When I tell people the full details they find it hard to believe, and even to me it reads like a barely believable soap opera script.

In particular it became clear that my father played an essential role in providing my mother with stability, discipline and support. Over time, and particularly in the last three years, she fell into chaos. After a catastrophic fall downstairs in January 2018 that nearly killed her, she increasingly slipped into addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills, impulsive spending and huge amounts of debt. A formerly house proud woman living in untidiness and squalor, increasingly angry and reactive and damaging relationships with friends. Every time I visited her I would see a clear representation of the chaotic world she had created for herself in her flat covered with random papers and leaflets, pointless trinkets she would buy from the town.

The contrast with the mother I knew growing up, a deeply warm and caring, clever and informed person, was unimaginable. This was a woman who had worked all her life in some of the most demanding environments, holding down a job as one of the most professional (and feared) senior teachers at one of the most difficult schools in Southampton.

The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has talked about addiction as a form of "reciprocal narrowing" of attention. Where a substance is used to narrow and numb awareness (usually of pain or trauma), to the point where the only thing the addict can think if is the next fix, which numbs awareness and attention further, in a self-reinforcing downward spiral.

This warmth and connection was seen only in rare glimpses. Sometimes when I would visit she would barely even acknowledge me, lost in the narrowness and constriction of her wounded psyche.

During this time I tried everything I could possibly think of. I lost my temper with her and told her she was destroying herself, I broke down in tears in front of her, I tried enlisting the help of the family in an intervention.

In early March 2020 I took her to the addiction clinic nearby and had a rare breakthrough. She confessed everything about the scale of her drinking to the counsellor and committed to a course of action, weekly support sessions. She went to the first one, and the very next week, the pandemic hit and the meetings stopped. The isolation and lack of social support of lockdown made the situation worse.

Most difficult with addiction is the secrecy and lies that go with it. She would deny drinking when it was obvious that she was drunk, and even when I told her that I wasn't expecting her to be sober, and I would much prefer her to be honest, because how could we have a relationship at all if it wasn't based on truth, she would still lie.

I felt like if I could just find the right intervention, the right moment of realisation, the right words, that this could shift things. It never worked that way.

Along with the lies came the denial and ingratitude. In total contrast to the mother I had known, she had become completely self-absorbed, and attempts at intervention or help would meet with rejection and anger and evasion. There was no appreciation of the effect that she was having on others and no awareness or thanks for anything that I or others were doing for her.

In July 2021 I was driving to a friend's birthday in the North of England when my brother texted to say that no-one had heard from my mother for a couple of days and her phone was off. I called her neighbour who went in to check on her and found her unconscious on the floor, barely breathing. When the paramedics came they said she had been there for at least two days, that she was gravely ill and that I should come down to see her. When I asked if that meant that they thought she would die, they said yes. I drove down immediately and despite the Covid regulations I and my sister were allowed in to see her. She looked like my father had in the last hours of his life, a dried out husk.

Yet somehow over the next days and weeks, she pulled through. On multiple occasions she had seemingly tried as hard as possible to destroy herself, but she was still here.

I've never been part of the twelve step (Alcoholics Anonymous) world, but am familiar with the worldview and think it's fundamentally right. Step one to recovery is realising that you're not in control. What became more and more clear was that the linking factor between all my mother's addiction was an egoic attachment and delusion that she could control it. She would claim to be going to AA meetings, but it was clear she'd never grasped that first point. The AA process then involves invoking a higher power to help with the recovery journey, it's a process of spiritual transformation.

But I suspect some of the insights of AA have hardened into something like dogma. During one of the most difficult visits, arriving to find her drunk at 11am, yet denying it, I called the Al Anon helpline, AA's support network for families of alcoholics. The volunteer on the other end of the line told me clearly and repeatedly that I had no responsibility or control in that situation, that it was my mother's decision and there was nothing I could do. He kept returning to his own story of trying to intervene with his ex wife, and how he'd been unable to do anything to help. He continued talking about his own experiences for so long it started to feel that I was in the role of counsellor instead of him.

There's a core truth in that message that we have to accept and integrate, that ultimately the addict has to help themselves, there's little anyone can do unless the person is wanting to get better and willing to do the work. But it's also clearly true that there are things that we can do to help, and to support and make that easier.

When she finally came out of hospital in summer 2021 I found her a therapist, an excellent, highly experienced woman who used to work in the NHS alcohol services. She seemed to find reasons not to go, from money or transport, but with persuasion and repeated reinforcement of why this was necessary, she started going more regularly.

To help her get out of debt we found a smaller place that she could move into, and I took on the negotiations and administration with the estate agents and solicitors. My brother, who lives in Holland, helped her with her finances.

After another relapse and fall over Christmas I suggested that she could move to a nearby city, Brighton, where I could live nearby and be available to help. She thought about it and decided that she would rather live in the place she had made her home since 2018, the small market town of Romsey. She was clear that she wanted to be close to the Romsey Abbey, a beautiful old church as large as many cathedrals. It didn't quite make sense to me at the time why she was so seemingly obsessed with the Abbey.

A few days before Easter this year I thought that it might be good to go to church on Easter Sunday. Both my parents were Methodists when I was growing up and we went to church regularly, but I hadn't been for some years. With many of the thinkers I've interviewed over the years, I've come to appreciate and value the deeper stories we are born into and act out in our lives, and in some sense tie our culture together, and it felt appropriate to go to church at Easter. I live in London, and initially thought to put the word out on Facebook and see if anyone was interested to go to Westminster Abbey or something similar. Then it struck me that my mother would definitely be going to the service in Romsey (2.5 hours each way) and I could go down and see her for the day.

Things had already started to shift in the weeks leading up to Easter. She seemed to have stopped drinking, or at least cut down a lot, she sent me and other members of the family a thank you card for things we had done for her, the therapist said she was the best she had ever seen her at the last session.

When I arrived at the Abbey, I sat down next to her and held her hand. She started crying and saying how wonderful it was to see me and how grateful she was for all the help she was getting. We shared a beautiful moment in the church. The service was quintessentially English, as serious as it needed to be but no more, with a healthy dose of irreverance from the vicar, the almost apologetic lack of evangelical zeal that makes the Anglican church so endearing.

After the service she led us to coffee and cakes with the congregation. It was only then that I realised why she had been so keen to stay close to the Abbey. Over an hour or so different people dropped by our table to say hello and to speak to her and be introduced to me. It was so friendly and wholesome, and wonderfully, perfectly classically English in its restrained supportiveness. She had been open about her addiction with these people, they knew her and her flaws, and valued her nonetheless with Christian charity and openness.

I realised I had underestimated the level of support and connection that she had in Romsey, and the natural resources of community that she had created for herself and could continue to support her. As Johann Hari said in his popular TED talk, the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it's connection (to self and others).

I also realised that I had been fixated on the one thing that would make a difference, the magic words I could find, or the intervention that would finally get through, and yet that's not how recovery works. It was the long slow work of being there over time, despite all her attempts at wrecking the relationships with everyone around her, it was about all of us being there for her as family that had turned things around.

We spent the rest of the day visiting a local garden, had lunch and then drove her home. When I returned home to London I was inspired to send her Lou Reed's Perfect Day, as it seemed to sum up the beautiful transcendent of finding a perfect day in the seemingly mundane.

The transcendent for me that for a day at least, I had got my mother back.

She replied saying it was one of her favourite songs.

Ultimately she'd done it herself, with help and scaffolding from many others. What happens now is up to her. There is still a long way to go, much trauma to process, but she now has the resources to do it. She's still only 71, still has her piercing intelligence and her emotional awareness. I believe she can do it, and that there can be many more perfect days in the future.

I am crying as I write these words now. I'm not sure why, if it's the gratitude for this experience, or if it's for the pain of the last years, or if it's both. I think it's both, and the deep spiritual truth is that the pain and the joy is interlinked and intertwined, the one deepens our capacities for the other.

One of the very last things my father said to me was, "take care of your mother". I had no idea at the time what he was asking me to take on, and I wonder if even he knew how things would get. In retrospect I am grateful for the responsibility. It has been one of the hardest yet most valuable lessons of the last years for me.

Thank you father. And thank you mother. I love you very much.

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I am hosting a special session on addiction and recovery for Rebel Wisdom members next Thursday, 28th April, with a special guest facilitator. To join up as a member, click here. If you really want to come and cannot afford membership, we will happily make space for you, email: mailrebelwisdom@gmail.com