When you love someone who is addicted to something that can end their life in an instant, it consumes you. The fear. The sadness. The waiting for the phone to ring. The wondering what a different step down a different path could have meant for them, for all of you. You begin to wonder if you told them enough that you love them, how much their presence in your life means to you, how much they mean to the people that love them. You question everything while the voice inside you that you’ve been silencing for months is screaming. There are some questions we can’t really bear to think about the possible answers to.

My brother, Justin, is an addict, sober for years after doing the hard work to get his life back on track. Sober for long enough to get custody of his young daughter and make a life for her. Sober for long enough for us to almost forget his sunken cheeks when he overdosed on heroin all those years ago, of his gray skin, of kneeling unabashedly at his bedside in the ICU where the people trained to be there were desperately trying to “keep him alive through the night”, while we waged our own war by pleading with God to please spare him. Sober for long enough for us to sink back into our own comfortable cloak of denial that this particular evil could ever look our way again.

But that’s the thing about addiction that the optimist in us works hard to ignore. It’s always there. Waiting. Crouching in the shadows on the brightest days, anticipating the moment when they will be called again to action, wreaking havoc and destruction, and doling out pain to anyone who dares come near. My brother’s addiction has waited patiently as we slept, and now that blissful sleep has gone. My brother is once again in active addiction, and we once again find ourselves helplessly on our knees, begging for his life.

I have always been a dreamer, a hopeless romantic, an optimist with an unshakeable Faith. Deep down, I am still all of those things, but I wonder how well that optimism is serving me at this particular moment. I wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to expect the worst to happen in the hopes it softens the sharp edges of what feels inevitable right now. I want to BELIEVE that he’s going to wake up from this and see the light at the end of this dark, lonely tunnel he’s run headlong into, and that he will decide to follow it long enough that he can stay here with us. I want to believe that our love and Faith is enough to keep him here. I’m just so scared that it isn’t.

When someone you love is in active addiction, you find yourself constantly thinking about what you could have done. Should have done. You wonder what signs you missed or flat out ignored in the interest of remaining positive. You ruminate on the last thing you said to them. Was it wrapped in love? Was it hateful? Should you have said something different? For me, the words that are haunting me sound something like, “If you get out of this car, I will never speak to you again!” And to be perfectly honest, at the time, I meant them. We were on our way to rehab and he was trying to jump out of my vehicle while I was going 65 in the left lane, surrounded by vehicles of all shapes and sizes traveling at the same speed. I was scared. I was angry. I was desperate. Looking back, we were probably feeling a lot of the same things, but for completely different reasons. But nevertheless, the words were said, and after crossing three lanes of traffic that miraculously opened up for me, he jumped out and refused to get back in, and I was forced to move from the shoulder and back into the fast-moving traffic, and somehow home. He somehow found a different ride to the rehab facility with a “friend” who allowed him to lie and say he didn’t really need treatment, and three days later, here we are. He’s overdosed again and through the miracles of modern medicine is with us in the land of the living, but not really, and we are able to breathe, but not really…

…and I’m afraid to answer my phone when it rings.