When The Famous Ones Die

On seeing my own death and holding on to the 'exquisite ordinary'

Here is the audio of this essay if you prefer to listen to my dulcet tones.

First a word on the word ‘addict’. Not everyone agrees with using the word ‘addict’ but I find it helpful to be blunt with myself about what I am. I am an addict. If I describe myself as a person with Substance Use Disorder, it feels like I am side-stepping a serious truth, it feels like a linguistic dodge. To call myself an addict is a form of insurance, you see. I am not someone with something. I am a person who is something. I call myself an addict so I can never forget that this propulsive and depraved urge to drink and numb and pursue it over the edge and right down to the bottom dwells in the very cells of my body and I have no control over it. So yeah, I’m an addict.

Addiction has taken some of our best recently and I can’t help but ruminate. I can never seem to meet these celebrity deaths without some strange degree of selfishness. A stupid part of me, thinks that I, in some way, own these deaths because they have the same illness as me. This is patently ridiculous and self-absorbed. It makes me feel guilty, because I have no right to grieve these people when their real friends and family are no doubt reeling and shattered by the loss.

But I cannot help the grief that comes with another of my own dying, because when they die they are acting out some version of a future that might be mine and might be the future of my friends who are also in recovery.

And I cannot help the scalding horror that comes with witnessing your own death.

So I grieve. And I am scared because with addiction it is not a quiet passing but a violent, degrading mess. You are stripped of dignity and wrenched from this world and it all feels so so avoidable. But of course it is not. That is the part non-addicts find so hard to comprehend. ‘If they just stopped’, they say, heads shaking, palms facing upwards seeking some kind of explanation. If they… just… stopped.

But this is where their logic is inside out. ‘If they just stopped’ is not the reality the addict lives in. It’s more true to say: If the disease just stopped. But the disease never stops no matter how many years of sobriety they might have had on the clock. The disease can be dormant but it never stops. It lies in wait.

When the famous ones die even after finding sobriety, that’s when we see just how cunning and treacherous this illness is. Addiction is patient. It can bide its time for years. Philip Seymour Hoffman was sober for 23 years when he relapsed in 2012 and later died of an overdose. He was 46 years old. He had been sober for exactly half his life and still the disease got him.

‘Living in addiction’ is a phrase we hear a lot in recovery and I like this idea that addiction is not just the actions you carry out to serve your addiction, it is a place where you dwell. It is geographical, it has its own climate. No outsider can ever understand the pull of addiction. They cannot understand the unrelenting pull that comes from a cellular level. Your very bones crave this thing. The urge for this thing resists logic, it bypasses all reason. Your very marrow lusts for this thing. How to describe this to a reasonable, well person?

Have you ever been caught in a strong undertow? Have you ever felt the sensation of the unfathomably large ocean wanting you, trying to suck you backwards? The sudden thud of panic as you feel the power of this thing. And the mad thing is you can see the shore, your shouts may even be heard but every futile attempt to swim towards it is demolished by another wave. To be forever thrashing and fighting the undertow is what it’s like to live in addiction.

To witness the trajectory of addiction is something quite staggering. It is so systematically destructive that frankly sometimes I’m impressed by it. It is, in many ways, one of the most efficient ways to completely destroy a life.

When I was 13, I drank alcohol for the first time at a party. I remember the relief of it. I remember thinking that as long as this existed, as long as I had this, I would be okay. I could get through life. And to be clear my life was one of astonishing privilege. I had a loving home, friends, a bright future. But remember I had the thirst in my bones. This disease does not recognise the beauty in our lives. This disease is unreasonable, it is not appeased by security and love. It operates so completely outside of these things. It is illogical. And I mean that so literally. It is an all-pervasive ill logic.

The night I drank for the first time, I stood in the shallows and felt the slightest pull around my feet. Come on in the water’s fine. As my teenage years passed – years punctured with blackouts and bad things happening in the formless blanks of alcoholic amnesia – the pull was insistent and I willingly wandered in further. I ‘graduated’ to drugs and I applied my same alcoholic drive to weed and pills. Then at 22, my worn out mind was cleaved open by a bad trip and the world beyond my body, reality basically, splintered. I heard things that weren’t there, I saw a strange face in the mirror, etc etc. Drug-induced psychosis, mental collapse, nervous breakdown. I went mad, you get it. This might feel irrelevant to the story but bear with me. I tell you this because what follows is so perfectly emblematic of the way the disease lies in wait.

After the breakdown, I gave up all substances. I was too mad to drink, I had no desire to for five years. And then one day I thought: ‘it’d be nice to have some wine with dinner.’

Ha.

The next five years were a gradual then sudden full-throttle descent into full-blown alcoholism.

Looking back now, I think I always knew in some small part of my mind that I did not, could not, drink like other people. But this thing seemed benign for so many years. I kept myself in check – or at least thought I did. I made rules to prove to myself that I was in control (a lot of these ‘rules’ on reflection were hilariously low-bar: no drinking before 5pm, no spirits in the day time – that kind of thing). I maintained something of a steady position in the undertow. I got dragged back sometimes. I floundered. I pissed the bed. I did dangerous things in blackouts. I resented my beautiful babies in the boiling morning hangovers. I lied to an athletic degree to everyone in my life. I stank when I hugged my children.

The first time I googled ‘Am I an alcoholic’ was when I was 29, two years since the disease had whispered to me ‘it’d be nice to have a glass of wine with dinner’. The very act of asking the internet ‘am I an alcoholic’ kind of answers the question – but I couldn’t face this and I drank for four more years because I simply could not imagine living without it. I broke all my ‘rules’ about drinking, I switched to white wine because secretly drinking red wine during the hours no normal person would be drinking red wine is too obvious. I found box wine was the alcoholic’s best friend given no one could see how fast the level’s were dropping.

Finally, I stopped taking care of myself, could barely take care of my children and I went to a very dark place. And by ‘dark place’ I mean I went in search of the bottom of this craving. I felt that if I could find just the right amount of alcohol, I would finally satisfy this need that dogged me. I prepared on a night when my husband was out, I set myself up with many bottles of wine and I finally stopped trying to fight the undertow. I allowed the ocean to drag me out. But I never found where the craving ends. It has no boundary line, I never touched the sides or the bottom. This realisation the next day that this thing would never ever be satisfied, this new understanding of just how much bigger than me this craving was, is what finally saw me stagger to the shore.

Shame used to be my abiding emotion. Queasy self-loathing and a dreariness in the veins. Shame-drenched days were all I knew for the last year of my drinking. And still I drank on through the shame and if that isn’t evidence enough of how beyond our control addiction can be, I don’t know what is. Imagine opting to live in that state of smothering shame all day every day because the alternative – to let go of the substance – is so completely out of reach.

I went to my first 12-step meeting terrified of what being there meant. Terrified that if I admitted what I was, I would lose alcohol and never be able to drink again. But an unexpected thing happened when it was my turn to put words to the unsayable thing. ‘My name is Sophie and I am an alcoholic.’

I felt a tremendous release, a cascading relief at finally, finally not holding it in anymore.

That’s not to say what follows was easy. The 2000 and something days without alcohol have not been without pain. But these days have also come with what I’ve come to call the exquisite ordinary. Bringing my kids to the park with a head free from the frantic, ever-present calculations of when and where the next drink is that is the constant state of every person in addiction. Going to choir and singing with friends and getting so much joy from it. Before I would never have done something like this because the only occasions I saw any value in where ones that involved booze. And of course by the end, even these occasions became a chore because it was so much effort to pretend to be a normal drinker in front of others. By the end, I just wanted to drink alone so I could drink the way I needed to.

This year will be my sixth sober Christmas (if nothing awful happens in the next two weeks) and often people ask me if Christmas is hard as a sober person. I can only speak for myself when I say that no, it is infinitely easier. When I was drinking, Christmas, with all its extra family time and socialising, was a bloody ball ache for me, a secretive alcoholic. So much pretending my drinking was normal. The hassle! Christmas in sobriety is actually a lovely time, I go to AA on Christmas day and see all of the people who have helped keep me sober. I do nice normal things with my kids, baking, decorating and so on and I don’t have a glass of wine or spiked coffee in my hand. These nice normal things are untainted, they are not unfolding in the presence of my addiction.

Being able to meet my husband’s eyes and kiss him first thing in the morning without soupy hangover breath betraying just how much drinking I’d done the night before is an amazing ordinary thing that I cherish. Just being present in my life without my thoughts racing ahead to the next opportunity to drink be it a glass of wine or stealth chugs from a bottle of vodka in my kitchen is astounding.

I’ve had a baby in sobriety. A miraculous baby who I pray will never know me with alcohol in my system.

A baby who will never be read a bedtime story by a mother struggling to focus on the words. A baby who will never shout in the night for a mother who’s in a blackout.

The shame’s not gone – how could it be? But I can try and make my amends every day. Every exquisite ordinary day.

What I’ve learned is that the safest way to operate for me as an addict is to see my sobriety as forever precarious. And when the famous ones die, or rather are taken by their addiction – I am reminded to never ever wholly trust my sobriety.

Love it and cherish it but never take it for granted. Recovery, no matter how many thousands of days you have, is not a given.