Missing Robert
Grief is a tricky beast. It hides and makes you think you’ve “dealt”, you’ve “moved on”, and then it hits out of nowhere like a tsunami on a sunny day.
We don’t talk about him very much, but we miss him.
I miss the way he said “Well, hello there!” when he called around this time each year to get ideas for the kids’ Christmas presents.
Over the past 2 years, there have been plenty of What ifs, plenty of What could have been done conversations, but the bottom line is that while he didn’t he make the choice to die from his drug use, he made the decision to use drugs.
He made the decision to refuse help. “No program is going to help me,” he said, and that is when I knew he had decided to stop fighting for hope.
It was a decision that defied logic. He had been clean for years, so many years that my children only knew the fun Uncle Robert.
The Uncle Robert who helped them catch fireflies in the summer and who shot a zillion fireworks with them on New Year’s Eve.
It was a decision that led down a dark path, a path filled with cover-ups, half truths, and out right lies.
It was a decision that robbed us of our brother, friend, uncle, and son.
It was also a decision borne out of a daily battle to stay on the right path, a million unseen, un-applauded decisions made over the years of being sober. A battle he fought on his own.
He didn’t have to fight alone. We, his family, would have loved to celebrate victories with him. We would have loved to applaud his successes.
But we didn’t see the burden he carried until it was too late.
By the time we saw, his mind had already been turned upside down. By then, he had bought the lie that our words of hope and encouragement hid ulterior motives and that his drug dealer friends were the only ones who could be trusted.
Isn’t that the biggest twist of irony?
The people cooking the poison that killed him had convinced him that he was no longer alone because they had rescued him when no one else would.
The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. That is the game plan he followed with Robert, and the story he seeks to write for all of us through all kinds of addictions. If our enemy can keep our focus on numbing the pain in our life, he keeps our focus off of living the life we were meant to live.
Life that gives hope, that looks forward to the future, that believes that change is possible.
So many of Robert’s years were marked by his struggle, but that struggle was not who he was. He was self-less to a fault, fun to be around, and he loved his kids. That’s the legacy I choose to remember.
At the same time, I can’t ignore his last months and days. They are filled with somber warning. They remind me that when I listen to the lies of the dark, when I give in to my own struggles and try to numb out, I am one decision away from stepping on the same path that stole him from us.