The Waiting

by Minerva


(Photo stolen from this site)

My sister-in-law is a drug addict.

She's been a drug addict since long before I met her, long before she reached adulthood. In fact, when I was first dating her brother, the man I would later marry, he told me that it was unlikely I would ever meet Kate. "She'll probably be dead before you get a chance to meet her," he told me, and he wasn't kidding.

But she didn't die. She got herself cleaned up, through a lot of hard work and the support of family and friends. She held down a job, took back responsibility for her young child, even went back to college. Her life became busy, full, and complicated, but in her own frenetic way she managed it. She went to meetings all the time -- Narcotics Anonymous, I presume, but maybe Alcoholics Anonymous, too. She thrived.

She met a great guy. He understood her past and was willing to take her on. They got married and had a baby of their own. They owned a nice home, had two bright and well-adjusted children, and life seemed very good for all of them.

Kate has been addressing, little by little, the things in her life that she has ignored for so many years. One of those things was dental work. When it became necessary to have oral surgery, Kate hesitated because of her need for pain medication. But there was no way around it, and she had the surgery and took the pain meds. At some point -- my grasp of the details is fuzzy at best -- Kate's addiction again took over. Was she immediately hooked, or was it after her bout with pneumonia? Was she using before the two major medical emergencies that hit the family, or did the enormous strain of those events push her over the edge?

In any case, Kate seems to have been at the eye of the perfect storm of crises, and when the storm blew over, Kate was a raging addict again.

After a stint in rehab early this year, Kate was battling back. We saw her this summer during a family visit, and she seemed jumpy, erratic and hyperactive, but as long as I've known Kate she's been jumpy, erratic and hyperactive. A few alarm bells went off in my head, but I kept quiet, because really, what did I know? What could I do? I knew nothing. I did nothing.

I got the call on a recent Sunday morning, from a brother who rarely calls. "Kate's in jail," he said quietly. The call came hours before Kate's parents, my in-laws, were due to arrive home from a trip abroad. They knew nothing of the arrest, nor did they know that Kate was using again. The last the family knew, Kate had been clean again for several months.

Kate's hard-won idyllic life is now in shambles. The family sits by and waits, wondering what will happen next. Moves have been made to protect children and finances, but otherwise, there is not much any of us can do. We wait. Kate sits in jail, as far as I know -- the crimes she committed as she savaged her life and the lives of her family are too many and too dark to list here -- and we wait.

Of all of the horrors inflicted upon families by drugs and by the loved ones who use them, the thing I keep coming back to is the waiting. People who are used to taking matters into their own hands are left wringing those hands, powerless, reactive instead of proactive. There's so little to do or say, and all of the pent-up anger, hurt, and fear are likely to be directed laterally, instead of at the user, who isn't there to take her lumps. When do we all start bickering? Who will start the snarling at one another?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.