by Poorna Bell
But he is not asleep, he is gone. There is an expectation to feel him there, to feel something tangible and filled with comfort, and the absence of that is cold and empty.
When I return to the cemetery alone, a few days later, it is completely different. John Denver comes on the radio, ‘Rocky Mountain High’, a song Rob loved. It’s warm and in the distance I can hear ‘Amazing Grace’ being played on bagpipes at a funeral nearby.
I realise Rob isn’t his body; he is the songs he loved, the plants he photographed and the letters he wrote to all of us. And rather than an absence at his grave, I feel Rob pouring in.
I took vows, and while his life was not mine, it was half of mine and I promised to be there for him in sickness and in health.
I’m sorry, I whisper.
I say it like a rosary prayer, over and over.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Bobbie, I’m so sorry.
I ask him for forgiveness. I tell him how much I miss him, the smell of his hair, the sound of his voice.
As I sit in this swell of new grief, I think about how all of those people will feel when they see the coffin being lowered into the earth. How it will stay chiselled into their memories for years to come, each second of that moment hammered in stone, blood and pain.
Chapter Eight
Narcotics Anonymous Chapter Meeting
Date: January 2015
Robert Owen Bell was the guest speaker:
People come to Narcotics Anonymous in all kinds of states and often full of preconceptions – ‘It was wrapped up in my head with the Salvation Army,’ one addict tells the room to laughter, ‘I expected tambourines and God-botherers.’
I came into my first meeting three days clean after a quarter century of heavy drug and alcohol use, culminating in a ten-year relationship with heroin that began as a flirtation, became a love affair and ended in four years lost to an addiction that stripped me of everything I valued in and outside of myself, still dope-sick, clucking, cursing the cold that had fallen on the city the day I’d gone into withdrawal.
There were no tambourines. Smiles, yes. Hugs from strangers, yes. A commonality of experience that helped draw me out of the nightmare my life had become, yes.
Hope for those lost to hopelessness, definitely.
I struggle with aspects of the NA programme and probably always will. However, rather than reading like a tract, the philosophy of the ‘fellowship of NA’ sounds more like a political manifesto from the turn of the last century.
‘A non-profit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem’, NA is made up of ‘recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean’.
‘Anyone may join us, regardless of age, race, sexual identity, creed, religion, or lack of religion,’ it continues. ‘The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, because we can only keep what we have by giving it away. We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean.’
Meetings begin with a few simple readings steeped in an honesty most addicts feel they have lost from their lives forever: ‘Who is an addict? Most of us do not have to think twice about this question. We know! Our whole life and thinking was centred on drugs in one form or another – the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more. We lived to use and used to live. Very simply, an addict is a man or woman whose life is controlled by drugs. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death.’
This statement both resonates and rankles. I struggle to agree with the idea of my addiction as an ‘illness’. Is this the last of my pride? Or am I turning my back on an easy excuse?
Having professed the non-religious nature of NA, I’m going to ruin it with a biblical metaphor. Growing up in a devoutly Christian household, the passage in the New Testament that meant the most to me was Jesus, a man, alone and about to die, crying out on the Cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’
Drug addicts don’t live in Hell, that bustling metropolis of souls united in torment, but hang helpless on a lonely hill, facing a tomorrow over which they have lost control, of more lies, shame, betrayal; a tomorrow of abasing themselves once more before a God whose only currency is death, but which cannot be denied or abandoned without great suffering.
Drugs strip the addict of everything he or she values, both within and without.
NA addicts are reminded why they are in the rooms: ‘Before coming to the fellowship of NA, we could not manage our own lives. We could not live and enjoy life as other people do. We had to have something different and we thought we had found it in drugs. We placed their use ahead of the welfare of our families, our wives, husbands and our children. We had to have drugs at all costs. We did many people great harm, but most of all we harmed ourselves. Through our inability to accept personal responsibilities we were actually creating our own problems. We seemed to be incapable of facing life on its own terms.
‘Most of us realised that in our addiction we were slowly committing suicide, but addiction is such a cunning enemy of life that we had lost the power to do anything about it. Many of us ended up in jail, or sought help through medicine, religion and psychiatry. None of these methods was sufficient for us. Our disease always resurfaced or continued to progress until, in desperation, we sought help from each other in Narcotics Anonymous.’
Addicts lose their partners, children, jobs and homes, alienate the family and friends they steal from to support their habits, or push away as they become increasingly isolated. They disappear from social circles in an attempt to hide their problem, consumed by shame, embarrassed by their helplessness.
I was lucky in still having a roof over my head and a loving wife willing to support me through recovery, but most addicts come into the room having hit rock bottom. Early on, I heard the story of a man who had drifted into London from the North with a bag of crack cocaine and a wad of cash in his pocket.
He woke in a Euston cemetery with nothing and was soon living on the streets, begging to survive, hopelessly addicted to alcohol and drugs. He was visibly deteriorating, and a woman staffing the day centre where he sometimes showered and grabbed a cup of tea offered to get him into rehab – but there was a catch: he had to enter rehab clean.
It was January, and New Year’s resolutions meant detox centres were full to bursting, but having hit rock bottom he found a new determination and holed up with his sleeping bag (his only possession) out the back of the local Iceland.
‘I detoxed behind Iceland in the middle of the coldest winter of my life,’ he says. ‘And a couple of days in, the cops who usually moved me on were buying me pasties and bottles of water, and the manager and his staff were cheering me on – he’s gone three days! Four!’
He left behind the cold of January 1991 to enter rehab and has been clean since. Now that took guts. And heart. In rehab he joined NA, and over a decade later still attends meetings – not just for himself but to help other addicts. Remember: ‘We can only keep what we have by giving it away.’
By the end of my heroin addiction, intimacy was almost completely lost to me. I spoke to no one but the parasitic dealers who kept me in gear; I snuck into bed hours after my wife to lie rigid beside her, consumed by guilt and shame, cowering behind the tissue of lies that hid my addiction.
My friends were gone; everyone I knew I had made a stranger.
But in the rooms my fellow addicts offered smiles, hugs, laughter, profanity, understanding, acceptance, as much support – or space – as I needed, a text message, a sugary tea and a chocolate biscuit.
And I soaked that empathy up, a thirsty man in the desert stumbling into an oasis. I had been alone for so long, in my head and heart, isolated, lost, kneeling helpless before my addiction every morning.
In NA I found help I could grasp, made tangible in the story I share with the other addicts in the rooms and the love given freely by those who
had once thought love was lost from their life to those who have lost their belief they deserve love.
NA meetings also begin ‘with a moment of silence, to think of all addicts still suffering, both in and outside of these rooms’.
So to all those addicts (especially those worried they’re going to be God-bothered into submission) still suffering in the cold, I can only say come inside.
Chapter Nine
‘What came first,’ asked Rob’s psychiatrist, ‘the addiction or the depression?’
We were sitting in the Priory, in The Doctor’s expensive office, drinking rapidly cooling tea. It was a rhetorical question.
As we waited in the natural pause that followed, I heard Rob pacing outside while we had this private chat. Wondering what his doctor would tell me. Wondering if I would leave him, when I finally knew the true extent of it all.
After Rob told me the truth about his addiction, I agreed to stay with him and work through it on one condition. If he relapsed or felt close to relapsing, he would tell me and we would get help. The worst thing, I said, was being lied to.
‘I love you, but my parents didn’t raise me to be an idiot,’ I said.
In the nine months following that conversation, Rob relapsed twice. Once on heroin, once on alcohol. Both times had been surrounded yet again by layer upon layer of lies; he had allowed weeks to pass, weeks where I questioned my own sanity, where I questioned him, before he finally owned up.
Although by now I knew the signs – lack of sleep, a reluctance to come to bed at the same time as me, borrowing money and loss of appetite – somehow he had still managed to hoodwink me. He traded on excuses and the trust I had in him, what little was left of it.
Why didn’t I leave him? Why didn’t I just say no, put my foot down and demand utter compliance?
Because I was human and I had feelings. I wasn’t a doctor; I wasn’t dealing with a patient. Because what kind of marriage was it if I became the disciplinarian and treated him like a child?
Rob was a human being, a difficult, obstinate, often aggravating human being, but nonetheless an adult who deserved dignity, and, like other people struggling with a dual diagnosis of mental illness and addiction, he needed it more than most.
I don’t know how I knew this but I did: the reason why Rob had come to this point was because he believed he wasn’t worth anything. The most important thing I could do for him was to help restore his humanity.
While I’m painfully aware how Rob’s battle with addiction ended, I asked Dr Shanahan if he noticed any commonalities in people who managed to stay clean for years. He said that ‘the insulation of hope was very important to people’.
‘The feeling that something better was possible. The maintenance of friendships, however thin and tenuous they were. Just someone who continued to trust and believe in them a little bit. Just believing, as I do, that if there is life, there’s hope.’
I don’t think people realise how hard it is when you are trying to decipher genuine cause from excuses, when your relationship is lost in a moral miasma of grey and half-truths. It’s not as simple as shutting the door, kicking them out.
When you don’t know the truth, when all you are going on is a bellyful of paranoia and anxiety, your love for the other person holds you hostage.
The first time he relapsed, he managed a month before confessing. I couldn’t fathom how, despite forgiving him and helping him through recovery, despite the very high cost I paid in terms of all my relationships, especially my parents, he had reverted to lying again.
‘Does our marriage really mean that little to you?’ I asked. ‘Do you seriously not give a fuck about how hard this is for me?’
He tried to explain that it had nothing to do with us, and that it had everything to do with his own struggle with addiction.
Shortly afterwards, in a letter to his doctor that I saw without him knowing, he said: ‘I want to be clean, for good. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, and I know I can do it. I did it towards the end of last year, and I have complete faith in myself that I can do it again, and without it ending in a relapse as it has this time.’
Although I was fed up and felt like I’d heard it all before, I was sure he could do it.
I made him promise again.
With blue eyes big and full of fear that he would lose me, he swore he wouldn’t ever touch drugs again. That he knew, that he’d learned, that he would not mess this up. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You are the most important thing to me. Please, honey, please give me another chance.’
We began recovery again the next day. Two days of silence and being sick in the spare room that doubled up as his office, and then after a time I would hear music coming from his room again. When Rob was back in active addiction, you knew because he wouldn’t play music.
When he was well, he’d sit at his computer and play Billy Bragg, the Carpenters, Slayer, Turbonegro, The Specials, Townes Van Zandt, Gil Scott-Heron and his favourite at that time, Nekrogoblikon, a ‘melodic death metal’ band whose material centred mainly around goblins and whose mascot was a guy wearing a goblin suit called John Goblikon.
I have ears that stick out, and when I scraped my hair back, he’d look lovingly at me and say: ‘Aw, baby, you look just like a goblin.’
‘How’d you like my goblin foot up your ass?’ I’d reply with a glare.
In the mornings, he’d make a strong coffee with four sugars, light up a cigarette and stick something fast and loud on. In the afternoons he’d sing along to Karen Carpenter and make Daisy’s paws dance in time to the music. The evenings were mainly James Taylor, a musician who’d had his own battles with drugs and had emerged clean and sober as this wonderfully kind, worldly man. I think Rob saw hope in that for himself.
We were still renting, and decided to move to the more sedate, leafy streets of Middlesex. South London was too druggy and there were too many bad memories. But in between our house move, Rob underwent the second major relapse since his proper attempt at recovery in 2014. This time on alcohol, which meant the downward spiral was far quicker and more destructive.
It started very innocuously. A couple of beers when we were in India in April for a cousin’s wedding, back when I didn’t know that recovery meant no drugs whatsoever, including alcohol.
Three months later, we then moved far away from the drug dealers in Streatham to quiet, suburban Hampton where we didn’t know anyone, and visited our local pub as part of our introduction to the area. Then I noticed that Rob went to the same pub the next day. And the next day. He would have a couple of beers every evening.
A week went by, and I voiced my concern. I could see the patterns of addiction returning. The excuses: ‘It’s sunny’; the bargaining: ‘It’s only one’; and eventually the lying: bank statements revealed he had been to the off-licence every night and somehow had managed to conceal it.
When Rob died, I rescued as many of his voicemails as I could. I wanted to remember his voice, turn it over on my tongue like a chocolate, feel it pass through my ears and pour that remembrance into myself.
But there is one that I hate because it is so nonchalant. It is the perfect example of how he manipulated my concern to make it seem dramatic, unwarranted, when he was disguising his substance abuse.
He left the message for me while I was on a train back home to Hampton, a commute I hated because the trains only ran every half an hour, and it seemed to take forever to get home. In the voicemail, he said he was in the pub and knew I’d be furious and ‘overreact’, but that I didn’t have anything to worry about and he didn’t want to fight.
It was at this time that I would have one of the worst nights of my life with Rob.
It starts with him spending most of the night playing music and clattering around loudly. When I wake up, tetchy from a night of bad sleep, I come downstairs to find him sprawled on the floor next to the dog. I think he’s asleep, but he isn’t, he’s passed out drunk.
I don’t know
this yet.
I see the car has been parked haphazardly outside the house; the windows rolled down. I am late for my train; I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
I yell at Rob to wake up, but he doesn’t. I’m pissed off. Fed up. But I’ve got to get to work. We live in a safe neighbourhood, the car will be fine.
I’ve just been promoted so work is intense. It’s a long day, and while on my way home, sweating on the hot train, I get a phone call. It’s Rob and I can’t understand what he’s saying. At first I think it’s a bad connection then I realise he can’t actually talk.
‘Are you drunk?’ I yell incredulously.
He’s so drunk he can’t even answer. The temperature of my skin feels like the surface of the sun. I am so angry and I feel myself welling up but I can’t cry, I won’t cry on this train full of goddamn suburban commuters travelling towards their wonderfully sedate picket-fence lives.
I sit rigid, with my mask on, for the longest forty-minute journey in the history of Poorna.
When I get home, he can’t stand. He becomes belligerent because I won’t talk to him. I won’t talk to him because he is swaying and his eyes are rolling in his head. I feel disgusted. I want this man as far from me as possible. This isn’t the person I know. The person who placed a ring on my finger promising to honour and cherish me wouldn’t put me in this horror show.
He’s a fucking stranger; he’s breaking my heart.
He follows me into the kitchen. On some level, through the fog, he knows something is wrong but can’t seem to work out why I’m so angry.
I ignore him. While I’m chopping up vegetables he loses his balance and his face smacks down hard on the tiled floor. I swear I hear a crack. That gets my attention. I fight the urge to cry. I go over to him as he lies on the floor.
He is heavy. He is big and I’m not strong, so I can’t lift him up properly. I’ve never been more scared for him, for me, and for us. Finally, he gets up.
