Farewell to ‘C’

My friend at rehab, ‘C’, left today and I was bit bereft. Over the last month I’ve got to know her well and found humour and solace in her friendship. As Scottish as square sausage (try saying that with a few vodkas inside you), C arrived here, like a lot of us, in a mess. To deploy an unfortunate analogy, rehab may not exactly be the last-chance saloon for addicts, but there is a sense in which it marks a hugely important milestone in a person’s recovery. As such and on the whole, people take it seriously. If you’ve made it as far as rehab, then you have already recognised that substance addiction has become a major problem in your life, maybe the defining problem, and that you’re serious about tackling it. But seriousness of purpose should not take away the soul and spirit and warmth of a person. And C effortlessly combined all those strengths.

A blazing alcoholic of the old school variety, C spent her drinking life taking no prisoners in her fevered quest for the next drink. Be it drinking petrol (yes, really), aftershave, perfume, various aerosols (‘Don’t forget tae spray it intae a glass first’, she cautions with a brassy laugh), mouthwash and hand sanitiser, C has pushed things to the limit and beyond. If you’re ever tempted, let me advise you that C was hospitalised after the petrol incident and from there promptly sectioned onto a mental health ward. Such are the places that alcohol can take us. C had now reached a point where it was do or, quite literally, die. And so to rehab and, one hopes, the long journey home.

But what struck me most about C wasn’t just her propensity for alcoholic insanity, or even her obvious warmth, kindness, compassion and outrageous sense of humour. In common with many others here, C is a formidable individual. Highly-intelligent and glamorously well-presented with a successful business career behind and in front of her, C doesn’t fit the usual stereotype of what an alcoholic might be. Which of course is something that a lot of addicts struggle with. Easily pigeonholed into the nether-world of ‘losers’, ‘junkies’, ‘dropouts’, and ‘derelicts’, the already strong sense of being down and out is further compounded by such words and notions. To be fair, those of us in the ‘recovery set’ play with these ideas ourselves, gleefully tagging each other with unhelpful appellations. ‘Good morning alcoholics, junkies and other misfits’, I said cheerfully at breakfast the other day, to a chorus of amused resentment. One of our therapists pointed out that this approach probably isn’t the most helpful, as it also reinforces and allows society’s negative language and view of us as some kind of outcasts. And she’s right as well. It’s all fun and games when you’re safely ensconced in rehab, but maybe not so funny when you’re back on the outside facing down the big, bad world and its many judgements.

‘Anything to take me away from life’, as C describes her relationship to alcohol. I know exactly how this feels. Maybe not so much a wish to be dead, as to be somehow removed from life. To exist on a level free of its sometimes overwhelming pain. I think, in their various ways, all addicts feel like this.

For C, an unexpected diagnosis of bipolar disorder was the key to unlocking the closed door of addiction, lithium the life-saving balm. ‘I haven’t had any cravings since it started to work’, she says cheerfully. ‘It’s a fucking lifesaver’. But like many of us in rehab, C had another quality that I recognise and share: an absolute refusal to be beaten, come what may. True to say that, yes, addiction might still win. If you really must run the numbers, then the odds are against us. The hospitals and graveyards open up before us, full of addicts who lost their battle.

But never let it be said that C, myself and all of us here didn’t at least try. It’s no mere hyperbole to say that we have seen, more clearly than some, that the battle against addiction is a battle for life itself. I’m privileged in the short time I’ve been here to have befriended a true warrior in that battle, because another thing I know is that you can’t do this alone. As for C, she leaves behind her a legacy of good humoured warmth and kindness that will stay with all of us here for life. The first step back into the outside world is a big one but one that C can take emboldened by our care, support and love.

One day at a time.