It's a chilly rainy Saturday, June 2. Today would have been my husband's 57th birthday. I imagine I would have teased him about sliding ever closer to 60. I think the word geezer would have been used. Apple crisp, his favorite dessert, would have been served instead of cake. Our three kids would be on hand, throwing out their own gentle digs about the old man getting another year older.
Ron died six and a half years ago. When I tell people my husband died they inevitably ask, "How?" I answer, "Drug overdose." And while it's the plain truth, it sounds so grim. I don't know any way to soften the information, and I don't really want to, anyway. That's what happened.
To people who aren't familiar with addiction, an overdose probably sounds like a grimy, seedy way to die. Think dark alleys, gutters, or drug houses. It does happen that way in many cases, but not in all. Decent, kind, lovely human beings die from drugs and alcohol. They die in clean, respectable surroundings, hair combed, teeth brushed.
My husband was a kind, intelligent, artistic man. He had a wonderfully twisted sense of humor, and the richest, most contagious laugh I've ever heard. He was a first-rate carpenter, a gifted artist. He loved our three children, his parents, siblings and his many nieces and nephews. He loved me as I've never been loved before or since.
His favorite band was the Rolling Stones. He loved playing their music at concert hall volume levels, and he usually sang along--not letting the fact that he couldn't sing a lick dilute his pleasure.
His favorite actor was Jack Nicholson. When we watched "As Good as It Gets" on cable, Ron burst out laughing at Nicholson's first appearance in a scene, and all Nicholson had done was answer the door.
"What? What?" I asked him, thinking I'd missed a line of dialogue.
"Nothing," Ron replied, still laughing. "It's just, just the look on his face!"
When I tell you that my husband was a drug addict and alcoholic I am not denigrating him. I am telling you he was ill, and that his illness colored all the years of our lives together. Had he only been an addict and alcoholic I wouldn't have fallen in love with him, or stayed with him for 20 years. Addiction was only one facet of who he was. If all you knew about Ron was that he was an addict, you wouldn't have truly known him at all.
Ironically, if we hadn't both been alcoholics, we probably never would have met. We were introduced by a mutual friend at a Friday night recovery group meeting. Later in our relationship, we confessed that we both were smitten at first sight.
On the surface, we had little in common. I was a bookworm, he was a Red Wings and Packers fanatic. He was a practical-minded realist, I was a whimsical daydreamer. But chemistry trumped commonalities, and in less than a year we were living together. A year later, we were married. We didn't let the fact that neither of us was emotionally equipped to deal with a lifetime commitment deter us.
We shared some of the happiest, most passionate moments of our lives, and some of the ugliest, as well. Ron was one of the unfortunates who was unable to maintain recovery for any extended period of time. For my part, I managed to stay clean while still clinging to the character defects that had led me to the bottle in the first place. If our marriage was illustrated on a graph chart, the highs would have spiked off the top of the paper, and the lows would have reached clear down to the floor.
As I get older I have less patience with people who ask "Why can't they just quit?" when discussing addiction. Who would volunteer to be tormented with cravings for the very substance that's destroying your life? Imagine having an irresistible impulse to repeatedly smash your head against a brick wall. That's addiction. It isn't fun, and it isn't a choice.
Eventually I got sick enough of myself to seriously follow the tenets of my recovery program. Ron just got sicker. He lost himself in hard drugs, and the kids and I lost him. He died in November 2005.
His death is tragic, but not shameful. He wasn't a weak, careless man; he was a sick man who couldn't find his way back to recovery. Every addict is more than their addiction, even when their addiction has consumed them.
I don't miss the chaos, the fights, the anger, the fear. But I miss my husband, the man who loved to sit in the yard and coax chipmunks to eat sunflower seeds out of his hand. The man who wasn't afraid to act completely ridiculous if it would make his kids laugh. The man who told me I was beautiful and made me feel it. A man who had so much more to him than the addictions that swallowed him whole.
Deb Pascoe of Marquette is a freelance writer and a peer recovery coach for Child and Family Services of the U.P. A former columnist for The Mining Journal, her book, "Life With a View," a collection of her past columns, is available in area bookstores.