March 2023
You write in your letter something which I sometimes feel also: Sometimes I do not know how I shall pull through. -Vincent Van Gogh
When we’ve lost someone we love, in our case our son Bobby, four years is both an eternity and yesterday. We no longer expect them to show up for family gatherings or to send a text or call, but the intensity of their absence still feels as if we lost them yesterday. When the loss involves addiction, the quest for answers and understanding is often an ongoing pursuit.
A large part of our son Bobby’s struggle, which fed his addiction, was that he didn’t feel as if he truly fit in anywhere. I didn’t realize the extent of this until after he died when I read some of the things he wrote. A lot of people, including me, enjoyed being around him and when he passed away, I felt as if I had lost both a son and a friend. We loved him and he loved us. It never occurred to us to question whether or not he felt he belonged. But he did question this. Bobby told me that he’d had this feeling of being on the outside, of not fitting in, since he was a child. I thought about this a lot after I watched a TED Talk on addiction by Johann Hari. Hari ends the talk by saying that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection. I think there’s truth to this, but it doesn’t completely explain Bobby. He did establish friendships and connections with people, yet it’s true that, as time went on, a lot of these connections were threatened or severed by his addiction. This, in turn, fueled his drug use, but it’s really hard to determine the part this may have played in the early stages of his addiction. Of course, for everyone, it’s complicated and there is more than one risk factor. Something else Hari said resonated even more as contributing to Bobby’s struggle. He said addicts don’t want to be present in their own lives. To feel this way, there are likely connection issues as well, but I think not wanting to be present even more closely matches not only Bobby’s behavior, but his choices, his writing and his approach to life. He posted the following picture by Van Gogh in 2011 when he was 21. It was with the comment, “He really captured how I feel on a daily basis.” I think it was partly in jest, but only partly. He thought about death more than most people.
I called Bobby my niche child. His sister, Hannah, can take her skills and gifts and fit into a variety of situations. But I always felt as if Bobby had to find his niche, a particular place out of which he could function and feel that he was in the right place. I never envisioned him in a corporate setting or mowing a lawn in a suburb. I could, however, easily picture him in an apartment in a large city, with a cat, books and music, working for a small art gallery and traveling with an adventuresome girlfriend. If he imagined something similar, the vision wasn’t strong enough to pull him through. And as heroin increasingly clouded his thinking, visualizing anything like this became less and less possible for him
where did you go
what did you do
where did you wake up
I went everywhere I could
I am trying to escape
can I escape
been looking for my mind since the pixies asked me to
I did everything I could to escape myself
over oceans to London
over arctic to Beijing
over prairie and rocks to Durango
traveling looking for myself in everything else
instead of letting go
can’t I escape?
I go to work here there and everywhere
What can I get for you guys today
What kind of massage would you like today
Where do you want me to bring this artwork today
Where is my guard post today
can I never get away?…
In the everlasting eternity my father believes in
I awaken
I found myself
-Bobby Young