Chapter 1: Drinking & Driving

On my 30th birthday, I got a DUI. As you can imagine, it turned my life completely upside down. Not only was it expensive as hell to deal with, but it forced me to reevaluate my life and my priorities. I’ll be honest, I’d been drinking and driving for years up until that point. Yes, I knew better. (Don’t we all?) Still, it started to feel like a normal part of life since I was drinking so often. It happened in New York. I drove in from Boston to visit a childhood friend, and we planned to turn all the way up for my birthday. We were drinking all day long—wine, vodka, all sorts of drinks in the car—driving drunk through the streets of New York. By midnight, we were hanging out at another friend’s house. The time came for us to go back to the place we were staying, and I don’t know what came over me, but I really wanted some Oreos. My friend, drunk off her ass and an enabler, agreed. So, it was decided. We would go to Walmart and get candy, cookies, whatever. Everything. I started driving. Not in my right mind, I got turned around and we did not reach Walmart before I saw flashing red and blue lights in my rearview. 

I started to panic a little. My friend was belligerent in the passenger’s seat, and I could barely see straight. There was no way this officer would let us go. On top of that, my mind went straight to Sandra Bland, who had just died in police custody the year before. I didn’t know what might happen. I was only a visitor in New York, and all I could think about was getting home. When the officer approached the car, it didn’t take him long to assess the situation.

“Officer,” I said. “I just want to get home.”

Addiction runs in my family. My mom battled a drug addiction throughout my whole life, and so did some of my other family members. I saw how difficult it made her life and how frequently it interrupted mine as her child. Her instability, physically, mentally, and financially, strained our relationship. As I grew up, I avoided substances because I knew what they could do. I tried to find other ways to cope with my problems. I threw myself into school and work instead and spent a lot of time retreating into my thoughts. If I had a drug of choice, it was metaphorical. If anything, I was addicted to success. I was always striving for something greater and searching for the next best thing. But by the end of college into graduate school, alcohol became a larger and larger presence. I started partying almost every weekend, drinking way more than socially, and driving myself and my friends around while drunk had become a habit. 

When I was 27, my mom died. Our relationship had been on an upswing at that point. Before then, I made great strides to limit my interactions with her. I resented her for not being able to provide a stable home for me and my sister, for not being able to take care of my sister’s child, and for always asking me and the people around me for money. She would get clean at certain points, but it was hard to tell how long such a time would last. When I lived in Boston, my mother lived in New York (where I grew up), and she was in a period of sobriety. She became more active in my life, visited me, listened to me, and took steps to build our relationship. For the first time in a long time, I started to really love and trust her. I thought she was finally coming into her own. Early in the week of her passing, she called me. 

“Hey,” she told me. “I’m in the process of moving.” She was living with her boyfriend, Kevin, and they were getting ready to move into a new house together. “I hate to ask, but can I have like $200 to help with the move?”

Normally, I would have said no, assuming she was really asking for money for drugs.  This time was the first time I felt absolutely sure I wanted to help her out. “Sure,” I answered. “I’ll give it to you by the end of the week.”

I made a plan to surprise her. I decided to visit New York to give her the money in person. While there, I figured I could spend time with her and finally have the tough conversations we needed to have. Now that we’d spent time developing an adult friendship, I wanted to learn more about her. I never got the chance. That Thursday, a day before I planned to make the trip, I woke up to a bunch of missed calls from my mom’s phone. I was in a guy’s bed at the time—one of my sneaky links—and I bolted up to return the call. It was my godmother. I heard her voice, but I still felt like her words couldn’t be real: “Your mother’s in the hospital. I don’t think she’s going to make it.”

I went to see her in the hospital. Kevin had come home from work and found her struggling to breathe. Apparently, she’d had some sort of asthma attack and went into cardiac arrest. By the time I got to see her, she was intubated, not breathing on her own, and she couldn’t speak. I didn’t get to talk to her. Her boyfriend told me that her last words were, “I want my girls to know I love them.” Fuck. I was her next of kin, which meant I was responsible for making decisions about her care. When it became clear to the doctors that her situation was dire, they gave me two options: I could either leave her in an intubated state where it was unlikely she would ever breathe on her own or take her to a hospice where she would transition. My godmother and younger sister didn’t want the latter. They claimed that they could take care of my mother. But it was my decision to make. It was tough, but I decided on hospice. None of us had the resources or ability to take her into our care. Since I was working at the time, I couldn’t stay long. I went back and forth between Boston and New York for a couple of weeks. I said my goodbyes to her during my last hospice visit. Though I didn’t get to have the talk I’d wanted to have with her, I tried to make peace with it over her hospice bed. 

“If you go,” I whispered to her, looking at her closed eyes. “It’ll be okay.”

And she went. 

At 27, I felt like I was at a turning point in my life. It had been a season of transformation—I’d just left a long-term relationship—and I wanted to focus on me. When my mom died, I tried not to let it weigh me down. In a sense, I felt almost lighter with her passing. I know it’s taboo to say, but I was able to let go of some of my troubles and resentment when I had to let go of her. I felt a little freer. I felt like I could be fully independent now. I was ready to live, and alcohol went hand in hand with my newfound freedom. So, the drinking increased exponentially for the next three years.