Gary’s mother, Cathy, reflects on her journey supporting Gary through his active alcoholism and addiction. She shares what it’s like seeing him in recovery today. Gary’s story is below.
“This is the longest I’ve been sober since when I was a baby until I was 12.” Gary laughed back in early March, chatting with me about his sobriety date in July.
“I get to share my life today in treatment facilities that I used to do everything to avoid, I love to share the solution. Life today is pretty amazing, I have a great job that I’m sure grateful for. I know I’m growing because if I miss a day of work, I actually feel bad about it. I used to love being off. The first 6 months of my recovery felt like a pink cloud, but depression has definitely been creeping up in the past two months. It’s crazy, people actually ask me for advice now because they see me doing well. It’s humbling. Of course, I do the work for myself but I love the motivation of others. Today is great. I have a safe living environment, I live with my former sponsor. It’s amazing that you don’t worry about anything when you try to do the next right thing. Sure I wish I could make a little more money, but there is a lot of peace at the end of the day. The best part is that my mom doesn’t worry, I actually answer the phone when she calls, and we have a great relationship today because I don’t terrorize her.”
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Gary had a great upbringing because of his mother, Cathy. When he was eight months old, Cathy divorced Gary’s father. He struggled with his own demons, and Gary’s mom didn’t want Gary in a toxic environment.As a single mother, Cathy worked hard to provide him opportunities to go to good schools, and any time he had a problem, Cathy was always there for him, without a doubt. Eventually, she married his stepfather, who was another positive addition to Gary’s life as a child. His stepfather supported Cathy in raising him as a single mother. “I’m really grateful for my step-dad. He did a lot in helping my mom with me. I know I was spoiled but he helped make sure I wasn’t too spoiled. My mom and I, we’ve always been so close.
As a kid, Gary remembers having had all the “isms,” what some people in recovery groups refer to as childhood signs of future addiction. He felt he never had enough. There wasn’t anything that Gary was satisfied with where he didn’t want more. Though he did well in school, Gary was rebellious outside of it. He recalled being a young teen trying beer for the first time, “I didn’t even like the taste of it, it was more the excitement that I was doing something wrong. I should have noticed I had a problem from way early on, but it didn’t seem weird because everyone else was doing it, too. It wasn’t til I was alone years later shooting up heroin and I looked around and realized that I’m alone, then it hit me.”
When he was 18, Gary was hit head-on in a car wreck, and despite having severe injuries that required intense recovery, Gary still was able to start college with a roaring start to his academic career. With days consisting of cocaine and alcohol, he remembered one of his most embarrassing moments when his grandmother visited his dorm. She opened his closet door only to have bottles of Southern Comfort crash down on her. Did he acknowledge that he maybe had a problem then? No.
“I mean,” Gary reflected, “I should have realized when I was kicked out of school and had to go back to Louisville that I had fucked up. But alcoholic, addict that I was, I didn’t.” At the time Gary’s behaviors blended in well among his college peers. It wasn’t until after graduation that everything started to escalate in all areas of his life.
For example, Gary had a beautiful girlfriend who later turned into his wife. Though they were happy for a while, it wasn’t your traditional love story either.
“What was getting married like?” I asked. “ Well, when I got engaged, it was thrown together. I hadn’t gotten her a ring, I was jacked off coke, and I went down into the basement. So when she came down and turned the lights on, I was there on my knee. I originally imagined asking her to marry me on Mt. Fuji, but no. I did it in the basement. But she was happy. She had always wanted a wedding, and I adored her. She used (drugs) with me, and in the beginning, we were both functional, but eventually, things got bad with us.”
“So earlier you said you said alcohol, coke, and pills were your thing. How did you get into heroin?”
Gary responded, “I used to be the type who said, I’ll never do meth, I’ll never do heroin. If you say that today, just give it time.” He went on to explain his first exposure to heroin at his dealer’s house. “I got to his house and I walked in. There’s kids running around, drugs everywhere. I’m not even phased by seeing kids around drugs at that point. It’s kind of embarrassing. Anyway, I’ll never forget, I saw a brown line of stuff on his dresser. It caught my eye. ‘What’s that?’ ‘That’s H, that’s boy.’ Ya know, heroin. Then of course, my dealer joked and said, ‘Bet you can’t take that line and make it home.’’ So Gary did, he continued, “I hate romanticizing drugs and I try not to, but I’m not gonna lie, I never felt better. I spent the rest of my active addiction chasing that feeling,” he concluded.
So if you do the math, that means that for the next 6 years of his life, Gary had heroin almost every day. He estimates that he spent over $200,000 over the years.
Though his drug use escalated, Gary was functional. He did well at a successful company. Gary shook his head, reflecting on how he would crush pills in the middle of the workday. He would use, then suddenly his productivity would shoot up. His boss would always remark, “damn Gary how did you get all of that done?” Gary smiled at me mischievously through the Facetime screen and shrugged his shoulders.
Between him and his then-wife’s combined work income, they bought a lake house near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Things were okay for a while. They worked, used, worked, a pattern that is familiar for many functioning alcoholics and addicts.
At one point Gary was moved to finally meet his father. I asked, “So you randomly wanted to meet your dad?” Gary confirmed, “Yep, it was a genius idea I had while high on coke.”
All these years later, Gary’s dad was still in active addiction, while on the other hand, Cathy, Gary’s mom, feared for Gary’s life as she heard about his drug use from others who witnessed it. At the lakehouse, Gary started to lose control. He would drink over a handle of liquor in a day. His tolerance had gotten so high he was using fentanyl, too. Everything seemed manageable to him until it suddenly wasn’t. One of the most giant red flags Gary experienced was when he and his then-wife hosted a dinner party for some childhood friends. Though he didn’t overdose, Gary snuck out mid-meal to get high and nodded out at the dinner table upon his return. His friends, sure, they drank, but seeing Gary’s chin drop down to his chest and his eyelids droop was enough to confirm to his friends what they had been suspecting, Gary was definitely an alcoholic and addicted to drugs. He was in danger. Upon returning to Louisville, those same friends made sure to let Cathy know, who felt on a heart wrenching level how close she was to losing her son.
“It was out there. I had a problem. I lost my job because of a slip-up. I would ask drug dealers to ‘hold the heroin’ and just give me fentanyl, so I went to rehab in 2019.” Gary, however, explained that he really hadn’t suffered enough to want to truly get sober. He only went because he wanted people to get off his back, especially his mom at the time who was worried sick about him. So when Gary left the facility this first time, he got high in the parking lot on the way out, got drunk, and ended up back at that isolated lake house south of Louisville. Now he started using drugs intravenously. His mother, if she was lucky, maybe heard from him once a week, even when she tried calling him every day. “I just wanted to disappear,” Gary explained, “I wanted to be able to hide, get high and not have anyone who cared, know.”
When Gary did choose to reach out to his mom, it was usually in a drunken stupor after drinking 1-2 handles of liquor. “I’d call my mom bawling my eyes out, then I’d end up in rehab, and suddenly I’d be like, ‘How did I end up here?’ I was in a really dark place. I was trying to get sober and I was failing.”
As Gary continued to struggle, his mother Cathy also needed to find guidance of her own. After leaving rehab, Gary’s tolerance dropped significantly, so what he used to use and drink without a problem was now enough to kill him. He overdosed well over 10 times until he got sober, the number may have been as high as 15 times or more. His mother herself had found him blue and possibly dead a few times.
How were you supposed to love your only son who could at any moment kill himself? Cathy found a support group for herself and resolved to love and support Gary, but not financially. Gary laughed as he shared how he was resentful when his mom was encouraged to not enable him with money. “I mean, I get it now, I didn’t then,” he chuckled.
As Gary’s life got more complex, his hopes vanished, too. He and his wife’s relationship had gotten so toxic that they separated. He had limited access to money. He was losing his house. He couldn’t stop drinking, and his thinking was incredibly distorted. He believed he had no way out, and knowing that his body could no longer handle drugs how it used to, he resolved within himself to get high one final time. He knew it would kill him and he was ready. “I had had enough. The fun was gone. The partying was over. I was killing my mom. In my mind I was like, ‘I’m doing this to make sure I NEVER ever wake up.’ So I took it. Then, I started to feel a warm, weighted blanket coming over me instantly. I knew then that I would die, and something in me panicked, ‘Oh my God I’m killing myself!’ So the last thing I remember is texting my friends and my mom. I sent my location from my phone. Later, I woke up in an ambulance.”
I asked, “So, who got you?” He responded, “My mom. Usually, if she had been at home or at work, she would have been 30 minutes away from where I was, but she was eating lunch two minutes away. She knew what was up, called an ambulance, and she came and found me. I was in the car. I was blue.”
Gary said a friend of his in recovery often says, “I hope you reach a level of desperation you never want to go back to.” After Cathy saved him from his suicide attempt, something changed in Gary. He can’t quite explain it, but the change led him to completely let go. He was ready for his stay in a psychiatric hospital after he was revived. He was ready to engage in rehab and take all the suggestions. He was prepared to participate in his twelve-step program and become a contributing member of his recovery community.
Today, Gary’s relationship is restored with Cathy. The greatest gift a son could give his mother is the gift of peace of mind. Today, Cathy has that.
Gary has been sober since July 16, 2020.
If interested in contacting Gary or Cathy, please send a contact request to Jessica.
