I had a cousin I was very close to that we lost 1/23. We were the same age and, despite being at different (still both local) schools, we were together so much that we told people we were twins. More or less inseparable until we were 16, our paths then forked into very different lives.
Addiction didn’t kill him, but it did. He was only 32 when he contracted the flu and things cascaded quickly to his death due to the damage that various hard drugs had done to his body. Multiple trips to rehab hadn’t made a difference in his addiction but it had made an impact on him personally.
He told me of the friends he had made in there. How deeply he understood their struggles and how his heart ached most for those addicted to alcohol because there was no other substance so readily available. He had been thankful that his drugs of choice were harder to come by. That he couldn’t simply walk into a store and buy them.
We often think of addiction in stark terms: needles and empty bottles. In his case, this was the human experience that he fell victim to. But the truth is, addiction’s grasp extends far beyond traditional substances. Our very behaviors, from the seemingly harmless to the overtly destructive, can become compulsive and all-consuming.
