“Here we go again.” I mumbled as I walked aimlessly down the linoleum corridor. This was not my first stay in a drug rehab. Wearied from my excuses and chronic somnolence my wife had gone up north to visit her folks in New York. I was on my own; so I thought. The fabrications that I had told myself and everyone else were collapsing. My marriage and my relationships with my sons were in ruins. This time, returning home was not an option. I was to be discharged to a halfway house the next day. “Fifty-eight … I’m getting too old for this crap!” Contemptuously, I scolded myself as I meandered down the hall to the nursing station to make a call. It was Sunday, visiting day, and another hot September afternoon on the sunny west coast of Florida was wasting away. Before reaching the phone, I spied another patient kissing his wife. Loneliness and self pity consumed me. 

I could not cover-up my pain by using drugs any more. They no longer worked for me. The wide spectrum of physical symptoms that I had long relied upon to vindicate my drug use were no longer valid. Priding myself on my past thirty-one years of sobriety had lured me into a lonely dark hole. I had good friends but nobody to talk to. My long time allies – addicts in recovery, still looked up to me despite my dependency on pain medicine. With the aid of some well-tailored alibis, they all believed that my stay was the sole result of surgery and heart disease. But, I knew that I was not the innocent victim of the medical profession; nor was I the martyr of poor health and bad pain management. 

I had failed to confide in anyone about the nature of my addiction. I falsely insisted that I had always followed the prescribed amounts – one of my many attempts to obscure the truth. I did not tell anyone that I had confiscated my son’s marijuana, scolded him for it, and then on the sly smoked the booty. Lacking the humility to admit the truth, I had fallen into a quagmire of lies. I wanted desperately to return to the good life I had once known: to the time when I had no secrets, to the time when my family trusted my word, to that time when I knew and felt deserving of a loving God. What had happened to me? I was bewildered.

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