More Than Our Ends: A reflection on sisterhood, addiction, and loss – PART III

The following is a true story about love, and loss, and how the emotional rollercoaster of addiction affects so many. We are deeply humbled by the opportunity to share such a personal story from one of The Prompt community’s most prolific and beloved writers, Sarah Razner.

The story has been broken into five parts, which will be posted each day this week, to honor Jenna Razner. Read the prior installments here: Part I and Part II. On Friday, we will also post the story in full.

Following her first serious rehabilitation, Jenna found sobriety for a few years, and thrived.

She rebuilt her life, taking on a new teaching job and later a managerial position within education. She received help to manage her mental health and keep the anxiety at bay as much as she could. She reestablished friendships and said goodbye to others. She laid the foundation of new relationships, particularly with those she met at 12-step meetings, who inspired her their stories of one, seven, 20 years of sobriety, and lives full of hope, promise, and happiness. We saw Jenna aglow again as she pursued her passions in the classroom, with animals, as an aunt, and as a caretaker for our grandma. She did what she could to help others who were walking the same path, supporting those who were in recovery and struggling, and, in what was a proud and beautiful moment, sharing her story in front of her sober community to help inspire and raise awareness.

It felt like after a hypoxic existence, oxygen had been pumped back into the room. We breathed deep, all while knowing one day we could return to the shallow. We all wanted to believe we wouldn’t.

As is the case with diseases, relapses in addiction are not uncommon. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 40 to 60 percent of people in treatment for substance abuse disorders relapse. After the death of our grandpa, Jenna’s struggles amplified, and searching for relief and consolation, the disease called her back to alcohol, a temporary salve that only increased the gaping of the wound.

What followed were some of the hardest years of Jenna’s life and ours.

The addiction took hold in full force, reaching new lows. She fell into bad relationships that decimated her and all she had rebuilt. She pulled away from her sober community, even as they reached out. She lied to turn a tale in her favor, until we couldn’t decipher the fact from the fiction. She listened to those who offered her false promises, and shut down those who tried to discourage her from doing so. It felt like a slap in the face, a betrayal. At times, it felt like she dropped out of our orbit completely, only reappearing when her world was in flames.

She became almost like a stranger, or at least a stranger in comparison to the Jenna she had been. Physically, she was still on this earth, but we entered a stage of grief nonetheless, both for the person she once was and in anticipation of when she was gone, body and soul. I’d be lying if I said that bitterness and anger and resentment towards her didn’t grow in the gap between what we used to be and what we had become. I didn’t want this to life for me, for us, for her, and even though I knew she really didn’t either, it didn’t relieve the sting.

Within our family, we all kind of became like strangers to each other, turning into different versions of ourselves, none that any of us liked. In that way, we weren’t that different from Jenna. I wore a mask to everyone in the outside world, presenting myself as someone who wasn’t struggling although I was. I trafficked in half-truths and omissions to people I loved to try to keep the peace. I buried my emotions in my coping mechanisms like writing, and stories, and exercise to try to survive. Driven by emotion and self-preservation, I said and did things I regretted. I struggled to ask for help. I detached and distanced myself, speaking at times in harsh, rigid tones that led Jenna to dub me “Sergeant Sarah.”

The disease may have lived in Jenna, but we all showed the symptoms.

Although I did not see Jenna every day like when we lived at home together, the instances I saw her when she was using I count among the worst moments of her substance abuse. Every night during her binges, my dad stopped at her apartment to check on her and see if she was ready to get help. Sometimes my family and I went with him, especially if it had been a bad day, as we did not want him to have to find his daughter dead on his own.

On one of these occasions, we brought her food in the hopes that we could get her to eat something so her diet wasn’t strictly liquid. She could sit up, but only with her arms propped on her knees. Her speech was stunted and stuttered, veering into gibberish. Her face was blotched in red, her eyes dark, her lips tinted from the alcohol, the smell of it lingering in the air. She couldn’t move easily, having barely any strength to lift a sandwich or drink to her mouth, but if she was to survive, she needed to eat, so I fed her. I brought her straw to her lips so she could sip, offered her fries and her sandwich piece by piece. Her bites were slow, hesitant, and exhausted. They were the motions of someone who was sick, someone deteriorating from a long illness, because that was exactly what was happening.

While some people believe someone choosing to pick up a drink or a drug in addiction disqualifies addiction from being a disease, that disregards two things: the changes to the brain that drive that choice, and that choosing is not the same as wanting.

No one would want this, I remember thinking as I looked at this withered version of Jenna.

Despite the changes within her, she was still my sister, still someone I loved dearly, still someone with whom I shared thousands of memories, many of which, though hard to see then, were good.

It had been 10 years since we first realized what was going on, but it may as well have been 100 lifetimes. She was now 37, and I was now 28, and I felt like we were both simultaneously too young and too old to be going through this.

We sought to help her as much as we could, running dry what felt like all of our resources. While Jenna had great support within her sober community, other systems in society are not as helpful, understanding, or forgiving when it comes to assisting someone in active addiction. They and their loved ones are often met with repeated brick walls when seeking help.

Our first line of defense was the hospital.

When Jenna asked us to take her in for treatment, most of the time we did, only pumping the brakes if she had been in and out of the ER multiple instances in one week. Doctors and nurses offered her the best care they could, generally treating her with compassion and sometimes to a reality check. My family and I, along with Jenna’s friends—particularly those from recovery—kept her company, trying to keep her anxiousness at bay as she sobered up, my dad and brother-in-law playing her favorite tunes off their phones to calm her. But the long process of being admitted to the mental health floor had never been Jenna’s friend, and more often than not, after waiting for three, four, five hours to be cleared, her anxiety and withdrawals peaked and she powered out of the doors determinedly, unable to be stopped.

I said many things I regretted in those moments, curses I should’ve never uttered.

After a particularly long day that ended with no progress, I told her she was dead to me. Although I know it came from a place of frustration and that feeling was valid, given the chance to do it over again, I would take those words back every time.

Once after Jenna fell unresponsive, my mom called an ambulance, and paramedics took Jenna to the local hospital. Within an hour they released her and called us to say we needed to pick her up because it wasn’t safe for her to leave on her own. We also couldn’t bring her back, since she had been there too many times that week. It didn’t matter that she was mentally and physically unfit to leave—a fact that they admitted to—or that with each drink she took she was killing herself; they could not assist anymore. When my mom told me what had happened, I broke down in my office, bereft, believing that this time would be the end, and not ready for it to be.

We reached out to our county to see if we could file a third-party petition and testify that Jenna was not in her right mind and a danger to herself, so they could mandate that she entered treatment. I don’t recall the reasoning behind their “no” to us, but do I remember them making a distinction between mental health and addiction. If she was struggling with her mental illness and posed a risk, we could move forward with the petition, but since it was an addiction, they could not compel her to enter treatment, as if addiction and mental illness were two disparate things. As if she wasn’t killing herself.

At the end of our ropes and fearing for Jenna’s safety and our own, multiple times we felt compelled to call 911, hoping they could help us get her medical treatment or at least somewhere safe. The officers largely wanted to assist and did what they could, but as the black and white of the law doesn’t offer much space for the grayness of addiction, too many occasions ended with legal ramifications for Jenna. Some were necessary, acting like terrible stopgap measures to save her. Others, most, felt like a punishment inflicted on someone who was already suffering enough.

Both were sickening in their own ways.

When I called Jenna’s counselor for direction, bemoaning the lack of resources for families to get their loved ones help, she said something I will never forget: “It’s not a crime to drink yourself to death in Wisconsin.” She spoke the words not with coldness or anger or impatience, as we had heard many times before, but with empathy and truth. I appreciated her recognizing our situation and confronting us with reality. I hated the reality of it all the same, and to this day feels absolutely wrong. I understand that it’s not a crime, but if we know someone is a danger to themselves, should we not be able to help? Should we not do more than turn away and hope for the best? The optimist in me still thinks so.