Loving all of it - the boy I left behind

by Colin Smith

“Loving All Of It” is a book of 32 essays, edited by Gordon McLauchlan, on the delights and otherwise of getting older. I’m up for the challenge and loving it; there’s no alternative. Life is the gift that keeps on giving, right?

Three months ago I wrote about hobbling into hospital where I met a young woman with a sharp knife. Two days later I left with a new hip. If it sounds like I’m repeating myself, it’s because that little tale of replacement parts reminded me of another trip to another hospital, 40 years ago.

I was 33 years old - a staggering, sozzled, pickled, munted alcoholic when I dribbled my way into Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer. It had taken me 17 years to get into that state. They say in addiction circles that “when the addiction begins, the mental and emotional growth arrests, so I was still but a kid and I was looking for a new life – a total life make-over no less, no sharp knife needed, just lots of hard mahi, as it turned out.

Trying to erase one’s old but familiar way of being in the world is a battlefield. The old life has died but the new sober life has yet to emerge. It’s ironic that I’m writing this on ANZAC Day, as addiction is a muddy trench too, where one faces a fusillade of the unknown but to retreat is certain death.

These days when I go tramping on St James and Molesworth I stop at Hanmer for a nostalgic walk in the hospital grounds, and I have a korero with the 16-year-old I left behind. I go there with my moving-on swag. I sit under a tree and tell him I’m sorry I had to leave him behind. I get emotional; he was a likeable little geezer, but his way with the bottle didn’t fit the new life, I tell him. I also thank him profusely for having the wisdom and courage to get me there in the first place.

But, and there is always a big “but”... while I am enjoying the fruits of a new and sober life, every time I go back to Hanmer now, I realise how that sad but cunning little bloke I left there is no longer living there. He’s out in the world wreaking havoc in the lives of my children.

As I’m writing this I’m sitting about sad and helpless, watching my son drink his way into alcoholic oblivion, and in my opinion almost certain death. He has no intention of stopping. He’s angry I want to save him.

Eighteen months ago he sat sad and helpless with me as his sister Jess, my daughter Jess, lay dying in the same way – of alcohol-related organ failure. Her death hasn’t deterred his own headlong downward spiral. Nor has the death of his young brother Paki in a car crash 20 years ago. It’s not easy sitting around watching ones’ children die, I tell him. I’ve learnt a lot from “Resilient Grieving” by Dr Lucy Hone. A lot is about how life will chuck stuff at us. We can’t control the stuff, only how we respond to it. That way, in spite of the sadness, we can always be aiming towards “Loving All Of It”.