50 Miles. Sheryl St. Germain

      Introduction

      Most people who compulsively seek to escape through drugs do so because they find their consciousness unbearable. That’s the real source of addiction.

      —Maia Szalavitz

      My son was born into a family cursed with substance abuse. I use the words addict and alcoholic often in this collection, but it’s not without awareness that those words often color too deeply how we see someone. If I say my son and I come from a family of alcoholics and addicts I must also say that we come from a family of workers: carpenters and builders, waitresses, warriors and mechanics, gardeners. We come from a family of politicians and jocks, musicians, book-lovers, drug dealers and dreamers. We come from a family of good cooks and risk-takers, a southern family as proud of its southern roots as it is of its dark handsomeness. But the thing that ties most of us together is a propensity for drink and drugs.

      I was raised in New Orleans, a city known for its excesses, a city I left at 27, moving to Dallas with my son’s dad before he was born, hoping to escape the fate of others in my family: an alcoholic father dead at 59 of cirrhosis, a brother dead at 23 of a drug overdose, another brother at 41; an aunt dead of overdose at the same age; a nephew dead in his twenties from risk-taking behavior; grandfathers and grandmothers, and great grandfathers and great grandmothers who lived shortened lives, some developing cirrhosis in the throes of alcoholism. A brother-in-law addicted to crack, stabbed to death during a drug deal gone bad. Other relatives are still active substance abusers.

      It didn’t help to move. Gray, my only son, born in 1984 in Dallas, died thirty years later, in 2014, of a heroin overdose. He’d struggled for many years with alcohol and drug abuse. I wrestled myself with both drugs and alcohol, though alcohol was the hardest of the two to give up. My last drink was in January of 2010. Although I used drugs in my youth, mostly marijuana, LSD, miscellaneous pills when I could get them, and cocaine, culminating with spending part of a year shooting up cocaine, I, like most, walked away from it. I do not know exactly why I walked away from it, though, given the family predilection, but the experience of shooting up dope has given me great compassion for those who do not walk away. My greater problem was alcohol, which I used for many years to become someone I could not be without it; three essays in this collection, “To Drink a Glacier,” “Call of the Bagpipes,” and “The Third Step,” illuminate my continuing struggle with alcohol.

      No one needs to tell me that genes have complex roles in addiction. I can see it with my own eyes and feel it in my own body. The question I ask myself every day, though, is how did I manage to survive, and my son not. The title essay of this collection, “Fifty Miles,” examines that question, though the reader will find no hard-and-fast answers in that essay nor in any of the other essays.

      So why read these essays if I offer no answers, when our culture clearly seems to need them?

      It’s hard to imagine anyone living in the United States who doesn’t know of, or has not been affected by, the current epidemic of opioid overdose deaths. A surfeit of numbers and statistics have been offered to bring the crisis home to the general population: 142 Americans die every day of drug overdoses; more people die of overdoses than die in traffic accidents; overdoses are the leading cause of death for those under 50 in the United States; heroin overdoses tripled from 2010-2015; drug overdoses claimed the lives of 72,000 Americans in 2017, a 10% increase from the previous year. The White House panel charged with examining the opioid epidemic asked the President in 2017 to declare a national public health emergency, stating that “America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks.”

      Statistics and documentary reportage are helpful, but they are not enough, as William Carlos Williams reminds us in this well-known excerpt from “Asphodel,