There are so many amazing books out there about grief, but I had a tough time finding anything that talked about losing a sibling to substance use disorder. When I was younger, and my sister Jackie was just starting her long journey in and out of rehabs, I didn’t understand that the jumble of emotions I was feeling–anger, guilt, sorrow, confusion – was actually a form of grief. She was still here, still alive, but our relationship was so tough that I mourned her long before she died, on March 1, 2021, when she was just 40 years old.
Much of the book has dark humor in it, because I find humor to be healing, but as I was writing this chapter, “Mourning Them When They’re Here But Not” from my book So Sorry for Your Loss, I found it tough to find any moments of levity. There are chapters about my mom’s hospice, about the link between food and grief, about signs and symbols that help us feel close to people we’ve lost, and a chapter about losing pets. This chapter, though, is specifically about my relationship with my sister, which, over the course of nineteen years, was painful, challenging, and–despite it all–full of love. I wanted to be as raw and honest about my experience as possible, in hopes of speaking to anyone else out there who loves or has lost someone with alcoholism or substance use disorder. It’s not easy to live with these relationships, whether it’s a parent, a sibling, a partner, or a friend. As alone as you may feel, you’re not. I hope my story, and my sister’s story, as painful as it was and is, can help.
Detach with love.
I first heard this phrase in a dusty basement of a brownstone in the West Village. After months of anxiety and spiraling, I had found my way, at last, to an Al-Anon meeting. Founded in 1951, Al-Anon is a recovery and support group for family and friends of people with alcoholism. I went there out of desperation, knowing that how I was handling my relationship with my sister Jackie was not working. My anxiety, codependency, and enabling (insert any number of faulty coping mechanisms here) wasn’t healthy, for me or my sister. If you love someone deeply, it’s impossible to stand aside and watch them destroy their life. It tears you apart. The harder you try to fix things, the more helpless you feel, and then you blame them for putting you in that position. I was gutted and worn down, and, looking back, getting close to a breakdown myself. I didn’t have a therapist, and I needed help.
At the Al-Anon meeting, people shared their stories of pain or loss. They talked about spouses, siblings, friends, and parents. One woman talked about her financial woes, so I’m pretty sure she was using Al-Anon as a free therapy session. Eventually, I got the courage to raise my hand. I cried, and talked about Jackie. I emptied myself out to a circle of strangers. No one in that circle told me how to “fix” it. They didn’t say it would all work out. They told me to detach with love. It was the only way to survive, they said. Some phrases can take a while to truly click into your brain. You might nod in recognition, but their full meaning might need to marinate for weeks or months, until you finally absorb it. Not this, though. Detach with love was an immediate “aha” moment for me. A hallelujah. It made so much sense. Just because I immediately grasped the meaning deep in my bones, though, doesn’t mean it made everything immediately better.
For the next fourteen years, I detached with love whenever it was necessary. That might mean I wouldn’t always answer the phone if I knew Jackie was drinking and possibly belligerent, or it might mean that, if I did answer and hear that familiar slowing of her speech, I would gently tell her I loved her, but to please get help and call me when she was sober. It allows you to step back, without guilt or anger. It gives you permission to focus on your own life, instead of allowing their life to drive yours into the ground. It’s not always easy to detach, though.
When she was in the hospital in New York once after a bad relapse, I flew out from California to sit by her side. I didn’t have kids yet, as my other sisters did, and my dad was caring for my mom during a particularly rough stretch of chemo, so off I went. I couldn’t detach completely, not when my baby sister was alone, fragile, and being questioned by hospital psychiatrists about the color of her hair. Jackie told me she wanted me to stay in the room while the psych team talked to her, and I remember the protective anger that reared up inside me when the lead psychiatrist in her white coat asked my sister, “So, tell me about your red hair.” I had been puzzled by Jackie’s bright red hair for years. My mom was always begging me to tell Jackie to go back to her natural brown curls, as if my words would have made a difference. We were all confused by her hair, but how dare this rude, horrible woman question my sister’s choice of hair dye. Where did she get her medical degree—clown school?
Jackie, always so gloriously deadpan even in her worst moments, replied, “I don’t know. I just like it. Tell me about your hair color.”
The psychiatrist moved on to a new topic after that.
Just as she always did, Jackie made it out of that hospital and back into sobriety again, for a time. No psychiatrist was going to make her doubt her choice of hair color, or question something that made her feel good about herself. After that day in the hospital, I respected her maroon-or-ruby-or copper-colored tresses just a little bit more. I like to imagine that through those colors, she was saying screw you to a world that didn’t understand her.
I worried about Jackie in New York in the early days of 2020, as the pandemic hit. During the previous two years, she’d been heading down a dangerous path of drinking to the point that ambulances would take her to detox at least every few weeks. If the hospital had an available detox bed, Jackie would be supervised and safely weaned off alcohol and drugs for a few days, unless she decided to walk out on her own, which she often did. Thinking of her wandering out of detox as a dangerous pandemic swept across the country had me panicked. In those early days of Lysoling our groceries and locking ourselves away like petrified moles, the fear that a virus could kill my sister was real. If anyone died during that time, our collective, immediate thought was usually, “I’ll bet it was Covid.” If they were hit by a bus right in front of our eyes, we wondered if it was Covid. They could ingest a gallon of arsenic, and we would assume it was not just the poison, but the poison plus Covid. I wasn’t sure that Jackie, in a compromised state, would remember to wear a mask. I was afraid her immune system wouldn’t be able to handle such an unpredictable illness if she did get sick.
One sense of relief I had during that time was that my sister got sober and was doing amazingly well. She sounded healthy and upbeat. She was holding a steady job. During the summer of 2020, she left Queens with her husband and moved to Colorado. She didn’t have a new job yet, but she had her cat, and her daily walks and jogs, surrounded by mountains. She was cooking and watching movies. We were talking nearly every week. Actually talking. I knew enough to understand that relapses could always happen, and that they were part of recovery, but I allowed myself to have some hope that, maybe this time, she could make it. If she didn’t, she would start again. No matter how many times you’ve been through the ups and downs, it’s hard to doubt an person with a substance use disorder when you love them. Despite the odds, hope is crucial.
Then there is also the fact that loving someone with a substance use disorder and facing ambiguous loss can be incredibly lonely. It can tear you apart, if you let it. It’s a struggle, whether they are here or not. People sometimes say, “She’s not suffering anymore.” They say she’s with our mom, our grandparents, all the beloved cats she had over the years. I hope all of this is true. I want her here, though, sober and thriving and leaving me voicemails that say, “Hey, Deanie . . .” I will want that forever. You can yearn for an alternate reality, but also accept what happened. I don’t yearn for that alternate reality constantly. I live side by side with the loss. But I can’t pretend that, every now and then, instead of telling myself she’s not suffering anymore, I just want her back.
My sister was so much more than her disease, and that’s what I carry with me. I hold onto that, and to Jackie’s affection and empathy, her passion for animals and her love of campy horror and David Bowie’s music. Her deep kindness, her bone-dry sense of humor, and,—maybe most of all—her puzzling, ever-changing, beautiful burgundy hair.
Excerpted with permission from *__So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief, and Other Grave Concerns __*by © Dina Gachman. Published by Union Square & Co.
Let us slide into your DMs. Sign up for the Teen Vogue daily email.
