Tigers Above, Below, Everywhere, and Infinity

On Al-Anon: Mary Oliver. Pema.

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Clear eyes, full hearts, etc. — AJD

A couple of months ago, my nephew relapsed again for the ninth time. Or is it the tenth? The 20th?

He could still be detoxing, or maybe he’s out in the world again, or in a sober living in some woodsy part of South Jersey, or one that’s near some stretch of a broken parkway in Levittown. Someone knows the details, but I do not. I texted him three days ago on his new number (now saved in my contacts as “STEVEN NEW REHAB CELL”), but I have not heard back.

You might remember my nephew’s situation. I wrote about him back in 2022 after one of his other relapses, and here is how it began:

“I never wrote about my 20-something nephew here, although I’ve been tempted many times. You see, he’s a heroin addict who has been trying to get clean for the past few years, bouncing in and out of facilities, recovering, relapsing, and then turning up in some deeper, darker place. He gets treatment, finds a sponsor, and commits to sobriety, but then he gets distracted or complacent, and then he goes out again, as many of us often do.

The last few times he’s relapsed, my sister called me from her bed on FaceTime. I could tell by her expression that she’d been crying but trying not to cry–there is a distinction by now–as she wordlessly shook her head, and I would know not to even ask for details, only that it had happened again.”

He’s 31 now, but it’s basically the same story. My sister’s FaceTime call came a couple of months ago, and she was as stone-faced as ever. She has committed to detaching with love—as we say in the Al-Anon biz—but her heart had not fully healed from the dozen other times this has happened. All the spiritual work couldn’t fully make the anger and sadness vanish, and I understood why she needed a longer, no-communication break from him, but I tried to remind her not to lose faith. She said she would not and that despite how much her son had broken her, the thousands of shards still making their way through her, she hasn’t given up on him completely and never would. “I’d still fight fucking tigers for him,” she said.

After she said that phrase—a poignant, beautiful one as I’d ever heard—I thought of that one Pema Chõdrön story about the tigers, the one that descends upon your life when it’s sorely needed.

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close by, growing from a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”

I called my sister the day before I was set to meet Trey Anastasio, “I think I’m gonna tell the lead singer of Phish about Steven if that’s okay,” which we both acknowledged was an absolutely absurd sentence to say out loud. “There’s a treatment center in Vermont that he opened up. Maybe that could work for him.” She said it was fine that I did, but no worries if I didn’t, but if I wanted to, it couldn’t hurt.

I don’t know if I should be getting involved in this situation again—I’ve done a few phone calls on his behalf before to get him into other rehabs—but Divided Sky seems different than the other ones he’d been to before, and maybe it would work out for him.

But who am I doing this for? For him, of course, but primarily for my sister. I am trying to eliminate those awful FaceTimes, which have sadly become an almost annual event. But first, he has to find his way out of whatever dark opioid hole he fell into again, but even on the way up, there are still tigers above, of course.

Even though my sister does not want to be whiplashed by some accidental hope anymore, I texted her the next day to let her know the Phish guy was very helpful, and she pressed a heart on it almost instantly.

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