Widow in Recovery Connects with Other Grievers
“You don’t have to slow dance with everybody.” – Jeff Bowers
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
Carol Bowers is the proud mother of a daughter and a son. She also has five grandchildren and two great grandchildren. Her life today is abundant with blessings, but it was not always so.
“When I was 39 years old, I had been on methadone for 11-and-a-half years. It was getting really bad. One day when I went into the clinic, they sectioned me. When I got on the scale, I weighed 70 pounds. They told me they were going to detox me, but they weren’t going to give me anything that was going to make me comfortable, such as methadone. Something inside me said, ‘I’ll go.’”
“I got out on my first eight-hour pass, because I wrote a really good plan – none of which was true.”
An Airwave Miracle
“A gentleman was driving me to the place where I last used drugs and a song came on the radio; ‘Hold on for One More Day’ by Wilson Phillips. I said, ‘Pull over and let me out.’ I went to a pay phone, called my daughter and asked if I could stay there for the night. I went there, I slept, I woke up the next day, and I didn’t want to use. It was the first time I had ever experienced anything like that.”
“I knew, without a doubt, I had a higher power that was watching out for me the whole way. The next day I was at my mom’s, and my brother came down from Maine – out of the blue. I was not allowed to go back to the program because I didn’t make it back on time. Of course I was blaming them, but what I did wasn’t right. My brother said, ‘Why don’t you come stay with us?’ I had nowhere else to go at that point, so I went. I stayed in Maine for three months and Jeff and I started to communicate. His relationship ended and he came to stay with me for a while.”
“It started getting dangerous for me – staying with my brother – because he was an outright addict just like me. Only now, he was drinking. He started to say, ‘Come on, you can have a drink, look at me – I haven’t had any hard drugs in two years.’ I knew I couldn’t because that is using, but he didn’t understand that.”
“So, I came to the South Shore area, where my husband lived, and I got into a sober house. Real recovery started for me then, as did our relationship. We lived together for the next 31 years, building a life, recovering, learning what it’s like to be in a healthy relationship – which was phenomenal.”
A Wounded Healer
“My husband had a gift with his message. He didn’t like the limelight, it wasn’t an ego thing, but he was asked to speak at international conventions. He helped thousands of people, he was an incredibly special person, he touched people everywhere. At his celebration of life, 300 people signed the guest book.”
“He got COVID-19, and it settled in his spine. He couldn’t lay down or sit up and was in horrible agony for two straight weeks. He was getting delirious because he wasn’t sleeping. He went to his doctor of 30-something years who gave him a narcotic. The doctor had him sign a paper saying he would not abuse the drugs or sell them. Is that ridiculous or what? You’re going to give an addict who is in pain a drug and take their word for it? It sickens me when I think about that.”
“He took the medication, somewhere along the way he crossed the line and ended up using street drugs. He was living with me for three months before he came clean, and I didn’t know. I could pick someone out in a meeting who is high, I have a very good instinct about it, but for some reason with him I couldn’t tell.”
“On June 24, 2021, he sat me down and said, ‘Honey, I have to tell you something. I have to change my sober date. For the next nine months he stayed clean, but he was totally shattered. I didn’t know the man I was living with. It was horrible. Every day, it was just so hard for him to even want to live. I was trying to carry him and do everything I possibly could, and then one morning, on March 31, 2022, he said I love you, he kissed me goodbye, and he went to work.
“On his break, he must have bumped into the person he was buying drugs from nine months earlier. 20 minutes later he checked into a hotel. Five minutes later he called the VA to say he wouldn’t be back because an emergency came up. He used one fentanyl pill, and it took his life.”
Uncharted Territory
“My journey into the grief process started when I received a card in the mail from The Sun Will Rise. It said, ‘We understand,’ and ‘We are here if you need to talk to somebody,’ and I was livid. So, I called them up and said, ‘What, do you have a blimp up in the sky?’ Because that’s where I was at with it. But, the person talked with me and she was so sweet. After about 15 minutes I said, ‘I’m really sorry, what you heard is my grief. I’m still feeling the stigma of it. But she opened up my world to the idea that there is someplace to go where people don’t stigmatize others. I said, ‘You’ll probably hear from me soon.’”
“I was having the toughest time; I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I was going to meetings, I continued my recovery, which was really important to me. But, for the first time in 33 years, I wasn’t getting what I needed. So, I called TSWR, and I spoke with Robyn Houston-Bean. She sent me to a group for people who have lost their spouses or partners to substance use.”
“I will forever be grateful to Kar-Kate Parenteau, the meeting facilitator. I was such a mess when I first started going. I couldn’t say two words without breaking down crying. But, because of recovery, I knew that talking about it was the best thing for me. It made me feel lighter – it was amazing – it was like carrying this heavy load, and I get to this place where I am kind of numb and I can catch up. I didn’t understand the numb state when I first started to process grief. I thought I was shutting down, that I didn’t care about him anymore, but it felt right.”
One Step Back
“A year after going to Kar-Kate’s meeting, I started to hit this dark place. My mind was telling me crazy things. I could feel I was in trouble, and I needed to do something. I reached out to Robyn to see if she knew a therapist who could help me with this. I also talked to Franklin Cook from SADOD and he referred me to Leslie Lagos with TSWR. I believe my higher power was at work, because Leslie and I have many similarities in our lives. She lives on Rita Street, my mother’s name is Rita. Her sister’s name is Lori, my sponsor’s name is Lori. Her brother who passed away is named Timmy, my son’s name is Timmy. Thank God for her because I really was in a dark place and she worked miracles for me.”
Write it Down
When Bowers is having a tough day of grieving, she has developed a set of tools for getting through it. “They don’t always go in this order,” she says, “But they are my go-tos on a sad day. It is important for me to feel whatever I am feeling at that time because I am an addict grieving someone who died from substance use. If I’m not mindful of this, I could end up using. I’ll take a little bit of time alone and let myself cry as much as I need to. I will be as sad as I need to be, and it makes me a little bit lighter. And, I journal. I write what I’m feeling and why I’m feeling it. I believe magic happens when the pen hits the paper. The truth comes out for me. There are times when I write stuff and I don’t even know where it came from.”
“After I write, I will read it back to myself. It is a different way of processing what is going on inside of me. Sometimes when I sit with myself, my mind can distort things and take me in a direction that the pen would not have brought me on. Sometimes, on a tough day, I’ll journal first, and then reading it will bring out the tears. Early in my recovery, I had a sponsor who taught me that the answers are inside of me. She taught me how to sift, because my perception gets twisted, probably because of the addiction. You say this but I hear that. You do this, I see that. When I want to go off on somebody, she taught me how to sift through it and find out what is really going on and where it is really coming from. In learning how to do that, I learned a lot about who I am and how I operate. I have a thought, a filter, then the action. Sometimes I have to walk away from situations in order to figure things out. Other times, it is very clear in my mind.”
“My husband used to say, ‘You don’t have to slow dance with everybody.’ My sponsor taught me to ‘build a bubble’ around myself because I tend to attract very needy people. If they are not full of need, they can get through the bubble and if they are full of need they will bounce off. I try to visualize that in my head, and it helps me.”