Bereaved Friend Recounts Bittersweet Recovery Journey
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
On his recovery journey, Jeff Chasen has experienced conflict, loss, and triumph. Along the way, he has learned volumes about honesty to self, processing grief, and the value of service to others.
A Rocky Start
“In about the third or fourth grade, I was the classic disruptive, impossible child to have in your classroom,” Chasen begins. “I was constantly being removed and sent to the principal’s office. Then came the ADHD testing, the diagnoses, and the medication. At this point, every adult in my life was unhappy with me. I was unhappy with myself because of the circumstances. The situations I was creating were not my intentions. The behavior was coming from an imbalance.”
“Six months later, I was on probably three or four medications I didn’t need at very high doses and I was still struggling. I remember being in the nurse’s office, seeing another kid with different-colored meds than mine, and I would offer him my lunch money to take his pills without even knowing what they were.”
In junior high, Chasen discovered alcohol, “That’s when the gasoline got dumped on the fire,” he says. “I was presenting as a severe case of substance use disorder (SUD) with mental health issues.”
A Winding Road
Chasen’s high school years began with a series of expulsions, before he was introduced to AA. “It took me about eight months to get some traction, but I put nearly three years of sobriety together and I graduated from high school. The world I lived in changed dramatically just as a result of abstaining from using substances and being in community with other people who were sober.”
“I’d like to think I got a sponsor and worked the steps, but I did not truly surrender myself to that process and have an experience, internally, while doing it. I attribute that a lot to why I relapsed. I managed to convince myself that I was never an alcoholic, that my AA parents brainwashed me, and that if I would have just kept drinking like my buddies I would have figured things out.”
More Challenges
After relapsing and going back to treatment, Chasen spent the next nine years, from 2006 to 2015, in a 12-step fellowship. “Again, I would like to think I got a sponsor and worked the steps, but I never truly surrendered and humbly went through the steps in a timely manner as if I was on a life or death errand. That relapse lasted about two months and I made a choice to go back to treatment.”
Next, Chasen found his way to a 12-step rehab in Plymouth, NH. “For the first time, while the proverbial cement was still wet in my head, I completed the first seven steps. I took it really seriously, as a life-or-death errand, and I got results that were unbelievable.”
Friends Forever
Living in a sober home in Weymouth, Chasen became close friends with two of the residents. Both struggled profoundly with substance use, and eventually relapsed.
“One was named Steve Doucette from Stoneham. My mission was to save Steve, to steer him out of the darkness and into the light of the 12 steps. When he moved back home, I called him every day. We were FaceTiming one night and he seemed a little slow, but not too much. I could have sworn I saw the top of a beer bottle in the camera frame but I wasn’t sure. I could have said to him to point his laptop camera down a bit more, to show me what it was, or I was going to call his mom, but I didn’t. Steve didn’t show up to work the next morning because his mom found him OD’d in his bed that night.”
“I know now, in my heart, I couldn’t have stopped it, I couldn’t have changed things, but I didn’t know that then. I internalized it as though it was my fault. Steven died during my first year of sobriety, when I was the most vulnerable. It made me obsessed with being a sober house manager, trying to get the flock of the house on as good of a path as possible, extending that out into the community, and sponsoring people.”
“The other friend was named Nick Tantillo, who was a great guy, a great friend, and a great father. He had a larger than life personality and he was the funniest human being I have ever met. He had a way to make the most miserable down-and-out person burst out into belly laughs within five to 10 minutes of being around them. He lost a leg in an accident. He had a prosthetic leg. If he couldn’t make you laugh with his jokes, he’d say, ‘At least you didn’t lose your leg in a wood chipper.’”
“Nick always struggled with sobriety. He’d put a few months together or get a year medallion, but something would always pull him backwards. As amazing as he was, there was a sadness to him – a darker side that I could never really figure out. Nick died of a fentanyl overdose on Christmas Eve 2022. I got the call on Christmas morning while opening toys with my son. I had to have my son’s mom take him so I could be alone and grieve. He didn’t want to use drugs that would kill him. But he did, he didn’t tell anyone, and nobody could have stopped him anyways.”
Processing Grief
After Steve’s death, Chasen was inspired to orchestrate a candlelight vigil for his friend. “I invited everyone in our AA group who knew Steve to drive from Braintree to Stoneham to his mother’s house to light candles and just be there. To be a presence, to be available, and to show her what Steve meant to us. 75 of us showed up. The memory of her coming to the door, the cry of pain she let out – I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like that since. I asked her if she wanted us to leave, although she couldn’t speak, she made it clear that she wanted us to stay. That night convinced me that I need to spend the rest of my life trying to help other people.”
“With Nick, the grieving process was similar to Steve. He was in the same AA group with us but I had a seven-year friendship with Nick. Losing a second person from that group was pretty hard hitting. It is pretty surreal to know that a day of sobriety is not guaranteed for me. I had to rededicate myself to my own personal recovery. Also, this year, I’ve struggled with mental health, I’ve struggled with anxiety, and with feelings of depression that don’t stop me from living my life but are still powerful. And, I’ve gotten into therapy. There’s a huge stigma, still, around people in long-term recovery who seek help for their mental health.”
“With both deaths, my coping mechanism has been throwing myself harder into trying to help other people.”
Finding Help
For people in recovery who have lost a loved one and may be on the precipice of a relapse, Casen offers time-tested advice. “Go to your primary care physician. If you don’t have one, call any doctor’s office and say you want to become a patient. If they don’t have any appointments open for a couple of months, call another doctor. Keep calling until you get an appointment as soon as possible. They’ll make a referral to a psychologist in your area.”
“PsychologyToday.com is also a great resource. You can fine-tune your search and it will show you providers in your area that you can very easily email. If you’re in a mental health crisis, that can be really difficult stuff to do. So, there are recovery centers which are pretty abundant along the coastline and in central and western Massachusetts. If you walk into a recovery center and you are one, five, eight years sober and you say you’d like a referral to local therapists, no one is going to think you relapsed.”
Moving Forward
Currently, Chasen works as director of admissions and business development for Refresh Recovery and Wellness in Norwell. “We opened in April of this year. We are an outpatient, substance use, mental health, co-occurring provider. We do individual therapy, group therapy, and med management. We have a number of holistic practices that are optional. We offer 12-step stuff, Reiki, sound healing, crystals, energy healing – a lot of eclectic approaches that many claim have bettered their lives. We don’t mandate these things, but we have them here on the coffee table, if you will, to pick up and look through. Throughout the week we have a number of holistic groups that are well attended.”
When someone picks up the phone and makes a call for help, Chasen is often the voice that answers. “I am able to be a soft, calm, understanding, listening fellow human being to that person. I can offer them hope. I can put something tangible in front of them that is helpful. They can take it and maybe get sober for eight months or eight years. It’s good medicine for me”
“I had worked with my two partners here at a previous facility. When they told me where I was going to be working, I got really excited because it is two towns away from where I grew up. Since April, I have already been able to help a couple of people I grew up with and went to elementary school with. That’s so cool to me after the hell I raised around here – being able to do something positive is really fulfilling.”