Chapter 16: Conclusion

Conclusion

Linda Joyce (Belcher) Hathaway was an intelligent, caring, beautiful, passionate, compassionate, sexy, lustful, fun, childlike person. I loved her, and still love her very much. The world is a much better place because of the 46 years she graced it and sadder now that she is gone.

Linda’s life was tragically cut short by the use of drugs. Something that, in the end, was beyond her control. There might have been a time, say in junior high school, when there was a choice for Linda, but choice was something she had lost long before she and I met.

I would like to think that something good did come from Linda’s and my marriage, that somehow despite everything that Linda lost, she was able to find something in her time with me. When she died, she had sunk so low that she was selling herself for drugs. That was the addiction, her monster. The real Linda, the woman I loved, had managed, while killing herself, to find herself again.

She was able to climb down off that wall in San Francisco where she had been raped and left hanging for years. She rose up to reclaim her place in the world. She was able to go back to school and find a job. While her addiction was destroying her self-esteem, she was rebuilding it. I wonder if that is why her addiction finally killed her. It knew it could not win. Also, I hope that in the end Linda finally knew that she was worth loving, something she found very hard to accept while alive.

I do not know what, if any, answers the reader of this book can take away. As I said in the beginning, the purpose of this book is not to give answers. The problem that Linda and I faced is far too complicated to have an answer in a book or books.

If there is an answer, it is going to take a lot more than a few thousand words to find it. I hope that the reader has seen enough to understand that this problem is beyond human understanding or control. No one answer is going to be enough, and that the reality may be that there simply is no answer and that the Pandora’s Box of drugs will simply end up destroying all of us.

I know that some reading this book will look at my wife and think she is not like me. She was mentally ill. She did drugs in school, she was a thief, and she was a slut. The point is not the differences but the similarities.

Linda was a wonderful, loving person. That, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly rare in our world where we only have room in our hearts for ourselves, and leave everything to someone else, or the government. Today judges are surprised when family members are present when someone is committed to a mental institution. In a world like that, Linda was a saint.

AA may have part of the answer, but if that answer requires things that are no longer valued in our society, like being honest, then we are doomed.

I have never used drugs in my life. I have never taken a drink. But today, I have huge medical problems that are, partly, the result of my wife’s drug use. Every one of us, users and non-users, are directly affected by drugs and alcohol.

My hope would not be for answers, but for understanding. In AA before each person speaks, they give their name and say that they are an alcoholic. The first step is to admit that our lives have become uncontrollable. Maybe that is the first step each of us needs to take. To admit that none of us have control over drugs. Not those who take them, and not those who do not take them. The police, the drug dealers, the politicians, medical professionals, the users, and the people who love them, all need to take that first step.

I loved my wife, but on a cold morning in May of 2007, I had to pour her ashes onto a lonely stretch of beach, and watch as the sea came and took what was left of her from me.

Next: Chapter 17 - How Do I Say Goodbye

Previous: Chapter 15 - Kitty Litter

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