Dominick’s Shoebox

There once was a young man named Dominick with wavy black hair that matted his forehead and a nose ring that shouted rebellion. He wore striped shirts and did not present as anything out of the ordinary. I remember him being an energetic youth in his twenties, always had an energy drink in hand. It was usually a Redbull and sometimes a Monster, but he always needed that extra little “kick in the pants” it seemed. I knew not the extent of his history in the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous, but he had already been coming around for sometime by the time I had begun my journey into sobriety.

Through his shares in meetings and conversations we would have, I was able to piece together some clues about the number of years he had likely been battling against his own brain, which seemed to want to drag him back into the world of drugs against his own will. Dominick appeared happy and energetic but to me, there was an aura of desperation surrounding him, almost like his death was coming any day now and he was struggling to hold on even a second longer. I can’t really describe the feeling accurately or give it the justice it deserves, perhaps it was the fact that he did eventually die which has caused me to remember feeling that way. It was almost like fate itself was whispering into my ears “Yep, that guy, he won’t always be here”.

There was a spirit of genuine excitement and fear and joy that would fill the room anytime he would enter it. Not what I felt, but these were the vibes I was picking up on about his persona and presence. Few people are able to capture my attention by aura alone but he was one such person who managed to do it. Life is like a movie and any decent movie does a great job at foreshadowing events to come. In a spiritual sense that I cannot explain, hints were being dropped. Maybe Dominick was going through a downword spiral that eventually took him.

And the thing about spiraling is that it has a psychological phenomenon about it where once you panic, you start thrashing, resisting and exerting energy and willpower in a way which makes the situation worse until you eventually “crash”. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more you struggle for control to break free, the less control you actually have. Perhaps years of struggling and fighting wore him down until he no longer had a defense against the first high that would become his final relapse before he left us. Dominick introduced me to more people, took me to meetings I had never been to before and opened up my world as a newcomer. As someone who was new and didn’t particularly want to be a person in Recovery, Dominick was the first person to give me a reason to keep coming back. I always looked forward to seeing him again as he was a friendly face that made the experience of being new less overwhelming and more inviting.

Such is the case with so many drifts in life, somehow or another we started hanging out less and less. There was no dramatic falling out, no clearly identifiable moment where it started happening, it just sort of…happened. One day we were hitting meetings together then at some point, we just stopped running into each other. I would see him from time to time, huddled around the doors of churches outside before and after meetings, smoking cigarettes and joining in on the occasional conversation. Clearly he was fading away a week at a time but being unaware of the signs and symptoms of relapse, it never occured to me that maybe we should grab a bite or do something together. By the time I started noticing this, I was a regular attendee who had become more accostomed to seeing the other people that we both knew and forming friendships with them. My world expanded while Dominick’s probably shrank. I don’t beat myself up for not realizing it sooner but in retrospect, I now see the danger he was in that even he probably could not fathom until it was too late.

One thing to know about the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous is that they give out keytags to celebrate various lengths of clean time. Because it’s been quite sometime since I’ve last gone to an N.A meeting (I now go to Alcoholics Anonymous instead), it’s hard for me to recall every single milestone, but the very first key tag represents “Anywhere from twenty-four hours to one day of clean time” or something like that. It is a white key tag with gold letters that say “24 Hours Of Recovery”. Over a period of years, Dominick had accumulated many of these white keytags which he would keep in a shoebox. He had so many of them that they filled it completely and he would simply get another box or container to put them all into. Sometimes he would make it a day, sometimes a few days, sometimes even a week or more, but rarely did he ever make it more than a couple of weeks of continuous sobriety at a time. From what I remember, he once said that his own parents had struggled with addiction while he was growing up and that they too, struggled to piece together any meaningful or significant length of clean time.

Eventually, many months had gone by since I had last seen Dominick. By this time he was considered by me to be “An Old Friend”, the type of friend we’ve all had whom we may think about from time to time but haven’t seen in “forever”. I was by this point a couple of years into my recovery journey and had accumulated some relapses of my own. I too had stumbled and fallen a multitude of times, but my relapses usually included something dumb like smoking weed again or consuming Kava at a local Kava bar. I reached a point where I was able to stay clean at least a month or more at a time. Almost never did I go back to heroin, coke or meth.

I remember the day I found out that Dominick had died. A mutual friend of ours who also happened to be my Sponsor and I were sitting at a diner, preparing to go over some stepwork. “Did you hear Dominick has died?” he had asked me. I was shocked. The devastation hadn’t set in yet. “Wait really? What happened?” I demanded to know. “Dominick went to a treatment center in Arizona, got out and got high again. He overdosed and died”. My sponsor continued “His last words were to me and he said ‘Don’t relapse!’”. It was insane to hear that this was something that had actually taken place. It felt so ficticious and surreal. It was the first time that the reality of what addiction can do to us really began to sink in with me. I knew that sobriety wasn’t a game but I didnt’ feel it!

The Reality Of Relapse

I’ve heard statistics floating around that addicts and alcoholics are around fifteen percent of the population. Maybe that is the case maybe it’s not but surely people who struggle with addiction are in the minority, as it is not the typical experience for most people to go from having a beer to developing a life ruining and potentially life ending habit down the road. Clearly we are a demographic of people who are not exactly neurotypical. Most people when it comes to drinking or smoking some weed can take it or leave it without much thought or consideration. And moreover, your average person probably isn’t going to try hard drugs even once. A simple lecture in high school is enough to disuade them from pursuing such treacherous pleasures.