Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Here’s a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully. Avoid Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” from the Polaroid or Kodak or whichever commercial, and the songs “Turn Around” and “Sunrise, Sunset” and—there are thousands more. Avoid Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” and this one, Eric Clapton’s song about his son.
... See moreDavid Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
She calls me from the lounge. Nic has boarded the plane and it’s backing up from the jetway. I see her standing there with her cell phone to her ear, looking out the window. I see Nic on the plane. I see him as he is—frail, opaque, ill—my beloved son, my beautiful boy. “Everything,” I say to him. “Everything.” Fortunately there is a beautiful boy.
... See moreDavid Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Whatever I did was done naively and stupidly and because of my immaturity, but it doesn’t matter. I blame myself. People outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. “You didn’t cause it.” I do not believe it.
David Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Anne Lamott advises, “Try not to compare your insides with other people’s outsides.” That is, it may look as if everyone else is doing great, their kids are sailing through. But no one sails through.
David Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
From Addict in the Family: “None of this is easy. Addicts’ families walk an unhappy path that is strewn with many pitfalls and false starts. Mistakes are inevitable. Pain is inevitable. But so are growth and wisdom and serenity if families approach addiction with an open mind, a willingness to learn, and the acceptance that recovery, like addiction
... See moreDavid Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
The mirth evaporates when an extremely shy woman, who mentions her “practice,” so maybe she is a doctor or a lawyer, reveals in a fractured voice that she tried to kill herself a few days ago. She has pale, almost green, skin, no makeup, bristly hair, and eyes haunted by sleeplessness. She says that she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked. S
... See moreDavid Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
“Addicts may have many complaints, including major and minor grievances from years past. Some of their accusations may, in fact, have truth in them. Families may well have caused pain for the addicts. They may well have failed the addicts in some significant way. (After all, what human relationship is perfect?) But addicts bring up these problems n
... See moreDavid Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
HA JIN WRITES: “Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as van Gogh asserted, ‘Sorrow is better than joy,’ and Balzac declared, ‘Suffering is one’s teacher.’ But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people li
... See moreDavid Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.
David Sheff • Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”