- Alcohol
When your husband is an alcoholic and causing chaos in the home, it’s easy for your own drinking problem to take a backseat. Carol drank alongside her husband, but it was easy to place all the blame on him for the destroyed businesses, lawsuits and dire financial straits the family found themselves in. They were married for 25 years and raised four children. Despite Carol’s and her husband’s drinking, it was actually their college-age son who first sought treatment for addiction.
Carol asked for a divorce, believing that would solve all of her problems. When her husband suffered a heart attack, though, any divorce plans were put on hold. And even if Carol did acknowledge she had a drinking problem, she was the caretaker so how could she possibly go into treatment?
The family issues finally came to a head one day when Carol asked her husband for the bank statement so she could balance their account. It was then that she found out there was nothing there. The IRS had stepped in and emptied the account. The bank levy was the last straw. Carol told her husband he could go to treatment or he could go to hell, she didn’t care which.
“I thought if I got him out of there, I could take care of everything because I’m Supermom,” she recalls.
She had $69 when that happened, with two kids in college and two in high school who were depending on her. She did manage to turn things around financially, even completing the building of a little house on their lakeside property. Carol settled in and waited to be happy. She may have been back on her feet, but her drinking problem remained. Finally, a girlfriend in recovery said, “Isn’t it time for you to get off the fence?”
When she arrived in treatment, Carol quickly began to tell them all the things her husband had done, to which they responded, “We’re not here to treat him.” At that point, she began to open up the process and completed her program. Soon after leaving treatment, though, life hit her full in the face. Carol’s mother passed away within weeks of her leaving, and then she and her daughter were hit head-on by a drunk driver. Two years later, her oldest daughter, who was in medical school, was diagnosed with cancer.
Carol and her ex-husband flew out to be by their daughter’s side. The night before the surgery, she looked for a meeting to attend. There was only one per week and it happened to be that night, something she knows wasn’t a coincidence. The next morning, five people from that group showed up at the hospital and they came every day after. Despite treatment and remission, the cancer eventually returned and Carol lost her daughter to the disease, but not before nursing her for 15 months. That loss tested Carol’s sobriety in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
“I was having trouble getting to meetings and my sponsor confronted me. She asked if I was able to put my sobriety ahead of my daughter dying. She said if I didn’t, I’d be drinking again,” Carol recalls. “The rubber really met the road there for me, so I did what she told me and I got through.”
It’s not that it wasn’t hard. “When she died, I didn’t want to do anything,” Carol says. “I told her, ‘When you go, I just want to go with you.’ She was worried about me. I didn’t really want to live and felt I had no purpose.”
Meanwhile, her youngest daughter went to treatment while in college and her son too. It’s that son who helped her get through that time, sending his mother back to treatment. While there, Carol got word that her ex-husband passed away. They had reconnected during their daughter’s illness and death and there was even a question of reconciliation, so this was another big blow. This was only eight months after they buried their daughter, and Carol just couldn’t face another funeral.
Still, Carol made it through. She was hired by a treatment center and began a new career. Meanwhile, her kids confronted her about isolating herself in her house by the lake. A new job as a clinical director prompted a move to sunny Florida and another new career path. While in that position, she realized we weren’t treating our older adults as well as we should. Soon, she was speaking on this topic around the country and in Europe.
Today, she sees it as a fulfillment of her dying daughter’s vision. Just before she passed away, Carol’s daughter had a vision that there was something her mom was meant to do. Today, even in retirement, she continues to speak and consult on older adult programs.
Her new life was almost perfect, but still there was something missing. As she got out of the hot tub one day, she recalls having a conversation with God about how fun it would be if her ex-husband had lived and could be here to share this with her or if there could be someone else special in her life.
A few weeks later, while in the hospital for knee-replacement surgery, Carol got a call from her high school boyfriend. Groggy from the pain medication, she told him to call back in eight days. He called back in two. They began talking on the phone frequently, and she says it was just one of those things where she got that warm fuzzy feeling with him. Now they’re getting married after not seeing each other for 61 years.
“I truly believe it’s a God thing,” Carol says. “I think my daughter nudged God and said, ‘Let’s find mom a special man.’”