McKayla Lived On Both Sides Of Addiction

MCKAYLA LIVED ON BOTH SIDES OF ADDICTION

One day, McKayla told me something that has never left my heart.

She had spent years loving a man who was also living with addiction. She had waited for him, worried about him, and watched drugs slowly change the person she loved.

She knew the confusion of hearing one thing and witnessing another. She knew how quickly hope could turn into fear. She knew what it was like to look at someone standing directly in front of her and still feel as though she could not reach him.

Then she said something that stopped me:

“Grandma, I know that everything he does to me, I do to you.”

In that moment, I realized McKayla did understand.

When she disappeared, she knew I searched for her.

When she did not answer, she knew my mind filled with terrible possibilities.

When she said she was all right, she knew I listened for the truth hiding behind her voice.

When she came home, she knew I studied her face, her movements and, her breathing because I was always afraid that the next time might be different.

She understood because she had stood where I stood.

She had loved someone she could not pull away from drugs, while I was desperately trying to pull her back to me.

McKayla was caught in the centre of the same heartbreak. She was being hurt by someone else’s addiction, while her own addiction was hurting me.

She was watching him disappear.

I was watching her disappear.

And she knew it.

People sometimes believe that those living with addiction cannot see the damage surrounding them. But McKayla could see it. Somewhere inside the illness, my beautiful granddaughter understood what I was carrying.

I cannot imagine how heavy that knowledge must have been.

She already carried the pain that led her toward drugs. Then she carried the pain drugs created. And beneath all of that, she carried the knowledge that the people she loved were suffering beside her.

If I could speak to her today, I would tell her:

Kayla, I knew that addiction was speaking and acting through you. I knew your heart was still there, even on the days when I could no longer find it.

I was frightened. I was exhausted. Sometimes I was angry. But I never confused what addiction did with who you truly were.

You were still my Kayla.

You were still worthy of help.

You were still worthy of home.

And you were always worthy of my love.

McKayla understood the agony of loving someone through addiction because she experienced it herself. She knew what it was to reach into darkness for someone who could not, or would not, take her hand.

Perhaps that is why this memory hurts so much.

She knew exactly what was happening to my heart because it had already happened to hers.

She was losing him.

I was losing her.

And drugs were standing between all of us.

There was never a day when addiction made me stop loving McKayla.

There was only a day when addiction made it impossible for me to bring her home again.

McKayla Jean Jones — Forever 27