THE CALL
THE CALL
When you love someone living in addiction, you are always waiting for the call. Every time the phone rings, your heart stops, especially when you do not recognize the number, or it rings late at night.
You look at the screen and wonder: Is this it? Is this the call I have been terrified of? You dread it. You pray it will never come.
But somewhere inside, you know it might.
I think part of me believed that living with that fear was somehow preparing me. That if the call ever came, I would have imagined it enough times to know how to survive it.
Then the call came. I looked at my phone and saw:
NO CALLER ID
For a moment, I did not want to answer.
As if refusing the call could stop whatever waited on the other end from being true.
But my finger touched the answer button.
“This is Constable…”
I do not remember much after that.
I remember yelling that it was not true. I remember begging the officer not to continue. I didn't want him to finish the sentence because I knew the words waiting at the end.
But he had to say them.
And he did.
“I am sorry to inform you…”
The words no family should ever have to hear.
When the call ended, I frantically tried to dial my sister. She answered and heard me screaming into the phone.
I did not have to explain.
She knew.
She just knew.
After that, everything became a blur.
Seconds became minutes.
Minutes became hours.
Hours became days and sleepless nights.
Somehow, I continued to function.
I helped plan McKayla’s celebration of life. I spent hours creating her video, going through photographs and memories of the life she had lived; I felt it brought me close to her, and maybe it was just a dream, a very bad dream.
I chose the pictures.
I uploaded the music
I chose how we would say goodbye.
And I felt almost nothing. My body was just doing what needed to be done.
Then the Celebration of Life was over.
Everyone went home.
Life continued moving, even though mine had stopped.
I have been incredibly blessed by friends, family and complete strangers who have reached out with love. But eventually, the numbness began to disappear.
And the feeling that replaced it became so enormous that some days it suffocates me.
Because of McKayla’s addiction and the life she was living, I knew there was a very real chance that call would someday come.
I had played it over in my mind. I had wondered how I would react and what life would be like afterward.
But I can tell you this:
It is nothing even fucking close.
Nothing can prepare you for this.
Every minute of every day, my heart suffers. It has been shattered into a million pieces, and all the joy and happiness that once lived inside it seem to have leaked out through the cracks.
And there are so many losses you never think about until they become yours.
I remember being afraid whenever the phone rang, afraid McKayla was hurt, in trouble or needed something.
Now I know that call will never come.
There will be no more messages asking for help.
No more e-transfers at all hours for food, or for whatever else she told me she needed.
No more plans to write a book together.
There will never be another family photograph with McKayla in it.
There will never be another family celebration she might walk into.
There will be no wedding to plan.
No babies to hold.
No future dreams for her to chase.
Drugs stole all of that from McKayla.
And they stole it from every person who loves her.
Yes, McKayla was the one living with addiction, but the devastation did not end with her.
Each one of us now has to live an entire future without our beautiful McKayla in it.
And perhaps the hardest truth of all is this:
There will never be one more chance for her to beat addiction.
No next treatment.
No tomorrow morning.
No fresh beginning.
No final phone call where I find the perfect words that somehow reach her and bring her home.
All the chances are gone.
So if you are using drugs, living with addiction or love someone who is fighting this nightmare, please understand:
You may believe this call will never come to your family.
I prayed it would never come to mine.
It came anyway.
You may survive today.
You may survive tomorrow.
You may survive a hundred times.
But it only takes one time that you do not.
And when that happens, your pain does not disappear.
It is handed to every person who loves you, and they carry it for the rest of their lives.
Please reach out.
Please answer the phone.
Please accept the help.
Please try one more time.
Do it while one more chance still exists.
Because once that call comes, there is no going back.
There is only a voice on the other end of the line saying:
“I am sorry to inform you…”
And a family that will spend the rest of its life wishing the phone had never rung.
McKayla Jean Jones, your call came.
And I will never stop wishing I could have changed the ending.
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