On addiction.

Addiction depletes everyone it touches.

The only thing the House “impeachment inquiry” proved was that Joe Biden is Hunter Biden’s dad. And that he loves his imperfect son very much.

Republicans love to use Hunter Biden’s addiction struggles as a weapon to hurt Joe Biden. But they’ll never be able to hurt him as much as his son Hunter has.

Believe me, I know.

The first time I saw a drug vial, I was 13 years old. Just doing my laundry, like we were EXPECTED to do at that age in the year 1987 (unlike now when my kids look at me like I have ten heads for merely suggesting they sort their own socks… but I digress).

When I pulled my parachute pants out of the dryer something fell out and landed on my toe. And I don’t really know how I knew what it was, beyond the fact that I had been allowed to stay up late enough to watch Miami Vice a few times. Or maybe really, upon reflection, it was the not so quiet conversations about my big brother’s unexpected return coupled with talk of his “drug addiction”.

I knew enough I guess, that the empty glass cylinder tossing around with my best friend’s Benetton sweatshirt scared the fuck out of me. I was in 6th grade in a rural NJ school in which my entire grade represented less than 30 kids. I didn’t know Shit about shit. Yet somehow in the “Just say no” era, I still knew that drugs were bad. I knew that a crack vial in my parachute pants was a bad thing.

What I didn’t yet know was how hard it was all going to be. I didn’t know that I’d be faced with hating my brother for his addiction. I didn’t know that I’d someday see his addiction as a separate entity than I saw him. I didn’t know that I’d blame him for my father’s death. Or blame addiction for my mother’s. I didn’t know what that empty vial meant and would mean for me, my life and the lives of my sisters. For as long as we lived.

But I found out.

I am eight years younger than my brother Nick. He’s the oldest of the 5 kids and I’m the youngest. We were never especially close. It was always my sisters and me… and Nick. Two teams who had very different expectations. Nick was never pushed to succeed. He was the man. My dad’s thinking from my perspective growing up and looking back, was that his son could play football, go to parties with his football buddies, get into fist fights, drive fast cars and date pretty girls and that he’d end up being alright.

There was a whole ecosystem built around my brother just being at the top of the pecking order around the house. It was just the way it was. My dad, my grandmother, my aunts— they all fed into the patriarchy and that was the only reality my brother knew. He could do no wrong. The whole system was built to reward him for nothing. That he was entitled to it. He never had to earn it.

Knowing what I know now, that is what sealed his fate.

And that’s not to say that he always had it easy growing up, because he didn’t.

In fact, my first memory of my brother isn’t playing in the yard or sledding down the hill in the back. It’s not burning my mouth with the styrofoam cup of hot chocolate from the snack bar at one of his freezing cold high school football games.

It’s watching my mother take a steak knife to his throat as he held the kitchen phone to his ear while on the line with the local police.

I was very little. He may have only been 11 years old. I remember him being calm. I remember holding my breath and praying. I remember not knowing what my mom who was snarling at him to hang up would do to him. I remember knowing that we needed the police. That we needed help. And that my big brother was getting it for us.

I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember if the police came. I know two things- my mother didn’t cut his throat, and that she left us soon after that event.

I have memories of my mom beating me. Memories of her beating my sisters, although usually it’s not her in the memories, but the wicked witch of the west. But the only memory I have of her interacting with my brother, is that one.

I’ve spoken with my oldest sister about that. She told me that it was very hard for Nick. He didn’t want to upset our mother by standing up to her, but he couldn’t watch her abusing us either. And he was very young. It was extremely conflicting for him. She didn’t beat him. Only the girls. And he had to witness it without really knowing what to do. Can you imagine what a child in his shoes would be thinking? I can’t because his predicament was not my own. And I could never fault my brother for anything he did then. He too was a child of abuse, only a different kind.

My sister said the day he called the police was because things had gotten so bad that day, my mother so unhinged and violent, that he needed someone else to help. Our dad was away on business, and the neighbors had intervened on our behalf’s enough. So, he called the police.

I’m not sure, but I imagine that his call was used in the custody case that followed sometime after she left. She wanted visitation and the judge wouldn’t grant even that. I have been told that the neighbors even testified against her, recounting stories of her physical and verbal abuse. She was barred from seeing any of us for years.

And I know that much of the trauma of all of that stayed with my brother. As it stayed with all 5 of us. We never had a group conversation about how we had been affected by mom. My brother and I never spoke about it at all. But I’ve had honest conversations with two of my three sisters, and I know that we all carry those memories with us like scars. They’re all different but they were cut by the same knife. One of my sisters won’t talk about this stuff at all. Her path through the pain is to put it away. Somewhere it can’t reach her. I was that way too for a very long time. And it didn’t work for me. It wasn’t going anywhere just parked in my subconscious. I needed to take it out and look at it, so I could understand it. So I could work on diffusing it. I never spoke with Nick about the damage mom did to him. I wish I had.

I wish I could right now.

But it’s too late.

After high school he enlisted in the Marines. He’d come home for the holidays in his dress uniform and he looked to me like some kind of American hero. He looked great. He looked strong and tough and “manly”. And we were all, especially my dad, very proud.

But that was how things “looked”. Not how things were in reality. Something I had to learn about my brother was that the harder he tried to make something look on the outside, the more it belied what was going on beneath the surface.

He fell into drug addiction very early on while enlisted. He was deployed to a base in South Korea, and from what I understand, that was where it began.

Things went from conversations about Nick’s new girlfriend Kim at Christmas, to “dad will be driving Nick back from California. He wasn’t dishonorably discharged, so at least there’s that…” in the blink of an eye.

And that was when he moved back in with us. And that was when I got to know that version of my brother for the first time. One still very addicted. And as I reflect on it now, I can see that he was a man in a lot of pain.

And that’s when he began disappearing.

A few weeks at a time at first. And then a few months. And it would make us all sick with worry every time. My dad was getting physically sick. It was killing him.

This went on for a couple of years. Nick would vanish, get arrested, my dad would show up to bail him out, Nick would make promises to get help, and then it would repeat.

Until one night. A night my dad told me about afterwards, a thing he never did. He didn’t talk about feelings. But that night he did.

Nick called him from a pay phone in Morristown. He needed money. My dad said he’d drive down to meet him.

He pulled up and when my brother walked up to the car my dad told him that he wasn’t going to give him any money. He told him that his choice was to get in the car and drive to rehab that minute, or my dad would drive away.

I don’t know how he was able to do that. As a mom it kills me to even think about looking at my child, skin and bones, dirty, sick, addicted to poison and then say I would walk away if he didn’t let me help him. My dad had reached his bottom. He told me. He had nothing left. That was the choice my brother had to make.

And when Nick wouldn’t get in the car, my dad drove away. I knew from his puffy cheeks and red eyes that he had sobbed the entire ride home. But he did it.

And a day later, Nick called. “Ok, dad” he said, “I’m ready.”

He was in rehab for a long time. Stepped up to a halfway house, got a good job, and met a nice girl also in recovery. And that was when I finally got to meet my brother.

He was smart as hell. Something I honestly never knew. But he was sure everyone knew, because he was also extremely full of himself. Man, the bravado of my big brother. Eye rolls were a family staple.

But who could blame him. My family had all but built him a throne all those years.

But he was still a good person. A kind person. He was fun and funny. And my dad absolutely beamed around him. His son. His son he nearly lost. His son was going to be alright. As they played backgammon and shared stories, you could just feel how proud my dad was of his only son.

It was this way for about a decade. Nick got married. They got their own place. Things were great.

Until my mother, yes my mother, got married again. At that point, we were all adults with varying degrees of connection to her. Oddly, my brothers was the closest. And my mom was getting married to her long time partner, and three of the 5 of us went to the wedding.

His wife couldn’t make it for some reason, and as I was sitting at the table at the reception, I noticed this old friend of Nick’s invite him over to the open bar. My brother didn’t drink. But David gave him a drink anyway. And I was terrified. I alerted my sister who was also alarmed but tried to calm me with “it’s just one don’t worry”.

He started disappearing again a few weeks later. His marriage ended. And he never stopped disappearing again.

My son was born, and my brother missed it. He’d resurface once in a while. My moms sister would help him with money and food and then he’d vanish again.

When my son was a year and a half old, I took him to visit his grandpa. We went to Six Flags, and my dad sobbed at the dolphin show. I didn’t know why at the time, but it would later become clear. He knew he was dying.

On the ride back to his house my brother called his cell. My dad began yelling. His face got red. He was screaming at him. I knew my brother was hanging around some woman, and when my dad hung up, he explained that she was a heroin addict too. He was so upset, so angry, but also so depleted that it frightened me. He had had a terrible medical scare two years prior, and I worried he’d make himself sick.

He said goodbye to us as we were readying to leave. And he sobbed for several minutes straight saying goodbye to my infant son. It wasn’t like him.

He died two days later from a heart attack.

His widow blamed my brother. She said he wasn’t welcome at the funeral. And I was conflicted. My father, my whole world outside of my own little family was gone, and it was too much to deal with, and yet, I think I blamed my brother too. I watched what he did to my dad unfold before my very eyes and it infuriated me. And so I told him.

I told him that I was struggling with blaming him. I told him what he did to dad. And he heard me. I know he did. It didn’t change him, but he heard me.

The four of us sisters insisted that he be allowed to attend the funeral. It was an act of solidarity we had never known before. But it was the right thing and as much as we tried to stick together through the many challenges which lay ahead, particularly as it pertained to our brother, we didn’t always get there.

He never got clean again. Not truly. He’d say he was and come around. And one sister would help him with money, another would take his calls from jail. One cut him out of her life completely. I was somewhere in the middle.

When our mother died as a result of her addiction to pain medication in 2017, we came together again. One sibling did not go to the funeral. And as my two sisters and I sat in the pew holding hands, as I struggled to make sense of being unexpectedly overwhelmed with grief, one as much about grieving the mother I never had as it was about her dying, our brother walked in 45 minutes late. High.

He spent the next few years doing to two of my sisters what he did to my dad. Depleting them.

And then came the call. In the first few days of 2020. His girlfriend had returned home from work to find my big brother, once proud Marine, star football player, genius know-it-all and light of my father’s eyes, deceased on the kitchen floor.

55 years old. And he was gone.

And I knew instantly what had taken him.

My big brother couldn’t heal himself. He couldn’t manage the pain. He couldn’t outrun it. He couldn’t save himself. And ultimately, it took him away from us.

Drugs had taken my mother and my brother. And in their deaths I understood that they were imperfect humans, just like me, just like all of us, whose lives inflicted pain upon them. Pain which drove them to making choices they never wanted to make. Pain they never wanted to inflict on others.

And I began to look inward. At my own pain. At the choices it was leading me to make. And I knew that I would have to work very, very hard on making sure I did everything in my power to deal with it. I talk about this a lot, but I truly do believe that we can look at the traumas we’ve known and learn from them. That they can help us move forward, stronger.

I don’t want to run away from the pain I’ve known anymore. It happened. It’s real. It’s there. And it’s led me down dark paths too.

But something I’ve learned from being so close to addiction like my brothers, is that a father put into that predicament has no choice but to love their son. That’s all they have left at some point.

My dad loved my brother.

And Joe Biden loves Hunter.

And that love doesn’t turn off because they’re addicted to drugs. It grows stronger.

Addiction depletes everyone it touches. We have a choice to refill what it takes away with love. Love for ourselves and for the addict under its grip.

But above all, I truly believe that there is power in talking to each other. Power in talking to ourselves. Power in seeking help. Power in admitting your own pain.

And I know that my brother didn’t die in vain. He taught me so much about myself. About the world. About grace and forgiveness. About humanity. He was a good person who succumbed to his own demons. Taken too soon from this world. And his memory is a blessing.

I will never understand how anyone can simply write off someone struggling with addiction. Or how they can fault their loved ones for trying to help them.

I’ll never fault my dad for trying to help Nick. And I’ll never fault Joe Biden for trying to help Hunter.

I wonder how many of the Republicans attacking him for his son’s past have had to deal with addiction too. If they have, then they’d know better.

One would hope they’d act like it.

We would all be better off for it.

But if I could control what they do, we wouldn’t be looking at the goddamn mess of everything they’ve made.

I can only control what I do. And I have decided not to run from pain. Not to shun addicts, and not to cast judgment on a parent doing whatever it takes to save their own son.