I attended the memorial service of my old boss recently.

It had been many years since I was in his employ and many more since we’d seen each other.  But I’d heard of his passing due to some form of unmentionable cancer and some of my family members who also worked with him in our family’s former advertising business were making the trek into town to pay their last respects.  My presence would have gone unnoticed but I would be nice to have the family together again, even for the day, and I knew it would be a big event in town as he was well known, highly networked and therefore, he would likely be eulogized by some very important people.  Admittedly, I attended more out of curiosity than grief but I checked that at the door. Or at least I thought I had.

My family and I arrived at the catholic church that afternoon having parked our modest cars amongst the lot of luxury vehicles.  Former senators,  governors and other movers and shakers from one of the most vibrant eras of Las Vegas flanked our stride but here, all in black, eerily, we were equals.  It was a poignant reminder.

The Who’s Who crowd was capacity. Standing room only.  I remember thinking about when I used to ponder the question of who would come to my funeral one day, my passing would never command such an audience.  And that was merely the beginning of many epiphanies that would come to me during the hour-long event.

As happens with weddings and funerals, I’d taken notice of several people from my very distant past who were in attendance.  It had been decades since I’d seen most and it was easy to cherry pick the few to whom those years had obviously been kinder.  Many others had weathered the storms of life the past thirty years so poorly, they were  beyond recognition.  I’m pretty sure more than one of them had that very afternoon asked themselves if they were next.

The single sheet agenda promised an interesting selection of eulogizers. Those who’d made the cut were to be undoubtedly fascinating and articulate.

During the opening compulsory exercises, I silently recalled wondering whether a church was an appropriate place for the deceased’s closing ceremonies.  After all, he never seemed the church-going type. But then isn’t that how we do it?  And with that thought, my mind had begun one of my greatest journeys

They were funny. They were memorable. They recalled the best and the most embarrassing times of his life. The crowd laughed on cue and feigned a tears at the appropriately synchronized moments. It was a nice show.

But as If I were a society page critic sent to cover the event, I couldn’t help but ask the questions that, clearly, nobody wanted to answer.  Were these closing remarks accurate representations of the entirety of my former boss’ life?  Moreover, would they be the choices of the deceased if he’d had the forethought to write his own eulogy?

It was at that point that I began my own.  I’d stumbled on what turned out to be the most cathartic writing of my life to date.

I wrote my own eulogy.

Now, of course, my document is already signed and sealed, complete with cues for the playing of what’s become my life theme song, Life Means So Much, by Christian artist/songwriter, Chris Rice. In fact, if you’re so inclined, now would be a good time to look it up and download it on your smartphone and press play.  I’ll give you a minute.

Writing my own eulogy at first seemed like a pretty morbid exercise, the idea of which was birthed at an equally morbid time.  But as a a momentarily  inspired musician or a painter with canvas at sunset, I was compelled to think in sentences and having said my goodbyes to those distant friends and family at the service, I rushed home and powered up my computer.

What emerged through my fingers that evening and late into the night provided me with a kind of freedom I’m not sure I could genuinely describe.  The details of my document, now folded and sealed for revelation on that glorious day that I meet my Maker, are my secret to keep until that day.  If you’re intrigued enough by now, let me extend a sincere invitation to my own memorial service.  Watch your local listings for details.

Suffice to say, writing my own eulogy helped me to like the person I’d become.  The exercise was beautifully honest.  I figured “Hell, I’m dead. Who do I need to impress? Why hold back anything?”

There’s no handbook for such a project but to tell those who remain the kind of man I really was…not the trumped up version certain family members and friends might script for the hungry audience, if indeed there is one.

I have been through quite a lot in my life to date.  There are many very memorable and wonderful things in my experience of 52 years. Likewise, there are many very horrible things that have happened.  I acknowledged each as I wrote, but still, I thought, I’m missing something.

I had no deathbed confessions to write.

Sure, there were some relationships I’d wished had been healed.  God knows I had tried.  There were a slew of  previously shameful experiences I had long since reconciled with others and my God.  Through my recovery from drug addiction and subsequent personal reflection, I’d done my big work.  I realized then that  I was writing no cliffhanger.  No season finale loaded with twists, turns and surprise character revelations.

When I had finished, I knew I had finished. No more words would come.  In fact, I don’t recall even going back to edit or spell check. (I have never used spell check and I’m proud of the fact.)

Rest In Peace was quite apparently now something within my reach.  This was comforting beyond words.

As I sealed the envelope, prepared to give it to my sister for safekeeping until that day of (spoiler alert)

Not-So-Exciting-Revelation, I realized I was ready to die.

Not that I necessarily wanted to die, but was ready for the event whether that night or many years to come.

There’s an extraordinarily therapeutic value in writing one’s own eulogy.  If you dare to be honest with yourself, it can be the story of a lifetime, quite literally, that cleanses your soul and flags any remaining tasks to finish up.

We don’t know the hour or the day.  I don’t think my ex-boss knew when his day would come exactly.  But knowing him pretty well, I think he was self-centered enough that he would have wanted the last word that day.

For me, I decided I didn’t want to leave that task to others to formulate for me during what would probably be the most difficult time to write something so important.

I highly recommend it.

[Six years old this November, he’s taught me more about caring for others than any human ever did. This is a short story when he was still just a year old.]

We walk and pick up trash in our 20 minute daily metaphor.

“Let’s take a walk!”

Those few words induce such a frenzy in Butch, my nearly year-old puppy, his reaction has become the highlight of my day. Attaching his harness and leash is like fitting a spawning salmon in a dinner jacket. We start our excursions at a frantic pace to nowhere. Dogs have few preferences. Anywhere new to sniff, snort, roll, run and poop is ecstasy.

For a dozen years or more, I’d kindly but emphatically, refused several tempters with puppy in hand, pleading with me to own another dog. But growing up and while married, the inevitable eventual task of putting down a sick or dying animal always fell to me. Always. Now I can’t even keep a houseplant alive without guilt and vowed never again to accept the life and death responsibility of anything more animated if I could avoid it.

Clearly, I missed out.

I got Butch from a family friend in a clever, well-crafted moment of weakness she’d set-up knowing my post-addiction loneliness . Lori anticipated my refusal as she placed the tiny, licking creature into my open palm and told me we share the same birthday and well, I succumbed for the last time once again.

He’s now my best friend. And aren’t they all.

On our walks, he sniffs, I think, and together, we pick up other people’s trash.

It’s no noble green act for humanity. Our team effort of sniffing and retrieving garbage others have tossed, has become a metaphor for a much deeper message in the early morning hours.

On occasion, I am guilty of letting an empty water bottle drop or wrapper fly out of my car door in a rogue wind and I just don’t have the energy to go on a chase. It doesn’t haunt me. I don’t lose sleep or go to confession over it. Life goes on. Sue me.

Despite my apathy, though, it will land somewhere, and I wonder…
Will someone do us the same favor someday?

Without forethought or expectation and sometimes purely by accident, we care for others. We end up fixing their thoughtless mistakes thoughtlessly and without premeditation. Today they call it pay-it-forward. My hope for humanity, having taken some big hits in recent years, is buoyed by stuff like this.

But random acts of kindness have become so commercialized. These days, people have to be instructed to commit them and it kinda misses the point entirely. What was once indeed random is no longer the conscientious overflow of someone’s innate character, but a moment of self-aggrandizement on Facebook. Original, reflexive acts of humankindness are what used to set us apart from other species.
Well, most of them.

Seated in the shade on the cool grass, I asked Butch if he understood this complex yet very simple thought.
He squatted and pooped.

Good dog. I think he gets it.

Dog hearts are so big, with roles reversed and opposable thumbs, I think they’d pick up ours bare handed.

En route home with a full trash bag, I was more thankful than ever for that day Lori introduced us. Dogs seem to get naturally what humans don’t. The time will come when I have to say good bye to my best friend, but I will remember today and every day on an early morning walk with Butch and times like these when he inspires me to be a better human.

It would either kill me, or change my life forever.

Mistakenly, I had believed I had  a choice.

And until this moment, I have spoken to no one of the two weeks of my life that eclipse in importance all others.

My first glimpse of any hope or lucidity came at some point on Sunday, September, 11, 2011.  Bedridden, unshowered, unshaven and in my pooled sweat for a week, I had awoken from week-long hellstorm of hallucinations.  No idea if it was day or night…it didn’t matter anymore.  Blinds and drapes had long since been drawn in preparation.  Once the busiest front door in town, it had been unopened for a week.  Voice and text messages were gathered in such numbers on my chargeless phone I scarcely cared to plug it in again.

But I was awake. And it wasn’t the kind of awake that I’d been accustomed to for so many years. I was awake and I could feel.

I knew I could feel because I had just turned on the television thinking I might catch up on what had transpired during the past week.  I had been alone without a single visitor. The world could have easily ended escaping my notice.  And fortunately for me, in a very tangible sense, it had.

The TV images were predictable for that day. The tenth anniversary of the terrorist bombings in New York and other points. Services, memorials, reflections of survivors.  Not exactly the kind of programming to watch after a week of crystal methamphetamine withdrawal.  I had not cried during the prior week but I could see I was entering that next phase and the  TV news of that morning was to be the divine catalyst.

Lucid was probably an overstatement.  However, something had changed.  The fevered stupor of my addiction was breaking and I could actually reason from one thought to the next in succession.  Despite this glimpse of hope though, it was ragingly apparent the worst of it was yet to come.

Two weeks prior, I had been wearing an orange jumpsuit and was confined to a hard metal cot in a large room with hundreds of very creepy men.  I had little hope that my environment would change any time soon.  A week before that, my arrest and subsequent discovery of my habit by my family and friends had been a forced hand thank you to the detectives and swat team that raided my hotel room, home and car after months of surveillance.  The confiscation of thousands in cash and even more thousands in drugs of all kinds was undoubtedly their  biggest bust of the week—perhaps the month—according to the detective who had first cuffed me at the elevator of the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas.

In total, I had saved around $23,000 cash, the remaining profit of what had been a highly lucrative illicit drug sales business from the past few years.  But after the denied theft of my cash on hand by the arresting detective team and the documented $5,100 cash taken from my home during the raid by the S.W.A.T. team, I had about $15,000 in cash and other hiding places which I reserved for such a day.  As I watched the footage of the 9/11 memorial events on the television, reality had begun to hit me as I started tallying the immediate rest of my life.  It was the first hopeful thought I could muster.

The money situation had taken over my selfish mind for the moment, but as I watched the tragic recollections of the events ten years earlier, I was overcome by a reality more important. I put the pad of paper and pen down at my bedside and as I watched, I was overcome with feelings of loss and grief I had never before experienced.  I no longer cared about the money.  I didn’t even care about the future. The present, for all intents and purposes, was irrelevant.  I had become fixated on the past.

The program host on the TV was doing a segment on the orphaned children of 9/11 whose fathers and mothers, police and firefighters, had lost their lives in acts of heroism and compassion on that day. The children, now a decade older, were recalling the fond memories of their parents with pride.  It was that moment when the tears came.  I wish I could say it was for those children of 9/11 pictured on the screen in front of me, but it was for my own.

I would have rather rewound the week and returned to that  sweaty, hallucinatory hell than to have to face what I knew was the most profound loss in my life of addiction.  The stories of the noble fathers and mothers, selfless in compassion, bold and courageous in their efforts, was as far away from my self-image as the east is from the west.  The stark contrast between who they were, many posthumously, and who I had become as a parent, sickened me.  I vomited myself.  The hardest thing I had to face from here on out wasn’t going to be the possible 25 year prison sentence for eight felonies and a high level drug trafficking charge.  It wasn’t what attorney to choose and how many thousands I didn’t have to pay him or her.  It was how I was going to again face my own three children.

The moment of my arrest should have been a foreshadowing of this. I vividly recall the moment the undercover officer called my name, grabbed my right arm and cuffed me at the east elevator entrance. My second thought (my first was an obvious two words,) was “Andrew.”

Andrew is my youngest and my only son.

Now a vibrant, genius level student in his first year of college, he and I had remained closest during my addiction.  My two oldest were already on their own, smart and perceptive women, who otherwise might have caught on more quickly to the secret I’d long been hiding.  I had kept them, and my extended family members, at a distance.  But my son was a minor still and custody arrangements with my ex gave me a couple days a week with him, more if I wanted.  I rarely exercised that privilege.

In every father, there is an instinctive paternal concern to be with, care for, protect and support his children.  I had never lost that instinct.  Rather, I daily subdued it and pushed it down in deference to the drug, rationalizing that I was managing my dual lives quite well and without having raised any particular curiosities from my family.  My son, I thought, was perhaps the easiest, albeit most vulnerable, of the marks of my deception.  I still went to Boy Scouts with him on Monday evenings, often high, but he never seemed to know.  I picked him up from school, shared a meal, a drive, a movie or some other activity to buffer against what might otherwise be detected by him until it was time to return him to his mother’s home and race off to make my next drug deal or host a drug party that would likely last for the next couple days…at the very least.

More than once, having suddenly remembered my commitment to him that afternoon, did I race to shower, dress and get out the door and shoo my guests so that I could meet him in time to have a nice, unsuspecting, quality encounter with him.

I vomited again.

The recollection of these kinds of deceptive events were now coming in waves and the steady progression of shame I felt  through my tears was punctuated by an occasional glance at the TV to hear yet another story of a proud son’s word’s ten years after his father’s heroic death.

I had been no hero.

I believe it is a paternal instinct for a father to want to raise his children to think heroically of him.

Worse, I was not-only a non-hero, I had become the enemy from which fatherly heroes rescue their children and therein, become heroes.

I cried alone for hours, maybe days. It was still dark. I awoke crying. I cried on the toilet. I cried in the much needed shower I finally brought myself to take. I am crying even now as I recall this reality.

It would either kill me, or change my life forever.

The truth was, and still remains, that the choice for an addict must be both.  The want to die to self and to drugs and addiction and the want to have a changed life are inseparable desires for recovery to be sustained.  Singly, it is one of the greatest epiphanies I have ever had the pleasure of meeting to date.

Now, clean, sober and two years later, much of the healing has taken place with my children and family.  Much is still left to accomplish.  I’ve learned how to be a father once again.  Unfortunately for me and my children, we both missed and cannot ever recover those years.  Many important events happened during my addiction for my daughters and within my family.  And when they come up in conversation, I am embarrassed without recollection of them. I simply wasn’t there.  And even if I had been, I still was not.

Without having had a lifetime to build up resistances, mistrusts, walls and resentments, children can be quite forgiving.  Mine have been when they didn’t  have to be.

But the knowledge of the walls I created within them that I still am working to tear down make the tumbling and crashing of the twin towers of September 11th and the proud but fatherless children of heroes who also remember that day…vivid, visual reminders which will always make me contrite and somber and thankful, especially on that anniversary.

Today is September 12, 2013.

I am very glad it is.

I am very proud to be a father of three incredible heroes who survived my holocaust.

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