Shared with permission from the author herself, Rosemary Keevil was one of the Orchard’s first clients when our doors opened in 2002 (client #14!). The chapter below from her book entitled, The Art of Losing It: A Memoir of Grief and Addiction, recalls the story of her first days in rehab.
That being said, her book is a work of non-fiction and, as such, reflects her memory of the experiences. So the rehab she attended called “the Meadow” may seem familiar to alumni who have stayed with us on Barefoot – oops – we mean, Bowen Island! However, “many of the individual names and identifying characteristics of the individuals, places and institutions featured in this book have been changed. Certain individuals are composites. Dialogue and events have been recreated to convey their substance rather than written exactly as they occurred.”
“When her brother dies of AIDS and her husband dies of cancer in the same year, Rosemary is left on her own with two young daughters and antsy addiction demons dancing in her head. This is the nucleus of The Art of Losing It a young mother jerking from emergency to emergency as the men in her life drop dead around her; a high-functioning radio show host waging war with her addictions while trying to raise her two little girls who just lost their daddy; and finally, a stint in rehab and sobriety that ushers in a fresh brand of chaos instead of the tranquility her family so desperately needs.
Heartrending but ultimately hopeful, The Art of Losing It is the story of a struggling mother who finds her way―slowly, painfully―from one side of grief and addiction to the other.”
We thank Rosemary for her unflinching bravery at sharing her harrowing journey with us, and the world.
And without further ado… this excerpt is from Chapter 14.
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I start my first morning in rehab with a jog on the green grass on the hill in front of the Meadow which, I am told, leads down to an orchard of trees. My feet pound against the earth while my mind spins. Then it strikes me: I’m not hungover. I am not fucking hungover! Distracted from my distress, I open my eyes wide to take in the verdant scene around me and realize I’m not running in an orchard of trees. I’m running through grapevines. I thought this was an orchard. This is a has-been vineyard! This ain’t no orchard; this was a fucking vineyard. God, you really are twisted.
I manage to stop crying for the thirty-minute run, but it does not give me the pick-me-up it normally does. I’m just so distraught and unhappy to be here. I can’t speak at breakfast, and I barely eat, as my throat is swollen with emotion. My eyes are red and swollen, too.
After breakfast, we get into a group and I can’t stop thinking about how much I hate group therapy. I’m so not a group-therapy person. Get me the hell out of here. What time is it? I check my watch. Only 10:05. Shit, this thing goes till noon. We do this every day, Monday to Friday? I won’t survive.
All nine inmates are here. There’s Brad—a big dude, about thirty-five, with short, straight, prematurely gray hair and one of those permanently boyish-looking faces. He’s from Vancouver Island, where he works in construction when he’s not high on crack. There’s Stetson, a cute guy, also about thirty-five, who lives in Vancouver’s trendy Kitsilano district with his wife and two little children. Not sure what his poison is, but he sure looks innocent, with this thick curl of brown hair that keeps flopping onto his forehead, Hugh Grant–style. Rodrigo is also a young father and is from Colombia, replete with cocaine and beautiful women. There’s Henderson, a businessman who smokes crack in the shower in the morning before work so his family won’t smell it. I wonder if that actually works. Jason is about twenty-four, with a disfigured face— not sure what the fuck happened to him. I think he’s strictly an alcoholic. There’s Fred, who is American and closer to my age—also a crack addict; not sure what his occupation is. Then there are my two roommates: Celia, a garden-variety alcoholic housewife from Toronto, and Nicole, a grandmother who lives right here on Barefoot Island and is addicted to pharmaceuticals. Apparently, there’s a fourth woman coming soon.
All I can think about is how fucking depressing it is that I’m stuck with all these losers. I cry more, right through lunch. I stop the waterworks long enough to listen to a psycho-ed session after lunch. It’s a like a mini-lecture on drugs and their effect on the human body. Heroin is the most addictive and the most difficult to quit. Crack cocaine is the next-most addictive, then nicotine. Most people here smoke cigarettes. Although I smoke when I’m high or drunk, I don’t smoke when I’m straight and I’m not about to start. This makes me a bit of a social outcast, as everyone gathers in the smoking corner outside to puff and gab and laugh.
After the top three drugs, the next-most-addictive and toughest-to-quit drugs are methadone, crystal meth, alcohol, and cocaine, in that order. Most of today’s lecture is about cocaine—the seventh-most-difficult drug to give up. It creates euphoria and energy, as well as potentially dangerous physical side effects, like rising heart rate and blood pressure. (Man, I’ve experienced that!) In its powder form, cocaine is either inhaled through the nose or dissolved in water and injected. Crack is cocaine that has been made into a rock crystal, which is smoked. Injecting or smoking cocaine gives you a drastically fast high, but after about five minutes, a drastically low low sets in. Snorting cocaine has a less dramatic effect but lasts longer—about fifteen to twenty minutes. I wonder if, when I smoked a hunk of cocaine on the end of a cigarette, I was actually smoking crack.
After the psycho-ed class, I have an appointment with the in-house psychiatrist. He’s an affable fellow whose name is so difficult to pronounce, everybody calls him Dutchy. He’s about fifty-five and balding and has an appealing je-ne-sais-quoi quality. It must be the pink shirt and bright yellow tie he’s wearing. I like him and trust him immediately.
Dutchy asks me about my history of drug and alcohol abuse.
Where do I start? How much time does this guy have? Even though I do trust him, I don’t know if I can own up to all my shameful behavior. I don’t know if I can tell the whole truth.
As if he’s reading my mind, Dutchy says, “Relax, Rosemary. This isn’t a test. It’s your recent history of drug and alcohol use that’s most important right now. This is a time to be truthful. Otherwise, we can’t help you. You want help, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dutchy,” I say with resignation. “That’s why I’m here. Well, it started . . . hmm.” I think back to when Matthew delivered a stash of cocaine, and I tried to find a razor blade to cut it into lines. I hadn’t done that much cocaine, and it was way back in my twenties — some twenty years ago. Matthew promptly got out a credit card from his wallet and handed it to me, as if to say, Here, use this.
“It started in October 1996, about five years after my husband died. Matthew, a colleague turned bad-choice lover.” I shake my head and continue. “Anyway, I now call him Mr. Wrong. He brought over this cocaine, which I had given him the money for, and I was really excited. We snorted a couple of lines each, and, oh my God, it was like the answer to all my problems. I wanted more of this uncluttered brain I was all of a sudden experiencing. I wanted more coke. I wanted more of this, this, this …” I look around the room for the right words. “This scarcity of negativity! Shit. It was heaven!”
I know I’m kidding myself blaming this on Matthew, as if the fact that he supplied the cocaine absolves me of all my crimes. But I decide to spew out the history of my cocaine abuse, because there is a defined beginning and end and I am not currently addicted to it, so I can’t be that bad, can I?
“I did coke daily for a year, then off and on for four more years, mixing it with copious amounts of white wine. I cut down on the cocaine after that and had it about every weekend for a while then once a month for about a year, and in January of this year, 2002, was able to quit it for good. So that was six years of cocaine use off and on.”
I’m able to deliver this information to Dutchy without falling apart — like I’m reporting facts versus feelings. He’s looking at me and saying nothing, as if to encourage me to go on, which I do.
“When I finally quit it, I was able to consume even more wine at a time, like somehow the cocaine had increased my tolerance for booze. My alcoholism progressed to the point where I was drinking as soon as I got up in the morning.” My voice starts to break, as I’m starting to live in the gravity of my words, not just report the facts.
“I became … uh, um, well, desperate and depressed and anxious, which made me drink, which made me more depressed and anxious, so I popped pills to counteract everything.”
At this point, my waterworks start again and I’m crying too hard to continue. Putting my head in my hands, I start to bawl, haunted with guilt. I feel nauseated when I think about the abominable shit I’ve done — shit I can’t tell Dutchy, like when I whipped into the bathroom at the 7-Eleven on the way to Whistler with the girls and snorted some cocaine to get myself through the rest of the trip, but then realized when we arrived at the Whistler house that I was without my wallet. We had stopped at a restaurant, and I had left my wallet there. A police officer dropped it off at the house. I was so incredibly paranoid when he showed up. What an acting job I did with him, as if everything were perfectly normal.
I also couldn’t tell Dutchy the truth about how I was using cocaine during the years when I had an early-morning shift at CFAX radio, hosting my own live interview show and producing my colleague’s. My 4:30–9:00 a.m. shift gave me plenty of time to work, nap, snort, pick the kids up from school, snort, research my next day’s programs, have enough wine to kill the cocaine high, go to bed, and then wake up and do it all again.
I’m finally able to stop my crying fit, lift my head out of my hands, and look at Dutchy. Unmoved by my hysterics, he talks as if we are having a normal conversation.
“It’s not unusual for cocaine to increase a person’s capacity for alcohol,” he says. “How much were you drinking and what kinds of pills were you taking, Rosemary?”
“About a bottle of wine a day. Though I guess it could have been more than that, considering I started in the morning and basically did not stop all day. And the pills, well … some little blue ones for sleeping, and Ativan for anxiety.”
“You mixed them with wine?”
“Yes,” I say hesitantly. “Oh, and extra-strength Tylenol with codeine. And I’d take one or two zoplicone — is that what it’s called? Zoplicone, for insomnia?”
“Zopiclone,” he corrects me.
“I took them nightly to sleep,” I say, leaving out the fact that I also took them in the daytime. “I took two or three Ativans every few days,” I lie. “And a few Tylenol every couple of days, too. Always with wine.”
“When was the last time you drank?” he asks. “Do you need to detox?”
“I’m not sure. I tried to stop entirely two weeks ago, when I spoke with Graham, but I couldn’t. But I did cut back significantly. I haven’t been drinking when I get up in the morning, which I started to do a few months ago.”
Dutchy concludes that I am an alcoholic and not currently a drug addict because I quit the cocaine months ago and the pharmaceuticals I’ve been taking have the same effect as alcohol.
“I’ll treat you as an alcoholic,” he says. “And I’ll give you some Valium to help you sleep at night.”
Valium? Yippee! The thought of getting drugs to help quit my pills and alcohol seems ironic — and appealing.
Dinner that night is a succulent roast beef, and this time I can actually eat something without it getting caught in my throat. I guess Dutchy has loosened me up, because I’m also feeling more sociable. I’m sitting across from Jason—the kid with the disfigured face. Brad asks what his poison is, and he says, “Plain ol’ scotch. Can’t seem to stop it. I work in a mine on the island, and I bring a mickey of scotch in my lunchbox every day. That’s not enough, though. I barely make it through the afternoon. My buddies are real worried; so’re my parents.”
Jason shovels a huge bite of potato salad into his mouth and continues talking. “Tried to end it,” he says, pointing to his face—his nose half missing and his left cheek sunken in. “A Colt pistol. Just turned twenty-three, and I tried to end it.” He swallows, puts his fork down, and picks up his water glass. “Next time might work.”
Betsy, the woman who did my intake session, comes to the dinner table and sits down, leaning toward us. “After dinner, we’re heading out to the AA meeting at the church here on Barefoot,” she tells us.
Ugh! I have been to two of these in the last two weeks. They’re boring; all people do is sit there and whine. I don’t want to go to a fucking AA meeting.
“Is this mandatory?” I whine.
“Rosemary,” Betsy says in her soft British accent, “you never know who’s going to gain something from what you say.”
As if I could offer anyone any wisdom at all.
We all pile into The Meadow’s white van, which the other inmates have nicknamed the Druggy Buggy, and head to the meeting.
When it’s my turn to speak, I almost say, “I pass,” but stop myself. My eyes dart about the small room. About a dozen of us are jammed in here.
“My name is Rosemary, and” — I press the first three fingers of my left hand in the crease between my eyebrows and slouch — “I’m an alcoholic.” This is the first time I have said that out loud, and I feel relieved. I continue, “A couple of weeks ago, I drank a lot of wine, took some Ativan, and drove my kids. I blacked out. By some miracle, I did not do physical damage to myself or the kids. However, I did do $4,000 worth of damage to the transmission of my car.” People laugh. Wow, there can be laughter in the midst of misery.
There, I admitted it. I am astounded I actually admitted it, said it out loud. Telling Sheena was different—she’s my spiritual counselor.
Admitting my shameful, reprehensible, scandalous behavior to these people — well, something has shifted. It’s intangible, but it feels like there’s a new hue on everything. I sit up straighter in my chair. The heavy stones and rocks that have been burdening my upper back and shoulders are tumbling off me.
At the end of the meeting, we all stand and hold hands, and everyone else recites, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I try to listen to what they are saying and think I can remember for next time.
Feeling so much better than I did before the meeting, I start to walk out the door, but Stetson comes up to me and sets his hand on my forearm.
“Rosemary, Rosemary,” he says, with a glazed look in his eyes. He sets his hand on my forearm. “Your share just reminded me of something, something I did, something I had actually forgotten about.”
“Really? What?”
“I have two tiny children, one and two. Your share jogged a terrifying memory. You know what I did? I actually tucked them in and left them there. My wife was away. I left them at home at midnight, and I went downtown to score some cocaine. What if something had happened to them? You know?” He looks at me with horror in his eyes.
What can I say? How is that different from what I did? I believe that what I did was actually worse.
I’m so exhausted when we return to The Meadow that I can hardly stay awake for the nighttime check-in. Once again, we all sit in a group and say how we’re feeling, just a brief few sentences about how our day has been. It’s actually quite comfortable in the center’s living room — cozy couches, dim lighting, and a stone fireplace. At one end is a dining room table, which is big but not too big, long enough to fit about a dozen people. At the other end of the room is an exit to the outside patio and swimming pool. Stetson and I have challenged each other to a swim-off — we’re going to see who can swim forty minutes nonstop. I know I can.
I can’t wait to go bed, which I do as soon as we are dismissed. When I lay my head down on the pillow, I detect a scent of a smile on my face. I touch my lips and then my cheeks. No tears. Holy shit!
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If you or someone you know is in need of addiction treatment for drugs or alcohol, it is important to make an informed decision when selecting the right treatment center for your needs. We have created a list of questions that we think are important factors to consider when talking to intake specialists at the addiction treatment centres you are considering.