Susan Cherie Beam

When I was four years old, my father and I had a ritual – I would toddle up to his Lazy Boy, book clutched in one tiny hand, and outstretch my arms. He would send me out into the kitchen for a beer first. I would retrieve it, and then ran back into the living room, where I would into his lap and he would read out loud to me between sips. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the beer on his breath. If we finished the book, anything that was nearby would do – another book, magazines, the newspaper, etc.

Maybe it was in those evenings that twin seeds were planted – my love for reading and my love for substances.

Without ever using the word, my father was a feminist– he pushed all of his kids to work hard and get an education, especially his girls. It was pushed into my head that I needed to go to college and get a good job. That way, he reasoned, I’d always have something to fall back on, even if other things in my life failed. Academics were praised; aspirations towards something more creative were met with silence. When I announced that I wanted to be a writer, his response was: “Why don’t you teach high school English?”

Maybe if our lives had continued normally, I would have fought back and claimed my creative path. Maybe my father and I could have come to some kind of understanding.

We didn’t get the chance.

Only five short years later, my mother would be diagnosed with the first round of the breast cancer that would eventually kill her. This sent both my father and I into our own individual journeys of substance use disorder. His beers turned into shots of vodka in beer, and then eventually, just vodka, while I spiraled out on weed and pills and cocaine and eventually, heroin. I used his own issues against him – I would buy him beer and use extra money to feed my own addictions, taking advantage of him, especially in his inebriated state. After my first rehab stint, I claimed sobriety while hiding my bleeding track marks.

Eventually, I got sober. My father picked me up from the recovery house where I was living and took me to lunch. I handed him some recovery literature – in my own excitement over actually staying sober, I wanted to save him, too. Only I couldn’t – it took him another two years before he finally kicked the booze too, during his third jail stay. I mailed him the same literature in there. Our sobriety dates were only three weeks apart.

Together, our sobriety was something we had together counting down our years – even when, as opposite individuals, we couldn’t connect on much else. Then, during the last few months of his life, that shared journey – of addiction and recovery – became one of our last places to connect. Occasionally, he shared with me his struggle not to drink – the craving was on him hard at times. Other times, he became teary-eyed and said that of all his children, I was the most like him, even though we fought at times.  

Sometimes, this connection of addiction and recovery was funny. During one visit, he leaned forward and said to me, “I have to ask you something.”

“What’s that, Dad?” I said.

He eyed me closely. “Did you sell my chainsaw for drugs?”

I sighed. “Yes, and I made amends to you and paid you back, remember?”

He eyed me again and then nodded. “I think I forgot. But OK.”

He even, over the years, accepted me becoming a writer, actively seeking out my name in local publications and reading the stories. It helped that I balanced out my creative efforts out by getting a master’s degree, and then a PhD in English, going on to become a college instructor.

“You’re the first doctor in the family,” he said to me. He never failed to remind me that he had always wanted me to teach writing.

“I was the first junkie, too,” I replied. I liked to joke that he had always been afraid that as a writer, I’d end up living in a cardboard box on the street, but the heroin took care of that for me.

One day, he said me, “You know, I think you should write your story. You could help a lot of people.”

“Maybe,” I answered.

In the final days of his life, when he could speak, it was my story he liked to tell to doctors and nurses. “My daughter,” he would say, pointing at me, “was all messed up on drugs. I couldn’t believe it when the police called me the first time to tell me she had been arrested, but then I saw the track marks. But now she’s sober 18 years and she’s a doctor. I’m so proud of her.”

Him being proud of me, something I had craved for years, never failed to make me feel awkward in front of these strangers. “A Doctor of Philosophy. I teach English,” I would usually say, just to clarify.

When we were alone, he never failed to remind me: “Cherie, you need to write your story.” That statement, along with “I love you” and “Will you miss me?” were the last words my father said to me. I held his hand, his blanket spotted with my tears. In a way, it was not unlike how he had held me all those years ago. Aside from the roles being reversed, we were only missing the beer and the book.

In the weeks following his death now, I’ve gotten to reflect a lot on our relationship. In some ways, we shared something really special – walking through the hell of our individual addictions and being able to recover together. In other ways, Dad had his own issues – and I used some of those issues as fuel for my insecurities about myself and my creative efforts.

But now I’m healing…and to me, healing means releasing some of those insecurities. It means taking responsibility for my own experiences. It means showing my face despite the fear.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is doing something despite the fear.