Suffering and Survival

Life is funny. A cruel comedian, laughing at the punchlines I never saw coming. My name is James Sean Crosby—no, not related to Bing Crosby, though I get that question too damn often. I live in a small town called Canton in the southeast corner of South Dakota. Where even one new baby shifts the population. When they graduate most from being a C-Hawk go off to become a Jackrabbit in Brookings. I had my chance, a scholarship to Northwestern, the kind of opportunity people here dream of. I was debating between International relations, Environmental science, Civil engineering, or family psychology. But fate had other plans. My Grandma got sick, not the common cold, not strep throat, not a UTI but the big one… cancer. 

That disease ran through my family like it had a vendetta. Took my dad, my mom, and my brother six years after he was born. If you knew my family you’d think cancer was contagious. I was the only one it didn’t take. The only one left standing. And somehow, that felt worse. Because everyone else in my family was either dying or dead already, my grandmother did her best to raise me. Even then, I was often the forgotten one, a shadow in the corners of hospital rooms. I don’t blame her. Cancer needed more attention than I did. So, I learned early on how to take care of myself. By six, I was making dinner for everyone, walking myself to school, and figuring out how to stretch a few crumpled bills at the grocery store. I was a latchkey kid in every sense—responsible for myself because no one else had the time or energy.

When I was six my twin died. I thought about death a lot from that point on. Imagine your literal biological other half gone, buried six feet under. Now picture yourself in the hospital room, watching the light drain from their green eyes, knowing what's to come. At the same moment they die the rest of your family just seems to check out. Mom started smoking, Dad started drinking, and everyone started crying. For the next twelve years of your life all anyone ever says to you is “Sorry”, imagine how fucked up you would be. I'm surprised how well I turned out, I should be just another meth head on the other side of the tracks. But I am a survivor. Orphaned by cancer.

I'm twenty-three now and a plumber. I would work ten-hour shifts in both the blazing heat and freezing cold. All my friends have gotten married, and half of them are starting families or have moved to Minneapolis or Colorado. I've had two failed relationships. My first started just before my dad died. I was fourteen, just got my driver's license. How could I know how to love another person? She loved me through his death and I relied on her after. I started to fall from my independence and started to become dependent on her. I required her love like a drug. If she didn't message me, call me, or come see me every hour I would drown in thoughts that she would abandon me too. That's what death felt like, abandonment. Like they were escaping loving me. Like cervical cancer and pancreatic cancer were a way out of parenting me. Eventually, she broke up with me, no one can handle the weight of another's burdens. She was fourteen, she had high school, friends, family, and soccer, and she didn’t need me to add more stress to her life. I fell into even more of a depression than normal. I became antisocial, closed off, and built a brick wall between my soul and the world. Everything became about school, grades, wrestling, and my job at Bomgaars. I like to think of my relationship with my grandma to be very similar to Peter Parker and his Aunt after Tobey Maguire became Spiderman. We were so close, in that way where I would kill for her, and I loved her dearly but I had no time for her. I felt so incredibly guilty that when she got sick there was no way I could go to Northwestern.

Surprisingly she lasted the longest after her diagnosis, six years. And for six years I took her to radiation, I ran marathons in her name, I researched everything about gastric cancer, I found the best doctors, and a retreat in Australia where you take DMT and God tells you the cure, I fought tooth and nail. Once the cancer spread to her brain we were told one year, but she was tired. Then I was abandoned again, all alone. My chance for Northwestern was gone. I was a three-year plumbing apprentice in Sioux Falls. I inherited my father's childhood home, and I fell. I found my grandmother’s leftover meds while cleaning out her things. She had Oxycontin from the first three years, Dilaudid from the fourth, and liquid morphine from her last two. I was a wreck, barely able to breathe without feeling suffocated by grief. I felt so dissociated from reality I just wanted to feel some kind of control. I know, who takes drugs to feel in control. It started small. I wasn’t looking for an escape, at first—just something to dull the pain. One pill was all it took. I felt euphoric for the first time in my life. All the hurt, all the loss, disappeared. One pill and all my pain floated away. Eventually, I realized that the pain never left it just waited for me to come back down. I couldn't avoid that inevitable crash. So after a couple of months, I thought what if I never came back down? What started as one pill every other day quickly became four a day. And when those ran out, I moved on to Dilaudid. That didn’t last either. I thought I could stop cold turkey, but my body was betraying me. The withdrawal was brutal. I thought I was dying. I threw up everything, sweating through the worst flu of my life. Eventually, I took the liquid morphine just to keep myself from dying. I didn’t want to inject it, so I wanted to keep going with what was familiar. I found a dealer and asked for more Oxy. It felt safer, and easier to control. And that’s when I met Sandy.

We fell together like two pieces of a puzzle, each of us broken in our ways. I'm embarrassed to say I was twenty-three when I lost my virginity, and that I don't remember it because we were high. We did nothing but get high and make love. But it didn’t stay like that for long. I was fired from my plumbing job because I couldn’t make it through a full week of work—six months of half-shifts. Sandy, who had already moved in with me, started spiraling. She couldn’t handle the stress of losing the house, and that’s when everything started to unravel. See my problems were death, abandonment, and cancer. While hers were foster care, abandonment, and money. But when she saw how bad things had gotten for me, she tried to pull me out. She pushed me to get clean enough to take the Journeyman’s test. I somehow managed to score a ninety-seven, barely studying. We celebrated by splitting four Oxycontin between us and making love on the kitchen table. 

I am so grateful for Sandy because she tried to help me get clean, she was the stronger one. She’d throw away all the pills we had hidden around the house. We would go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings together, doing the steps towards recovery. The problem is before recovery NA suggests you cut ties with everyone that was in your life affecting the addiction, mostly dealers and other users. We thought we were better than this and could work together. Sandy would say we could get clean as a team, but neither of us could fight the cravings. It wasn’t just the drugs anymore; it was the emptiness between us, our fear of abandonment gluing us together. It was a vicious cycle with months of recovery followed by relapse at the slightest trigger. A fight between us, or once even seeing a three-legged dog wandering an alley, would send us spiraling back. Finally, we had one year of sobriety. We were going to therapy separately and together. We would attend weekly meetings or daily when things got hard. But she had her demons, and one day I got home after a ten-hour shift and when I called out to her there was no response. When I finally found Sandy, lying on the couch, pale, cold, her eyes half-lidded, mouth slightly open. I froze. My heart sank seeing the pills scattered on the coffee table like a cruel reminder that no matter how long you fight the disease, the demons, the addiction. Whatever you want to call it, it will always win. I shook her, slapped her face, started chest compressions, and begged her not to leave, but it was too late. She was gone. I held her in my arms rocking her back and forth, back and forth as I cried harder than I had for my mother, my brother, my father, and my grandmother. I should have known. I should have seen the signs, but I was too selfish. It felt like a curse to love me, and she had paid the price. The last person who tried to love me— gone. I remember holding her limp body, feeling like I was drowning. The drugs couldn’t take away the pain this time. I thought I would die from the grief. But that night, I made a choice. I had to stop. I had to pull myself together, even if I couldn’t forgive myself for not being there for her. That's when I realized pills were my cancer, addiction my disease, I could stay in remission, or it would kill me too. I just can't understand why I am always the survivor, of all the ones I've ever loved, I survive, it's my curse.

I will always, for as long as I live be grateful to Sandy, her death was the first to give me life, but this did not stop the pain of abandonment. Slowly, through therapy, I came to realize that she was my martyr, her death kept me from ever touching narcotics again. Just like my mother’s smoking kept me from ever picking up a cigarette, and my father’s drinking kept me from ever taking a drink. After she was gone things got hard. I couldn't go to work, NA and my therapist sent Emmet a sponsor over to check on me and he eventually became my roommate as I recovered from the whole she left in my life. Time moved forward, whether I wanted it to or not. At first, I stumbled—grief pulling me down like an undertow, my body aching for something to numb it. But I didn’t let it. I couldn't, not after everything. Not after Sandy. Emmet kept me grounded, my therapist kept me honest, and NA kept me moving. I was still searching for something, a meaning, a reason, a higher power. My family wasn’t religious growing up. My grandmother was Christian, but I never saw her pray or go to church. So I decided to start. If I was the lone survivor through all this pain, maybe it was my purpose to build something good from it. God gave me relief from my grief and my guilt.

 And then God, or fate, or the universe betrayed me. It was slow, I just felt relentlessly fatigued. I figured it was work, stress, depression. Then I started dropping weight. I set the doctor’s appointment, just a simple check-up. No harm, it's free with my insurance. I guess I was feeling all too normal in all other areas of my world, life had to be cruel. When the doctor told me Cancer, I had a flashback to every other time I had heard that word and what each family member had gone through following. I finally saw through their eyes. The diagnosis brought me a kind of connection to my family I never had before. Yet I felt so angry to have been there for each of them and had no one here for me. I guess it finally caught up to me, life is a sick fucking joke. I barely listened as the doctor went through treatment options, prognosis, and survival rates. I thought about how I had spent my entire life running from this exact moment. 

When Emmet finally dragged it out of me he forced me to go to treatments, ‘You have worked too hard for the past year and a half. Fuck for your whole life to just lie down and let this take you!’ he shouted at me for hours and even though it felt pointless I relented. He took me to all my appointments, and for six months I puked my guts out, ached fighting not to take the opioids they would offer knowing if the cancer didn’t kill me the addiction would. Finally, I had enough, why was I fighting cancer? It was gonna kill me just like it killed my brother, my mother, my father, and my grandmother. Life was a curse. I made the decision, at my next appointment, I would tell the doctor to stop all treatments. But before I could get the words out, all the oncology staff guided me to this bell. This stupid bell no one in my family got to ring. They didn’t have to tell me before my eyes started to swell. How had this happened, everyone cheered as I grabbed that rope slamming brass against brass. That ring is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard to this day, nothing will beat it. I am a survivor, I beat cancer, the thing that has killed my entire family. I have been given a second chance at life.

When Emmet told me that Megan, the head of the Narcotics Anonymous group was going to ask me to give a speech for my sobriety chip; unlike my normal self I was excited to share my story. After surviving everything—addiction, overdose, abandonment, even the great and terrible cancer I knew that I had to tell everyone about my life. The night of the meeting, the room was packed. I held my three-year coin in my hand, running my thumb over the smooth metal. I thought about my parents, my brother, and my grandmother. I thought about Sandy. And I stepped up to the mic. 

“I want to first say thank you to My therapist, Emmet, and all of you. You have kept me going. But a special thanks to Sandy and the grace of God, they are the only reason I am here today. For years I thought life was a curse, a cruel joke played on me. From the moment I was born ten weeks premature, I had received a rough start and it only got harder…” I told them about my brother, mother, and father. I explained how I worked hard in school pushing through the grief and about Northwestern. I told them about how at that moment I had my whole life ahead of me, I could do anything or be anyone. Then I told them about my grandmother, and I told them about Sandy. They all knew Sandy so this is when most of the tears started. “I thought I had some fucked-up mark on me, something that made people leave, made me suffer. I told myself life was unfair, cruel, out to get me. But the truth is, life isn’t out to get anyone. It just… is. Bad things happen, but so do good things. People die, but people live, too. And I lived. Even when I didn’t want to. Even when I didn’t think I deserved to. I lived. And today, I stand here, not because of fate or luck, but because of God’s will. So I choose to keep going to fight through all that I have working against me. I just hope that none of you have to go through the shit I did to finally see that life is worth it. That life is a choice.” I hadn’t planned what I was saying, the words just poured out of me. And by the end, I was crying too. People clapped and cheered as Megan gave me my Three-year sobriety chip. Some people came up to give me hugs or ask for advice. I'm proud to say I helped a lot of people in that room. Emmet and Megan were grinning at me like proud parents. And for the first time in my entire life, I felt light. Like I wasn’t carrying the burden of the reaper anymore.

I decided to walk home after that meeting, embracing the sunshine as life was lighter. When I noticed the young boy, maybe six years old, running after the ball his peer had kicked into the street, I only had seconds to act. I ran to him, throwing him to the curb as the Ford Crown Vic struck me. I tumbled over the length of the car, I was launched so high I could see over the tops of the trees and the homes. And when I made contact with the pavement I knew I only had minutes left. I couldn't hold air in my lungs. My skin felt overexposed and raw. The sirens were distant. Emmet was shouting something, but his voice was fading. I could taste blood in my mouth, and feel the weight of my body fading. The thought came slow, like a joke I’d just gotten the punchline to. I survived everything. The drugs, the overdose, the cancer. And now? This. I coughed, smiling despite myself.

“Life is funny.”