My father’s addiction made him a stranger. Is it too late to get to know him now?

When Sebastian Johnson lost his mother he realised that connecting with his estranged father, a recovering crack addict, might be a way to unlock some of his personal pain

In the late 1980s, Washington DC was in the grip of a drugs epidemic (Getty)

“Wow. This is really beautiful, son, thanks so much for this.”

I’m sitting in a restaurant watching my father thumb through a small silver album containing photos from my parents’ wedding. It’s the first time he’s seen the album in 25 years. It’s only the third or fourth time I’ve seen him in a decade.

I got the album after my mother died suddenly in her sleep in 2016. My father was in a Maryland prison then. Now he’d been paroled, and here I was learning about a wedding she’d rarely talked about.

Like millions of Americans, I am a child of addiction. Research indicates that an annual average of 8.7 million children ages 17 or younger live with a parent addicted to drugs or alcohol. Drug deaths rose by 21 per cent in 2016, the biggest annual increase ever recorded. Today’s headlines warn of the arrival of a new drug crisis, driven by a flood of opiates and alcohol. For the second year in a row, American life expectancies declined in 2016 because of the surge in the death rate from drug overdoses.

When my parents married in the late 1980s, Washington DC was on the verge of a coming catastrophe: crack cocaine. Cheap, highly addictive crack flooded the city, fuelling drug-related violence and disorder that officials were ill-equipped to handle. Drugs, or the lucrative drug trade, trapped my parents and many others in my family. I came along in 1988, two months premature and severely underweight – one of hundreds of thousands of children born to mothers battling addiction nationwide, according to a January 1991 General Accounting Office report.

For most of my life, all of this was a mystery to me. My mother raised me in Takoma Park, a leafy Maryland suburb known for political activism and stately Victorian homes, away from much of the havoc affecting families across the district. She used the distance from old habits and connections to beat addiction and rededicate herself to her dream of becoming an educator. She had a number of advantages: the first college degree in my family, a supportive network of co-workers and relatives, decent pay, and – crucially – no criminal record.

My father, now seven years sober, spent years in and out of prison for drug-related crimes and was in my life only sporadically. Growing up, I hated talking about him; and my mother didn’t force the issue. Part of my avoidance was due to shame, a common reaction to the conspiracy of silence that our society forms around drug addiction and abuse. But a bigger part was the frustration of not knowing – of being unable to answer the simplest questions about one of the two people I was supposed to know best.

In many ways, it’s easiest not to know. It’s simpler to see those struggling with addiction or convicted of crimes as problems to solve or bad actors to punish. It’s simpler not to engage with the humanity behind broken behaviours. We can save face with the outside world if we hide the painful struggles in our families. Alana Levinson, in the magazine Pacific Standard, wrote movingly about her family’s “pact of silence” around her father’s drug addiction, in which avoidance ensured harmony. This was how my mother and I dealt with my father’s addiction.

Ignoring these problems, and leaving them to addicts to solve for themselves, can soothe our consciences. It allows us to focus on how individual choices drive individual outcomes rather than on the reality – which is that blind luck and the vagaries of chance shape the choices available to everyone.

I was lucky to grow up in a supportive community with a loving mother who stressed the importance of education, and to have earned degrees from Georgetown and Harvard. Today I work with organisations seeking to reform our criminal justice system and improve chances for families affected by mass incarceration.

But the desire to transcend origins and “make it out” helps ratify the conspiracy of silence. Transcendence can be a selective amnesia: a way to ignore that which causes pain, or carries the whiff of shame, or connects us to a past we would rather forget. The escape narrative also denies the truth that people who survive do so more because of luck than will.

Having practised forgetting, I now have a deep desire to know. Having made it out, I want to understand what went right so that fewer things can go wrong for others.

Losing my mother was, in many ways, easier than getting my father back. Loss is a part of the natural, if tragic, order of things. There is a rhythm to it, a procedure, stages of grief.

But what to do with a father you never thought you’d have? How to relate to the prodigal parent seeking amends? How to comprehend the face of a stranger and see your own?

Tough anti-drugs policies have saddled hundreds of thousands with criminal records and failed to prevent the expansion of illicit drug markets or improve health outcomes for users (Getty)

I was apprehensive about what it would mean to have my father in my life just as I was getting used to living without my mother. I’m older now than my father was when I was born. At the outset, our relationship was suspended in amber, both of us fitted awkwardly into roles we’d outgrown.

I was mad about past heartbreaks, which we needed to revisit if we wanted a different relationship now. And I was incredibly angry at the hand I’d been dealt. It seemed unfair. Finding an outlet for my emotions, in friends and loved ones, has been critical to making a relationship with my dad work.

Since his release last May, my father has done very well, and largely because of a chance encounter. A few weeks after coming home, my dad saw a friend from what he called the “bad old days” at the bus stop. The man now helped run a nonprofit re-entry and employment programme for ex-prisoners. “I know how extremely lucky I got with that,” he told me. The friend helped him find work driving a garbage truck and steered odd jobs his way. And he served as an example and mentor, keeping my father on the right path, listening to and understanding the frustrations of re-entering society.

My father and I have been able to celebrate milestones, such as his first bank account and first car, together. When I asked him what his favourite thing about being out was, his answer was simple. “Paying bills,” he said. “Paying rent. Feeling like I can contribute and waking up with money in my pocket. Because when I was using, there was never a time that I went to sleep with any money.” He told me recently over breakfast: “I feel like I have something to prove. I don’t want people to look at me cross-eyed and assume they know everything about me.”

Reconnecting is a journey of unexpected turns and slow progress, especially when the loved one has been imprisoned or being treated for addiction. Given our history, it was difficult at first to trust my father. Being guarded and anticipating failure was a defence mechanism, as much as avoidance had been previously. When he offered to help me move last summer, I hesitated. I didn’t want to risk being stranded without a moving truck if he failed to show up. But more than that, I remembered the pain of missed birthdays and graduations, promises made and not kept, and years of swallowed disappointments. I accepted his offer, but I braced for the letdown.

On the day of the move my father was delayed by traffic, and I tried to bury my nagging sense of dread in a flurry of boxes. But then he arrived, and it was like a weight was lifted. I was surprised by how much that small gesture meant to me.

Such stories are common. Outlets such as Splinter, which ran a series on re-entry, and TV programmes such as Released on OWN have helped illustrate the twists and turns. My father and I are still on our journey, and I suspect we will be for some time. Like most things in life, it’s required patience and a willingness to readjust expectations. I’ve had to acknowledge, or at least consider, that this time could be different.

I’ve found others making similar journeys; sometimes those whom you would least expect.

On my first birthday, President George HW Bush delivered a televised address to the nation. Holding a small bag of crack cocaine, he denounced the scourge “turning our cities into battle zones”. He pledged to wage a war on drugs, beginning with the streets of the nation’s capital.

We now know how damaging this approach has been, at home and in countries around the world, according to numerous studies from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Tough policies have saddled hundreds of thousands with criminal records, exported violence to developing countries in Central Asia and Latin America, and completely failed to prevent the dramatic expansion of illicit drug markets or improve health outcomes for users.

Then, last autumn, President Donald Trump gave his own address on the new drug epidemic. He called it a public health emergency, putting him at odds with the drug policy articulated by his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who promotes the old law-and-order, tough-on-crime routine. But I was struck less by the President’s hypocrisy (no new money was directed to provide treatment to Americans addicted to opioids) than I was by his display of seeming emotion and empathy.

Trump spoke affectingly of his older brother Fred’s long battle with alcoholism – “the saddest part in what I’ve been through”, in the President’s recounting. Fred was a “great guy, best-looking guy, best personality – much better than mine. But he had a problem. He had a problem with alcohol.”

Listening, I couldn’t help but think of how different my life could have been had Bush given a similar speech in 1989; if he’d connected the struggle with addiction engulfing poor black and brown communities to a personal tragedy – his own son’s tortured relationship with alcohol, perhaps.

Numerous accounts have documented the difference in the responses to the crack and opioid crises. Opinion-makers and elected officials reacted to crack with alarm, not empathy.

A 1990 Rolling Stone article intoned ominously: “Crack leaves nothing to chance. Not only does it make babies only a mother could love, it wipes out that love as well ... Drug counsellors now look back to the days of heroin families with something verging on nostalgia.”

A 1989 Washington Post article headlined “Crack babies: The worst threat is mom herself” implores: “Why aren’t we protecting these children? One major reason is that, paradoxically, we continue to entrust their care to the very parents who are threatening their wellbeing.” What if I had been taken from my mother at her lowest point, something that happens all too frequently to mothers of colour?

Black fathers are in the worst position. In his landmark essay “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, Ta-Nehisi Coates found that “by 2000, more than one million black children had a father in jail or prison -- and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up”.

But the ability of white policymakers and politicians to see themselves or their loved ones in the faces of drug-addicted strangers has, along with rapid declines in crime rates, made a regime of treatment and prevention possible. State and local leaders have pioneered new interventions such as needle exchanges, community response teams that connect addicts to resources instead of shipping them off to jail, and decriminalisation of possession for small amounts of illegal narcotics. Too late and too little for the countless families affected by earlier iterations of the drug war, but in time to prevent a similar cascade of mistakes from hurting families of all colours. The challenge now is to ensure that policies of compassion and empathy extend to every one of us.

Last June, on the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I was in New York to attend the launch of the Ford Foundation’s Art for Justice Fund, an effort to bring the resources and creative energy of the art world to the cause of criminal justice reform. Glenn Martin, founder of JustLeadershipUSA, said something onstage that resonated with me. Acknowledging the tendency of some to put him, a formerly incarcerated black man, on a pedestal, Martin pushed back: “I’m not the exception, I’ve just been exposed to exceptional opportunities.”

His words reminded me of my mother – and of myself. When I was younger, I would ride in the car with my mother through neighbourhoods where she was raised. At every red light, she offered dollar bills and spare change to the addicts and homeless people crowding the medians. Interaction complete, she would offer a quick prayer: “Thank you, Jesus.”

As a child, I thought this was simple generosity. Now I see the gesture for it was: an acknowledgement that her fate could easily have been that of the stranger outside her window. And a deep gratitude to whatever power – metaphysical or otherwise – had secured for her a second chance.

It makes us uncomfortable to consider the role that dumb luck – the series of dice rolls, the whims of strangers – plays for us all. Those chance developments shape the partners we choose to spend our lives with, the jobs we report to each day, the children we would do anything for. I’ve learned a great deal in the past 18 months about chance and the nature of life.

Improbably, and in a way I would never have expected, I have been given a second chance at a father: at 29, the chance to share a laugh over dinner, to have him there when I moved into my first home, to enjoy Thanksgiving in his company and consider what kind of Christmas gift he might like.

It is yet another exceptional opportunity I’ve been simply lucky to get. But luck is not a model, not a policy, not a solution. Knowing that is the most important way to transform America’s understanding of addiction.

At my wedding last autumn, my father pulled me aside during the cocktail reception. “Your mother would have loved this, and I know she’s here right now with us,” he said. We embraced, he told me how proud he was of me, and I returned the compliment. We’d gone from remembering his wedding to carrying out my own; we were lucky. And we walked back into the hall, hearts full of new memories, the celebration just getting started.

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