The Cardinal’s Promise

I sponsored people who went back out.

Many of them died. Some went to jail. You pour yourself into someone, walk alongside them, answer the phone at midnight — and then one day you get the call that they didn’t make it.

It is a cunning and baffling disease. I say that not as a cliché but as something I know from the inside. I was that person once.

In recovery, you see things that never leave you. Young people dying from drugs and alcohol. Not old men at the end of long lives — young people with everything ahead of them. You sit in rooms with their families afterward. You watch mothers try to make sense of something that will never make sense.

Those rooms changed me.

Not because I got used to death. You don’t get used to death. You get used to staying. To not leaving the room when the room gets unbearable. To sitting with someone’s worst moment and not looking away.

Years later, when I became a hospice liaison, I understood something most people in healthcare don’t: the worst room is always the one with a parent losing a child. Nothing in hospice — nothing — is harder than that. The only reason I can stay in that room without flinching is because I’ve already sat with that kind of loss in recovery.

Recovery taught me how to be present for the worst thing. Hospice just gave me a new room to bring it to.

I think about the people I lost. The ones who called me at 2am and I picked up. The ones who didn’t call. The ones who tried and couldn’t hold on. I carry every one of them into every facility I walk into.

When I sit with a family who is losing someone they love, I’m not performing compassion. I’m drawing from a well that was dug in the hardest soil I’ve ever stood on.

If you’re in recovery and you’ve lost someone — a sponsee, a friend, someone you couldn’t save — that grief is not wasted. It’s preparation. For what, you might not know yet.

But when the moment comes and someone needs you to stay in the room, you’ll know how.

Because you’ve done it before.

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