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Jason’s death. I still didn’t see my own addiction, but I definitely knew that Rick’s was affecting me in ways I could no longer deny. Living with addiction, up to that point, had actually seemed normal to me because that is all I’d ever known.

CHAPTER 2
    A FAMILY HISTORY OF CRISIS
    THE LEGACY OF ADDICTION for Lauren and me began because I was born the daughter of an alcoholic father and she was born the daughter of an alcoholic mom and dad. My father was orphaned as a child and never talked about his past to me. I was told only that things were bad for him. I later found out that his father was also an alcoholic and a very abusive man who abandoned my dad and his siblings, which makes four generations at least of a family nightmare Lauren and I would have to struggle against.
    I know little about my grandfather, the person with whom our family legacy of addiction seems to begin, but I do know that he was an only child. His father died when my grandfather was just a
baby. As a grown man, he eventually settled in the city of Boston and was heavily involved in bootlegging and prostitution. At some point, that’s where he met my grandmother, started a family, and then abandoned them. My grandfather left his wife and all six of his young children to make it on their own, but my grandmother couldn’t handle raising this bunch, so she left also. The children were afraid and wanted to stay together after both parents left. They kept their abandonment a secret. My aunt was the oldest of the kids, the rest of whom were boys. She was probably eleven years old when she took on this role; my father was around nine. The youngest child was still just a baby.
    My father worked as soon as he was able, taking his red wagon door to door collecting laundry to wash so that he and his siblings had money to buy food. I can’t even imagine the fear and frustration a group of abandoned children like that must have felt trying to care for each other at such young ages. It was only discovered that my father and his siblings were living alone when my grandfather’s mother went to their home and found the children by themselves. She contacted social services, and the children were taken out of the home. My aunt, my father, and the other kids were placed in an orphanage, The Home for Little Wanderers, which still exists in the city of Boston today.
    At the orphanage, all of the kids would be taken to a different church every Sunday, lined up in the back of the church, and made to wait to see if any family in the congregation had an interest in taking one of the children. My uncle tells this story and says the rejection was devastating when they weren’t selected. Still,
sometimes a family took one of the children in. My father was in and out of multiple foster homes, which leads me to believe that there may have been behavior problems with him. I have heard from family members that he started drinking at a young age. Over the years, he located and reunited with his sister and some of his brothers, and he did eventually find and develop a relationship with both his parents. That’s how I know my grandfather died an obese man in a bathtub with a bottle of liquor and a sandwich. I have heard he weighed eight hundred pounds and that it took four policemen to carry his body out of the house after his death.
    My father and mother met when he was twenty-three and she was nineteen years old. My mom’s father disapproved of my dad. Her father was concerned that his daughter was going to marry a man they knew so little about. My aunt tells me that he asked my father, “Who are your parents? You get your family together and then you can marry my daughter!” That was the catalyst that motivated my father to locate his parents and siblings. After he did, my mother and father were married in a big church ceremony. My dad’s parents were able to attend the wedding, because they had been tracked down and