The wise man conquers all adversity through perseverance. Even the gentle rain, given time, can erase mountains.
— Darin Malchus

Sky above me, earth below me, fire inside. All the powers of hell cannot thwart my will.

Over the course of one’s life there are many twists and turns. Most are small, and others are more substantial. The greatest of these events determine life’s direction – the point after which our future will never be the same. These moments are called watersheds.

On a hot July day in 2002, I had a watershed moment, the beginning of the end of “The Dark Years” (see Transformation Part 1: The Dark Years for that story). I lived in West Jordan, Utah in a rental house. My wife at the time (now ex-wife), an active participating leader in our church’s Primary program, didn’t leave her room anymore. Why? Because she became so heavily addicted to Vicodin for so long she hadn’t gotten out of bed for two years. I exaggerate, but not by much. She got out of bed to go to the bathroom occasionally. And about every couple of weeks she’d go pawn some stuff and go to her doctors for a set of new prescriptions – enough for a few weeks or so. In the six months leading up to this day, she would also scrape up enough money to regularly buy several cases of beer. Cheap beer. Occasionally even a $6 bottle of vodka. The stuff of homeless alcoholics.

Yes the Primary President started drinking daily to augment her narcotic addiction. Only a year prior to this she had never tasted alcohol and even verbally attacked those who did, complaining how beer was “evil” and drinking alcohol in any form was an activity only shared by “low-lifes and deviants.”

How far you can fall.

Nothing ever left the womb that was her bedroom. Dirty dishes, clothes, food containers, trash. It all accumulated in there. The beer cans were piled between her bed and the far wall, until the level of the empties became the same as the level of the bed. I stayed as far away from that room as possible, being a toxic realm of death and the dominion of demons. Hazy, sleepy, and contaminated. Who knows how long the bedding went without being washed. Probably more than a year. The fact that anyone could live in such a lethal environment is a testament to the miracle of life, even without the booze and pills.

I figured my exit strategy to all this was to wait it out. Sooner or later I’d get lucky and one of her overdoses would actually end this. Either that or she would be overwhelmed by the noxious contamination of it all. It couldn’t be that much longer could it? When it happens I’ll rent a dumpster and a hazmat suit, go in there and shovel it all out through an open window. This would include her corpse. I even contemplated not bothering to mention anything to the authorities about her self-inflicted demise – doubtful anyone really knew if she was still alive anyway. Although the IRS might question my change of tax return status to Head of Household. It’s weird the kind of thoughts you have when you are faced with a crisis that becomes a part of every day life.

The opioid crisis, they call it.

It’s not a crisis anymore, it’s just Tuesday.

If she wasn’t going to hurry up and die, then I needed a miracle. We were too far beyond any sort of counseling or rehab program. There was no rehab program on earth that could deal with this. The worst heroin addicts didn’t have to live like this. My ex-wife still had her veins but not much else. Where was that miracle? I had asked God for it for years. Eventually I stopped asking him. It was clear by this point he either wasn’t there, or he didn’t care. Why would he let this go so long? I didn’t care about myself anymore but why didn’t he fix things for my kid’s sake? Two years prior to this I had asked my bishop to help. He had promised me that “the church” has dealt with this many times and would mobilize the church’s “many resources” to help us overcome our issue. Apparently the church wasn’t equipped to resolve a problem this big. It ended up the other way around. My ex-wife overcame the church. I guess by many resources they really meant “hardly any resources.” Did they really think a bit of counseling with a church appointed drug counselor whose main job is to deal with 15 year-olds who steal their uncle’s cigarettes could handle this one? It was a joke. I stopped going to church. They lied to me. God lied to me.

Miracles come in bizarre ways.

My watershed came in the form of a Sandy police officer at the front door. He asked if my wife was home. I pointed up the stairs. Go get her, I said. If you dare. Better bring some rubber gloves.

They scraped her out of her toxic cave, took her to the police station and booked her wearing a tattered nightgown and dirty slippers. She was charged with multiple felonies. Doctor shopping they called it, getting multiple narcotic prescriptions from different providers on the same day. They gave her a court date and released her to a court appointed doctor who was going to detox her.

Dr. Detox called me. He explained this could happen in one of two ways. First, we could check her into Jordan Valley Hospital for four days. They could detox her as an inpatient, with IV’s, nurses and overpriced hospital jello. He asked if I could afford the $12,000 it was going to cost. I’m pretty sure I laughed. He then told me the second way would be to do this at home. He explained in detail what was going to happen for the next four days and that withdrawals would become very, very ugly. I thought, this doctor has no idea the meaning of ugly. At this point there was nothing in this world that I could not withstand. I was past feeling. I could have sat in a WWII death camp in 1944 while they bulldozed emaciated corpses into mass graves and have a sandwich and a cup of tea. Bring it on, I said.

Try to shock me. I dare you.

A police cruiser dropped off my ex-wife later that evening. I mentioned to her that I had talked to Dr. Detox and I was well aware of what was in store. Anticipating the oncoming cataclysm I had sent the kids to a neighbor’s house for a couple of days. They had given her a dose of methadone with instructions to go to a methadone clinic each day for the next two weeks. After a reasonably uneventful night she was up early. Hell, she hadn’t been up before noon in over two years. She was agitated but doing okay. I was beginning to think this wouldn’t be as bad as they made it out to be.

I was wrong. Again.

By the afternoon things were beginning to degenerate. She would go through cycles of extreme anxiety and distress, broken by interludes of calmness. I talked her through a lot of it. I must have talked to her more that day than I had in over a year, cumulative. She went into the kitchen and started breaking dishes into the sink. Fine. Do what you must.

Dopesick. That’s what they call it. She would scream and yell, heart racing, blood pressure through the roof, muscle cramps, chills, sweating, shaking, and occasionally running to the bathroom to vomit.

You did this to yourself, I thought. You deserve this.

In a way I was disappointed that she was going to live. Damn my luck.

Eventually she started breaking bigger things. She took the dining room chairs and began to smash them over the top of the dining room table.

Possession by demons. It’s real. I’ve seen it.

Sooner or later you have to intervene. Up to this point I let the possessed Primary President destroy the house, but enough was enough. Things were being smashed that I didn’t want smashed. I had very little left of any value that hadn’t been sent to the pawn shop so what I had left, I wanted to keep. I went up there and demanded it to stop, withdrawals or not. In a demonic voice I swear was not her own she screamed at me, “FUCK YOU!” There was a full bottle of Windex sitting on the counter that she picked up and heaved at me with all the force of a major league relief pitcher. I ducked just in time, as this big bottle of window cleaner exploded against the wall where my face was not a second before. Almost before I could recover she picked up the now broken chair and swung it at me. I was able to block the main part of it but one of the legs caught me on the side of my head and the force of it pushed me against the wall.

The Primary President was gone. In her place was something else. Something from the pits of hell.

Each person has a worst enemy. It’s their own self.

At some point you don’t care anymore. Life isn’t worth it. Weirdly, you smile, because at the very moment you stop caring about anything, your stress leaves you. The weight of the world falls to the side. It’s the Janis Joplin moment, where freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. I was at that self-destructive point, when I didn’t care if I lived or died. It’s that feeling where things could never possibly be worse, so down inside you know tomorrow will be better. It has to be.

As they say, losing all hope was freedom.

I grabbed the possessed Primary President by both shoulders and pushed her down on the couch and sat on top of her. With hate-filled eyes she fought to get up. She tried to bite… and scratch… and kick. When you have lost all hope you can look a possessed person straight in the eye and smile. I couldn’t be dragged into hell because I was already there and I was in charge. After a few minutes she understood how I wasn’t going to let her up until she calmed down. She told me she was calm and if I get off her she’ll stay as relaxed as possible. I slowly released her and backed away, thinking it was over for at least a few minutes.

I was wrong, yet again.

She jumped up, grabbed the cordless phone, ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Okay fine, until I heard her yelling to the 911 operator “my husband just attacked me.” For a second I considered kicking through the bathroom door. Instead I just told her I was leaving. I was done. It was over. I had nothing left I wanted to give to this. I headed down the stairs to grab some clothes and as I passed the cordless phone base I unplugged the cord. In hindsight this was a mistake but at the time it made me smile.

It took three minutes to throw some clothes and a toothbrush into a bag and head toward the door. On the way out she cackled at me in some demon’s voice telling me the cops were coming for me. Whatever. Go back to hell where you belong.

I think I liked her better when she was drugged out. She was quieter, not screaming at me, and not trying to kill me.

I opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch when the first cop car came around the corner, lights and sirens blaring. It was followed within 20 seconds by a second car. The early dusk made the lights extra bright and the otherwise quiet neighborhood made the sirens extra loud. Four Salt Lake County sheriffs deputies simultaneously jumped out of their cars. They didn’t approach me but stayed at the curb of our corner lot. Across the street, I could see some of the neighbors had come outside to watch the show. One of the cops told me to drop my bag, turn around and place my hands on my head. I could hear the Primary President inside the house cackling like a troll. “And what if I don’t?” I yelled at the cop with my newfound self-destructive, non-caring attitude on display.

At that moment, Dirty Harry –the most aggressive and vocal of the deputies– decided to point his .40 caliber Glock 22 at me. The other cops, seeing this, did the same. Right about then, a third sheriff’s car rolled in and one more cop, a female cop, jumped out. Seeing the other four guns pointed at me I guess she felt she needed to join in, so she also pointed her gun at me. After all, you can’t be too careful when you are a Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Deputy – that fifth bullet could make all the difference. “Don’t make us fire,” said Dirty Harry. Drop your bag and turn around, he repeated. I looked at the five guns and dared them to shoot me. “Shoot me then” I told them. “At this point I really don’t care.” I didn’t drop my bag and I didn’t turn around. “I’m leaving” I said. “I’m not your biggest problem right now.” Dirty Harry didn’t like what he heard. He told me if I reach inside that bag, they’d open fire. What pansies. I called them this as I turned around. I never did put my hands on my head. If you’ve ever seen the TV show COPS you’ll know what happened next – they rushed me and shoved me against the door hard. I was furious. I just wanted to leave and they were being idiots. They took me down and one of the cops put his knee on my neck. Enough was enough. I fought back and I tried to kick one of them in the groin. I taunted them. Called them names. Begged them to take off their badges and guns and fight me one at a time so I could beat the living shit out of each of them, one at a time.

Bad boys, bad boys, what ya gonna do?

After they cuffed me they sat me down in the middle of my front yard. Dirty Harry then taunted me, laughing and telling me how I was going to jail that night, and for a long time. Scum like me don’t deserve to walk the streets, he sneered. When I tried to talk he told me to shut up. What an ass. If I ever see that guy again I swear I’m going to kidney punch him. My neighbors, they were all on their front porches watching it go down. The cops went inside the house and witnessed the destruction. They saw broken dishes, chairs, and Windex bottles. They concluded they’ve walked into a war zone. Surely all this destruction occurred while I “attacked” her, right?

Irony. The mockery of life. When truth twists back upon itself. The female cop came out to me and asked a surprising question.

“Is your wife on drugs?”

Really? Did she just say that?

No, I said. For the first time in six years, she was NOT on drugs. How do you like that? I explained what was going on and told them to look for the phone number to Dr. Detox on the refrigerator. Call it and he’ll tell you what’s going on, I said. They did –and he did. By this time an ambulance rolled in. No siren but the flashing lights were on. They wheeled the Primary President out on a gurney and took her to the hospital. As they removed the cuffs from me, the female cop explained that I should just leave and find a hotel. I’m pretty sure I laughed when she said that. “That’s what I was doing” I said. Dirty Harry was disappointed because he really wanted to take me in. I was disappointed because I wanted to punch that sneer off his face. He told me that disconnecting an emergency call in progress was a felony and if it were up to him, he’d still put me in jail. Whatever. Did he really think I cared?

Things are never as they appear.

On my way to Motel 6 I reflected upon what all my neighbors just witnessed:

• Three cop cars swooping in with lights and sirens
• Five cops pulling guns on me on my front porch
• Them taking me down and cuffing me
• My ex-wife being taken away in an ambulance

Very nice. From my my neighbor’s limited point of view I must have appeared like some sort of violent abuser. What else could they think after seeing all that? I’m sure it’s no surprise to anybody in the judgmental, sanctimonious Utah suburban world that none of my neighbors ever talked to me again after that day. Their kids were never again allowed to come over and play with my kids. Our family became ostracized by the neighborhood, and by extension, the ward. Oh well. I’m sure it was more comfortable for them to stay away than it was to make an effort at understanding. But I get it –I’ve seen this attitude by Utah Mormon culture far too often to not understand it by now.

After this day, I knew things would never be the same. This was a watershed moment. This was one fateful day that would change the future. Good or bad, life was going to take another course.

Miracles come in bizarre ways.

Postscript: If you have followed along this far, there is a third –and final– chapter found here:
Transformation Part 3: Metamorphosis
It’s not fully ready, but I have it all written in my head. It’s the hardest chapter of this story –and it has been hard to put into words. Some day soon I will finish it.