CALIFORNIA DREAMING & REALITY
THE END & THE BEGINNING
“Have you planned his funeral?”
That’s what the doctor said: Have you planned his funeral?
He said this to us in a matter-of-fact way. Because it was pretty much a fact: Connor, our son, our firstborn, just nineteen years old, had been laid to waste by addiction.
Kirsten and I looked at the doctor and then turned to Connor, who sat silently. I looked closely at him. He was my son, but he wasn’t Connor anymore. He was a shell of his former self. The morning Connor arrived, clouds shrouded the sky but a light of purity radiated from his eyes. In that moment it was as if the Creator had lifted a veil and reminded me of the all-fulfilling love that I had been shown years earlier in a dark period of my life. Light danced playfully around baby Connor’s face. There was no light or energy around him now. I didn’t think it was possible, but he looked worse than the skeleton we’d picked up at the airport a few days before. The cold fluorescent bulbs of the office made his face look pale yellow, jaundiced from Hepatitis C. His eye sockets were dark and seemingly bruised, like he was in a fight, a fight he was losing .
We knew what was going on. Knew the doctor had seen too many cases like his. Knew he was right that Connor was on borrowed time. Knew he was trying to scare Connor straight. Knew the Connor we knew was in there, trapped, fighting for his life. Knew he was not giving up.
But how much fight did he have left in him?
Have you planned his funeral? Because he’s going to die. My son. The addict.
With no hope coming from the doctor, Kirsten and I looked into each other’s eyes for the hope we longed for. But we were just numb. We had endured this pain for so long. The boomerang of Connor’s addiction had left us spiritually, emotionally, and financially drained. All we had left was our faith, but even that was waning, and the stress threatened to rip our family apart for good.
It all happened so fast. In the middle of high school, Connor said he wanted to try wrestling, which thrilled me. I had been a state champion wrestler in high school and the winningest wrestler in Penn State history after my four years on the NCAA mats. I had challenged some of the greats in the sport, trained for the Olympics, and even won tournaments against champs half my age after my kids were born. But I never pushed Connor or my younger son, Liam, into wrestling or any sport. Connor hadn’t wrestled since he was a little kid, but he made the decision to try out anyway. He made the team.
Then, at one of his matches, he got slammed and ended up breaking his leg. He was put on painkillers, and so it began: prescription became addiction, and Connor soon found himself seeking out more pills on the streets. They weren’t hard to find where we lived, in north suburban Atlanta. They hadn’t been hard to find anywhere we’d lived. But it wasn’t just a fight against pills now. Connor’s addiction had quickly evolved to heroin. That’s what happens when people like Connor can’t find or afford the pills anymore: they buy a heroin shot on the street for five bucks. The scourge of our nation is cheaper than a six-pack of beer.
Connor knew kids who had overdosed and died from heroin. His good friend was found overdosed with a needle stuck in his arm in the basement of his parents’ home. It didn’t stop him from using. And we never saw it until it was too late.
Have you planned his funeral?
The doctor’s words echoed in our heads. Kirsten and I mustered the energy for what we believed would be one last time—one last chance for Connor to stay clean. He had been hospitalized, sent to residential treatment centers, lived in intensive outpatient sober living homes, completed an outpatient program, moved across the country for a change of scenery and to try a new program. Now, at our wits’ end, we were taking him to a methadone clinic.
Every week we put Connor and a clunky toolbox outfitted with a silver padlock into the car. He lugged the box into the clinic, where the nurse administered that day’s dose and then placed the rest of the week’s supply in the box for Connor to take at home. She watched as Connor locked the box and left the clinic.
We thought it was working. Believed it was working. Wanted to believe it was working. Connor’s liver enzymes even went up a bit, but this was before there was a cure for Hep C, and when his enzymes dropped again, he collapsed. We brought him to the emergency room, where he stayed for two weeks. He needed a liver transplant. The doctor at the hospital told us if he did this again, he was dead. We know, we said, we are trying to get his enzymes up. We thought, believed, wanted to believe he was just talking about the Hep C. We had thought, believed, wanted to believe the methadone was working.
Turned out Connor was still using. After all we had been through and continued to go through, after all we missed and vowed never to miss again, we still didn’t see it. How many times had I denied he could possibly have a problem, even when Connor didn’t try to hide it? Early in his using, I found him passed out in the hall in the middle of the night and thought maybe he was just exhausted, or at worst, learning a typical teenage lesson from drinking too much. He said he needed to go to the hospital, and I said, Get up. You’re okay. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to know. I was insensitive to his complaints, I figured he was faking an illness. That’s what I believed. That’s what I told Connor. Even when he told me that his chest hurt. I dismissed that as the phantom pain of the hypochondriac he wasn’t, instead of the addict he was.
I never took Connor to the hospital that night. I learned later that he had mixed opiates and amphetamines in excess and the combination had made him feel like something was wrong in his heart. He was seventeen years old and had been using for more than a year.
I denied the truth. Maybe because we had settled in suburban Atlanta, where you don’t think about the problems behind the manicured lawns and nice front doors. Maybe he was hiding it well behind his good grades and friends who looked anything but shady, as if only shady kids use during the opioid crisis that still haunts us today. Maybe I simply did not want to admit it—like so many parents who live in denial and lie to themselves.
Maybe all that would be true for most parents. But it shouldn’t have been for me.
As Connor sat in his hospital bed, I knew I had not done everything to help him. I was living with more than just denial of Connor’s addiction—more than fear of Connor’s death. I was hiding something from him and his brother Liam, as I had from almost everyone in my life for decades: my story. My whole story. The one that I always wanted to tell, but the few times I tried, I failed. The parts of my story that made me feel weak. The parts that made me feel like a loser no matter how much I won.
Here’s the story Connor and most everyone around me knew. My name is John Hanrahan, and in 1960, I arrived in this world the fifth born and first son of six Hanrahan children, a typical suburban American Irish Catholic family in Falls Church, Virginia. I was a nationally acclaimed high school wrestler who earned a scholarship to Penn State, where I was the first to win one hundred matches. While I was
