Whose Someone Are You?

As I get older I have been afraid dismayed and amazed at the private pain that is endured around me; both strangers and loved ones whose faces carry the heavy weight of life.

I have always managed to come out on top of my pain, sometimes barely, sometimes after a time. My way is to wear it like a badge; to conquer it and to face it head on; sometimes admitting publicly to things that make my family cringe and myself cry behind closed doors but it has worked, for me.

But for some the only way is to hide behind alcohol, drugs, pills, painkillers, food, cigarettes and a million other things that keep them in a cocoon; safe from the world we inhabit and to them I say this:

You are someone’s only person.

For someone you are the only person who remembers that treacherous family picnic where everyone got sick from the tainted potato salad and Uncle Ted got drunk and dove into the fish- pond face first.

You are the only husband who watched your wife as she delivered your slick black haired baby boy.

You are the only second cousin who will ever remember playing freeze tag on an abandoned school bus and kicking out a window to escape getting caught.

You are the only son who put red hand prints on a platter for your dad that fifth Father’s Day you celebrated with him.

You are the only mother who held your third daughter every night for six months because she couldn’t get to sleep when her stomach was hard and tight with colic.

You are the one; the only one. You are someone’s someone, and it is enough.

And we stand by while you poison yourself, and hell, sometimes we offer you another beer because after all you are a functioning alcoholic. You get up for work and drink coffee and pay the electric bill and cook a tasty meal.

And if you are eating yourself to death what do we do? Do we still bring our favorite five cheese macaroni to Thanksgiving every year?

We wake up everyday and we go to work. We listen to voice messages and balance checkbooks. We water grass and go through the drive thru at KFC while our someone is dying a miserable slow daily death.

Let’s not sit still any longer, let’s say something. It might not work, but I’d rather try than sit around a sidekick to something like that.

I love you, stop hurting yourself. Fix yourself before you never see a baby’s gum-toothed smile again; before you never taste that first burst of juice from a navel orange; before you never walk on streets plastered with pink cherry blossoms on that first fresh spring day. Come out of your cocoon. Do it now. It is urgent because someone needs you and someone loves you.

 

Whose someone are you?