More Than Our Ends: A reflection on sisterhood, addiction, and loss – PART I

The following is a true story about love, and loss, and how the emotional rollercoaster of addiction affects so many. We are deeply humbled by the opportunity to share such a personal story from one of The Prompt community’s most prolific and beloved writers, Sarah Razner.

The story has been broken into five parts, which will be posted each day this week, to honor Jenna Razner. On Friday, we will also post the story in full.

My sister, Jenna, loved fall. She eagerly awaited the changing of the leaves and the roll out of fashions in maroon, burnt orange, and mustard tones. She craved the scent of Bath & Body Works’ “Sweater Weather” candles, and the taste of apple cider and pumpkin muffins from the local orchard. As a teacher, she loved to carve jack-o’-lanterns with her class; as a barista, to serve drinks with all the trappings of fall; and as a mom to her many fur babies, dress them in special flannel scarves for the season.

Sarah, with her sisters, Jenna (middle) and Katie (right) in June 2019

This fall favoritism is a family trait.

My mom, sister (Katie), and I joined Jenna each year in enjoying the scents and the beauty of a Midwestern autumn. But my bonding with Jenna had bounds. Just as she had her recipe for roasted pumpkin seeds easily accessible, she had a list of horror flicks to watch and scary spots to explore. As she walked into haunted houses, ready to laugh in the face of whatever menacing “creatures” lurked within, I kept as much distance between me and the beasts as I could, knowing I’d be far more likely to cry or want to throw up than giggle. It was a trait in her that I both admired and didn’t understand. I couldn’t and still can’t fathom why people would willingly scare themselves when there was enough to be scared of already.

But Jenna saw something in horror that I did not.

She found thrill in the jumpscare, and throughout her life had learned to lean into fear. As a teacher, each class and each year came with new challenges, as with learning, no growth happened purely in comfort or without effort or a bit of anxiety. Multiple times, she had to reconfigure what she imagined her life would be: in career or relationships or her day-to-day. Although it was difficult to meet such changes at all, let alone with a smile or without sadness, Jenna met them and made whatever space she found herself in more beautiful, and she made friends with whomever inhabited those spaces with her. She had dealt with things much scarier than what Halloween could conjure up.

In early August of this year, as businesses began to stock their shelves with candy corn and mellowcreme pumpkins, Jenna suggested we go to Fright Fest at Six Flags Great America. She was a fan of the Halloween-themed festival, and wanted to ride the plunging rollercoasters, even those that ran backwards on rickety wooden tracks for the event. Since amped-up rollercoasters ranked pretty high on my list of least appealing things ever, I almost immediately turned it down.

Maybe one year, I thought, like I had so many times over the past 12 months, a year that had felt like a turning point in our relationship, in our family. Maybe one year we’d all be able to take a long vacation together. Maybe one year we could heal and all the pain and the trouble and the panic of the past could be behind us. Maybe one year I’d stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Less than a week later, the shoe dropped with a startling bang, and life answered my maybes with a distinct, harsh, unforgettable, unyielding no.

On August 14, Jenna became another casualty in the terrible battle of addiction.

It’s a devastating war, one that has taken more than 2 million lives in the past decade when accounting for those who died due to excessive drug and alcohol use. Despite its prevalence, it’s a disease that we still lack understanding and empathy for in comparison to other ailments, relying mainly on stereotypes and convenient untruths to form our perceptions. Although we’ve made progress in raising awareness in recent years, as a whole, we are still struggling to meet the disease with kindness and acceptance and care. As our siblings, friends, parents, spouses, neighbors, and coworkers hide in shadows and silence to escape judgment, we are doing them a disservice and creating an environment in which it seems easier and less scary to remain in active addiction than to face the stigma of the outside world.

***

Like many who suffer from this disease, Jenna battled as much of it as she could in secret.

In the early years, I believe she hid the true depth of her addiction from us as much as she did from herself.

In Wisconsin—a state known for its love of alcohol and proclivity for binge drinking—alcohol is a staple at get-togethers and homes. As is common for people in their twenties, Jenna and her friends enjoyed hanging out with drinks in hand. While within our household, drinking was limited, it was the norm at many larger family events.

At the time, we didn’t see her drinking as problematic, simply because we didn’t see the full scope of her use. We weren’t aware that the social activity had poured into her solitude as she began to self-medicate for worsening anxiety. I cannot tell you exactly when that switch flipped and the disease, half-nature, half-nurture, took hold, but I can tell you that in hindsight, the trajectory makes sense.

According to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, more than 50 percent of people who have a mental illness suffer or will suffer from substance abuse disorder, and vice versa.

Although it is not known which comes first, the substance abuse or the mental illness, the two are comorbid, meaning they go hand-in-hand and often affect one another. I have seen this in my own life, as the vast majority of people I know who suffer from substance abuse disorder suffer from some kind of mental illness as well, such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia.