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Drug addiction did not define him. He was defined by being a teacher of severely disabled children. A caretaker for his mother. A father figure and godfather to my son. A man loved — no hyperbole — by all who knew him. He was my funniest and most supportive friend for thirty-three years. This is his story.
I met Terrence when he was 26 and I was 38. He was an undergraduate and I was a graduate student at North Texas University.
We met in an Abnormal Psychology class, and that became our joke for all the years of our friendship. I was a wild woman going through a mid-life crisis. He was a serious student working to finish his degree.
His father died 200 miles away shortly after Terrence arrived on campus. Theirs had been somewhat difficult relationship. Terrence was gay. He never came out to his father before his father died, but there was an unspoken tension between them that wasn’t there with Terrence’s younger brother, who played sports and was more typically a boy.
Back then, some in the Black community claimed there were no gay people who were Black, although they had to overlook some famous people — James Baldwin, for one — to believe that. In Terrence’s own family, his uncle was never fully out, though the family knew he was gay.
Terrence presented as cis-hetero. Not by design, he just naturally walked through the world that way. He had some tells, but you had to know him well to see them.
In class, he sat with a girl who we all thought was his girlfriend. He baked cookies one night and brought them to class, telling me they were for his sweetheart, which I assumed was her. Later he told me they were for his friend Ed. The older man he was seeing.
I asked him one night, per a request from a mutual male friend of ours, if he was gay. He immediately and calmly answered yes. He asked why I wanted to know, and I admitted it was our mutual friend who requested I ask. I had a crush on his friend, and the friend had a crush on us both, although he never admitted the one on Terrence.
Being gay, and being or not being accepted for it, is not what sent him on the first step down the fatal path of drug addiction. All his friends, most of whom are hetero, accepted him, and his family did as well — when he finally came out to them. When he told his mother at age thirty, she said,
“It’s about time.”
His father’s unspoken lack of acceptance did haunt him.
We loved him and his longest term partner. I’ve loved that partner and a later one who is now a good friend. When I met him, I told Terrence that if they broke up I got custody of Edmo. When they did, I did.
Edmo describes Terrence as “Complicated with a hint of tragic and a twist of wonderful.”
Perfect description.
Terrence with author Carol Lennox listening to music at Central Market. Selfie from author’s collection
I’ve never laughed more with anyone in my life. We cracked each other up in person or on the phone. Abundant laughter and necessary tears were the glue that bound us together. I can still feel his big arms around me from when we hugged every time we met and parted. Including the last time I saw him before his mother’s 80th birthday party.
He’d worked all day with the family to set up the back yard as a casino. He was sweaty and wearing old cargo shorts and a torn T-shirt when I hugged him close. He told me he would graduate in July with his Master’s in Special Education.
He’d worked for many years with severely disabled children and had been developing a curriculum for transitioning differently abled teens to work programs after high school graduation. What I didn’t know was that he had been fired from that job after a recent relapse where he disappeared for days.
His drug use started seventeen years earlier in Los Angeles. He started therapy there and was delving into serious sexual abuse issues from his childhood that his parents hadn’t known about. The therapy brought the memories of trauma to the forefront, and one hour sessions a week weren’t enough to resolve the abreactions and revived memories.
The work was intense, and in my professional opinion, mishandled, and his partner traveled to the East Coast to visit family during that time. One night, with his partner out of town, he went to a gay bar. Someone there handed him something to smoke. It was methamphetamine.
When I found out he was addicted while I was visiting him in L.A., I called his mother and told her. When his partner found out, they broke up. His mother came to get him and bring him back to Texas where he entered rehab and got clean.
He began working for a school again, as he had in L.A. and we spent many hours dancing, laughing, laughing, laughing, listening to live jazz, grilling and hosting pool parties. He was there for my son, his god son, in all the important ways.
Two years later, he relapsed for the first time. He’d gone back into therapy and the intensity of working through the trauma again proved too much. Although I couldn’t be his therapist, I did spend hours with him reassuring him nothing that happened to him was his fault. I thought he believed me and his therapist.
However, it seems he never overcame the shame he felt over the abuse that was inflicted on him. He then added the shame and guilt of using and relapsing to the heavy burdens he was carrying. `
The pattern repeated every two to three years. He always got clean again and was his normal fun, loving, caring self. Until the next time.
The last time wasn’t after his mother’s 80th birthday. He was gone four days that time. Death and grief terrified him. He’d lost a partner to AIDs in the nineties, and his uncle and grandmother recently. He’d been the caregiver for his grandmother. Acknowledging his mother’s age, although she is the youngest eighty-year-old I know, was too much for him.
Still, he returned and worked hard on writing the last two papers for his Master’s degree. The last message I received from him was that he had a paper to finish, but wanted to get together and grill the following weekend:
“I am doing well these days. Sane and stable!! We should plan a grill and swim.”
By the following Saturday he was back out on the streets. He died of an overdose that caused overheating and stopped his heart Thursday morning.
It might have been an accumulation of damage over the years, or an actual overdose, or it may have been bath salts. The symptoms of overheating suggest it was. A dealer wanting to make a quick buck, the people who were using with him in a motel and the motel manager who did not have Narcan, and his own cumulative trauma killed him.
It is doubly tragic that he died during Pride Month.
If he was ever ashamed of being gay, I didn’t know it. He blasted Barbara Streisand in the car on our road trips. He participated in Pride events. He kissed his partners in my presence. But he refused to hang out in gay bars unless it was with his hetero friends — groups of fellow teachers and me. Until that fateful and ultimately fatal night in L.A.
If there can be a takeaway from his story, it is that a dangerous drug couldn’t numb him enough or let him forget the trauma long enough, but it could kill him. Addiction that began out of unresolved trauma robbed the world, me, his family, my son, and current and future severely disabled students who needed the support of a loving, funny, fun-loving man whose life lit up the lives of the rest of us, even while he struggled in his own.
If you are addicted to meth or any other drug, please seek help. In the U.S. call SAMHSA at 1–800–662-HELP (4357)for information on resources.
Call 988 for crisis or suicidal ideation. There are similar services available in many countries.
For friends and family, intervention, support and encouragement can help someone with addiction, although you cannot “fix” them. AlAnon and codependency groups and books can help you define and set boundaries.
If you are a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, please reach out to https://enoughabuse.org/get-help/survivor-support to find numerous resources.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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The post My Gay Friend Was So Much More Than Unresolved Trauma Leading to Addiction appeared first on The Good Men Project.