“This Is How I See Him”

How do you reconcile with an addict who never gets better?

- Christy Johnson

Hate is a powerful word. A scary word. That’s exactly how I felt about my ex-husband. I loathed Bob. I was disgusted by him.

Bob was an opioid addict. Though he managed to hide his addiction in the early years of our marriage, eventually life with him became intolerable and I got out.

Two years after we divorced, Bob took our two younger kids on a fishing trip—the court awarded him visitation rights every other weekend, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. He was high. He weaved his pickup truck across the center line and smashed into an oncoming car. Jake, our twoand-a-half-year-old son, was killed instantly. Bob had put Jake in the front seat wearing only a lap belt.

In a moment of distraught prayer after the accident, I felt God give me the power to forgive Bob. But the forgiveness was more for me than it was for Bob. It ended some of my torment over Jake’s death.

What it did not do was enable me to stand being around Bob. Especially after the court, for reasons I will never understand, declined to revoke his visitation rights following the accident. He was found guilty of negligent homicide and sentenced to community service. Bob had been a talented salesman before drugs consumed him. He sold the judge on the promise that he would turn his life around.

He kept right on using. A couple years after the divorce, I married a wonderful man named John. John was stable and sober, a faithful churchgoer. He helped me create a good home for Brittany and Garrett, Jake’s older sister and brother.

I did my best to move on from the trauma that Bob had brought to my life.

But every other weekend, I had to pack up overnight bags for Brittany and Garrett and drive them to Bob’s parents’ house, where he then lived, collecting a disability check for what I assumed was a fabricated knee injury. Bob had become an expert at coming up with stories to pry drugs from compliant doctors.