The Silent Patient

Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

“A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

. When I met Kathy and fell in love, marijuana faded into the background.

how could she teach us what she did not know?

constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience.

babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly

a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain.

kinds of theories have been put forward about the origins of addiction. It could be genetic; it

could be chemical; it could be psychological. But marijuana was doing something much more than soothing me: crucially, it altered the way I experienced my emotions; it cradled me and held me safe like a well-loved child.

In other words, it contained me.

Brutal, yes—and unkind. I’m not proud of that phone call. But it seemed like the only honest action to take. I still don’t know what I could have done differently.

then, slowly, in the darkness, I realized something.

I didn’t want to die. Not yet; not when I hadn’t lived.