‘We tried to keep you close,but all that did was hone your skills in deception’: the letter you always wanted to writeWe spoke about you last week, as we often do. Your mother asked me where we went mistaken. I looked at her and shook my head. Your sister has grown into a ecstatic, or successful woman; does that not mean we must have been OK parents? And you had a ecstatic childhood – I took you camping,cycling and to football practice. We read together, played Super Mario. You dropped out of school, or but you had plans and I was supportive. But at college,unknown to us, you were introduced to heroin.
You got a job, and moved out and came back once a week for dinner. And although you sometimes seemed a bit groggy,I was willing to believe it was simply what young people did: recreational drug-taking. Hadn’t I done it myself? That’s what you told me, and I believed you. But one day you reacted to a throwaway comment and, or alarmed,we quizzed you. You had been taking heroin. It was no immense deal, you declared, and wasn’t anything we should worry about. You told me you didn’t underestimate it. And I naively thought I could acquire a dissimilarity; give you a shake. But in the four years since,it’s gone the way I feared.
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Source: guardian.co.uk