Brother Love: `Will Somebody Throw Me a Lifeline?’

The second of a four-part series, chronicling my April 2021 efforts to check my brother Phil into a substance abuse rehab facility.

This is part two of a four-part series from a particularly intense weekend, April 10-11, 2021, as I strove to shepherd my brother Phil to a substance abuse rehabilitation facility. (This series is in addition to prior columns that I have written about Phil — you can find those, also labeled “Brother Love,” in my archives.)

We pick up the story with me at home early Saturday afternoon, April 10th. I just resolved to find Phil (after dropping him off about an hour earlier) and get him to a motel so that I can drive him to rehab the next morning.

If you have not yet done so, you can read Part 1 here.

I’d asked Phil about his plans earlier today, the idea of coming alongside him germinating in my mind but not yet certain. The Loving-Enabling Tension was at play, as it always is in matters pertaining to me and Phil.

Against the backdrop of his decades of struggle with alcohol abuse and drug addiction, I am in a perpetual state of evaluation: What does love look like in any given situation? What’s a loving thing to do? And when does love cross the line and descend into unhelpful, dysfunctional enabling?

Sometimes, the line is blurry, and I pray for God’s guidance—then hope that I hear His voice and act accordingly. Other times, the line is pretty obvious: “No, I’m not going to loan you $10 (again), but let me buy you lunch.”

Summer 2016, me and Phil, a couple of bespectacled graybeards.

Not long after Phil came out to Chicago nine years ago, this is the invisible relational tightrope that I have walked. Especially early on, I stumbled frequently. But increasingly, like a kid who has grown up in the circus and developed into a competent performer, I have developed a steady balance.

There are times when I have confidence bordering on conviction about how to step forward. On this day, staying on the sidelines, clinging to some tough-love philosophy, is not an act of love. With help so clearly in sight and—most importantly, my brother saying he wants to get that help—I can offer the safety net that he needs.

With that internal dialogue having settled into a decision, now the question has become: Will I be able to track Phil down?

My two texts, 20 minutes apart, go unanswered. Then, after another half-hour, my phone rings: it’s Phil, and he’s gushing about having just run into my 17-year-old daughter, Maggie Rose, outside the library. It’s been at least a year, maybe two, since he’s really interacted with her, and he’s struck by her height and maturity.

“Oh my God, Matt!” he says. “She’s such a great woman. She’s as tall as me.”

Phil in February 2012, shortly after moving here, outside the Oak Park library. At that time, I used the image to promote his carpentry services. When sober, and sometimes even when not, Phil is a highly skilled carpenter.

He’s by the library still and I tell him to stay put without filling him in on my plan. I don’t want to scare him away; I am unsure how serious he is about checking into detox. In fact, I am quite certain that he’s not sure how serious he is, either. His strategy in these moments is to drink or drug even harder than usual, as if to stock up on his intake before being denied access to his poisonous comfort.

When I arrive, I chat with Maggie Rose first as she breaks away from a small clutch of friends she has been hanging out with. I explain the urgency of getting our van, and she points out where it is. In the other direction, she points out Phil sitting on a ledge that runs alongside the sidewalk facing Lake Street.

I come up behind Phil. True to the pre-detox playbook, he is markedly more intoxicated than I recall him being only two hours ago. Underneath the Wizard garb, he’s muttering in an angry tone.

“Somebody throw me a lifeline!” he bellows, his tone desperate and pleading. “Will somebody throw me a lifeline?”

A half-hour later, we arrive at a motel six miles away, about midway between Oak Park and O’Hare Airport. When I had told him, outside the library, that we were going to stay at a hotel, Phil had broken down in tears. All the way there, he is a chatterbox, a preview of the night to come.

I tell him to stay inside the van as I go into the office alone and get a ground-floor room. I want to keep it as simple as possible for Phil, whose latest maladies include a badly swollen right knee that he squeezes into a padded Velcro brace, a fallout from his recent wee-hours tumble onto the railroad tracks.

He waits in his customary back seat and then follows me inside Room 133, rolling his small suitcase. Its contents include the Gospel of John, a bottle of Western Son Vodka, and a two-liter bottle of Orange soda.

The marquee outside proclaims “Super 8,” but for Phil, this might as well be the Four Seasons.

“This is so wonderful,” he says. “You have no idea.”

Giddy as a kid on the first day of summer break, he can’t go more than a few minutes without thanking me.

He is a flurry of activity:

Turns on the TV. Hugs me. Hugs me again. Cranks up the thermostat to 86 degrees. Admires the bathroom. Uses the bathroom. Asks me to turn up the volume on the TV. Instructs me to keep the window curtains open—he loves the view of a building that looks to have been bombed out, and remarks on his history of working on such sites.

Our masks are off, and I am grateful for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that Phil got over three weeks ago, and for the Pfizer shot that I received eight days ago. He’s fully vaccinated—having somehow made it through the past year without testing positive for the coronavirus—and I am only partway there.

There’s still a remote chance that one of us has the coronavirus, so I try to keep a bit of distance—in between his hugs, that is.

Coming Wednesday: Part III, our first hours in the motel room.

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