Freedom Is Wild

A Serialized Memoir of Life and Death

You do not write the best you can for the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit. Resignation to the will of God does not mean that you stop resisting evil or obstacles, it means you leave the outcome out of your personal considerations. – Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

“I am an involuntary witness to God's grace and to the fortifying power of faith.” – Whittaker Chambers

February 2020

On my laptop there is a 100 page manuscript of an unfinished book I have been writing, off and on. It’s kind of a memoir about our life with our recently deceased daughter and what we have learned along the way. It is, perhaps, half complete at this point. I find it very hard to work on. The subject matter is extremely painful, so I can work on it for only a few days at a time before needing to take a break. Breaks from writing can sometimes blunt the pain that comes from dwelling on old memories. Sometimes I set the book aside for months at a time. Even so, I’m still committed to finishing the book because it is one way, maybe, to keep our experience from being wasted.

Since my daughter’s death last month, I have been working on the book more, trying to get some thoughts down in writing while recent events are still fresh in my mind. And as I have re-read the parts I wrote before she died, it has occurred to me that I’m going to have to change much of it to the past tense.

Everything about my daughter is now in the past.

Of course, we are not the first parents to lose a child, but I suspect every parent of a lost child knows too well the obscenity of the idea that your own child can become someone from your past -- someone you used to know. It’s eerie and disconcerting and wrong.

Anyway, I said I didn’t want our experience to be wasted, so what did I mean by that? Well, I meant that our experience with Mary entailed an excruciating process of reexamining much of what we believed about the way the world works. We found that, when confronted by the challenges we faced with Mary, beliefs we held about many things just didn’t fit with our actual experience of the world as we found it. It wasn’t that we had adopted these beliefs consciously. It was more like they had insinuated their way into our thinking as part of the air we breathed. We only really discovered that we held these beliefs after observing the instinctive way we reacted to the early crises we had to deal with. Everywhere we turned for help, among both Christian and secular thinkers, we found the same fundamental assumption at work.

Almost without exception, writers, thinkers, and friends assumed that when a person makes pathological choices, some prior circumstance or event holds the key to unlocking an understanding of that person’s choices. But what we learned over time was that this view of the world, which mostly ignores the implications of real human freedom, failed to explain what we confronted in our own lives.

In some ways, these faulty beliefs actually prolonged and compounded our suffering. Only after we gave ourselves permission to discard this received “wisdom”, taking a fresh, unvarnished look at things, did the mystifying confusion about our situation begin to recede. The business of wrestling oneself free from the conventional wisdom is, in my experience, much harder to do than it sounds. Giving yourself permission to actually learn from your own experience is frowned upon in an age like ours - one which is so enamored with the opinions of “experts”. You are not supposed to form your own conclusions in the face of evidence - you are supposed to accept the explanations provided down to you by the experts. It’s harder than you might think to really be ok with the fact that some of the ideas you have held, which are also widely accepted by so-called experts and apparently accepted by many other Christians, just don’t hold up under the harsh glare of reality.

Our life with Mary threw us into up-close and personal contact with drug abusers, drug dealers, criminals of all kinds, ex-cons, jails, police, urban poverty, rehabs, social workers, public defenders, and all those adjacent organizations and ministries that economically benefit from the perpetuation of social pathologies. And what we found is that we had to peel away, layer by layer, any illusions we had about why people behave the way they do. We had to reconsider whether we believed, as a general matter, circumstances determined choices or whether choices determined circumstances. In point of fact, we had to develop a more biblically informed point of view about human behavior, one which placed far more emphasis on human freedom, the affections of the heart, and the true moral agency of human beings.

It was years, long after we had done the wrenching work of discarding the conventional wisdom about addiction and its many adjacent problems, before we found we were not alone in what we were seeing. We eventually found a kindred spirit in Theodore Dalrymple (a.k.a. Anthony Daniels) who writes honestly and movingly about the moral and worldview dimensions of social dysfunction in general, and of addiction in particular. In his book “Romancing Opiates”, he comments on his own personal difficulty in concluding that the prevailing orthodoxy was, well, bunk:

“Had I not been fortunate enough to work with three eminent and highly competent physicians in my hospital who had observed precisely what I had observed, and drawn the same conclusions, I think I might have broken down, for as every political propagandist knows, there is nothing more destructive of the human psyche than to be forced to doubt the veracity of what one’s own elementary observations demonstrate, simply because they conflict with a prevailing and unassailable orthodoxy. In such circumstances, one is forced to choose between considering oneself deluded, or the world as mad: one is either sane in an insane world, or insane in a sane world. Neither alternative is entirely satisfactory.”

Quite.

Early on, we offered a great deal of ineffectual help that was rooted in the faulty assumption that Mary felt as badly about the consequences of her choices as we did. Only when we finally accepted that Mary actually preferred her own circumstance to any situation that would require her to change her affections, were we able to think more effectively about how to respond. Our experience here probably could be seen as cautionary regarding the approach taken by public policy “experts” and people in Christian “ministry” whose compassion is sometimes informed by superstitious assumptions which downplay the implications of real human freedom.

I can no longer view the problems of the urban poor in America the way that I used to. I have learned, through hard experience, that what I might view as dysfunctional or horrific in the life of another person may actually be preferred by them over other alternatives, especially if that person has cultivated an appetite for darkness and is enthralled by lies. This is not always the case, of course. There are true unfortunates in the world. But I have found the preference for chaos and dysfunction to be so consistently present in the lives of so many different people from Mary’s world that I have come to suspect the vast majority of money being spent to alleviate poverty, in this country at least, is utterly wasted. Here’s an excerpt of something I have written before about some of these ideas:

Almost without exception, the people I have tried to help have failed to take advantage of the help I have offered. The young men usually end up back in jail. The drug addicts usually end up back on drugs. It has nothing to do with their race. Zero. It has everything to do with their character and with their culture. They love and value the wrong things. Their understanding of the world is at odds with what is true. Their culture denigrates the very commitments and disciplines that could otherwise alter the trajectories of their lives. They do not value work. They do not accept the benefits of delaying gratification. They are dying, not because of white privilege, but because their culture has embraced deadly ideas.

The ideas we hold are a matter of life and death and not just in some pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by sort of way. People are physically dying, today, almost entirely as a consequence of believing lies. I have had my nose rubbed in the truth that Satan is not called “the prince of this world” for nothing. He seems to have the power to sometimes put a veil over the minds of people. He is busy whispering his lies even now.

We had to come to serious grips with the fact that we were not merely dealing with personal morality or psycho-therapeutic issues, but with spiritual and supernatural conflict. We know from experience that there really is a dragon loose in the land and he really is waging war on “those who keep God's commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.”

He intends to kill if he can.

So I want our experience to provide a short-cut to learning for some other family that finds itself in a similar situation. I don’t hold any illusions that every situation is the same or that our own experience is somehow the measure of all other experiences. I only hope to provide for someone else something I couldn’t find for my own family when I so desperately needed it. I want to help someone else pass through the crucible of learning much faster than I was able to pass through it myself. That’s what I mean when I say I don’t want our experience to be wasted. Mary was too valuable, and too precious to us, to waste her life by turning her memory into a game of “let’s pretend”. I want what we went through - what she put herself through - to provide help to someone else in a time of need.

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September 24, 2023

I wrote the preceding words sometime around February of 2020. It was a month or so after my daughter died and, while I have continued to work on the book periodically, I have never actually shown it to anyone.

I have been committed to chronicling the lessons learned from what we’ve been through, but the reader may appreciate just how emotionally and psychologically exhausting it can be to constantly revisit some of these difficult events.

Nevertheless, I have tentatively decided that, over the next few months, I am going to serialize, here on my Substack, some of the chapters from the book I have been working on about our life with Mary. I will continue to publish the normal “Stuff I’m Thinking About” on culture, technology et al, but I will intersperse my normal posts with chapters from the book.

I was well into the writing of the book when our daughter (not entirely) unexpectedly died from an overdose of Fentanyl, so some of the chapters in the book are written from the point of view of her still being alive, while others reflect that she is gone. I have made no effort to reconcile or unify those points of view as they appear in the various chapters. Each chapter’s point of view is reflective of when it was written relative to her untimely death.

What follows below the break are some words I wrote, soon after she died, to help me later remember the events that occurred the day of her death. I include them here because they are not part of the book but are really the final moments beyond which all of our struggle to save her just…ceased.

Reading back over what follows, I’m also reminded that these words were written just as Covid began to stalk the land, although the pandemic was not penetrating my thoughts as I wrote this. My own experience that day was made worse by the sheer callousness and incompetence of the local government where Mary died. We could not have known how thoroughly the same kind of governmental incompetence and callousness would continue to characterize, in so many ways, the lives of everyone for the next two years.

You can find the rest of the portions I have published at the following links.

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Afterword

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January 30, 2020

I was sitting at my desk working. It was about an hour before lunch. The phone rang. Normally I check the number before answering but I was distracted, staring at some source code on my computer, so I just clicked the green “Accept” button shining on the screen of my phone.

“This is Keith.”

“Is this Keith Lowery?”, the voice on the other end asked.

“Yes”, I replied.

“Mr. Lowery, this is Suzy from the family assistance team at the Harris County Medical Examiner’s office. I just have a few questions about Mary that will help with our examination.”

Now I was no longer distracted.  “Who is this again?”

“This is Suzy with the family assistance team at the Harris County Medical Examiner’s office. I have a few questions about Mary.”

Now my heart was racing. My brain was short circuiting and I was having a hard time focusing my mind to ask a question I didn’t want the answer to.

“I…I…I’m sorry, is Mary dead?”, I stammered out.

As I asked this question, I could hear my wife in the living room laughing and playing with Mary’s son.

There was a very long pause on the line. The voice came back and I heard it say, “I’m sorry Mr. Lowery. I thought someone would have told you. Mary died this morning.”

For the next 20 minutes, my mind and emotions reeling, I answered the caller’s questions about Mary’s personal history as my wife, unknowing, played with Mary’s son. I alternated between sobbing and combing my memory for answers to the medical questions I was being asked.

You’re not supposed to bury your children. That’s not how this is supposed to work. Mary was not supposed to be someone from our past.

I finally regained the presence of mind to tell the woman on the phone that I had to stop answering her questions because I needed to tell my wife that our daughter was dead. It had somehow not occurred to her that now was not the best time for me to help her with her job.

I called my wife into my office and told her that Mary had died. There is really no way to ease into that, and I didn’t even have any information about the circumstances surrounding Mary’s death that would let me cushion the blow. I just had to tell her: Mary is dead. Her reaction was as if someone had unexpectedly punched her very hard in the stomach. She keeled over, holding onto my arms to keep from falling, and started heaving. Through her sobs she said, “Now we can’t hope anymore.”

It was finished. What would be, would be. There would be no changing the finality of this outcome. Our only refuge now was the recognition that we are not omniscient. We are not Mary’s judge. If there is a path to mercy, our God – who loves mercy – will find it. Whatever he decides will be perfect. And we remember this:

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

How God will accomplish this, for everyone who has lost a child, I cannot imagine. But I will choose to trust He knows how.

We had suspected for a while that we might receive this call one day, but there’s no way you can really prepare yourself for it. In fact, I had a very distinct premonition just six months earlier, during one of Mary’s disappearances, that she had overdosed in a hotel room somewhere. And now, as it happened, that was exactly how she died.

Mary’s 4-year-old son came to live with us several months ago. He wandered into my office as my wife and I were holding each other and crying. It frightened him to see us so distressed, so we turned off the tears as quickly as we could.

(As an aside, though I’m writing these lines about 3 weeks after Mary died, to this day I have never received anything like an intentional and humane notification from either the Harris County Medical Examiner, or the Sheriff’s office, that Mary has died. We were bombarded by calls all that morning by healthcare and government agencies asking, I kid you not, for her body parts. 😳 But even though we are Mary’s next of kin, not a single government bureaucrat could be bothered to lift a finger to inform us about anything having to do with the circumstances of her death. Anything at all. Everything we have learned, we have had to learn through our own digging. The sheriff’s office has never returned a single phone call though we’ve left many messages seeking information. The only time we ever heard from the government of Harris county was when they wanted something from us.)