Eva

Training is going well. I ran my first 10k for years the other night and felt comfortable……. I have a headtorch and I feel really excited. Advice about just looking at the next run rather than the marathon has helped. It still seems a completely unattainable goal but I am plodding on! Thanks so much for all your messages of support and your money. The first blog was really emotional for me.

Now onto the reason for all of this…..

I knew I wanted to run the London marathon for charity and after some consideration I applied for a place with Addaction, knowing how their support would have helped Eva and my family. However, £2000 is a lot of money to raise, and I’m especially nervous because I can’t help but think this must be a cause that finds it difficult to elicit sympathy in the public. Addiction is so often seen as self inflicted. I want to raise as much money as I can for Addaction, but I also want to provide something a little bit thought provoking and maybe change people’s views a little bit. I am not professing to be an expert in anything, far from it, but I know my story.

Looking at an alcoholic or drug addict is not comfortable. It does not evoke feelings of sympathy or wanting to help or protect. Their behaviour is unpredictable and undesirable and sometimes they do horrendous things to feed their addiction. People lose sympathy quickly. After Eva’s inquest there was a short article in the Hull Daily Mail and I went online to read it. A few comments left by members of the public were horrendous, unthinkable. People didn’t care. She was an alcoholic.

The behaviours of an alcoholic mean that they can be very, very hard to love. Over years as this behaviour becomes the norm, it is easy to forget the essence of who that person is and easy to judge and easy to be angry, furious, with them. In the depths of the disease, I forgot. I was furious all the time. I was furious for all the phone calls about another drama that she’d caused, another inconvenience to my parents, another inconvenience to me, another argument. The list of bad things that happened as a result of her drinking went on and on and on. At the beginning I tried to be there for her. As the years went by I lost patience. I tried to catch her out and when that didn’t work, I threatened her. “If you don’t stop you will lose me”. On one of the occasions she was in rehab I got a letter from her and I was so excited to open it. I thought she might finally be apologising. I was wrong. She was telling me how hard I’d made it for her, how small I’d made her feel, how she would never let anyone make her feel the way I made her feel. And I thought, “That is the addiction talking. That might be her counsellors. They have no idea what it’s like. I did not behave badly, this is all because of Eva, not me. I will not apologise. This is not my fault.” The letter was devastating. I was young, I was completely ignorant and I was just so angry. And I had the arrogance of sobriety. Now though, the more I read about addiction the more I realise she was right. What she had needed all along was more love and unconditional support and I threatened to take it from her. Her last few threads of support. I have huge guilt but am comforted by similar experiences from others and the fact that I know living with an addict is really, really hard. I wish I could have handled things differently, I wish I could have done better. I really tried. I just had no idea what to do and I didn’t understand.

For a long time after she died I had bad memories. I just couldn’t remember what life was like, what Eva was like, before the drinking started. Even after she died, my most recent memories were formed around her drunken events and that’s what came to mind whenever I thought about her. I was absolutely devastated, but I was still angry. These memories are etched on me but have become much less significant over the years. It has taken time because she was unwell for all of her adult life. Now when I think of her I remember stories of when we were kids, stupid stuff we did together and all the love and laughter we had between us all which was incredible. Eva of course, wasn’t her addiction.

This was Eva:

And this was who she was.

When I needed reminding, my mum used to tell me that Eva would never have chosen to be an alcoholic and we are sure that she did not choose to die. She did not aspire to the lifestyle. No one does. She drank because she felt sad and alone and depressed. She was mentally ill and it helped her to escape her reality. It was NOT her fault and she was NOT her addiction.

Every person with an addiction is a person.

No person with an addiction is their addiction.

Every single one needs support, every single one needs love.

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MagdaBannister