Today Cameron continues to share her story of loving her big brother Bryce and devastatingly losing him to his disease.
Cameron shares the progression of the disease and the struggle to balance being a sister and a social worker.
I understand hearing the story of someone losing their loved one to the disease of addiction is sorrowful. This part of the story must also be shared when we speak about addiction being a progressive, chronic, and potentially fatal disease.
Cameron’s courage to tell her story shines a vital light on the lack of support for siblings in the disease and with their grief.
See full transcript below.
00:01
You’re listening to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast a place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now, here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.
Margaret 00:25
Welcome back, Cameron shares more about how Bryce’s disease took over her wedding. And how she experienced the progression in that moment. And thereafter. She also candidly shares how hard it was to straddle being Bryce’s sister, and a social worker with lots of experience with people with the disease of addiction. Let’s get back to Cameron!
00:50
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast
Margaret 01:03
I think this disease will take every speck of air out of a room if we let it and we won’t have oxygen. And we do that. Like there’s a culpability on our part, because we let it happen. But there’s absolutely the truth that this disease can become all-consuming for everyone in the family. So, when you say he took over, you know, he became the big issue of the wedding. Tell us a little bit about what that looked like.
Cameron 01:32
So, he showed up to the rehearsal dinner late, and he was estranged from my mother’s family
hadn’t seen them and who knows how long. And we had friends there, you know, family and navigating just the divorce family dynamics was enough to begin with, um. He showed up, and I think it was the first time I looked at him and actually felt appalled. He was sweating. He was pale, his face was a mess. And he looked like, beyond sick. And it was so obvious. And I think I felt a level of embarrassment. I was scared. I was definitely consumed by what he looked like, throughout the next 24 hours, which was the evening before my wedding and on my wedding day.
Margaret 02:34
So, you saw the disease in your face at that moment, not your brother. And I would assume you were not the only family member appalled and overwhelmed. And, like preoccupied with his condition?
Cameron 02:49
No, and I don’t think it was ever spoken about. Maybe they hid it from me, because I was getting married. I don’t know. But I didn’t know who he was at that point.
Margaret 03:01
Which speaks to the progression of the illness where the person gets less and less like themselves, less and less able to pretend they’re themself and the disease becomes so much more prevalent everybody. Resentful at him?
Cameron: No,
Margaret: Not even then?
Cameron 03:26
No. more sad than angry. I was frustrated. I wanted him to tell me he was sick. And he had relapsed, and he needed help.
03:32
Margaret: And instead?
Cameron 03:36
He lied about everything. I don’t know what the excuse of the day was at that point. Um, and maybe there wasn’t one. But he didn’t need to tell me, I knew. I just wanted him to tell me.
Margaret 03:52
Oh, so classic, right? Like, can’t they just be honest with us? We can see it in front of our face. Why can’t they just tell us the truth? It feels so deeply personal and insulting. The reality is, is they don’t even tell themselves the truth. How can they tell anyone else the truth when they’re in that condition? They’re lying to themselves every stinking minute. It’s painful right to reflect on. So, the waiting happens and interesting you say it was kind of not talked about but yet consumed you. Did you and your sister at least talk about it? Because you two are pretty regular.
Cameron 04:28
At some point, we definitely talked about it, um, that I don’t remember the exact conversation but it wouldn’t be us if we didn’t.
Margaret 04:38
So where does it go from there?
Cameron 04:41
Well, I remember being somewhere and he went to Florida for rehab. And with the knowledge and experience that I had in my professional life; I thought the Florida shuffle. These unregulated places. And he’s so far away. And then I let go. I mean, he went, the day, I was in another county, I was meeting with somebody about programming, and I got a phone call from Florida, that I needed to buy him a plane ticket to Pennsylvania, and he’d be flying in tomorrow. And I’d have to pick him
up. And I thought, for what, where’s he going? He said, he wants to be near you. And I panicked. I don’t want to turnyou away, if that’s what you want, and you want to heal. And I don’t want you in the same place where my professional reputation is and mingling with a lot of people that were clients of mine, it felt too much of blurring a boundary. I tapped into some connections, and we found him in programming a county next door.
06:08
And he did a partial program, sober living homes, I would pick him up on the weekends, I would pay his rent, and meet the owner of the program at night, pay his rent. And this continued until I was moving out of town.
And I had decided I was moving away to Philadelphia, and he needed to be on his own. I had gotten him hooked up with a psychiatrist, that’s a friend of mine, after care, the recovery house and I really truly knew whether or not he was sober, like he still didn’t internalize anything. And I was put off by him at that point. And felt like I need to live my life. I’m going.
Margaret 07:05
Any support for you at that point. Prior to that, to get to the point of letting go enough to do that.
Cameron 07:13
No, I think the physical separation needed to happen to make it harder for me. And I do want to just say, I also know enough that I’ve been in therapy for a long time. So, I had support. In my personal life. As a family system, that didn’t exist, we didn’t participate with any program. I think everybody was pretty much turned off by him and kind of giving up hope that he would change and, you know, go back to the person he was. And deep down inside. I knew he hadn’t made changes. But I couldn’t totally let go.
08:00
This podcast is made possible by listeners like you.
Margaret 08:03
It is amazing to me to think that I have gone from one listener to almost 5000 downloads of this podcast. That just blows my mind. And I’m so excited to see this expand and grow and reach more people. I am grateful for the feedback I’ve been receiving of people saying it has given them tremendous value and support on their journey of recovery as family members.
So, I’m calling out to all my listeners. And I’m saying let’s grow this some more. And in this being the second year of being in the business, my business embrace family recovery, I’d like to expand the content of the podcast.
So, if you have any ideas, interest areas, people you think would be fabulous guests, please send me an email. My email address is Margaret@nullembracefamilyrecovery.com.
I would love to expand the guests to include other types of addictions. We’ve mainly focused on substance use disorder, chemical addictions. I’d like to get some behavioral addictions in there. Food, sex, gambling, gaming, whatever aspect of this illness has affected you as a family member, and how you found your way through the journey of the disease in active behavior or use and into recovery.
So, if you fit that category, and you’re willing to share your story, you know by now if you’re listening that this is a conversation, a place where we just share and that seems to be working as a way to offer people the chance to feel less isolated and know they’re not alone in this process.
So please reach out to me with ideas, being willing to be a guest. Again, my email is
Margaret@nullembracefamilyrecovery.com
And thank you for all your support. And let’s keep this growing and reaching more family members out there. Please share this podcast with anyone who has been touched by the disease of addiction. Thanks, and take care of you.
10:21
You’re listening to The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Can you relate to what you’re hearing? Never miss a show by hitting the subscribe button. Now back to the show.
Margaret 10:33
How did you balance the knowledge, the heart, and the enabling?
Cameron 10:42
So, you know, intellectually, I know what I know, and I have the knowledge. My heart was if we trade places, what do you need? Who do you need? Be somebody. Or my heart was like you love this dude, he’s your brother, your he’s super smart. He was my hero growing up. Of course, he screwed up, look at the things that happened to us. Like, you can’t just give up. The enabling. I made justifications for certain things. I never gave him cash. So sure, I’ll pay the rent, but I’m paying it to the landlord. Um, I’ll pay for your medication, but I’m not going to give you the money, I will take you to the pharmacy, I’ll pick up the medication, I’ll buy it, and then give it to you. And he was pretty successful. So, prior to him running through a lot of his money he had, that. I helped him navigate the legal system. Custody stuff. I justified a lot. And I did it because he was my big brother.
Margaret 11:51
I want you to know, that is absolutely not a question I asked in judgment. We all do it. We all work really hard to find the balance between support that’s healthy and enabling. And you did a lot of things of boundaries wise have clear boundary with the money. I’m not going to do this. But I’ll do this, you know, which a lot of us don’t figure out how to do. I think it’s so hard to in the moment of literally living in crisis every day of what phone calls coming, what issues coming to stay healthy without a lot of support around that specific issue. Thank God, you had a therapist, you know, thank God, you had people in your life who you could get support with. And I wonder how much of your time in therapy at that point was focused on him.
Cameron 12:43
Everything was focused on him. And I had moved, and I was working inside prisons. And I felt like I actually was unable to escape the reality of addiction,
Margaret: The ugliness of what the truth of it is?
Cameron: Yes, like, going to work and seeing a holding cell filled with people that are detoxing and thinking, gosh where’s my brother, I got to call him, I couldn’t really get away from it, where I felt like my other family members didn’t live it to that extent, certainly not better, not anything, just a different experience. And he was fascinated by prison. And I would say like, we’re not going to talk about this, but he would laugh about it. And it became clear that he was just unhealthy.
Margaret 13:36
So again, you bring up something interesting when you work in the field of helping people with this illness, and then you have it in your family. Like how I look at it as my children were doomed before they even got to adolescence, because I was always going to be vigilant to what I knew to be patterns. And I had to work really hard in my Al-Anon program to not do that to my children because they may not be cursed with this illness, they may be fortunate. So, I tried to educate not to use scare tactics because they don’t work. I tried to keep my head out of the story in my head of what this could look like. So, what it sounds like, to me is like even your place of competence where you’re damn good at what you do, you’re being triggered all the time to your brother and what he could or could not be doing.
Cameron 14:33
Constantly. And there was a point where I thought I wish he was in jail. At least I could see that he was okay, I know better, now. I have spent a lot of time in jail, not as an inmate but as an employee. And so, I know people have access to anything in jail and he would have been that guy, that addict right that’s finding a way to get high no matter what, and still like for years, he kind of just denied that he was an addict, which was like at the course super frustrating for me.
Margaret 15:08
Yeah, you don’t usually get a bed in a treatment center without a diagnosis.
15:11
Cameron: Yeah. And it was still kind of like a joke, not a joke.
Margaret:
That invincibility, maybe?
Cameron: It was, it was absolutely, I could stop, I get this, I get that it’ll be fine. Um, there were moments where he was sober. And I remember the time that he said to me, when I go to a meeting, I like run them, and everybody wants to go to me for advice. And I thought, oh, God, that must be a really sick group of people, because he was still a newcomer. And I knew that he had not made any changes.
Margaret 16:00
So obviously, the disease infiltrated your family, your relationships within your family, your work, hard to keep them out of there, on your emotional and mental piece, but also logistically when he was crashing and burning near you. You shared you got married, were you able to keep him out of the middle of that relationship?
16:23
Cameron: No, I’m divorced. Not because of him, but I’m sure. Looking back, I mean, I spent
my free time which was minimal. It was either working then going to grad school at night. And then after that on the phone with my sister till it was bedtime, or then it was working, seeing patients from 4pm to eight or nine at night, and then paying his rent and, you know, talking to my sister. So that marriage didn’t last. I got a divorce, before he passed away.
Him and I would maintain a relationship. And he always knew I was there. And the one where he didn’t feel judged by, that sibling. Maybe it was more safe to just be what he was. We’d got to into an argument over something not related to drugs. And it was a comment he made. It was a snowstorm. And he said, I’m taking the train, I’m going to be off the train in Philadelphia, and I’m going to come to your house. And I said, you’re not going to do that because I can’t believe this came out of your mouth. And we did not see each other that day. He came back to where he was living. We made up, our relationship was fine. Like it wasn’t a long period of time. And then I moved back to the area. In 2019. He had a third child to a woman locally, at the end of January. He was in a relationship. He came by with the baby one day and slept on my couch for five hours, ate all my food and took the baby home. And I know he was using. It wasn’t new dad tired.
Margaret 18:42
And there you find yourself in another pickle of knowledge, clinical knowledge, and personal pain.
Cameron 18:52
He said to me, it’s really nice place you got here. Can I have a key? So, I can just come and like nap or whatever. And I said to him, you’re not getting a key to my house at all. I had grown a little bit.
Margaret 19:14
Yeah, a lot a bit! And I hope that you can internalize that that growth for your well-being was absolutely healthy and okay. You were protecting yourself from his disease, not telling him you didn’t love him and care for him.
Cameron 19:30
And there were messages that followed. You could tell me what you want, and what you need. And I’ll do it if it’s for the good, but I will not enable you anymore. And we lived pretty close by we didn’t see each other a lot. I had a job, and I was working and traveling constantly. And I was out of town in a prison, and I was two and a half hours away from here where we live in the same town in May. It was a beautiful day, I had a great meeting, and I would get in the car, after I would leave the prison, check my email and phone before I would start to drive to see if anything was urgent. And I could never explain to you how I knew. But when I looked at my phone, and there was tons of emails, texts, everything, obviously, you can’t have a phone inside the prison. So, you miss a day’s worth of communication. I looked at my phone, and I knew instantly that something was wrong. So, I call back a number. And it was the coroner’s office.
20:49
Margaret: I am so sorry. Do you ever just hate the disease?
Cameron: Absolutely.
Margaret 21:00
Like, it takes so many people unnecessarily and I just freakin hate it.
Cameron 21:04
And to watch it grow instead of shrink, you know, like we’ve now started as a society to, you know, call it the opioid epidemic. There’s definitely been an increased awareness or information put out there to the general public about this disease. It’s not as, I shouldn’t say frowned upon, but it’s not as I felt embarrassed by it. Now, if anybody asks about my life, I’m completely honest. That’s my story. That’s what happened. These are the things I did. This was my experience. And my brother was an addict. He died from a drug overdose. I can say that I can talk about it.
Margaret 22:00
What changed for you to get to that point?
Cameron 22:02
there was like a series of unfortunate events in my life. A lot of work in individual therapy, a lot of feeling like you’ve already experienced all of this. Like, so what if somebody judges you? Clearly not my issue to contend with.
Margaret 22:29
So, a wonderful mentor in my life, she was just a pistol. When she met me, she said “what someone else is thinking is none of your business unless they choose to tell you”. It was a lifesaving message. We turn ourselves into pretzels to try to be who we think somebody else needs us to be. Or to be okay with. When we don’t even truly know what they think.
And her thing was, knock it off. Be true to yourself. If people don’t like what they see, or judge or whatever, if they have the chutzpah to tell you, you get to deal with it. And if not, it’s their problem.
Cameron: Sure.
Margaret: And I think that’s invaluable. Lest you walk in our shoes, Cameron, and I have not walked in your shoes, but less someone walks in your shoes, let them judge after they experience for themselves and try to navigate this insanity. And know up from down, left from right. Breathing one day is hard to do. Because you don’t know if you can catch a full breath because you’re so terrified, right?
Cameron 23:34
100%. And parallel to that I knew enough that I needed to do work for myself so that I didn’t care and that I needed to speak my truth, find my voice. And so I was in therapy, and I had started seeing a new therapist and I remember the day I said, I need her because she won’t buy my shit. And my shit is that I have all the answers, and I’m always okay. I’m fine. Three days after my brother passed away, actually, on the fourth day I went back to work.
Margaret 24:16
Again, not unique to you, when you love someone with this disease that is very common coping mechanism. So, tell me if this resonates. I ask family members all the time. Are you working more or less at this point, when they’re in the heat of it? Have you noticed your work level go up? Have you noticed it get more? Most of them will say yeah, I work constantly. I said have you thought about the fact that that’s your place of competence, when your family life feels like it’s falling apart, and you can’t get anything to work out? Does that resonate for you?
Cameron 24:50
Work was an addiction? Absolutely 100% can’t change my life can change the things that have happened to me can Change the family dynamics can’t change my brother who is, you know, out to lunch or God knows what or where. But if I’m here, I can do something, and I’m damn good at it.
Margaret 25:15
And I think all human beings need some of that, right? Like, we need to feel like we have a place and a space where we can make a difference. I wish more of us would find our way into a support community with others who’ve walked our path. Because that’s a huge place, we can make a difference by sharing our story, which is why I’m so grateful you’re here because I know there’s many siblings out there who’ve experienced similar to what you have, and haven’t necessarily really found that space to hear from someone like them.
Cameron 25:49
Yeah, and I had actually, like, sucked up a lot of my balancing, I’m a professional in the community with, the best thing I can give to people that I served was, I actually walked this to, I lost my brother to the same disease I’m trying to help you with. And I was willing to sort of, I don’t know, do something, I think in my mind, I mulled over support groups. And then when I finally went to a support group, I showed up, and it was 98% mothers who have lost the child to an overdose. The other percentage might have been a dad, or two. And then there was me. And I thought, I can’t say anything. These moms lost their child. I only lost a brother.
Margaret 26:54
I think had I been in your shoes, I would have probably reacted exactly the same way. Like where’s my voice safe to share? Where do I go where I can say my truth that doesn’t take from the magnitude of what it might feel like for a parent. So, did you ever find that space? Were you able to ever find a place with siblings who had lost a sibling or were in the journey with their sibling?
Cameron 27:22
So, there was one mother who approached me and said she had a son. And she thought I knew who her son was. And I did. And he had passed away and had a brother. There’s some group on Facebook, that you, you know, answer a couple of questions to be able to be admitted as a member. And I couldn’t connect with it. There was nothing guided, there was no one responding to these desperate messages of grief from other siblings, and it still exists, and I still see some posts. And I think this is what people use as an outlet. And I have yet to find anything that is a space for siblings who’ve lost their sibling to an overdose. There’s more information, and I tell this to people to maybe highlight so they can understand that it’s a lonely space. There’s more information if you type in a Google search on losing a pet than there is on losing a sibling.
Margaret 28:48
Cameron’s last statement just takes my breath away. How is it possible there’s more information on losing a pet than losing a sibling when you research online? How can that be possible?
Part of Cameron wanting to share was because of this truth. Siblings need and deserve more support in this family disease of addiction. Cameron generously shared the beautiful words of Bryce’s eulogy. The part I’ve chosen to share written by Cameron’s sister really highlights the sibling bond and pain with loss.
Cameron’s sister wrote, “you save two of your siblings lives and I’d be willing to bet along the way many others. You saved me from choking, and you saved Cam from drowning. If this were your sick way of winning well then, I’ll call out the fact that we spent the five years living a double life, Haley and Cameron by day and ineffective superheroes by night. We spent five years trying everything possible to save your life, and we couldn’t, and we really want to.”
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability and sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website, embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you!
