Why would a recovering alcoholic and drug addict with more than twenty years of sobriety find himself making life plans with a fresh off the street junky who was trying to get her chaotic life together? An old Saint and an old Sinner getting together and making plans for the future? Because for more than thirty years, we had traveled in the same circles of heaven and hell, oftentimes together.

“Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.”

— Marie Curie

“When you’re in hell, only a devil can point the way out.”

– Joe Abercrombie

On February 3rd, 2024, I contacted my friend Juliet and asked her if she wanted to go to a punk show with me on the 24th of that month. She quickly said yes. She had not been to a show in a long time.

She never got to go.

A week before the show was going to take place, a mutual friend contacted me to let me know Juliet had gone to the emergency room, that she felt so ill she had taken herself to the hospital.

That’s where she had a cardiac arrest.

The doctors revived her and kept her alive for two more days. The day before I was going to travel from my current hometown of Reno to the San Francisco Bay Area to visit her in the hospital, the friend contacted me again to let me know she had passed on that afternoon.

Juliet had been having health problems, but neither I nor Juliet thought they were serious enough to be life-threatening. A prime reason that Juliet went so suddenly and quickly was because her body had been battered by years of drug abuse.

I am a recovering alcoholic and addict. I spent most of my teens and twenties awash in liquor and meth, among other substances. I managed to clean myself up when I turned thirty.

Juliet was part of my using history. We met in high school, and after high school I got involved in the speed scene. While I was stuffing rocket fuel up my nose, Juliet developed a taste for heroin. We would occasionally meet and trade drugs.

The first time I had mainlined heroin, that is, injected it, Juliet was the one who shot me up. At the time I had smoked heroin before, but I had never mainlined it. To say it was the most intense drug experience of my life is quite an understatement, and at the time I had tried just about every street drug out there. I describe the experience in detail in an article I wrote nearly four years ago.

Juliet was also part of my recovery history. After I set aside drugs and alcohol I started doing the things I couldn’t have dreamt of doing when I was getting wasted all of the time: Writing, going to college, and especially working out. I joined 24 Hour Fitness and worked out religiously, and I started running long distance races.

She also cleaned up her act, around the same time I had. But Juliet didn’t just get clean and sober, she got super clean and sober! She started working out as well and eventually became a certified physical fitness trainer.

She opened her own gym and held fitness bootcamps there, hour long sessions of interval training. I took one of her classes, thinking it would be easy since I was already a gym rat and a long-distance runner.

Nope.

I found out I was not as physically fit as I thought. The day after my first bootcamp with Juliet it took me about five minutes to sit up in bed! That was the beginning of my physical fitness upgrade. I started going to her bootcamps once a week, and I ended up getting in the best shape of my life.

Juliet provided me with key turning points in my drug and recovery lives, exposing me to parts of worlds I thought I knew, opening my eyes to new facets of those extreme cultures I had already thrown myself into. I never got caught up in heroin, but many of my friends struggle against that demon, and too many of my friends have died from it. Because of her I know what the stuff tastes like. I have a much better idea of what they’re up against, and that makes me a better person.

And because of her I also started on a path that would get me into the best shape in my life. She’s the reason I own my own kettlebells!

Unfortunately our lives would not follow the same trajectory. Throughout these years I’ve maintained my sobriety. The same was not true for Juliet. She relapsed, not too long after her business folded. She turned back to heroin.

Sometimes people in recovery relapse. That is, they use drugs or drink alcohol and blow all of their accumulated clean time. Sometimes people in recovery relapse because they had a few Coors Lights at a family picnic. But others go all the way, relapsing hard, such as when Juliet turned back to using heroin.

I lost track of Juliet for quite some time after her gym went out of business. Friends had told me that she started using again. Eventually she became estranged from most of her friends and family. During her second phase of heroin addiction people did not trust her when she reached out to them, when she asked for help. Usually she asked for money. Many people knew or quickly learned that she was only trying to get money to score drugs.

I don’t have all of the details, but I know she lost touch with virtually everyone she knew because of her fall back into junky culture. From what I understand, she wavered between using, to trying to get clean, to just trying to maintain herself in her circumstances. I don’t have the full story from those years, so the details are incomplete, but that’s how I understand it.

A few years ago I reconnected with Juliet through Facebook. Since we had last seen each other, I had really thrown myself into my writing. I was publishing novels, working on my blog, and promoting my works. She reached out to me, wanting to know more about my publishing endeavors and how I was trying to promote and develop my writing career.

We reconnected, mainly through writing. She expressed an interest in getting back into writing herself. I knew she had been an musician, but I did not know she had writing aspirations. I showed her some of my work and gave her a copy of my road trip novel.

She was not only interested in working on her own writing, she was helping me out with promotion as well as giving me feedback on my current projects. We met a few times in San Francisco, going out for lunch, talking about writing and the old days, and just hanging out.

During this time she expressed a desire to get herself together, to clean up her act, to try and better her life. She knew it was not going to be easy, trying to wean herself off of her drug habit. She was in the process of curtailing her drug use, only taking maintenance hits, mild amounts of heroin that were not going to get her high, taking just enough to keep her from diving into the DTs, the harsh and sometimes dangerous side-effects of heroin withdrawal, until she was able to get on medication.

When she told me she wanted to turn her life around I did earnestly believe her. She knew I was more than twenty years clean and sober. She knew that I was driving my life forward, trying to keep my work going and growing, and that I was dedicated to my sobriety. Even as old and battered as we were, we talked about what we wanted to do with our futures. And as we kept talking, our ideas about lifting ourselves up started to converge, to the point where the idea of collaborating our efforts, with writing, with finances, and even with living plans, started to intertwine

But my new dalliance with Juliet roused a few ires among my tribe. A few friends told me I shouldn’t be around her at all. They warned me that she would just take advantage of me, that if I kept associating with Juliet she would just drag me down with her. I was also told that she, as a recently active junky, was a threat to my sobriety. One person even insisted that the only reason I was establishing an active friendship with Juliet once more was purely for prurient interests. (That I was only thinking with my you-know-what.)

All of these comments glanced off of me. I didn’t bother trying to refute them, though I thought many of their assertions were ridiculous. In more than twenty years of sobriety I have been around many drunks and burnouts in all kinds of states of mind and inebriation. None of them came close to threatening my sobriety. I had hoped that most of my friends and colleagues would give me the benefit of a doubt, and trust that I knew what I was doing. But I did not let any of their disdain discourage me from trying to re-forge a friendship with Juliet.

Even so, I knew the desire to reconnect with this friend was strong, and I also knew it was going to be a challenge, being that she was still so close to her addiction, that she was struggling with money and housing along with her fight against junk. But for such a friend, for everything she had done for me and my life, I was more than ready to face that challenge, even knowing that there was a chance she could fall out again.

I realize that a lot of my friends were warning me out of a sense of concern and caution. Too often people in my shoes, recovering drunks and burnouts, can fall into traps that lead them, once again, down the path of substance abuse and general ruin. They begin to believe they can “have a drink once in a while,” or think that going on risky adventures won’t sway them. Too often friends and partners or even potential partners can lead them back down that rabbit hole of chaos. I’ve seen it before, even with people who have as much clean time as I have, going out and using again, and turning back into the train wrecks they once were.

But I also got a sense that my friends disdain for my active friendship with Juliet was not solely because they were worried about me. When Juliet hit the skids again, when she took herself out of the game by turning back to heroin, she disappointed a lot of people, friends who had been rooting for her, comrades who had offered their support… people who had been hoping for the best for her.

She broke their hearts when she had a hard relapse. I know, because it broke my heart too. To know that a friend who had done so much to encourage and support my life and sobriety had turned back down that road was a painful and discouraging turn of events. It’s hard to put into words the dark feelings that turned in all of us when that happened. I believe that many people, in trying to discourage me from reconnecting with Juliet, were led by their feelings about her downfall, because in finding out a friend of theirs was associating with Juliet again, all of that might have easily brought back those dark feelings, and that helped drive their warnings.

Even though I dismissed their concerns, I know I’m not made out of teflon. I was fully aware of what trying to mingle with Juliet could entail. She could relapse again, hard. And to deny that she could influence me would be folly. After all, she was someone who changed my life, more than once. I probably would not have experienced the heaven and hells of hard heroin use without her, and if it weren’t for her I wouldn’t own my own kettlebells. And I was quite well aware she could sweet talk me with her beauty, her sharp wits, her street-wise ways, and the kind of hellcat charm that I find so attractive. If there was ever a woman who could sneak past my boundaries and roadblocks, it was definitely her.

I have known people who have sunk to the point of virtually no return, tragic individuals who had sunk so low and done so much damage to themselves, physically and mentally, that their most likely path was any one of the trifecta of morbid outcomes that are expounded at twelve step meetings: Jails, institutions, and death. I knew she was not there yet. Far from it. I sensed she still had the strength and verve to make another go at sobriety, to right herself once again and not just survive, but thrive. Juliet had always been interested in artistic endeavors, and her desire to do so again had been reawakened. She started giving me feedback on my writing, and showing me pieces she had written. She even talked about getting back into music.

I don’t know for sure that things would have worked out for us. Juliet could have declined back into some bad habits, things I would not have been able to stand for. She might have changed her mind about us at some point, deciding that living with a staunch soberite would be too much. But I didn’t get the feeling that’s where we were headed. We were going to spend the weekend together, that weekend of the punk show for which I had bought her a ticket. I was going to go for walks with her and her newly adopted doggo, a small pupper she had recently acquired. I was going to surprise her with presents and a trip to a really nice restaurant, something I was looking forward to doing, especially since I knew she had been struggling financially and had not done such things for some time. That weekend could have been the first step towards our moving in together, with her coming out to live with me in Reno, or us joining forces and incomes to find a place in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She never would have gotten her little doggo if she hadn’t been thinking about her future. She would not have made such a commitment. I knew she was really sincere and determined to right herself, once again, to earnestly try and create a better future for herself.

And this time I would’ve been right by her side, all along the way, had her body been able to keep up with her spirit.

Losing Juliet was more than losing a friend. It was losing a possible partner, a possible future, and reconnecting with a woman whose influence on my life was second only to my mother. When she left, it created a great void before me, one that’s with me right now, in this moment, challenging my hopes and dreams. This loss was not simply like losing yet another friend. Her passing has altered me irreparably, for how many days I have left on this Earth.

At the very least, when she left this world, she did so knowing there was someone on her side, someone who was rooting for her, someone who believed in her… that she had a friend who wanted to be with her, and that I was an old friend that was willing to go beyond friendship, and be a true partner.

And this old addict, with more than two decades of sobriety under his belt, knows he is missing out, that had she not left this world so soon, she would have made me thrive as well.