When he was about three years old, Cliff’s mother and his father divorced, and his mother remarried. Following this marriage, there were two additional children. By the time he was a teenager, he felt somewhat like an outsider in this new family configuration. Cliff speaks of his mother as the person who stood up for him. He did meet his natural father when in high school and spent summers with him. Sadly, his father died too young. He does not have a close relationship with his stepdad, and now his mother and his stepdad have separated. He remains close to his mother and currently “calls her every day.”
Cliff married Michele while quite young and they had two children together, a daughter, Chelsea, and a son Michael. At first, all was going well; Michelle attended to the needs of the children and Cliff worked hard to support and provide for the family. But at some point, Cliff says, Michelle felt the need to party on weekends and introduced Cliff to powder cocaine as a way to unwind. Later a friend introduced him to smoking crack as a better way to get “high.” Cliff now becomes what he himself described as a “functioning addict.” At some point, he and Michele divorced.
Michael, Cliff’s son, moved into the city and began using heroin. Cliff was deeply concerned about the possibility of overdose and made several rushed trips from Spencerport to the city when Michael did not answer his phone. After a few of these trips, he moved in with Michael. He told me that four- or five times Michael had overdosed and needed Narcan. At some point, Michael ended his drug use and has now been clean for five months. Cliff hopes they can rebuild the closeness they once had.
Eventually, the drugs were affecting Cliff’s work and his cousin had to fire him. At this point, Cliff says, “I got the case of the f—it’s: nothing mattered, I’m a crack head; I stole to support my habit; got arrested a couple of times; and lived rough.”
I asked him what brought him to REACH. “I had nowhere to go. I needed to quit the drugs; they were no longer effective.” He had been spending the nights wandering the streets, some nights he crashed at a “trap house” (a house that distributed drugs) where he earned his drugs by cleaning up, etc. Early this past January he was at the Villa of Hope just hanging around. As they were closing up for the day a staff member asked if he had anywhere to go. Cliff said, “no” and was driven to The Vineyard where he met Dr. Michael who took him to REACH at Barberry Terrace. There he was able to be safe and begin his journey out of a drug life.
But now he faces some challenges: How to reconnect with his cousin and get back to regular work and how to reconnect with his children and share in their lives. He knows that he lost their trust and wants to rebuild that. He is hoping to get his own place but finds the process of applying and meeting the requirements slow and demanding. Cliff has been drug-free for just over a month now. He is determined to stay this way. We wish him well on his journey to full health and reconnecting with his family.
Written by Peter Peters, Board Co-Chair and Advocacy Leader
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