By Rosie E.
Dear Kyle,
I have never written to you and to be honest, it feels a little strange. It’s been something like three years since we had any kind of conversation, except for those strange telepathic feelings that seem to come over me every few months. We have some catching up to do.
The rest of the kids our age are off at college. They have cars and jobs and they complain about things like exams and loans. But where am I? I’m in a therapeutic boarding school learning how to live a healthy life because I’ll drink myself to death otherwise.
Today the students at my school were asked to pray for a young man who is in intensive care because of a drug overdose. He’d been sober before, but his relapse brought him right back to where he left off, and now he is flirting with death. It’s hard to believe that death is such a possibility for people so young.
At any second, drugs can take a life away from someone with a bright future, a loving family, and many friends. Addiction can rip away a son, a brother, a boyfriend, a friend, and affect lives in ripples wider than could have been imagined when pushing off for the first time.
I’ve been sober now for about two years, and my life has taken many turns for the better because of it. I have discovered the many gifts I was given by God and have used them to enrich my life. I have a renewed relationship with my family, I am college-bound, I am healthy, and for the most part I am happy. I made it to age 18! I have few things to complain about. I am so glad to be alive, to learn, and to love. I am grateful for all the things I can do.
I have a chance to tell my family I am sorry. I have a chance to graduate from high school. I have a chance to show my little sister how to drive, to propose a toast at her wedding.
But you never will. Your addiction took your life slowly. From the minute you touched drugs and alcohol, the phenomenon of craving set in and you no longer had control, the same way I don’t. I wonder what it was that separated me from you and the many people from my past. Why am I alive, and why aren’t you? For a long time I hated God for taking your life and saving mine. For a long time I desperately wanted to die, but couldn’t. What was the divine reasoning for your early death?
My family leader says that the reason he loves Native American spirituality so much is because the Native Americans learned early on that they couldn’t figure out the Higher Power, and so they stopped trying and just learned to accept the spirit in its ways. Your death has been a mystery to everyone who knew you, something that we cannot understand but have learned to accept as something that we cannot change.
Every day I feel you looking down on me, asking me and everyone else on earth to live a life that you couldn’t. The students at my school, The Family Foundation School, come from backgrounds accompanied by trouble and pain. We have been handed a miracle that you never had, a miracle that allows us to turn our lives around if we choose.
Your death can teach many lessons, but more importantly, your life should be celebrated as a gift. You were, are, and always will be loved beyond any addiction’s power. Though your disease took you away, it will never take away our love.
Happy 20th birthday, Kyle.
In memory of Kyle Lendenmann
October 31, 1989 – February 23, 2007
Honoring a Transformation
