God Bless This Mess(68)

In all the time I’d spent in LA, it was only the second time I’d been out to that seaside town, and just knowing I was headed to the beach made me smile.

I was still thinking about Miss Andrea, and about Tyler, but I had spent a good part of that month trying to get myself centered, and the beach was the perfect place for me to get back to trying to do that.

It was a beautiful day spent hanging out with girlfriends, watching the sun go down over the Pacific as the sky turned all sorts of amazing colors. And I went to sleep to the smell of the salt air, and completely forgot to plug my phone in before I went to bed.

I picked it up when I woke up, and was staring at a blank screen. I borrowed a cord and let it charge, and as soon as it turned on I saw five missed calls from my mom, along with a bunch of text messages: “CALL ME.”

I called her right away.

“Oh, thank God,” she said when she picked up the phone.

“What is wrong?” I asked.

“It’s Patrick. He overdosed last night. He’s in the hospital.”

“What? Is he okay?”

“No,” she said. “He’s on a ventilator. Please come home, Hannah. He needs you.”

My relationship with my brother had always been strained, and for the last couple of years, it was clear that he’d been running with a rough crowd. He’d been drinking. He’d done all kinds of drugs, both uppers and downers, and my parents didn’t seem to be able to do anything to stop him.

While I’d been struggling with all of these matters of the heart and trying to come to grips with the mistakes I’d made, he’d been struggling in a whole different way—acting out and causing my parents all kinds of stress, like he’d always done, ever since he was a little kid. And I’ll be honest: my first reaction when my mom told me the news was anger.

I hung up the phone and walked down by the water, and I sat on a rock, and I didn’t cry, and I didn’t scream . . . I just sat there thinking, This cannot be happening.

I couldn’t get a flight home that day. Everything was booked. While I was trying to figure out how I could get home, Tyler let me know that his mom had passed away the night before, too. They took her off the ventilator. She was gone. Miss Andrea, who was so warm and welcoming to me that she made me think I could fit right into Tyler’s life, was gone. Tyler’s mom was gone. It just broke my heart. I told him how sorry I was.

I also let Tyler know that my brother had overdosed, and that he was on a ventilator, and he told me how sorry he was for me.

He told me they were going to plan some sort of a celebration of life for Miss Andrea. “I think she would have wanted you to come,” he said.

“Of course I’ll come. I want to be there,” I responded. “Just let me know when.”

He texted later that day to say he was thinking of me, which I thought was so sweet and unexpected when he already had so much to deal with on his own.

We were both going through these nightmares at the same time, and we seemed to be able to lean on each other. The weight of what was happening was just so much more important than any of the problems we’d had. Our hearts rose above the mess of it all when it mattered most.

*

I flew home the next morning, March 2, with nothing but some sweats and whatever else I could fit into the overnight bag I had brought with me to Malibu.

I didn’t think I’d be in Alabama for more than a few days.

When I arrived at the hospital, my parents told me the doctors were just taking Patrick off the ventilator. At first I thought that meant the worst, but what they meant was he was breathing on his own. He was awake. He was gonna make it—and that, they said, was a miracle.

Patrick had apparently ingested an opioid that was laced with three times the lethal dose of fentanyl. He didn’t know it was laced with fentanyl at all.

When I first got there, I was still angry at him. But when I walked into his room and saw him in that hospital bed, the anger was replaced by something else. I felt numb in some ways, like I just couldn’t believe it.

It looked like he was almost embarrassed to see me; as if I was the mom and he was scared about what I might say. And I might have acted that way toward him in the past. But as he lay there, looking so broken, it hit me: I was just so glad that he was alive. I didn’t want him to be scared of me. This wasn’t the time to lecture him.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said.

I told him I loved him. And I prayed with him.

It was only later on that I said to him, “So . . . what’s next? I mean, things have got to change after this, right?”

Thankfully, Patrick agreed.

He embraced the idea of going into rehab, which was a requirement for him to leave the hospital. And because he was serious about it, I did some research and asked some friends and found him a really strong in-patient program down in Texas. He never could have afforded it himself, and I don’t think my parents could have afforded it in that moment, either. Thankfully, because I had made some money from going on TV, I was able to wire the large deposit they needed to secure him a spot.

They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. In that moment, everything I had been through, all the pain and embarrassment and shaming I’d endured, somehow seemed worth it.

*

Patrick developed pneumonia in the hospital and had to wait a few days for his lungs to get better before traveling to Texas.