Rebound: Life After Divorce & Addiction

by Matthew Andrews

My sister-in-law finally made my bed on the living room coach. Before turning in, she went to the kitchen and carefully took all the sharp knives and locked them in the basement. She pocketed the key before coming to say goodnight.

My drinking had been out of control for years. At business school, I fell asleep behind the wheel of my girlfriend’s car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. The car flipped. I woke up going full speed down the highway, upside down, waiting to see if I would live or die. Amazingly, I escaped with no major injuries, only scrapes. The state police officer who arrived on the scene took one look at me standing next to the wreck, shaken but in one piece.

“Son, you’re one lucky bastard!” he said. “I have seen more than one Escort flip but have never seen anyone walk away alive. I don’t like pulling dead bodies out of a wreck, so how about being more careful?” The car was totaled except for the six-pack of Sam Adams Summer Ale bottles I had in the back seat. They – ironically – had not shattered.

A month after moving from my brother’s place into my dumpy studio, I went to our large family Thanksgiving carrying the shame of my now public infidelity. My paternal grandmother, a spiritual woman then in her eighties, took me aside.

“There is good stuff in you, Matt. I have seen it,” she told me. “It is not how you fall that counts in life, but how you pick yourself up.”