The oldest grandson has agreed to go to drug and alcohol rehab following the housing meeting. The rehab starts early November and runs for six weeks.
Grandma went to the same rehab in the mid 1990s and was successful there. She had previously been unsuccessful in a native rehab in Toronto, which closed down shortly after she left in the early 1990s. Grandma says the grandson will like it at the rehab in the north because they can cook their own breakfast. The waking up at 6 am to eat and do their chores, less so. During the day, she says there was programming, circles and groups, with an hour’s break after lunch.
In the evening, you were free to do what you wanted, she says, so they mostly played boardgames and watched tv. There were workbooks to be done, but you could finish them whenever. It was pretty relaxed. “You could do sweatlodge there,” she says, “which is nice. I think he’ll do very well.”
Housing sent over the forms to be filled in, a month and a half wait before he would be sent. He would have to be sober for a week before going. That would be the difficult part: sobering him out for a whole week. Grandma managed to get sober through sheer willpower for that week herself. She’s unsure he can white-knuckle it like she did.
Grandma’s husband, beside himself at her leaving, refused to leave the local native center during her absence, the director letting him stay all day, evening, and night. Staying with him in his sorrow. Him unable to stay alone without Grandma. Grandma says the native centers actually cared back then, the director going above and beyond to ensure he didn’t fall into deeper despair.
The first rehab Grandma went to the main staff were sleeping together, she says, which complicated things. Programming suffered. She shared a room with someone from Oneida reserve. Someone else had snuck in a Chinese fighting fish in a small tank, another a rat, she remembers. They were both later kicked out for other infractions and Grandma acquired the fish and the rat. She says life became a lot better in rehab after that.
On Mondays at the rehab, she says they would lay on a cushion on a table and they would massage your whole body, which she enjoyed, so full of stress. Everyone looked forward to Mondays and were always in a good mood that day.
An annoying man started pressuring her for sex at the rehab, so she ended up leaving with someone else, a man named Ernie who was leaving that day, who brought her back to Kitchener. He killed himself shortly thereafter. Another friend lost. She blames the rehab center for his death.
Grandma remembers cleaning at the first rehab, not because they asked her to, but because she was so bored from lack of programming. They weren’t stopping people from victimizing in the rehab, she says, so Grandma and Ernie took off early, before 6 am to escape being seen as they left.
She says if the staff had not showed their own sicknesses and lack of healing to the clients, Ernie would still be alive today. Him telling her, “why are all our native centers sick? I was really hoping to get somewhere here. This center is fucked up,” on their way home to Kitchener.
Two or three years later she decided to go to the rehab up north, her second time, and finally kicked her behaviours. She reminisces on the beach there. How she didn’t want to come back, bar her kids and her husband.
She hopes it’s still like that for the grandson.
Do you believe recovery can change the course of a family, or do we carry our patterns with us no matter how hard we try to break them?
If this story makes you think about recovery, second chances, or the possibility of breaking generational patterns, restack or share it. Someone else might need to believe that change is still possible.
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