My older brother Stephen’s descent into drug addiction began in south-east London in 1969. It started with cannabis at school and escalated to LSD and amphetamines. By 1973, my 18-year-old, Jimi Hendrix-loving, Afghan-coat-wearing brother was taking heroin regularly and committing crimes to fund his habit.
I was 14 when the hell of Stephen’s heroin addiction began. Like my parents, I was enveloped by feelings of shame on the chocolate-box pretty but stifling housing estate where we lived in Eltham. Stephen’s antics regularly made the local papers, most notoriously when he stripped naked, covered himself in yellow paint and jumped over the hedge in front of our cute little house. He was on a bad acid trip, believing himself to be in a prisoner-of-war camp, the hedges transformed into barbed wire. My parents were unable to endure the gossip and we moved away in 1975, by which time Stephen had already had spells in young offender institutions for burglaries.
In the last six years of his life, Stephen was in and out of rehab. He had nearly died before – he had a couple of near misses after using heroin following a period of abstinence, not realising his body would struggle to tolerate the same dose. Either those scares weren’t frightening enough to make him want to get clean, or he just couldn’t stop. I never got the chance to ask him. He was found dead in a toilet cubicle when he was 24.
I have been haunted by feelings of guilt about Stephen ever since his death. Was it my fault he was unhappy? What could I have done to have helped him more? Did our parents love me more than him? Why didn’t I talk to him more?
Stephen was four years older than me, which our parents felt was perfect – Stephen was expected to look after me as my mum’s older brother Jack had looked out for her, but he never did. In spite of our mum and dad’s efforts to ensure Stephen had enough love and attention after his little sister came along, my big brother didn’t cope well with my arrival. Family albums show him as a contented, happy little boy but after my birth, Stephen looks anxious and withdrawn. Home movies show me teetering on brick walls singing I’m the King of the Castle while Stephen experiences one mini wobble and jumps down. This ultra-cautiousness jars when I consider the risks he was to take with his life later on.
I have had a blessed, fulfilling life in many ways, but my brother’s death remains its defining event. My parents were understandably devastated at the loss of their only son, and I spent a lot of my time looking after them throughout my 20s and 30s, feeling intense pressure to compensate for what I always think of as Stephen’s failure to thrive – I was living proof that they weren’t bad parents. How could I have made time for a family of my own? A more uncomfortable truth is that I was terrified that as a parent I could experience the hell my parents went through with my brother. How would I have coped with a child like Stephen? I couldn’t take the risk. Sibling survivor guilt has featured large in my life too. Why him, not me?
But when my mum died in 2018, everything changed. I got a commission to write a piece about a London hotel and so, for the first time in decades, I found myself in Leicester Square, where Stephen had overdosed in January 1980. With both parents gone and all remnants of duty and responsibility for their happiness long expired, I felt a gut-wrenching sadness at the loss of my messed-up brother’s young life, at the astonishing waste, and everything he had missed.
That day, all the guilt and shame I’d shared with my parents lifted as I was finally able, 38 years after Stephen had died, to grieve. I bought a candle and a miniature liqueur (he loved Cointreau) and I sat close to where he had died, and held a little vigil. It felt so good to experience loss and love instead of guilt. Why had I felt Stephen’s destruction to be in part my fault? I was just a child when it all began. I didn’t have the wisdom or the life skills in my teens to help him out of it. How could I have?
While my parents were alive, I couldn’t feel anything because I was so consumed by compensating for their loss. I felt emotionally inadequate and at times full of self-loathing. It went something like this: if I didn’t love him, I must have contributed to his feelings of self-hatred and I am therefore partly to blame for his death. Now that I can finally grieve for myself, the survivor guilt that has haunted me for decades has gone.
I didn’t understand then why Stephen was so hellbent on self-destruction, but what I now know is that it wasn’t my fault. Stephen and I weren’t close – it’s hard to get close to an addict – but I cared about him deeply, and badly wanted him to get clean. I loved it when he called me his pet name for me, Lins, in rare displays of affection. I indulged myself with these treasured little memories that day. It was an immense relief to recall something positive. The release from guilt felt like being let out of a kind of prison.
Stephen always said I was the brainy one. I wonder what he would have made of the way my life has turned out. I wonder more keenly what his life might have been like if he had survived. He would be 68 now. I recall him being a competitive cyclist as a young teenager, an avid lover of rock music and a Monty Python fan. He liked drawing, too. Who knows what he might have achieved if heroin hadn’t taken everything from him?
Lynne Wallis is a journalist specialising in how people are recruited into cults, and how they can recover and reintegrate back into mainstream society
In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline on 988. In Australia, the Opioid Treatment Line is at 1800 642 428 or call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015
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