THE MORTAL WOUND

Blaser shares a family memoir of conflict and drug abuse.

In the prologue to this brief but emotionally powerful remembrance, the author informs readers that her son, Luke, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2017. In the years before his death, Luke lived a troubled life, in and out of prison, drug rehabilitation programs, and halfway houses. When sober, Luke was bright, charming, and talented, but the combination of untreated ADHD and an unstable childhood led him into a tragic spiral of drug abuse and mental illness. Blaser sees Luke’s life and death as linked to her own experience, which she describes in detail: Born in Basel, Switzerland, she came to the United States in 1964 to work temporarily as an au pair and married the troubled scion of a Baltimore family after becoming pregnant with Luke. She eventually ended her marriage, but not before enduring years of her husband’s drug use and infidelity, and she was often forced to manage her son’s erratic behavior on her own. Because Luke was let down repeatedly by an indifferent social welfare system, the author became a social worker herself, paying her own way through college and graduate school. Luke’s life, however, continued to founder, and Blaser was both frightened by him and disappointed by her inability to help him. “Being the parent of an addict means pain, doubt, regret, anger, guilt. You’re trapped. There is no user’s manual.” A sense of captivity, of feeling bound to a beloved but self-destructive child, is a key theme of the narrative. This book is written clearly, and readers will gain both practical and emotional insights into the complex and destructive results of intergenerational drug and alcohol abuse. Unfortunately, the brevity of the narrative and the simplicity of the prose style result in a less than fully developed understanding of the main actors; Blaser’s life, as described in outline form here, is worthy of richer descriptions and a stronger contextual setting.

A heartbreaking but ultimately unsatisfying consideration of the origins and consequences of addiction.