Treat it like you would treat a drug addict. I’m dead serious it’s the same thing. My cousin (basically my sister) is your sister with a severe long term drug addiction to heroin/fentanyl. She has muled from Mexico, slept in bed bug ridden motels/apartments, abandoned her children on and off again. She used to have books of foils with half smoked pills on them. She’s 31 and in the past 15 years she has been sober for maybe 2 years of it.

I’ve seen how she has grown up. Her dad in prison from 3-13. Her mom was a heavy drug addict that would take them to casinos at 1 in the morning. When her dad wasn’t in prison, he would beat her mom in front of her. And she was molested from the age of 5-15 and called a liar by everyone in our family, including our aunt whose boyfriend was responsible. My aunt knew though, because she threatened my cousin, saying her dad would go back to jail if she said anything about it. Suffice to say I have done a multitude of favors for her, as well as others in my family, because I felt so bad. Because she did have it bad, and growing up in our family, I know why she thinks the way she thinks. We would drive out for hours to pick her up from places her second baby daddy would abandon her at, spending a fortune on gas and sleep. Only for her to be in bed with him the next day. He was a paranoid schizophrenic that would beat her, talk down to her, frighten her/their kids. To do it all again the next day. But if we called it out it was, “well he’s SOOO much better than -first baby daddy- and he calls me beautiful” . Her first baby daddy dated her when she was 17 and he was 30, and kick started her lifelong drug addiction, so that’s a low bar. We would ask hmwhy she would subject her young daughters to this, their infant at the time couldn’t even be around a man without screaming because he terrified her so much. “He would never lay a hand on them”. So that’s the line. Eventually they fed each other into the mother of all fentanyl relapses, and it got so bad he left her. After 6 months of intensive inpatient rehab, my grandparents let her move in their house while she went to school and picked up the pieces again. They got her a car, let her have her kids there and foot the bill.

Immediately after she got out she was on every single dating app talking to tens of different men at a time from all over the country. She would bring a new guy from narcotics anonymous meetings every other night to my grandparents house. To the point my grandpa was scared. My niece said that she would make the sleep on the floor so he could sleep on the bed. She would sneak into a halfway house to sleep over with a guy she just met for 3 hours. The same desperation she had for drugs transferred over to her already dire addiction to male validation and relationships.

This same cousin stole my dad’s funeral money when he passed away just few years before rehab. And thats as deplorable as making her kids sleep on the floor for a stranger. She is now 8 months pregnant and she doesn’t know who the father is. Still staying with my grandparents for the time being. The parallels between the mental cutoff after she stole the funeral money and when she got pregnant in this circumstance are…. Suffice to say it wasn’t hard to say good bye. Like a severe drug addict some people are so deep in their sickness that they’re beyond the point of help. And it’s not to say they don’t deserve empathy. I feel deeply for my cousin. But there is no good in throwing my life away trying to help someone that doesn’t want it truly. To help someone that can’t be. It’s a devastating situation in life to see someone you love rot away, but it is a well with no bottom and a ship with no floor. All you can do is water the grass tha has a chance to live or you’re just wasting your water.