Senior Portfolio: Nonfiction Article for Recovery Today
By Austin Hendricks
It’s the first warm day in February and the sun is shining in Marion, Indiana. There’s a strong breeze blowing from the west, enough to make the patio furniture on the neighboring houses rock. I walk up to the blue house with white accents in a still-being-developed neighborhood. The lawn has a tiny tree in front and no grass to be seen. I knock on the door of the house of Shane and Amy Beal, ready to talk to them about Shane’s life with addiction.
It’s quite the suburban scene, knowing that the man I’m about to talk to was in prison only a few years ago.
Their elementary-aged daughter welcomes me into their house and their dog, Frankie refuses to leave my side as soon as I step through the threshold. Shane appears in sweats and a hoodie and hugs me, as does Amy, his wife. We sit down and chat for a bit before I turn on my recorder.
“Tell me about how this all started,” I say.
Shane smiles. His struggle with addiction started when he was very young. His life was going well. He had loving parents, a good home, and was getting a fine education. Then, in the sixth grade, he was introduced to alcohol.
“I immediately liked it,” he says, a sort of enjoyment in his voice. “I mean I took one sip and I loved it.” He continued by saying that earlier in his life he had been molested by a babysitter and alcohol had made him finally able to put those feelings away. “I didn’t have to feel those things.” From there, Shane began drinking more frequently and then started to steal his parent’s pills. He drank all through high school and quite a bit during college. All the while, he was trying to escape the bad feelings that come with living life. He met his wife, Amy in college and they hit it off. Shane was studying to become a lawyer and Amy was studying to be an elementary school teacher. The two married and had their first son, Elijah in January of 1998. A few years later, they had their second son, Seth. Life was going well, but Shane continued to drink. After a while, the alcohol wasn’t enough anymore and he moved on to harder substances such as cocaine.
He continued to do this throughout his marriage, but by 2006, Amy couldn’t do it anymore. They separated and their divorce was finalized in December of 2007. Shane, now without his family moved out and began to live life on his own. His family supported him financially, and he saw his sons every other weekend, but everyone knew he was still chasing the escapism that comes with drug use. He continued looking for it. He described himself as having periods of 30 to 90 days where he would be clean and that was enough to give people hope.
“It was just this big cycle,” Amy says. “I would reinvest in him only for him to fall back down again.”
They thought that upon the birth of their daughter, Avery, in 2009 that she would be the thing to finally bring him back up and into their lives again. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Shane’s addiction slowly got worse and worse until the winter of 2015, when he was finally arrested for forging a check, and later evidence proved him an illegal drug user. “That might have been my lowest point. But when you think about it, it was also my highest point [in regards to recovery].”
Shane was sentenced to four years in prison with an earliest possible release date of December 16, 2017—after his oldest son’s high school graduation.
Shane spent 486 days in prison.
Some of that time was spent in solitary confinement but most of it was spent in dormitory-style living. He said that, despite being surrounded by 144 other men, he never felt more isolated than when he was in prison.
The days were long. They were fed breakfast starting at 4 AM, be in treatment (or what he called “programming”) from 7:30 AM to 4 PM, and be served dinner.
“It was 486 days of bologna sandwiches...I used to like bologna,” Shane said, smiling.
After dinner, Shane would go to the Rec Center, then Chapel, then do some journaling, and be in bed by 9 PM every day.
“[Despite] the routine, they would change it up on you every day...so one day you would have breakfast at 4 and the next you might not have it until 6:30...but you had to be up by 4...I think that’s, that’s the ‘breaking the human spirit.’”
At this point in the interview, Amy had gotten a phone call and had left the room for a bit. When she came back, I asked her how Shane’s time in prison affected her and her children.
“I tried not to think about it,” a few tears began to form in her eyes and she took her glasses off to wipe her eyes with a tissue. “As long as no one asked me about it and I didn’t think about it, I was fine.”
Shane said that writing his sons and visits from his daughter kept them involved with each other. And it was through writing that they could work through the things that they all wanted to say to each other. Elijah, their oldest son worked through the disappointment he felt, Seth, their middle son, kept up the humor from their relationship, and Amy continued to make sure their daughter, Avery, was able to see him every few weekends.
Seeing as I began to strike some still raw feelings, I turned the conversation towards the days following Shane’s release. He smiled and he began to detail how it felt as if the weight of the world lifted off of his shoulders.
“There was so much relief...but so much had changed.”
He detailed how fast it felt to be in a car because the fastest he had ever gone in eighteen months was the speed at which his legs moved. The officer he was riding with had taken him to McDonald’s, unannounced to him, and asked Shane what he wanted. His first meal outside of prison was two double cheeseburgers, fries, and a Coke.
“Sure beats a bologna sandwich,” he said with a laugh.
He was picked up by his parents from the courthouse and dropped off in Amy’s driveway. She came home and saw him standing there and hugged him.
“The first thing I noticed is he had lost about twenty pounds...so I went to get him some clothes that fit him.”
She then told him to get in the car because they had to go watch their son Seth’s golf game a few towns over. Amy remarked how Shane didn’t want to ride in the golf cart with them, but instead preferred to walk from hole to hole. Shane said it was because he felt a sense of freedom on this course that he hadn’t felt for a long time.
The couple remarried in 2017 and talked of leaving Marion and starting all over in South Carolina. Shane had yet to find a job in the first three months of leaving prison, as many places refused to hire convicted felons.
“It felt like the community had turned against me,” Shane said.
Soon though, he was hired at Grant Blackford Health in July and was promoted to a Case Manager in October. He felt like that wasn’t enough though, as much as he liked it. He felt like he wanted to open up his home to all the struggling addicts and help them with their addiction. He and Amy began praying about what to do about these feelings. They both knew they wanted to help the addicts of Grant County, but didn’t know how to go about it, much less where the resources came from. A few weeks later they ran into some friends who had the means to donate a house to their cause, which is how Hope House was born.
Shane and Amy now work on their business of Hope House in Marion, which opens its doors next month. Their mission, as said on their Facebook page is:
“Our mission field is sober living homes for men and women which provide a Christ-based environment for our residents to find recovery from a substance use disorder.”
What Shane is most proud of is that everyone who is employed there and the board members have had addiction touch their lives in some way. Some members have been former addicts themselves, others are family members of addicts.
“You cannot offer support if you don’t understand what it’s like to go through addiction.”
Hope House joins other sobriety organizations in Grant County such as The Amara House—a space dedicated for women to transfer out of situations of abuse and addiction.
According to Shane, addiction never goes away. It just gets to be a smaller and smaller voice in your head. He calls them whispers.
The two of them now happily live with their daughter and dog in a new house they built, right next to Amy’s parents. Shane is busy with the opening of Hope House next month and posts inspirational pages from his prison journal on his Facebook page. Their sons are each at college now, and while I was there, Amy’s father, Jim walked in and the three of them discussed their plans to watch their oldest son’s graduation from Northwestern University in June.
Shane has come a long way from where he started.
As I left their house for their family to enjoy the rest of their Sunday, I couldn’t help but admire the neighborhood being built around them. The warm temperatures and the western breeze across the lots marked with little plastic flags seemed to say “yes, there is a way to create something new, even from nothing.”
If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction or substance abuse please call the National Drug Helpline at 1-844-289-0879.
Austin Hendricks is a senior theatre and writing major at Indiana Wesleyan University. He finds that writing is one of the best ways to express himself. When not writing, Austin is usually working in the theatre, attempting to find his light.
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