I wrote about Patrick Carrigan in February 2014.
I wrote about him again in June 2014.
I’m writing about him now because he’s dead.
Everything I wrote about him the first two times caved in, swallowed up by a black hole where hopeful hearts slam headfirst into miswired brains.
The first two times, I essentially billed Carrigan as The Comeback Kid.
For 20 years, he had been a walking — make that a staggering — disaster. Two prison terms for making meth. Multiple arrests for being drunk and disorderly. Four or five DUIs — he couldn’t even remember the exact count.
Rehab after rehab after rehab, but nothing worked.
One day in 2009, he found himself standing on the Y-Bridge, 250 feet above a potential self-inflicted death, trying to sort out the most conflicting emotion a person can have.
“I couldn’t stand living,” he told me, “and I didn’t want to die.”
Instead of jumping, he vowed to himself that he would transform his life.
He did.
Fast-forward to 2014. He had stopped drinking. Stopped drugs. Enrolled in the University of Akron and earned a degree in geology. Fell in love, got married. Bought a house in the Falls. Regained custody of his son, who was taken away after his drunken father nearly killed him in a traffic crash.
Whenever people ask me to tell a story about them turning their lives around (it happens more often than you might think), I am highly skeptical. I know how difficult that is. The statistics are grim. Carrigan contacted me multiple times before I finally agreed to meet with him.
He appeared to be the real deal. Personable, intelligent, eager, likable. He seemed brutally honest, fessing up to every indiscretion, his expressive blue eyes unblinking. Most of all, he seemed extremely confident that, 14 years after being released from prison, he had become a new man.
The key, he said, was quitting drinking: “I finally realized that if you get off alcohol, you don’t really get tempted by everything else.”
Carrigan came to me because he wanted others — particularly prospective employers and recovering addicts — to know turnarounds are possible.
The second time I wrote about him, he was celebrating a breakthrough. Long underemployed because of his felony record — working as a welder instead of using his college training in geology — he had finally landed a job as a testing technician for a company that does work for industrial, commercial and government institutions. He said he got the job in part because of my previous column.
He was thrilled.
“I guess hard work and determination pay off,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
I hadn’t thought about Patrick Carrigan for a long time. But when his sister wrote to me a couple of weeks ago, I knew exactly whom she was talking about.
The email, sent the day after his death, said he had lost his job and had to file for bankruptcy. He had become “so down on himself” and was saddened by losing friend after friend “to this goddamn illness that is addiction.”
I had a tough time reading the rest of the message because of the moisture that built up in my eyes.
We love underdogs. We want to believe in tales of redemption. We want to believe that sheer personal willpower can lift us out of the darkest darkness.
It hurts even more when the underdog is immensely likable.
Carrigan’s death notice, printed Aug. 27, was brief. He “died unexpectedly at his home” at the age of 44. He left a 9-year-old son, Jaccobb. (Yes, the spelling is odd but correct.)
Last week, Patrick’s big sister, Lisa Carrigan Tomm, filled in the details during an emotional visit to the Beacon Journal.
He died “unexpectedly” because he backslid.
From a broader perspective, though, maybe it shouldn’t have been unexpected. After many years of sobriety, Carrigan began to join his co-workers for drinks after work. Perhaps he figured that, with his life in order, he could handle it. But, as his sister notes, “it’s a slippery slope.”
His perspectives began to change. He regressed to some of his old attitudes and ended up getting fired after mouthing off to his boss.
FALLING BACK
Lugging his felony record and yet another strike against him, the only job he could land was back with the welding company.
A series of injuries suffered back in his wild-man days — a tibia and fibula broken so badly that amputation was almost required, a broken hip on the other side — made welding physically painful. Then he hurt his bad leg again on the job. Because he had been hired through a temp agency and was unable to perform, he was fired again.
Carrigan also was in the dumps because of the deaths of multiple close friends, especially a woman who, after years of being clean, overdosed out of the blue.
The only thing that never wavered was his love for his son.
“He worshipped his son, and his son worshipped him,” Lisa says.
The boy’s life changed forever on Aug. 19, a Friday. Late that morning, while he was at school, Patrick and Lisa were texting back and forth about their parents’ 50th anniversary picnic, planned for that Sunday.
When Patrick failed to pick up his son at school just a few hours later, the school called his wife, who collected Jaccobb and drove home.
They found Patrick’s keys and wallet on the bed. The bathroom door was closed. They couldn’t get in because he was on the floor — dead from an overdose.
Although the toxicology report has not been completed, his sister believes it was probably “oxy or maybe fake oxy.”
When asked whether Patrick left a note, she says, “No, nothing. I know this was an accident. There is no way in hell he would ever leave Jaccobb. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.”
Patrick’s wife is Jaccobb’s stepmom. He is now living with his maternal grandmother because his mom is serving time for a drug conviction.
Jaccobb’s “got a lot of questions,” Lisa says.
So do a lot of other people.
“We all knew he was drinking,” Lisa says. “We had no idea he was using anything else.”
PRAISE FROM FRIENDS
Roughly 350 people showed up for the funeral, she says, including multiple people who told her they never would have gotten through their geology classes without Patrick’s help; a woman who said she was 10 years clean and sober only because of Patrick’s encouragement; a slew of folks who said he helped them through various personal crises.
“Every single person there, no matter how low they got in their life, Patrick was there trying to help them,” Lisa says.
So here we had a guy who seemed to have made a storybook recovery, a strong, bright, motivated, well-intentioned individual. But he simply couldn’t do it.
What’s the lesson?
Lisa answers instantly: “Say something!
“I think the lesson is say something. Reach out. Reach out.
“That was the theme all through the funeral. All of his friends were saying, ‘Damn it, Patrick, why, why, why didn’t you just say something?’ ”
Some human beings arrive pre-wired in dangerous ways. As Lisa notes, citing the struggles of other family members, “It’s a predisposition.”
But it’s not an inevitability. And that’s what makes this so sad.
Patrick’s death came with a little extra kick in the gut for Lisa, a nurse who is the site coordinator for the Hospice of the Western Reserve in Lakewood: She had just been asked to sit on Cuyahoga County’s opiate task force.
So why did she contact me only one day after Patrick died?
“I want to make sure the end of his story is told so that it helps somebody else,” she says, tearing up.
“Because if all of this is for nothing, I don’t think I can handle it.”
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com. He also is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bob.dyer.31.