Coming Clean

By Jessie Warren

In the writing of Coming Clean, over fifteen years, I had several titles in mind, but God gave me Coming Clean. When arrested by the police, you're taken to an interrogation room, and an officer comes into the room. He tells you to come clean. Well, using heroin for twenty-seven years, I was able to elude the law, but I wasn't able to elude God. God sat me down and said to me, "Come clean." A further confirmation that God picks the title is when I went to a local art school, and I told the class of my mental idea for the cover of the book, and what I needed was for them to use their artistic talents to put my mental picture on paper. About twenty-five students submitted their work. The first drawing I saw I knew it was the one that I'll use. You see, I snorted heroin for that twenty-seven years. If you notice, the word clean is coming from my nose. The student was not aware of this. I had not told her. God has been with me throughout this process step-by-step.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637107010

Book preview

Mama

Mama was an alcoholic for most of her life. She suffered many of the hardships that being an alcoholic brought. From a child to becoming an adult, I fought the bottle with her. She would scratch blood from my arms as I poured her liquor down the drain. That did not work. I furnished her entire apartment after she promised me she would not drink anymore. She could not keep her promise. I remember threatening bootleggers that I would burn down their houses if they sold her anything to drink. I even threatened liquor store owners, but that did not work. My mama died February 28, 1993, but by the grace and mercy of God, she had lived clean of alcohol the last fourteen years of her life, and I will write about those fourteen years.

Mama moved to Virginia to settle my stepfather’s estate. He had left some property, and since they never divorced, she had the power of attorney. In New York, I got the word that Mama had stopped drinking. I did not believe it after all that she had been through and all the failed attempts to stop in the past. I had given up hope that she would stop. But I am glad God did not give up on my mama. God’s blessings extend from everlasting to everlasting. He blessed me to spend six years with my mama before he took her up in glory. I will cherish those years and will be forever thankful. During those years, my mama and I got the opportunity to mend some fences. I was well aware of the resentment I had against my father for they were many, and they were deep, but I was not as aware that I had some even deeper resentments that I held against my mother.

I had been in Virginia for about a year. I was at work one day when I received word that my mama had suffered a stroke and was rushed to the hospital. When I walked into her room. She was lying in bed sleeping after being sedated by the doctors. I noticed she had a needle in her hand with nothing connected to it. I asked the doctor why it was there, and he told me because oftentimes stroke victims would suffer additional strokes, and if that happened, they would not have to search for a vein. It was at that moment I realized my mama was mortal. You sorta think your parents will live forever. I remember Mama telling me, You all are going to miss me when I am gone, and I would say, You are not going anywhere. You will live to see your great-great-great-grandchildren. Now I sit looking at the face of my frail mama and thinking I could lose her.

Mama recovered from the stroke and came home, but that thought of her mortality stayed with me. I never told her about it, but it brought me closer to her. It motivated me to get to know my mama on a much deeper level. I would call her and tell her I was on my way over and if there was anything she needed. Usually, she would say, Bring me a soda, and I would pick up a case. I had begun to spend time with her. I would stop over, and sometimes, Mama would be getting ready to soak her feet in a foot tub. I would take the tub fill it full of hot water and get a bar of ivory soap along with a sponge and a towel. I would soap the sponge really good and soak her feet for a few minutes in the hot water. Then I would take one foot at a time and wash it. I would put so much soap on her feet from the sponge that her feet would be nice and soapy. Then I would work the soap between each toe and massage her foot from toe to heel. I would tease her with this little piggy went to market, and she would laugh. More important than pampering her was the talking we did. I remember asking her, during one of her foot massages, Mama, have you ever been in love? She answered off the top of her head and said, Yes, of course. I said again, Mama, tell me if you have ever been in love. This time, she thought about it, sadly shook her head, and said no.

Here, my mama is in her sixties and has never been in love. I took it upon myself to show her love and to show her what love is. I started by telling her how much I loved her, and I began hugging her. When I hugged her, she did not return the hug. She kept her arms down by her side, but I was determined and did not allow that to stop me. I continued to be affectionate with her. And one day, I went to hug her, and lo and behold, she hugged me back. I knew I was getting through that wall she had erected over the years. I understood that because she had so many children, she did not have time for love.

Life has a way of revisiting us through regrets, resentments, things we should have done, and things we did. Mama was no different. In her final years, her life revisited her, and she had a lot of regrets especially when it came to her children. Mama never told me this, but as I watched her dealing with her sobriety, she would go out of her way for us even though we were grown. When I called her from New York and told her I wanted to come to Virginia with my family, even though she had only three bedrooms, and I had a wife and three children, she saw it as a chance to make up for some of the things she did not do for me as a boy, and she said without any hesitation, Come on. Mama would give up her last dime if one of her children asked for it. I remember how important her life insurance was to her, but there were times she would give my brother her insurance premium to pay his rent and then come to me for the money to pay her insurance. She just wanted to make up for her past, and I understood that.

Mama was brought up in the church, and through God’s great mercy and grace, she found her way back. She rejoined the choir. I was brought up in the church also, and that same mercy and grace were extended to me. I found my way back, but during this time, I was still on the outside and would only attend church on those occasions when my mother had a special program or Easter. On those occasions, I would sit in the pews and look at my Mama singing, and I could see her journey. I knew how far she had come to get back.

One night, my mama called and told me she was experiencing some pain in her chest. She wanted to go to the hospital, so I got dressed and went to see about her. When I got there, Mama was dressed and ready. She tried to put on a strong front, but I knew there was something wrong because she never would have called me at this time of the night if she was not in pain. I drove her to the emergency room, and after the usual three-hour wait, the nurse called her name, and we went back to the examination room. When the doctor came in, Mama told him she was having pains in her chest, and he asked her to undress. I left the room and went to my car for a smoke and after a while went back in. They had taken her for x-rays, and she was sitting on the table. Mama told me that she overheard the doctors talking, and one spelled out the word tumor to the other doctor. She had this worried look on her face.

I told her, They were probably talking about some other patient, and you are just being nosy as usual and thinking they were talking about you.

The doctor gave her a prescription for the pain and told her to make an appointment with her private doctor and that the hospital would send her x-ray to him. As we drove home, I could tell Mama was worried, and as for me, I kept thinking about that word the doctor spelled out—tumor. The thoughts of her mortality returned.

Mama made an appointment with her doctor immediately and asked me to go with her.

I said, Of course, I will go.

When we arrived at the doctor’s office, he had already received and looked at the x-rays. My mama and I sat down. The doctor confirmed what the emergency room doctor spelled out. He confirmed that there was a spot on her lung, and it looked like cancer. He said he would have to take further tests to be sure and that he would have to take a biopsy to be 100 percent sure. I remember thinking, I wish you would have waited until you were 100 percent before you use the word cancer. I could tell Mama was scared, but she attempted to be brave. I think a lot of her fear was that she was not going to have enough time to make up for the things she did not do. As we drove home from the doctor’s office, Mama told me that before we know for sure to keep this between us. I told her I would, and I tried to encourage her and tell her that everything would be all right. No matter what, we would beat it.

Once the news was confirmed that it was lung cancer, we were already getting close, but the news brought us even closer. I began spending every spare moment with her. When she called, I would go see her. The doctor started her on chemo. I was there holding her hand at every session. Eventually, she was hospitalized as the cancer continued to spread. My mama and I talked about everything at the end including the forgiveness of her children. She wanted us to forgive her for not being the perfect mother. She asked if I could forgive her, and I, in turn, asked if she could forgive me. Mama told me that she was not afraid of death because God had allowed her to live to see her children grow, her grandchildren, and she had even been blessed to see a great-grandchild born. She said she did not want to suffer and asked me to promise her that when the time came to not allow them to hook her up to a machine or do anything to bring her back. I believe she told me this because she knew I would carry out her wishes. We would pray together for God to take her home even though I wanted my mother to live, but that would have been selfish on my part, so I joined her in prayer.

During the last years, the relationship between my mama and me transcended different levels. We went through a level of resentments, guilt, shame, and regrets to through forgiveness and love, and at the end, we became friends. I saw my mama as a human being and, under the circumstances, doing the best she could with what she had. I told the doctors, in