Fortunately · Unfortunately

Fortunately / Unfortunately is a recurring narrative pattern that makes the contradictions of Nic’s addiction impossible to smooth into a simple story of loss or recovery. First introduced through a children’s game, the alternation becomes David Sheff’s way of holding good fortune and catastrophe in the same account: Nic is his beautiful boy and a drug addict; he returns to recovery and relapses; he is gravely endangered, but not dead. The pattern’s significance lies in its refusal to make either side cancel the other.

A children’s game becomes a frame

David is driving Daisy and her friend to a birthday party at a ceramics studio when the girls play a game inspired by Remy Charlip’s picture book Fortunately. In the book, Ned is invited to a surprise party, but it is a thousand miles away. A friend lends him an airplane; its motor explodes; there is a parachute, but a hole in it. Each fortunate turn opens the way to a new misfortune, and each misfortune is answered, at least temporarily, by another possibility.

The girls carry that structure into their own improvisation. One imagines a delicious sandwich, only for it to fall in the street and be eaten by a slobbery dog. Daisy adds a fuzzy hamster that takes it away and disappears into a crack in the wall. The increasingly elaborate mishaps make the game funny, but its rhythm is more than comic: rescue never permanently ends danger, and a setback does not necessarily end the story. The alternating words give the players a form for moving through reversals without pretending that the previous turn has vanished.

From play to the family story

As the girls giggle in the back seat, David’s own version begins to play in his mind. Its first contrast is intimate and stark: fortunately, he has a son, his beautiful boy; unfortunately, that son is a drug addict. The child’s game has given him a structure, but the material inside it is his family’s continuing experience. The repeated pivot lets love and illness appear side by side, without turning love into a cure or illness into the whole definition of Nic.

The pattern gathers force through the changes in Nic’s condition. He is in recovery again, but relapses; fortunately, he is not dead. That last reversal is deliberately limited. It does not say he is well, or that the danger has passed. Earlier, the family endures four days of horror while Nic is gone. Later, David urgently searches for a program that will take him before he loses him. When Nic is hospitalized after losing consciousness, a doctor explains that the rapid response of the emergency medical team gave him a chance to survive. These episodes show why the pattern cannot function as a tidy balance sheet: survival matters enormously, but it does not erase the crisis that made survival uncertain.

Reversals without a cure

The pattern also speaks to David’s effort to live with contradictions that do not resolve into a final answer. He recognizes the painful tension between an addict’s limited responsibility for his condition and the addict’s responsibility for what happens next. He knows he must establish limits on what he can endure and do, while remaining willing to redraw them. With Nic in the hospital, he experiences greater compassion and love, not a sudden escape from fear or uncertainty. In this context, fortunate and unfortunate are not opposing verdicts; they are truths that coexist within caregiving.

David’s own cerebral hemorrhage sharpens that meaning. In the neuro intensive care unit at UCSF Medical Center, he cannot remember his name or the year. The brain injury does not remove his anxiety about Nic. Later, as he recovers, he recalls having wished for a way to scrape Nic and the worry from his mind. He no longer wants that erasure: even the pain is bound up with the love he wants to keep. The hopeful side of the pattern is therefore not freedom from anguish. It is the recognition that anguish and attachment remain connected, even when neither can make the future safe.

Refusing the neat ending

The alternation also challenges the temptation to close the family’s story at a moment of apparent resolution. David had wanted Nic’s letter to Jasper to serve as a happy ending, a neat bow that would mark life after addiction. Nic’s latest relapse makes that closure untenable. The relapse arrives even though several circumstances in Nic’s life appear to be going well: he has a girlfriend, enjoys his work and coworkers, has a book deal and a possible assistant editor position, and belongs to a close group of friends. The reversals resist a simple explanation in which one obvious misfortune accounts for relapse or good circumstances guarantee safety.

Near the end, the pattern returns in a concentrated sequence: there is a beautiful boy, but he has a terrible disease; there is love and joy, but there is pain and misery. The final turn is not a promise of recovery or a declaration that suffering has ended. Fortunately, the story is not over. The words preserve an opening, not an outcome. As a narrative device, the alternation keeps the family’s experience unfinished and truthful: each reprieve can be followed by danger, each relapse can coexist with love, and continued life leaves room for what happens next.