The Way We Are

The Way We Are, an essay by Thomas Lynch, becomes a recurring point of reference for David Sheff as he confronts his inability to protect his son from addiction. First invoked through a father’s anguished question about what fathers are for, the essay later offers a hard-won model of remembering and loving a child whose present life has become frighteningly difficult to reach.

The Father's Question

The essay is introduced beside the narrator’s admission of helplessness: “It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain.” Lynch’s question, “What good are fathers if not for these things?”, gives that pain its central paradox: a father’s desire to protect his child persists even when protection is beyond his power. The reference frames the book’s account of addiction not as a problem the parent can solve, but as a crisis that tests the meaning of parental love.

A Passage Read Again and Again

Sheff returns to Lynch’s book Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, whose essay The Way We Are opens by itself to page 95 whenever he takes the book from the shelf. He reads it dozens of times. The passage he recalls is a father’s effort to preserve the earlier image of an addicted son: “I want to remember him the way he was, that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather's dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister's grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school.” The memories are specific and domestic: a fish, a graduation suit, a drawing at the counter, a first guitar, a first day of school. Against arrests, drunk tanks, and hospitalizations, they make the son’s earlier life vivid without pretending that his addiction has not happened.

What the Essay Makes Possible

For Sheff, Lynch’s account is more than an expression of shared suffering. Other people’s stories make him feel less isolated and serve as guides through unfamiliar circumstances; Lynch, in particular, shows him that it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever. That recognition does not rescue Nic or remove the uncertainty of his condition. Instead, The Way We Are gives Sheff a way to remember his son as more than the crisis consuming the family: the addicted person and the bright, remembered boy remain part of the same relationship.