Stay Close: A True Story of Addiction, Love, Despair, and Hope

By Meghan O’Dell

Addiction invaded our home in 1991. It slithered in and sat down at our dining room table, grew large and fat, fed on our misery, laughing, mocking us with its power. It claimed Jeff when he was just a fourteen-year-old boy. I did everything I could think of to save my son, but in the end I could do nothing, not really, to extricate him or to free our family from addiction’s claws.

This is one of Libby Cataldi’s many gripping, vivid descriptions of the way her son Jeff’s addiction affected her family. In Stay Close: A Mother’s Story of Her Son’s Addiction, Cataldi chronicles her family’s descent into drug addiction and eventual rise into hope and recovery.

By revisiting journal entries from as far back as 1997 and recalling events with the help of her two sons and their father, Cataldi crafts a beautifully written, enlightening story that bares the gritty truth of addiction and the tremendous hope and love that can arise from it.

The Formative Years

Cataldi tells the story of Jeff’s life from when he was a young boy donning a Superman cape and cowboy boots, dreaming of space travel, to being in jail for possession of heroin and drug paraphernalia, dreaming of getting another fix.

“Jeff, from his earliest years, loved to imagine, to create, and I can trace his childhood through his fantasies,” Cataldi writes. “Maybe Jeff always wanted to escape reality, live somewhere else. It seemed so harmless then, during his early years.”

When Jeff started skateboarding in the fifth grade, he also started getting into trouble, mostly with cigarettes. But cigarettes soon led to alcohol and marijuana, though Cataldi didn’t know it at the time. “The truth of these years of Jeff’s early drug use is still a blur to me,” she writes. “While I was concerned about cigarettes, Jeff was smoking pot, drinking, and watching pornography.”

Then the raves started. Though Cataldi and Jeff’s father Tim initially refused to let their 15-year-old son attend these all-night parties, Jeff would concoct elaborate lies and ruses, pretending he was staying at a friend’s house or going on a weekend camping trip but actually sneaking off to raves, where drugs flowed like water. Jeff later admitted that it was during this time period when he became “enraptured with drug use and the party scene.”

At raves, Jeff was introduced to drugs like Ecstasy, ketamine, PCP, and mescaline, as well as drugs he already had access to, like crystal meth, cocaine, and LSD. “Like a basecoat of paint, everybody was on something, trying to get higher on something else,”
Jeff recalls.

On Christmas Eve during his 11th grade year, Jeff was arrested for possession of cocaine and ketamine. Cataldi soon learned that Jeff was also using crystal meth, when a concerned parent called her to inform her. With his drug use now obvious to his parents, he announced he wanted to switch to a military academy, a boarding school in Virginia. His parents agreed, assuming that he wouldn’t have access to drugs there and would be under strict supervision. However, Jeff had the weekends off, which gave him full access to raves “and a level of detachment” he wouldn’t have had living at home.

When Jeff left home for boarding school, Cataldi and her husband separated. “We were a family joined together in love, but Tim and I didn’t know how to negotiate a life together, let alone a life that included addiction,” she explains. A few months later, Jeff’s younger brother Jeremy decided to switch schools too, and would be joining his brother at military school.

Jeremy told Cataldi later, “I wanted to be with Jeff; I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. Jeff and I had an unspoken bond. I always felt safer with him. As much as I wanted to be his protector, I felt Jeff protected me.” But Jeremy did protect his brother as well, covering for Jeff when grilled about his drug use.

“Jeremy learned silence, to hold his tongue, and he suffered during those years, first from the constant tension in the house and later from his parents’ separation and Jeff’s departure, always feeling the need to divide his loyalty between his parents and his brother,” Cataldi writes.

Trouble Brewing in Boston

After Jeff graduated from the academy—despite being suspended for smoking and being involved with someone who was reportedly selling drugs on campus to students—he entered Boston University, where things only got worse. Cataldi noticed his diminished physical appearance and lack of appetite, though Jeff insisted he had just been sick with the flu.

“From periods of drug use I remembered the weight losses, muted smiles, and dwindled energy…I remembered how his vocabulary languished, as it tiny neurons of his brain’s language center were obliterated,” Cataldi writes. “During those times of drug use a kind of curtain seemed to fall between us, as if a cloak of darkness shrouded my son’s inner brightness, clouded his life’s spark, and eroded his mind’s vitality.”

As Jeff’s time at Boston Univeristy went on, he became addicted to ketamine (also known as “K”), which is an animal tranquilizer that can be injected, smoked, or snorted. At one point he was taken to the ER with almost paralyzing abdominal pain, which turned out to be a side effect of the ketamine, often called “K cramps.” But his constant use of the drug took K cramps to the extreme, requiring kidney surgery.

“K stood out against everything else at the time, and it altered feelings in the most dramatic ways,” remembers Jeff. “Like soaking my mind in watercolor paint, K animated everything around me…Whole afternoons seemed to pass in forty-five minutes and I’d hear friends talk without ever opening their mouths…Everything I saw I believed, and unlike hallucinations on acid, things on K are softer and more surreal.”

“Occasionally, though, I’d do too much, and the high would get scary…when someone overdoes it, it can stop movement and conscious thinking, a lot like being paralyzed,” Jeff explains. “When that happened…a collage of memories from all stages of life would clutter my mind, and I’d become horribly disoriented.” Jeff explains that the drug was intense, especially since he and his friends preferred to inject it.

Cataldi stayed close to Jeff after his kidney surgery, helping him recover. But one night she found him with one of his old friends, obviously high. He told her he took six Percocet because he was in pain from the surgery, but later admitted he had shot ketamine that night too.

Jeff continued to tell his mother that he was in counseling and had been drug free since taking the Percocet, but Cataldi wasn’t convinced. When he asked to come home for the summer, she told him he could only come home if he went to rehab for 28 days, as she didn’t trust him to stay sober.

Starting Rehab

Jeff completed 28 days of rehab at Father Martin’s Ashley, and Cataldi began learning about the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and started attending Al-Anon meetings. Jeff had a full-time job as an intern in a commercial real estate company and was doing well, but Cataldi became concerned that he wasn’t attending 12-step meetings regularly. In the fall, Jeff returned to college, where Jeremy would be starting his first year.

Then Cataldi received an alarming phone call from Jeff’s girlfriend, Sophie, who told Cataldi that Jeff was using ketamine again, shooting into his arms and legs. When confronted, Jeff admitted that he was using again but became defiant and defensive.

“After rehab the previous summer and back in Boston, drugs reentered the picture,” Jeff writes. “I started drinking, which opened doors to coke and pills, then K, then everything else. If you’re not working against addiction, it returns. It’s inevitable.”

The next concerned call came from Jeremy, who called his mother, begging her to stop giving Jeff money because he was using it for drugs. Cataldi said she hadn’t given him money in over a month, and Jeremy tearfully explained that he found syringes in the bathroom. “Jeff’s a mess,” he told his mom. “He gets high and can’t even move his body. He’s gonna die.”

Cataldi didn’t know what to do, as he had already been through treatment and she’d laid out consequences (she refused to give him money and wouldn’t let him stay with her). So she called Jeff and asked him point-blank about his sobriety, and Jeff ultimately agreed to enter a three-month halfway house in Florida, where he seemed to do well.

“He was learning new skills and creating a new life for himself, one based on honest work and the principles of AA,” Cataldi writes of Jeff’s time at the halfway house. “Jeff’s sponsor taught him that had to acknowledge his many mistakes, make amends, and move forward. ‘Do the Next Right Thing’ became Jeff’s motto, words that helped him redirect his life.”

Jeff left the halfway house after being there for almost nine months—even after being kicked out for two weeks for lying about attending mandatory AA meetings—and returned to Boston to complete his degree, although his counselors did not support the idea of him going back to the “people, places, and things” that could trigger his addiction. However, Jeff was determined to finish school there, which he did. He was soon hired by the PR firm for which he had interned, and he and a close friend decided to share an apartment in New York City.

New City, New Problems

But New York brought more trouble. “In those final months in Boston…I’d developed some bad habits that traveled with me to New York,” Jeff writes. “When I was alone and finishing school, I started using drugs that were less social and a little darker…Getting high was less about the party and more about feeling connected.”

Cataldi was under the impression that Jeff had been drug-free since he left the halfway house three years prior, but she was in the dark. One summer Jeff met Cataldi in Italy, where they spent two wonderful weeks together. “I remember well his smile and his gentle personality and manner…I remember his laughter, the way he would bend his head back and look into the sky, and his joy would resonate, deep with pleasure,” she recalls.

But this ideal time came to an abrupt end after Jeff left Italy, when Cataldi’s friend Ombretta told her that Jeff had confided in her that more than eight months earlier, a boy had died of a heroin overdose in Jeff’s apartment. “As I packed to leave Italy,” Cataldi writes, “the word ‘heroin’ was alive in my mind, followed by two more words: ‘death’ and ‘Jeff.’”

Back in New York, Jeff began riding a bike for a delivery service that sold high-quality pot. Cataldi knew he had a delivery job, but didn’t know what was being delivered. At this time Jeff was using heroin every day, and his life revolved around it. “My friends that weren’t carrying habits themselves were pretty unimpressed with the routine, and some even tried to intervene. I was on my way down and everybody knew it,” Jeff writes.

Soon Cataldi received yet another concerned call from a friend of Jeff’s, and Cataldi was now aware of Jeff’s heroin habit. “Hadn’t I noticed his nodding off, she asked, his eyes closing as if he were about to fall asleep? She explained, almost incredulously, as if I should have been well aware that this was the telltale sign of heroin use,” Cataldi recalls.

Struggling to Stay Clean

When Cataldi confronted Jeff, he admitted that it was all true, and that he had been using heroin almost exclusively for three years. “He explained that heroin provided him peace, a comfortable level of belonging—much like a love that a person had always been searching for, heroin was like a warm cocoon of affection,” Cataldi explains.

“He both loved and hated his addiction: He cherished the high from heroin, but abhorred its grasp on him, abhorred the consequences of his use,” she continues. “He told me that he wanted to get clean, needed detox, and had tried several times on his own, but he couldn’t stick with it.”

Cataldi helped him detox while waiting for an opening at Pathways, a nearby drug rehab center associated with a local hospital. She could never seem to get through to the admissions office, and when she did, was told that they didn’t have any open beds. After three days, they were finally seen at Pathways but were told that Jeff would only be given a bed for three days. He did well there and registered in their outpatient program, agreeing to attend AA meetings and find a sponsor. But he was soon using again.

“I was always conflicted about my use,” Jeff writes. “For as much stillness and warmth as heroin provides, the inevitable detox is hell. When you’re carrying a habit, it’s impossible to accept the drug as the source of your problems. I was convinced that life was harsh and heroin was the only thing making it bearable. Heroin was the solution, not the problem.”

But he was also trying to maintain a job and a sense of professionalism, and the bills were mounting. “Every week I told myself I was going to get clean. I’d set dates, contact methadone clinics, and buy detox meds from friends…I tried to kick once a month or so, but I rarely lasted more than forty-eight hours,” he admits.

Another Dark Chapter

The pattern continued: Jeff would detox, then relapse. Then the news came: Cataldi was diagnosed with breast cancer. She soon had a bilateral mastectomy, and both sons stayed with her during and after the surgery. “You’ve always been our mainstay, strong for Jeremy and me, but now you were in the hospital with cancer and I was terrified,” Jeff later told Cataldi.

“It’s incredibly hard for a son to know that his mother is sick and there’s nothing to do about it,” Jeff wrote—only now understanding that his mother felt the same way about him. “Although my drug use showed no regard for the family, I’ve always loved and cared deeply for everyone,” he continued. “Addicts bear a hard juxtaposition. If it weren’t for the euphoria connected to the drug, we’d never be able to handle it.”

The surgery was successful, and Cataldi was free of cancer. “My chest is raw and cut,” reads her journal, “but the hurt doesn’t rival the perpetual state of heartache for my son.” Jeff’s drug use continued, and though Cataldi felt grateful for his life each time she saw him, she also felt powerless and useless.

Cataldi’s 84-year-old father called her out on Jeff’s addiction, telling her she needed to tell him to stop. “Don’t you think, Dad, that I’ve already told him to stop, a million times over?” she responded. Jeff told her years later, “Telling an addict to stop is as effective as telling a man without legs to stand up and do cartwheels.”

Again the cycle continued, with Jeff struggling to get clean and relapsing, even going back to the halfway house in Florida, to a 60-day detox and rehab program at the state-run Drug Abuse Foundation, to an extended-care facility in Texas, and back to the Drug Abuse Foundation. During this period, Jeff entered numerous programs and regularly walked out of them, weeks and months short of the time he’d initially intended to stay. Jeff showed signs of wanting to get clean, but was never able to follow through with treatment. Then, in 2005, Jeff landed in jail for heroin possession. Cataldi and Tim decided not to bail him out, in hopes of the experience finally setting him straight.

That’s when Cataldi decided to write a book. “I want to write this book, but maybe it is just a book of a mother’s angst and tears, and crazy lives. The disease of addiction, a family disease, a disease that corrodes all of life, suffocates all its members, eliminating the ability to even see the sun,” her journal reads. “I want to quit writing, but I don’t know what else to do with my mind, my heart. My firstborn son, what will become of him? When will he learn? Will he ever learn?”

Jeff ended up posting his own bond and returning to the Florida halfway house. He was upset that his parents left him in jail, and Cataldi responded, “You’ve been jumped, beaten, hospitalized, institutionalized, arrested, and homeless. What’s it going to take for you to stop your drug use? Maybe this is it.”

Stay Close

Jeff’s case was ultimately dismissed, and he left for California, following a girl he had met at the halfway house in Florida. He ended up miserable there, constantly fighting with his girlfriend and using crystal meth and drinking. When he asked his mother for help, she offered for him to enter a program in Italy called San Patrignano, which required a three- to five-year commitment. Jeff declined, but the director stayed in contact with Cataldi, offering support and advice.

“The Italian patriarch of this office, a recovering alcoholic himself…tried to help me understand the concept behind two words: stagli vicino, stay close to him. He repeated these two words over and over again as he drove the point home to me…that Jeff needed to know that he was loved even when he was unlovable, even when he was closed away from us, and especially when he was at his sickest.” Stagli vicino, stay close, became Cataldi’s motto.

“This thinking of stagli vicino was contrary to much of the advice I had heard from other experts in the United States, who had encouraged me to ‘use tough love, let him hit his bottom, make him leave the house, don’t answer his calls, bury him in your head, have a funeral for him,’” she recalls. “These responses hadn’t worked for our family doctor, hadn’t worked for me, hadn’t worked for Jeff.” So Cataldi decided to do the opposite, to stay close. “I would not abandon him, and I would be constant,” she remembers.

Road to Recovery

After returning to a recovery ranch and attending AA meetings, Jeff finally came to a realization. “My body was eating itself from the inside out, and I felt hollow…I’ve never been so stripped by a drug before—every inch of composure was lost. That was the first turning point,” Jeff writes. “I’ve never been so grateful to be that broken.”

When he shared his story at a meeting, the leader said flatly, “Yep, some people have to die from this disease,” and then moved on to the next person. “The night I arrived and heard Harry respond to my share, I remember thinking, ‘Unreal. Has it really come to that? Is death my final option?’ It was heavy, but Harry was honest, and I needed to hear exactly that.”

Jeff continues, “I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to stop using, either. They say that addicts aren’t afraid to die, they’re afraid to live without drugs. I was there. It wasn’t until I started praying that things turned around.” At the 10 Acre Ranch, he spent his days focusing on his recovery, reading the Big Book (by the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), praying, meditating, and writing in his journal.

Jeff agreed to see Dr. Patrick MacAfee, a psychologist and family addiction therapist, and after three meetings Cataldi realized that Jeff trusted him. “We know a lot about addiction,” Dr. McAfee said. “What we don’t know much about is how addicts learn to live in sobriety. Jeff will have to learn how to live a sober life.” Jeff learned how to put his recovery first, for the first time.

After two and a half months of living at the ranch, Jeff found an apartment in Newport Beach and enrolled in an outpatient program at Sober Living by the Sea. When Cataldi came to visit, she was shocked at Jeff’s transformation. “He was tanned and a little heavier, fuller in the face, healthy looking; his eyes were clear; his voice was strong,” she recalls.

Dr. MacAfee continued to help Jeff, explaining that addiction is the loss of self, and that recovery is a transformative process where one recovers self. “Recovery offered Jeff the freedom to rediscover his identity and, in time, a real and authentic young man would emerge,” Cataldi writes.

On July 21, 2006, at age 28, Jeff quit using for good, and he now has more than three years of sobriety. He also reentered the professional world of public relations, and has been successfully working in the field ever since. “Today, Jeff acknowledges his past and strives for a better tomorrow,” Cataldi writes. “Today, he works—works at his job, works at his recovery, and works with his God.”

Today, their family is stronger than ever. “Jeremy has begun to break his long-held silence,” Cataldi writes, adding that Jeff and Jeremy visit each other and spend time together. “No matter what happens or what the future holds,” Jeremy told his mother, “Jeff and I are brothers…Jeff will always be my heart.”

While Cataldi spent countless hours over the years trying to find the source of Jeff’s addiction, trying to figure out why one of her sons was an addict and the other wasn’t, she now spends her time learning about how to support her son in his recovery. She firmly believes that families and people who love addicts need to say close to them, to give them patience, tolerance, and love.

Cataldi will never quit believing in Jeff, she’ll never quit praying or hoping for the best. She’ll always stay close.

Tags: addiction recovery, family and addiction, Types of Addiction