I almost killed my brother in a crash I caused. Nearly twenty years later, I watched him survive a brain tumor. Here is what living amends really taught me about sobriety, guilt, and showing up.
I am writing this from a lake house in North Carolina. It is Fourth of July week. Tomorrow we are renting a boat and taking it out on the water, and my brother is here to do it with me. So is his baby girl. This week we are grilling steaks, playing FIFA, floating in the pool, and maybe catching the fireworks.
On the surface, it looks like an ordinary family holiday.
It is not. It is a miracle, and I do not use that word loosely.
My brother and I are both alive this week for reasons that could have gone the other way more than once. Three times, our family almost lost him. Once to an overdose. Once to a car crash I caused. Once to a brain tumor.
I was the reason for one of them, and I've spent years since making sure I'm never the reason again.
What does "living amends" actually mean?
In recovery we talk a lot about making amends. Most people picture the apology. The phone call. The letter. The hard conversation where you finally own the harm you caused. That part matters, and I am not knocking it.
But there is something underneath the apology that matters more, and it does not happen in a single conversation. It is called living amends, and I think about it every single day.
Living amends is not something you say. It is something you do, slowly, over years. It is showing up. It is becoming the brother, the son, the friend you were not before. You do not get to erase what happened. You only get to decide, again and again, who you are going to be now.
My brother is my living amends. Let me tell you why.
The crash I am responsible for
At the end of October 2006, I got behind the wheel with my brother in the passenger seat. I was twenty-one years old, barely three months past the drinking age. I had been drinking. I had also taken benzodiazepines that were prescribed to me for anxiety, and the two together put me into a blackout.
I don't tell you that to spread the blame around. I'm fully responsible for all of it: the drinking, the pills, the decision to drive. I was an anxious kid managing nothing well, and I made a choice that nearly cost my brother his life.
The kicker? I thought I was being a good older brother. I was taking him to get a cheeseburger when he asked for one.
Instead I put us into a crash that fractured his C1 and C2, the top two vertebrae in his spine. He came within literal millimeters of never walking again. A potential Christopher Reeve injury, the same one that ended up killing Superman himself. Extremely devastating and terribly life-threatening. The fact that his spinal cord wasn't severed is, in and of itself, a miracle. I spent time in jail. And even after all of that, it still took me a little over a month to put the drink down for good.
That crash is the single biggest reason I got sober. I have now been sober for over 19 years. My brother has been sober for over a decade. There is a lot more to that story, and I am always open to sharing it, so if you ever want to hear it, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to share more.
How do you carry guilt and shame without letting them drown you?
Here is the part that belongs to mental wellness, and it is the hardest to talk about honestly.
When you are the reason someone you love got hurt, the guilt does not evaporate just because you got sober. It moves in. And if you are not careful, it becomes one more thing you want to numb.
Something I had to learn the hard way, and something I now sit with clients on all the time: guilt and shame are not the same animal. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. One of those can point you toward repair. The other just tells you to disappear. In addiction, shame is often the thing that hands you the next drink.
So what do you do with it?
I cannot apologize my way out of October 2006. What I can do is answer the phone, get on a plane, be in the pool with his daughter, my niece. Do my best to be a person who shows up today. That is the whole practice. It does not necessarily make me a "good" man. It simply makes me a present one, and presence is what I actually owe. If you want the clinical version of this, Hazelden Betty Ford, where I did my own graduate training, has a good piece on making amends in recovery.
What does showing up actually look like?
Well, being a nomad, for me a lot of it is simply plane tickets or trips with my family and friends whenever I can.
One of the first real trips I took after I got sober was a solo run down to Mexico. I jet skied across water so blue it did not look real. I dove. I floated next to whale sharks the size of a small bus and felt tiny in the best possible way. Clean, clear, fully there for every second of it. And the whole time, one thought kept circling back: I want my brother here for this.
So I brought him. We dove Cozumel together. We swam with whale sharks. We jet skied until our arms gave out. And on other more "ordinary" days, the ones with no ocean in sight, we get together in the garage gym and act like a couple of idiots.
That is what living amends turned into for me. Not penance. Not walking on eggshells for the rest of my life. Presence. Taking the good, sober life I had built and saying to my brother, come do this with me.
Then life did the thing life does
I thought the hard part of our story was behind us.
A while back, my brother started getting strange surges in his body. His nervous system would spike for no reason he could point to, the way it does when you are stuck in fight or flight. Anxiety runs in our family, so we figured that's what it was. He was never really getting headaches, so there were no real alarm bells to pay attention to. Nothing waved a flag.
Turns out it was a tumor on his pituitary gland. A big one, pressing on his hypothalamus, the part of the brain that helps run the body's stress response. Five and a half centimeters. The word the doctors actually used was "gigantic." It had been growing quietly for a long time, hiding behind a symptom we all have a name for... anxiety.
He made it through a 12-hour surgery. Four days in the ICU. More than thirty stitches in his head. There is an indentation in his skull now, where they cut the bone and set it back. For a stretch he had double vision, an eye that would not fully open, hot flashes, and a body that could not always regulate itself. He lost his job. For a while he could not lift his own daughter.
That was only three months ago. What an incredible recovery.
This week he is on a lake with me, watching that same little girl, planning a boat day that I'm so excited to be present for.
Why is "life on life's terms" the hardest lesson in sobriety?
We have a phrase in recovery: life on life's terms. It sounds nice on a coffee mug. In practice it means the hard things keep coming whether you are sober or not, and your job is to meet them without a drink or drug in your hand.
My brother has used up as many second chances as anyone I know. He survived an overdose in a sober living. I'm responsible for breaking his neck. And now this. Somehow he is still here, still fighting, still walking it back to the middle of his own life.
As a timely mention to this, I got my hair cut here in North Carolina today. The woman cutting it told me about her son, who died in a car accident at 20 years old. I sat with that. I know exactly how close I came to being the reason another mother tells that story for the rest of her life.
If that crash had gone a few inches differently, my brother would be gone. My niece would never have been born. My parents, my sister, his wife, his friends, every single person he touches in a day, all of it would carry a hole shaped like him. That is the ripple. It is almost too big to hold in your hands.
So this week I am not trying to be the hero of the story. I am just trying to be in it. I live on the other side of the world most of the year, and that distance sits heavy on me, especially now. But we are all pulling for each other to live good lives. And right now, my good life looks like a steak on the grill, a controller in my hand, and my brother in the chair next to me, breathing.
Life is precious. Getting sober did not make me immune to that. It just finally let me be awake for it.
If you are carrying guilt, shame, or the weight of something you cannot undo, you are not alone, and it does not have to sink you. That is a lot of what I do now, at Nomadic Addictt and in one-on-one work. And if the holiday itself is the hard part, I wrote a separate piece on how to stay sober and actually have fun on the Fourth of July.
So here is what I want to leave you with. Who in your life could feel you show up differently, starting now? Not with a speech. With your presence. That is where amends actually live.
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Whether you are navigating early sobriety, working through the wreckage of the past, or looking for someone to walk alongside you, I am here. Learn more at Nomadic Addictt or start the conversation.