How losing my childhood hero helped me discover the dangerous appeal of escaping life's painful realities.
His name was Chris Toburen, and he was my hero.
Chris was three years older than me, the son of one of my father's law partners, and just about everything a young boy of thirteen could hope to become.
He was a phenomenal athlete, a star football player who eventually went on to the University of Kansas, where he was named the Big Eight Defensive Player of the Year. He probably could have played professional football, but he had another dream. He wanted to become a Marine and fly military helicopters.
To me, Chris was Superman.
But looking back, what made Chris so special to me had very little to do with football, the Marines, or his extraordinary abilities.
It was how he made me feel about myself.
My father and Chris's father were avid canoeists. Several times a year, the four of us would head off to float the rivers of Arkansas and Missouri.
I was an awkward, insecure thirteen-year-old kid, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and desperately wanting to fit in.
Chris was the coolest guy I'd ever known.
I admired everything about him. The way he walked, talked, dressed, carried himself. I wanted to be just like him.
And for reasons I'll never fully understand, Chris took me under his wing.
On those canoe trips, he didn't treat me like some annoying little kid tagging along with the older guys. He treated me like one of them.
I belonged.
For a young boy struggling with his own identity and self-worth, that was an extraordinary gift.
Eventually, Chris went off to college, and our canoe trips became a thing of the past. I never saw him again.
But I never forgot how I felt when I was around him.
In fact, I spent years trying to recreate that feeling of confidence, acceptance, and belonging.
And somewhere along the way, I discovered something that seemed to help.
Alcohol.
A few beers could make my insecurities disappear. Suddenly I was funny, confident, outgoing, and comfortable in my own skin.
Or at least that's what I believed.
I didn't understand it then, but I was beginning a lifelong relationship with something that promised to solve my problems while quietly creating far greater ones.
The Day Superman Died
I was home from college one weekend when my father handed me a copy of our hometown newspaper, the Pittsburg Morning Sun.
There on the front page was Chris's photograph.
The headline announced that a local hero had died in a helicopter accident.
Chris and three other Marines had been killed when their helicopter crashed into a mountainside during a nighttime training mission.
I couldn't believe it.
My parents left the house shortly afterward, and I sat down on the sofa and cried.
I cried for Chris. I cried because I'd never told him how much he meant to me. I cried because I'd lost someone who had made such an enormous difference in my young life.
But there was something else happening that I didn't fully understand.
I was scared.
For the first time, I was confronting a reality that I wasn't emotionally prepared to accept.
If the world could take my hero, a Superman like Chris, what in the hell was it going to do to me?
If someone that strong, brave, talented, and seemingly invincible could be taken from this world, what chance did I have?
Suddenly, the world didn't seem nearly as safe as I'd imagined.
I didn't know what to do with those feelings.
But I knew something that could make them go away.
I drank.
When the Solution Becomes the Problem
Looking back over my years of alcoholism, I've come to understand something about my relationship with alcohol.
I wasn't always drinking because I wanted to have fun.
Sometimes I drank because I was afraid.
Sometimes because I felt inadequate.
Sometimes because I was lonely, anxious, ashamed, or overwhelmed by things happening around me.
And sometimes because I simply didn't want to feel what I was feeling.
Alcohol gave me a temporary escape from emotions I didn't know how to manage.
But it never actually resolved any of them.
The grief was still there. The fear was still there. The insecurity was still there.
And eventually, the consequences of drinking created an entirely new collection of problems I desperately wanted to escape.
It became a vicious cycle.
I would drink to escape my problems, then find myself drinking to escape the problems my drinking had created.
For years, I confused escaping pain with overcoming it.
They are two very different things.
What Chris Taught Me
Today, I think about Chris differently.
Of course, I still remember the extraordinary athlete, the Marine, and the larger-than-life young man I idolized.
But what I remember most is his kindness.
He had no idea what those canoe trips meant to me. He probably never realized how much confidence he gave a younger boy who desperately needed some.
And I never got the chance to tell him.
That's something I've carried with me for decades.
Chris also taught me something through his death, although it took me many years to understand the lesson.
We aren't invincible.
None of us.
Life is unpredictable. People we love die. Things happen that we can't explain, prevent, or control.
And no amount of drinking, running, hiding, or pretending will change those realities.
What can change is how we respond to them.
I've spent much of my life learning that lesson, often the hard way.
Today, through faith, recovery, and a much better understanding of myself, I'm learning to face the things I once tried so desperately to escape.
I don't always do it perfectly.
But I no longer believe the answer to life's painful realities is to make myself temporarily unaware of them.
And there's one more thing I've come to appreciate about Chris.
He probably never knew the difference he made in my life.
A few canoe trips. Some encouragement. A little kindness toward an insecure kid.
Small things, perhaps, to him.
But not to me.
And decades later, I'm still telling his story.
Maybe that's another lesson worth remembering.
We don't always know how much our actions matter to someone else.
Sometimes the smallest gestures leave the longest-lasting impressions.
And sometimes the people who change our lives never even know they did.
Thank you, Chris.
I wish I'd told you that when I had the chance.