There are some love stories that are difficult to explain from the outside.

Not because the love wasn't real, but because real life became tangled around it.

When someone we love is struggling with addiction, people can sometimes begin to see the relationship through the lens of that struggle. The addiction then becomes the story. The pain becomes the focal point. The things that went wrong become the narrative.

But before there was addiction, there was love.

And before there was loss, there was someone who was deeply cherished. 

In this blog, I want to focus on a story of complicated love and complicated grief: the story of two people, Ruth and Brent - whose relationship was shaped by both deep affection and difficult circumstances. Sometimes, when grief is viewed only through the lens of addiction, the love that came first can be forgotten.

This is a story about remembering that love.

Brent, Ruth and the love between them

I wanted to begin with Brent - not with how th...