All the Way (19 page)

It was a “step” program at The Canyon, an introduction to how your mind and body work with substance abuse. Every
day, you have group meetings and then individual meetings with your therapist. You have a workbook. They ask you all of these questions and then you do your homework. At first, I was flying through the fucking workbook. In the first two days, I was halfway done and thinking,
Is this all there is to it?
Little did I know that the workbook is just a starting point in getting to know a bit about yourself and digging—really starting to dig into your roots.

It had been a while since I'd read books and written shit down, because I'd never had to do that. My reading and writing skills got a lot better, because I actually started thinking and doing my work.

Some people at The Canyon were only there because other people wanted them to be there, and that doesn't work. I made sure that I was doing what I had to do for myself. That meant looking deep inside to find out how I had got to this point—kind of like a timeline. There were a few chapters in that workbook that related to my childhood, my upbringing, and my parents' upbringing. At first, I was a little timid about spilling the beans. I had to decide whether I was going to tell them how I actually grew up, or just fucking blow it off and get through it. At the beginning, I thought I just wanted to get through it. I didn't want to deal with any in-depth situations because it would cause more problems with my family. I didn't want my therapist having to contact my parents and have questions for them. I didn't need that. I didn't need my parents involved, telling a different story about how they raised me.

So, at first, I wasn't going to tell anyone about my personal issues from my childhood. I was going to do what I had always done, except for the time I fought my dad: shut up and put up with it. Up in the north, you just keep that stuff inside. If someone has a grudge against your family member, you don't talk about it, even though you live in the same town and see each other every day.

I tried to keep things inside, but then I would keep going back to those couple of chapters about my childhood and, every day, I would write just a little bit more and it was like a fucking weight was being lifted off my shoulders. That started opening doors for me. It gave me a way to get rid of those inner demons. And, really, that's why I'm here today.

My therapists left it up to me. They said that any time I had an issue, we could talk about it. I wasn't a big talker, ever, but the Canyon is where I really started to understand that communication is healthy. Without communication, it's pretty hard to get anywhere.

At the beginning, I was trying to not think about those issues. I was just trying to get past them. But, finally, I realized I was there to fix myself. That was part of how I needed to heal. I needed to understand how I got to this point, to understand why my parents are the way they are, to understand why people are the way they are up north.

I tried to deal with my issues. If I hadn't, fuck, I'd probably still be drinking. And the truth is, I still have a lot of issues. But rehab is where I really started to mature as a person, where I
started loving myself, and where I started understanding how I got to that point.

When I talked to my parents after I got out, they didn't really understand any of that, because that's just the way they are. So I had to take different routes in asking them certain questions, because they're constantly on the defensive. And then, at the end of the day, I told them I still loved them for who they are.

I also talked to my therapists a lot about Terence, and about what had happened to him. For me, that was a positive. I understood everything that he'd taught me as a kid. To watch him grow up and be a strong-willed person with the courage and determination to fight through anything—that was stuff I learned because I grew up beside him. This was a guy I looked up to every day. This was a guy who was the definition of hard work, persistence, and commitment. That's what I saw in him. He was a guy who, if I had to go to war or any of our buddies had to go to war, you'd want beside you. That was Terence. He wasn't the biggest guy but, boy, was he strong. And if times were tough, you could count on Terence to get through them.

And then the day came when he decided he'd had enough and he was gone. That was hard for me to process. It still is. Part of me was mad at him. No question about it. Why would he do this to me? Why would he leave everything for me to figure out? Why would he leave me to deal with all of this shit on my own? Why would he come to that point when so much in his life was happy then? Why would a guy with so much mental strength do this? There's nothing that burns inside me more than that—it burned then and it burns now. A guy who I counted on every
day and the next thing I knew, he was gone. . . . I admit that, after it happened, I questioned my own purpose in life. What am I here for if he's not going to be here? Frick, there were times when I second-guessed my life and whether I wanted to keep living it. Terence was a guy I counted on daily. When you lose someone that important to you and you don't understand why, it's pretty tough to get over. I used alcohol and women to try to fill that void, to distract me, sometimes to black me out. In rehab, I started to understand that.

But when we talked about Terence in rehab, I realized that I had so much more in life to prove. I wanted to carry on Terence's legacy. I realized that, frick, I couldn't keep pounding my head against the wall, trying to figure out what I could have done to save him. I guess everyone has their breaking point. In the state of mind that he was in that night, he was well under the influence and he made a split-second decision. With suicide, you'll never really know why. But for a guy to go out like that is a little selfish. When you take your own life, you're being selfish.

Knowing the shit that he and I went through, it was like, frick, I could kind of understand. He didn't want to fricking deal with it anymore. I understand that a guy can only take so much. With everything that was going on in his life, being a role model for a lot of these young kids, it was way too much for him to have to deal with. But I can't blame anyone other than Terence for him taking his own life. You can't put the blame on anyone else. You go through life experiencing shit that you don't want to experience, but in the end it was up to him. And I guess his time was up.

It might seem strange to some people, but even though it was painful, I enjoyed talking about Terence in rehab and I still enjoy talking about him—his presence is always around me. Despite what happened, thinking about him always makes me smile. And when other people talk about him, it actually helps me. He was like my soulmate. And now I'm plugging away in his memory.

So, that's part of what I did during my thirty days in rehab. I just put my head down and did all my work. The process isn't over. To this day, I'm still working on myself. We all have our own ways of dealing with things. In the past, I had trouble communicating. But now I'm open and I'm not so afraid to talk.

TWELVE

W
hen Jordin was released from The Canyon, he immediately flew back to Nashville to join the Predators. On January 31, he participated in his first practice and spoke to the media for the first time since leaving for rehab. “The support I've gotten from my teammates, my family, the fans of Nashville, it has been unbelievable,” he said. “Without their support, I probably couldn't have done it. I think the bottom line is that it's something I needed to do and, at the same time, I'm just happy to be back and thankful. . . . I'm just going to take it one day at a time. Right now, I'm just living in the moment and enjoying every bit of it. I can't tell you how far down I went. I'm just going to live in the moment right now.”

The Predators' general manager and coach spoke as well. “Nobody's perfect,” David Poile said. “We all have different issues in our life. I think that it just reached a situation where he was becoming more difficult and obviously a distraction to others in our organization. The point is, and this is the most important point, Jordin got it and Jordin did it and he knows he's better off for it today.”

“He is dealing with it the right way and he's manning up and that's what you're proud of,” Barry Trotz said. “He's manning up and taking responsibility and that's the first step for success. . . . As soon as the doctors give us the word, he'll be ready to go. His first focus is on getting order in his life and we support him 100 percent and then the hockey thing will come. He's working towards that.”

After I got out of rehab, everywhere I'd go in Nashville, people knew my story, but luckily I didn't have to lock myself away. They understood my situation. And the support that I got from the hockey world and from home was just unbelievable. When you're in rehab, you can't receive any mail or anything and you're not allowed to talk about the outside world. But my therapist at The Canyon told me that they were getting fucking stacks of mail for me when I was there. It made me feel good to realize how many people were behind me and how many people cared about me. You don't realize that until something hits you hard.

There is a protocol you have to follow with the NHL/ NHLPA substance abuse program. Once you get out of rehab, they want to make sure that your life away from work is stable and grounded before you return to hockey. I stayed in Nashville when the team went on the road, and I had a mentor who had been through the program and who worked with me. He was a local guy who was in AA and had been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. I had to kind of shadow him. When you get out of
rehab, there is definitely a lot of temptation. He helped to guide me onto the right track. We talked a lot about the people you talk to, the people you used to hang out with. I actually found the process really interesting. It was a bit like doing homework in high school. You jot down the names of the people in the crowd you hung out with and then try to figure out who your real friends are. There were some people who were my friends outside of my extracurricular activities—so, outside of my drinking and partying. And there were others who I realized were only hanging out with me because I was a public figure. They were popularity-seekers. They wanted to be around me only because they wanted to be in the public eye. They wanted to be noticed. At the time, I thought that those types of people were my friends, but after making those lists and having those conversations with my mentor, I started to realize that wasn't true. If I ever had a question, he was only a phone call away, and we went to AA meetings together three times a week.

The meetings were good for me. At first, I could relate to a lot of the experiences people shared, how their drinking controlled their lives. But eventually it got to a point where I felt like all of the negative energy was actually starting to drag me down. Hearing how shitty these people's lives were and how drinking had ruined their families and their work lives. I couldn't really relate to that. I still had a job—and it was a great job—and I still had a family that loved me.

There wasn't really a point in the process when I was told that I didn't need to go to AA anymore. They just kind of forgot about it, and I stopped going because I didn't really need it
to stay sober. Everyone takes a different path. A lot of people swear by AA, and good for them. But everyone has a different route. For me, it was about relying on my family and my close friends—my true friends, not the hangers-on. It wasn't about going to meetings.

Even with that support, in a lot of ways I was on my own. I had to look at my life as a sober person, really for the first time since I was a kid. Things definitely looked different. There was clarity about why people acted the way they did, and why I acted the way I did. And then there was the process of taking responsibility for what I had done. I had to acknowledge all of the people I hurt during my years of partying. When you're in a state of mind where you don't know what's going on, you hurt people. I was never a physical person off the ice, so it wasn't like that, but I would put people down verbally when I was drinking. I didn't think all of the drama that I caused was a big deal when it was happening. But now that I was sober, I started to think about how I didn't make time for my family and friends when they visited, because the only thing on my mind was going out and partying.

The process of apologizing to all of the people I hurt took almost two full years. Some of them I knew, and some of them I hardly remembered. Random people would come up to me and say, “I'm proud of you for turning your life around, but do you remember when you did this to me?” I might have met this one person one time when I was blitzed out of my mind and not have a clue who they were, but I had to accept that I had done what they told me and take full responsibility for
it. All I could do was say I was sorry, and if they chose not to accept my apology, that was up to them. But there were a lot of them. I kept thinking,
Holy shit, I never realized how many people I affected with my drinking.
For a while it felt like all I was doing was apologizing and apologizing. Was I really that bad of a drunk? I guess I was.

The toughest part was dealing with the people I knew and really cared about—my family and friends—and starting to understand what I had put them through. These were the people who I grew up with, who had been around me for my whole life, and who had distanced themselves from me because of my actions. I didn't understand why when they did it, but once I sobered up I had a better understanding, and it was a tough pill to swallow. I couldn't imagine my best friends having to deal with me. So, I took full responsibility. It was hard, but it was a process I had to go through.

I made a list and started working my way through it—all of the people who had stuck by me since childhood, who had always had my back. I thought about the shit that I had put them through and the pain—and not only them, but their spouses and their families, too. I used to go home to Rankin Inlet for a month in the summer and I would just expect them to hang out with me and drink with me. And if their wives or girlfriends objected, I would say, “Tell them to fuck off.” How could they not understand? I was only home for a month; it was my time to party. After talking to those friends and talking to their wives and girlfriends, I started to realize how much uproar I had caused in their lives. I think a lot of those families dreaded
me coming home because they knew it would be a shit show for a month.