To Leave Behind a Trail of Light, a Trail of Goodness By Karen Sosnoski

Sean Benham CC




To Leave Behind a Trail of Light, a Trail of Goodness


Decades ago, when my husband and I were young and still unmarried, our friend John’s parents frequently extended their house in Maine to our friend group (and to the friend groups of all six kids in their Irish Catholic family). If they resented the extra work and noise, I don’t remember them showing it. Marie urged us to eat what she’d cooked and seemed amused by us. With Alan, we walked the beach, him gesturing toward the sky while marveling out loud at his luckiness in a way that allowed us to feel we were a part of it.

Still, I was shy back then, not the kind of twenty-something to go out of my way to connect with friends’ parents, so I never knew Marie personally and she didn’t really know me. When I flew with my husband and son last weekend from Virginia to Boston for her funeral, I did so not to put closure on my own grief but to show respect and support for her kind, bereaved family and to reconnect with friends.

I got more from the weekend than I expected.

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Marie died at age 87 surrounded by family. This wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother took pride in her work as a stylist by trade and as a creator of clothes, quilts and meals by avocation. A respected mentor, passionate Democrat, and lifelong Christian, she walked her talk—calm, quiet, but not passive, especially when it came to asserting herself to defend those in need.

At the funeral service, I took in the sermon and the family tributes to Marie, all of which resonated. But when Reverend Callahan spoke of Marie’s legacy, a charge bolted through me.

“A Christian is a person who leaves behind a trail of light and goodness. Marie was [this kind of] Christian.”

No stained glass windows (that I noticed) in the church, and it has been years since I’ve identified as Christian; nevertheless, I saw it: Marie’s trail of light and goodness everywhere, in everyone around me. 

No come to Jesus moment, but a mini miracle nonetheless.

It was almost embarrassing the way that I, as an unrelated attendee, kept needing to cry during the rest of the funeral service—every time the light in the sanctuary sparked to a blaze: tears 
whenever, popcorn style, a family member got up from their pew to hug their father-grandfather-great grandfather, the recent widow. Tears when the youngest son of the deceased teased his siblings who’d forgotten to put his name in the program, his feigned hurt giving way to laughter; and tears again when the entire family laughed with him. Tears and light, tears and light at: “Aww, I know they love me,” and at how, right up there near the altar, the siblings pummeled their youngest with hugs.

“Our mother gave us each what we needed to love each other—together we’ll get through this loss,” said one of the sisters. They hugged again and the light shone again; and their father joined them again; and again my tears fell. Such goodness.

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All that light and goodness seemed to blaze right through my dead leaf memories and even some of the murk and confusion which were how I knew myself in my twenties. I stopped drinking, eight years ago, at age 53. Between this and my recovery from what became an addiction to my daughter’s addiction,  I’ve seen little of old friends in recent years. Compared to others my age in my circles, I lack nostalgia for the past. I brag this letting go of the past keeps me young and present. 

But at the funeral and the reception, I let myself go there.

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As a young twenty-something, I occasionally did see light. Certainly I did. Those sunsets on the Maine beach. Fires in New England fireplaces. Tender moments with my then boyfriend, now husband. The womblike pink/gold paintings of a loved friend.

But what most alights my memory are sun rays glinting off a wine glass, precariously perched on someone’s back porch railing. Then the  glass to my lips and the light reflecting off the faces of my friends—dear faces, beautiful faces, I love them still—but only those right next to me shone, and eventually, after more wine, only those right up in my face did, flickering in and out as my vision narrowed and everything outside the narrow frame grayed. 

Then no field of vision. Nothing to frame.

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Do stories of addiction and recovery always involve light (or lack thereof)? 

When at age fifteen our daughter Raven began sneaking out to drink and drug, her natural consequences hit swift and terrifying, like nothing I’d ever seen. My own drinking--which had already slowed over the decades--came to a full stop. It seemed wrong even to flirt with substances, the enemy of my first born and of so many of my loved ones. Soon I would trade this martyred sobriety for chosen recovery-- only then would my life begin to change.

Meanwhile I scrambled for the right kind of help for my daughter, fearing I’d never find it, even as the light within me, the light within her, and the light between us flickered on and off.

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Because “teenagers need their sleep,” the private ‘hippy’ school to which we sent Raven for a few months of her tenth grade (in our ‘throw money at the problem’ phase) started late, about 10 AM and ended early. Fortyfive minutes from our home, the small school offered no transportation. I drove Raven each morning, then went to try to write until pickup time at a cafe a half hour away, one filled with lonely old men and oddly flavored coffee options—one I learned to hate.

My daughter and I didn’t talk much on those morning drives, rather zoned out to Passenger, one singer we both liked. Land mines riddled our relationship that year; even so, occasionally we still had silly conversations of the sort that had been typical a year prior—about whether or not we’d marry Passenger or whether or not he’d marry us if I was younger and single or she was older and marriageable. Was he already married? Was he even into women that way? Is Passenger really his name? We didn’t know. We didn’t look it up. Maybe we could each just court him as a friend.

In retrospect it’s strange, or maybe telling that we liked his songs so much, since his lyrics raised the specter of all we were trying to avoid. In All The Little Lights, our crush mourns:

“One went out when I lied to my mother, said the cigarettes she found weren’t mine/One went out within me…it’s getting dark in this heart of mine.”

Passenger’s song, Dreaming, when I let myself think about it, troubled me the most:
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“If you can’t get what you need/you learn to need the things that stop you dreaming. /All the things that stop you dreaming.” 

In the years of my active addiction to my daughter’s addiction, denial stopped my dreaming even more completely than drinking or drugs ever had. And beneath the denial, a drumbeat of worry. What had caused her to drop friends, her dancing, her school work, her laughter, our family?

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“You’re free for the day,” I told Raven one morning as she opened the car door in front of her school, trying to pretend I didn’t want to hug her close and keep her with me. “You must be so relieved.” Trying to pretend that the rare laughter we’d just shared hadn’t mattered to me. “If you can’t be what you want, you learn to be the things you’re not.”

“No more ‘Mom music’ for another five hours,” I continued to joke, as if cavalierly.

That year, even on mornings when we’d been getting along, Raven typically flounced out of the car swearing at me. Not this morning.

“Listening to Passenger with you is seriously the best part of my day, Mom,” she said. My daughter stood stock still, hand on the door handle, and held my gaze, her blue eyes clear and serious for that moment, before closing the door, and I saw that for a part of her at least this still was true.

I didn’t know it would be another year or two before I glimpsed this part again and another five before she would embrace long term recovery (four years and counting now!) from an opioid addiction that nearly killed her. 

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How did it happen? People want to know this about themselves and their loved ones, even about their acquaintances or strangers whenever a light goes out—in a single night’s blackout blatant enough to lead to IG posts and gossip, or for long, long periods of darkness when grades, friends, jobs, and health are incrementally, then totally lost. 

When a light goes out for good, the questions buzz then echo. How? Why? Whose fault? Too much pain for the recipients of these questions. 

Our daughter lived, is alive today, still friends ask me what went wrong. I ask myself so I don’t blame them. I tell them what I tell myself that I’ve found clues, but no one answer. Maybe in recovery Raven will find answers for herself?  For now, for her, for me, it seems enough, fulfilling enough and hard enough to build good lives on what we do know. 

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Surprisingly, when the reverse of active addiction happens and the light floods  back, when the goodness does, the hows and whys aren’t definitive either. At least in my experience.

My daughter did get clean and I did regain my agency. We both discovered hope. Our talks shine radiant, feel good and non-compulsory, admittedly among the best parts of my week. Separately, we each are problem solving, failing better; growing braver, learning, loving.

Still, we know there is no one-size-fits-all path to a freer life. In each of our cases, some of our worst mistakes led to recovery. Somehow—through community, boundaries, divine intervention, hard work, deep prayer, and through resources we were lucky enough to have, Raven and I each got enough of what we needed to start dreaming again. 

These days we don’t usually dream together, but we always respect each other’s dreams.

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I used to say I’d do anything, would never ask for one more thing, and would be forever grateful if Raven went into recovery. Hah! How quickly we forget! 

I wasn’t considering my good fortune when I boarded the plane to Boston for the funeral. I was low-key nervous about reconnecting with old friends, berating myself for what my self esteem problems and the ways I’d chosen to deny them had cost me in accomplishment compared to these friends’; had cost others too, including my daughter, for whom, until recent years, I hadn’t been a strong enough role model. 

Humility is one thing—a good one; it inspires amends-making; positive action; change. Looping thoughts about past inadequacy, joined to ones about current weight gain and the impossibility of “catch[ing] up” career-wise are another--not so good. Both before the funeral service and after, at the reception, rumination threatened, once again, to narrow my field of vision. 

The darkness never goes away completely, nevertheless I’ve learned to leave one shade in my heart window cracked at all times. Just as the reverend’s words did at the sermon, songs, poems and testimonials at the reception, all speaking to Marie’s legacy, turned the lights back on. One anecdote, in particular, lit me up.

A twenty-something, the partner of one of Marie’s great grandsons, spoke in a slow, accented voice about how Marie had warmed her and made her feel accepted. When the two cooked dinners together, the young woman was reminded of loving moments from her own family in her own country (I missed which country this was). Her voice broke and she looked down at her hands as she acknowledged how much she treasured these memories. She would miss her partner’s great grandmother. She felt fortunate they had met.

This speaker had only known Marie for three years before Marie died which meant Marie must already have been about eighty-five years old at their meeting. Who would I meet in another twenty-five years should I live that long? How would I affect them? It’s not over til it’s over, I reminded myself. I reminded myself that legacy isn’t exactly quantifiable, is not only a matter of money or titles, or publicly celebrated accomplishments.

So there was hope for me yet! As in the church, my vision widened. Warmth spread through my body. My chest expanded and I took in extra air. I hugged my son standing next to me, before thanking him for joining us and when he tugged me close and said in his man’s voice (how did this happen?), “you are welcome,” a light flicked on in my heart.

I snapped a photo of my evergreen friend Carolyn at another table, head thrown back and grinning as she played with her three year old grandson. The sight of them turned on another light. 

Nearing this friend’s table, I heard the grandson say in a piping tone, “can I spend the night at your house?” and when I drew even closer, I put my hand on my friend’s cheek, remembering how her now laughing face had crumpled only an hour before, how she’d sobbed, following her mother-in-law’s casket with her husband John and his family out of the church. 

Same face. Same day. That kind of miracle. Such deep connections. That kind of goodness.

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Carolyn and I made plans to see each other again with our husbands and some other friends, the ones from the old Maine days. I’ve made such plans before. This time I meant them. As I spoke, I could just see it: how they’d probably drink wine and I’d definitely drink mocktails and we’d find new light in our memories of old times. 

My friend mentioned offhandedly that Marie never drank--not that that mattered, or maybe it did? 

No matter what the friend reunion would all be okay, I knew it would, even though for years I’d been looking for doors to shut, had thought that shut doors made me tougher. It would be even more than okay—our meeting--my old friends and I, me being sober on a big boat or at a beach bar.

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I suspect all stories of great change involve images of light.

Writing this, again I see the planned reunion with my friends from back in the day, how I’ll focus on their faces, growing softer and more beautiful with age. I’ll scan, too, the lilac sunset and the purpling shadows bouncing off the water, I do see us by water, and gold sun beams bouncing off their shoulders. I’ll remember my one friend’s pink paintings and her cute clothes she used to let me borrow to go out. And I’ll remember my other friend’s liberating energy, the way her laughter bounced off the walls and set our nights on fire. And no, I won’t forget the devastating headlines or my pressing need to respond, or my work, or my sister with whom I share my every day, or my 12-step sisters, or my relatively new friends, or my goals, or my husband for better, for worse, for in between. I’ll hold in my consciousness the small ache in my hip when I don’t stretch and I will not forget my aging father or the weird dream I had last night. Nor my adult children. Nor my favorite anecdotes about them. Not the book I’m writing. Not the other parents I’m writing it for. 

Not the world at large.

These intentional, sober days I can sit with my friends and with myself and stay with all of it.

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What people don’t tell you, what I needed a funeral to remind me of, is there can be a whole lot of light in growing older. There’s no need after so many years to throw up walls or hide in the shadows; no need to escape. 

By this age my old friends and I have all  been through it—troubled kids, sicknesses, family addictions, lost jobs, disappointing jobs, depressions, the deaths of loved ones—our separate somethings.There is more to come; we feel it in our bones. We grow in and out and into our marriages again. Soon we will grow in and out and in and out of good health. Some hours we’re lonely as hell and other hours our lives are overcrowded, and the crowds are on our last nerve. Our very last nerve--and yet so far, so many times, we’ve come out the other side. 

When I see past myself, past my dim corner of suffering, I see the broad vista of all there is to love in this life and how we share it, all of us. I see I am not special, for which I thank the god of my understanding.

At this very minute of writing I am growing older, at this very minute of writing I am forever young enough to step out into the light.

May we stand in this light together. May we invite all others in. Extending our hands and smiles and welcomes. Extending our strength to share the pain.

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This is my holding up dream, my senior prayer, my elder’s promise to myself: we will meet again, old friends and I, old friends if we’re lucky growing older. 

Let us see to toast the light and goodness already trailing in our wakes.This light we can only hope will bathe our future generations. 

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A recent regular contributor to Psych Central and Healthline, Karen Sosnoski's essays on resilience lost and found have appeared in Eat, Darling, Eat; The New York Times; The Sunlight Press, This American Life and elsewhere. Currently she is revising Above Us Only Sky, a creative nonfiction memoir about life beyond her addiction to her daughter's addiction. Last year, Karen spoke at the Department of Behavioral Health’s Recovery Pathways Conference and the Faces & Voices of Recovery’s 2025 gala; she co-facilitated a weekly mindfulness group. This year she is taking steps to make advocacy in the addiction field her late life's work. Just ask and this former loner will happily tell you about the joys of courage found in community.


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