The Tribune

By DR KENNETH D KEMP

THE internationally beloved movie, Mrs Doubtfire, starring Sally Field and Robin Williams, was released in 1993 and quickly became a smashing, box-office success. In it, Williams played a devoted and loving but unreliable father who temporarily loses custody of his children following his divorce. Then, in an act of desperation, he applies to be his ex-wife’s housekeeper, disguised as an elderly British nanny. Initially things go well but, when his cover is blown, his ex-wife is granted full custody even after he explains to the judge the motivation behind his insane antics.

As a father, his deep and enduring love for his children sometimes made him crazy, he remorsefully explained and he simply couldn’t imagine living without them.

My patient, who’s chosen the alias Ashley, loved this movie growing up because it demonstrated the intense love that can ideally exist between a father and his children. For most of her life, Ashley yearned for anything similar but was repeatedly denied that wish. Her father, hereafter referred to as Henry, was one of seven children and like his brothers and nephews, he became addicted to cocaine at a young age. Henry battled with drug addiction most of his life, but all the while unaware it was Ashley who bore the sharpest toll of his self-inflicted struggle.

Henry was born and raised in the Berry Islands, a remote part of The Bahamas, which stood at the centre of the 1980s drug trade. At the time, The Bahamas was a major transshipment hub for Carlos Lehder and his notorious Medellin drug cartel, used to successfully smuggle Colombian cocaine into the United States. While Exuma and Norman’s Cay made the headlines, it was quieter locales like the Berry Islands and particularly Great Harbour Cay where an entire generation of young men were lost when they became enraptured by drugs. Cocaine was everywhere throughout the island and, at the time, little was known about the associated dangers tied to its recreational usage. Many lives were destroyed as they rode the drug wave and then came crashing down in its demise.

For a while, Henry worked on a golf course, as a mechanic and as a bartender at his mother’s resort. Life on the island was simple. Everyone loved to party and tourists flocked to the island to openly engage in drug parties. Soon enough, Henry found himself constantly surrounded by cocaine. When the crackdown on drugs amplified, the economy on the island faltered and Henry relocated to Nassau where he worked as a lab technician.

While living in Nassau, he met a woman and married her 11 days before she gave birth to Ashley, the first of their two children. The marriage lasted for five years and ended with distrust and bitterness. As the years went by, cocaine habitually became Henry’s escape and his descent was swift. Initially he craved the perceived mental clarity that it granted but soon thereafter he only desired the feeling of euphoria that it elicited. As expected, the effects lasted for shorter periods each time, forcing him to take it more often and in higher quantities, destructively chasing an initial high that he couldn’t possibly achieve once more.

During one of his binges, he went to a coke house where he got high and fell asleep, leaving Ashley home alone for several hours when she was just two years old. Ashley’s mother never knew. They had another daughter nine months later but when Henry’s drug abuse intensified, the two finally divorced.

Angry, Henry took everything he could from their home, even the rugs off the floor and moved in with his mother but it wasn’t long before she kicked him out. So, eventually, he found shelter outside, living out of an abandoned rusted car on a vacant lot camouflaged by overgrown bush and off the beaten path. The hurricane season was particularly cruel as was the stench of fecal matter and urine. Henry domiciled in this humble lodging for more than 40 years, flanked relentlessly by snakes and mosquitos and victimised particularly by the heat of the summer.

For a while, Henry worked as a landscaper and despite his disheveled appearance, women were drawn to him because he was so charming, fun-loving and personable. Behind his overgrown, unkept hair and dirty clothing stood a strong man, fairly tall with smooth skin, strong shoulders and kind eyes. Like his daughter, Henry simply wanted to be loved and to give love in return but his addiction crippled him and he never understood that to Ashley, his consistent presence in her life was more than enough.

Henry had seven other children with multiple other women, for a total of nine. Ashley’s mother, the only woman Henry married, worked a lot so Ashley was raised by other family members and in time began living on her own. She sought love from verbally and physically abusive men, one after the other and Ashley had her first child at the age of 18.

Still yearning to feel the same love that Mrs Doubtfire had for her children, Ashley began visiting her father at his makeshift home in the bush. In retrospect, she acknowledges how dangerous that was but every acknowledgement of the associated risks was increasingly curdled by her need to maintain her father’s presence in her life. Ashley had difficulty sleeping and was prescribed a medication for her insomnia to which she quickly became addicted. Then, for a short while, she began to abuse alcohol but, in a moment of clarity, she soon realised that she couldn’t do to her child what was done to her. So, she called upon an unbelievable internal strength and stopped without outside intervention.

That ordeal, for all of its imperfections, made her appreciate her father’s struggle in a more humane way. She soon came to appreciate that despite his circumstance, or perhaps because of it, he had the agency and freedom to be unapologetically authentic. Henry never judged her and appreciated her immensely, teaching her how to love people who don’t love you back because he had to do it every day to survive. So, whenever she took him food, she’d also take some for other homeless people around him, knowing that when she left, he was at the mercy of strangers who’d hopefully be there for him when she couldn’t.

Her concern was justified. Henry had been beaten while living on the streets many times and Ashley feared every day that her father would either be killed or die from an overdose. The first time that she saw him with Cocaine, she cried for hours, praying that something would happen to force him to turn his life around. Then, not long after, when Henry was climbing a dilly tree for food, he lost his balance and fell 15-feet to the ground. As he landed, he heard a loud, audible crack. The pain was immediate and Henry couldn’t move because his back was broken.

Truth be told, he’d fallen long before this day and his descent was heedlessly initiated the first time that he touched cocaine. As he laid there, in excruciating pain and sobbing alone, Henry reflected on what brought him to that point. This journey was a long way down from his privileged, king of the mountain, life as a young mechanic and bartender living in paradise on a small tropical island.

Soon after Robin Williams became famous, he struggled with cocaine and alcohol abuse, publicly stating that cocaine was a place for him to hide. Then, 21 years after the release of Mrs Doubtfire and having warmed the hearts of millions of people across the world, he committed suicide at the age of 63. Robin and Henry both began using drugs around the same time. Despite their similarities, in that moment, the only fate that Henry could think of was his own. So, while there, gazing at the sunbaked sky and reeling at the possibility that he may never walk again, Henry, now also in his mid- 60s, yearned desperately, today more than ever, for his next hit of cocaine.

This is The KDK Report.

• Part two next week

Nicknamed ‘The Prince of Podiatry’, Dr Kenneth D Kemp is the founder and medical director of Bahamas Foot and Ankle located in Caves Village, Western New Providence. He served as the deputy chairman for the Health Council for five years and he currently sits on the board of directors for the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation in his role as co-vice-chairman.