The farm is within spitting distance of the Wyoming border. It looks like a place in a storybookoutbuildings red and bright and sharp against the fields and the mountains.
It’s almost 7:30 a.m., which means the guys have been up for at least a couple of hours and the cows have had their morning milking and Roman Brohl has showered and dressed. He appears today as an English lord on holiday might: white argyle sweater vest, white shirt, white visor, white golf shoes.
He has spent 13 months on the farm he calls Rehab Ranch. This is his last morning here, and the first in two months in which he awakened feeling calm. He spent the night before writing cards of encouragement to the 70 other residents here. He can’t say he was friends with most of them — they arrived after he did. But he’d met them and he understands well enough what they are going through.
The particulars of their stories might be different. The substance never is. You boozed until you lost yourself in it. You lose yourself and pretty soon, everything that seemed solid about life becomes tenuous. There’s a reason the average age of Rehab Ranch residents is 42.
“Pain is a great motivator,” says chaplain Art Herrera. “Under 26, you probably haven’t felt enough of it. You haven’t lost your marriage or your job. You haven’t had to pay child support. You haven’t ended up in the judicial system.”
Everyone is gathered in the dining hall, including Roman’s mom and dad, his brother and sister and their spouses. The residents, all men, line the walls. They wear jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps. For the most part, they appear older than they are until they smile, and then it is easy to imagine them as the boys they once were.
Roman is 32. He is as ready to leave the farm as he was ready to enter it, to take a year to learn to live with more faith, with less desperation. He’d grown tired of lying.
Roman had been a man who for more than 10 years took his drink alone, in secret and on a schedule he believed he could control until, of course, he could not.
I know you’re drinking, his mom, Barbara Brohl, would tell him. He’d deny it and she’d go to his place, bring him home and sober him up.
“I knew I couldn’t fix it,” she tells me. “You know, if your parent is an alcoholic, there are a lot of issues, but at some point, you grow up and you can build a life separate from that. If you have a spouse who is an alcoholic, there may be a point where you decide to leave. But when it’s your child, you can’t leave them and you can’t do anything and, to me, that was the hardest thing of all.”
I am the daughter of a man whose alcoholism killed him. It’s why Roman first contacted me. He’d been at the farm six months then. He told me something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. He said he’d accepted one day alcohol would kill him, but what he did not count on was that preceding physical death would come something worse: “the gradual and silent death of my spirit.”
He told me he was writing a blog, Snapshots from Rehab Ranch. You can still read it. In fact, you should. It’s rare to find an adult so willing to be vulnerable.
A series of questions consumed Roman for many months. Why? Why did he become an alcoholic? What was wrong with him? What caused his “great soul ache”?
“I thought if I had an answer, everything would be fixed,” he tells me. “But that’s not how life works. There isn’t an easy answer. And I don’t need one. There will always be things I have to accept I do not know.”
He writes in his blog: “I believe God instills in each of us something of tremendous value. . . . Inside of you, there is something you are supposed to share with the rest of us and I hope you understand your role in the harmony of humanity, your duty to develop and share it.”
During his year in rehab, he spoke to hundreds of students and to churches and he began to find himself again.
At his graduation, he urges the men who still have months of rehab ahead of them to learn to rely upon one another because alcoholism will pick the isolated off one by one. “Stay connected,” he says, “and you’ll be fine.”
His mother speaks last. She stands, beaming, next to her son and tells the room how the smart, charismatic, special boy she knew had become lost. “Not all at once, but a little bit at a time until I couldn’t find my beautiful boy. . . . Today, after 13 months, I get to bring my son back home.”
No man leaves here without the knowledge that becoming sober and staying sober present different challenges, but even that fear has left Roman this day. He made friends at the farm. They graduated just before he did, and, together, they plan to find a new way to live.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
