grieving the lost Substance: recovery as bereavement — "It’s a myth no one misses…"

The program's counter-doctrine to the myth of clean serenity: sobriety is not the absence of wanting but a permanent bereavement you manage daily. Gately still feels "a terrible sense of loss, narcotics-wise, in the A.M.," 421 days clean, and Ferocious Francis's counsel is that the missing is the proof you were an addict, not a failure of recovery — "you wouldn’t need help if you didn’t miss it." The Substance is figured exactly as a dead lover ("one true best friend and lover"), and the whole apparatus of clichés is what stands in for grief-work while "time harden[s] the scab." This is the theme's most compact statement that recovery is a lifelong management of loss, not a cure.