I had lunch with my son Rob the day before he took his own life, but a few weeks before that we had breakfast together at the Greek diner near his apartment. In a nutshell, Rob was supposedly in deep s--t with a loan shark and owed thousands of dollars, and I just couldn’t deal with the drama anymore. That’s when I decided it was finally time to “detach with love.” In retrospect, it was absolutely the worst timing of anything I’ve ever done in my life, a Homer Simpson “doh!” of monumental proportions.

For those of you who’ve been lucky enough never to have gone to an AA, Al-Anon, or Families Anonymous meeting, the concept of “detaching with love” or “tough love” is pretty straightforward. It basically means that you (and by you I mean me) can’t keep saving someone (let’s call him “Rob”) from the consequences of his bats--t-crazy actions and foolish decisions because every time you do (meaning me again), it only prevents the stupid idiot from actually learning something from his ludicrous mistakes and prevents him from making any meaningful change that we (everyone who loved him) so desperately want to see........

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