Book Review: Kardboard House by Nancy Espuche

Memo to Employers: Your Workers Have Addicted Loved Ones

A successful professional who lost her son has a new calling: advocating for employees with loved ones battling substance abuse.

Nancy Espuche, who served the same company for 32 years – and suffered through a loved one’s battle with substance abuse for nearly 10 of them – has a stern message for American employers.

“This problem,” she declares, “is now your problem, too.”

As the hub of a team that placed contract attorneys at inundated law firms, her position required polished tact, clear-eyed skills assessment and crisp communication. It was the sort of customized role that defines white-collar careers and, evidenced by her staying power, Nancy was quite good at it.

Then her son, Lucas, became an addict.

What transpired was a protracted scene played out in hundreds of thousands of families across the country. As opioids began to overwhelm her son’s life, her son’s life began to overwhelm Nancy’s. That included, of course, her career.

A once laser-focused professional became distracted, disrupted and disheartened. Lucas needed more help than Nancy could provide working 50-hour weeks. And Nancy knew her work team deserved more reliability than she could provide as her son’s addiction, like addiction does, progressed to the point of near-perpetual emergency.

So she asked her employer – one she’d served admirably for over three decades – for a reduced schedule. For some flexibility. For some understanding in a situation that could affect any family member, anywhere, at any time.

Her employer’s response? “Too bad.”

So Nancy Espuche did what she had to do. She quit.

Five years later, Nancy has parlayed her harrowing experience into a new career: de facto human resources consultant, providing much-needed advice to a workplace landscape in desperate need of meaningful change. In her debut book, KardBoard House, Nancy shines a revealing spotlight on the lack of resources, respect and empathy most employers have for employees struggling with family members battling substance abuse.

Truth Born from Tragedy

It would be wonderful to report that, in sacrificing her career, Nancy was able to save her son. But unfortunately that was not the case. Lucas Espuche died of a drug overdose on December 19, 2016.

Anyone in the addiction & recovery community can understand that it was not for lack of effort – his own or Nancy’s – that Lucas succumbed to active addiction’s inevitable final outcome. KardBoard House is testament to Lucas’ and Nancy’s honest attempts to arrest his inner demons and free him from heroin’s grasp.

Through pages of eloquent letters between them – both Nancy and her son are gifted wordsmiths – even non-addict readers are left with a message that all addicts, recovered or otherwise, intimately know: If an overdose death awaits someone as bright and promising and vibrant as Lucas, it can await anyone. We read these mother-son missives with full foresight that, in late 2016, they will suddenly cease – and this knowledge makes them all the more sad, urgent and impactful.

With Lucas gone, Nancy was left to pick up the pieces and the pen on his behalf – and on behalf of those, like her, that had suffered the frustration and indignity of an uncaring, uncompromising workplace amid a yearslong personal tragedy.

In fact, the genesis of what would become KardBoard House began taking root before Lucas’ death. Its title refers to the instability a household encounters when one of its members struggles with substance abuse. Sturdy brick and mortar turned to precariously pliable paper.

And while a son’s addiction can undoubtedly spiral a mother’s entire life into stress and chaos, it was Nancy’s experience in the workplace she found especially outrageous – and, perhaps, most ripe for change.

Granted, Nancy’s employer was particularly rigid and apathetic. She recalls an instance when Lucas was still a toddler and needed an operation. That evening, Nancy’s supervisor called her; not to ask how her son was doing, but rather to convey, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to report to work the following day.

From this exceptionally heartless anecdote, it’s easy to envision the reaction Nancy’s employer had years later to the workplace pitfalls caused by her son’s substance abuse. But sometimes it takes an outsized act of cruelty to spark the type of labor of love journey that Nancy now embraces.

Revisiting those frenzied final years at her previous employer, we see the causes to what, years later, have become KardBoard House’s effectiveness. As she consistently confronted a wholesale dearth of education and understanding in the workplace, and endured the simmering shame of her still-stigmatized personal problems, she became keenly aware of the limited availability of guidance, resources, and support in the professional world.

Not only was there no help; there wasn’t even the recognition of a problem. She’d joined a sad, secret society of professionals torn apart by a loved one’s struggles with addiction. She was stranded, stunted and, for lack of an alternative, silent.

“A percentage of everyone’s organization is struggling with a loved one’s substance abuse,” she explains. “For me, it meant that a successful salesperson could no longer approach anywhere near her potential.”
Performance, accessibility, reliability, teamwork, productivity, attendance. All were affected.

“My struggle interfered with my performance and my results,” she writes. “I loved my career, but who I once was at work no longer existed. I simply couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t be available all the times they needed me to be. And as Lucas’ struggles dragged on, I kept hoping someone would say ‘take care of your family first.”

They never did. And the result, Nancy knows, is wholly unhelpful to both employee and employer alike. “I came to think about what we need to do for employees with relatives struggling with addiction. And I realized that solutions needed to start with employer recognition and reaction

Work, in Progress

September of 2017 – 10 months after Lucas’ passing – was a bellwether moment for Nancy. Even as she grieved her unimaginable loss, she’d begun to form the framework of her fledgling mission to spare other family members from her workplace nightmare.

Any addict who’s shared at a 12-Step meeting would recognize Nancy’s reaction: validation. She knew she wasn’t alone. But unlike AA or NA, there was no roadmap for moving forward, no tried-and-true solution.

While there were no blanket answers – America’s economy is too robust, and its workplace environments too varied, for such one-size-fits-all solutions – in short order Nancy found herself openly challenging employers to start moving in the right direction on the longstanding, ever-worsening problem of employees with addiction-affected loved ones.

The following is excerpted from a speech Nancy would give just a month later, in October 2017. Those of us in the recovery community will recognize three features: namely, experience, strength and hope. Oh, and a savvy, succinct ability to portray this heretofore unaddressed workplace issue as a burden not only on employees but their employers as well.

“Businesses are exposed to lost productivity and employee instability. Managers are confronted with increased absenteeism, missed deadlines and more occupational accidents. Tempers flare, accountability is reduced and being present is a memory. The domino is here.”

In other words, in a country where tens of thousands of people die from overdose deaths each year (in fact, the figure recently eclipsed 100,000 for the first time), there are an exponentially larger number of employees – perhaps millions – with loved ones grappling with this gruesome beast.

So what, Nancy challenges employers, are you going to do about it? The speech continues:

“Do you have an environment that addresses the impact of substance use in families?

Do you invite this topic into the workplace?

Do you engage in conversation through literature, webinars and such?

Do you have resources in place and visible so those living with this challenge can seek help?

Do you understand the impact this struggle has on your organization?

Do you advocate for collective wisdom from those who have walked this path?”

As someone knee-deep in legalese for decades, Nancy knew – like a trial lawyer – not to ask a question to which she didn’t already know the answer. And she knew that the answer to each of these questions was a resounding, disgraceful “No.” Her questions were rhetorical, and therefore revealing.

Today, even after dedicating a book to this complex topic, Nancy freely admits that she doesn’t have all the answers. But that isn’t the point of KardBoard House. The point is to start a conversation that simply wasn’t being had – to plant a seed and cultivate it with practical advice. KardBoard House is Employee Empathy 101, a prerequisite for a more meaningful degree in compassionate human resources practices.

So what, according to Nancy, are those first steps? How do we begin moving this heavy boulder from a place of stigmatized stagnancy?

For starters, Nancy recommends that key workplace personnel – upper management, human resources executives, etc. – get educated on substance abuse and its dynamic on the family. Most of all, they should encourage employees to be open, because a problem can’t be solved if it isn’t acknowledged.

This openness, Nancy contends, needs to be nurtured. Employees can’t be expected to take the first step in a vacuum considering the longstanding stigmas surrounding addiction issues.

“I was brave,” she said, “but most people aren’t. Most of the people I’ve spoken with – especially parents – would never admit to their loved ones’ struggles. It’s this stigma that we need to exude familial, and especially parental, pride. Employees need to be willing to speak up, and employers need to be willing to listen and accommodate.”

The simplicity of these steps leaves readers wondering one thing: why aren’t they already being taken?

Why, amid the sizable shifts in work-life balance ushered in by COVID-caused lockdowns – and the ensuing Great Resignation, which has seen employees have more power than they’ve had in decades – are employers not using this evolving environment to act? To address an urgent matter adversely affecting perhaps millions of employees across the country… and through them, also adversely impacting their businesses’ bottom lines?

Employers across America are striving (or claim to be striving) to be more flexible, more accommodating, less rigid. They are also moving toward more inclusive corporate cultures that respect individuals’ life circumstances, and are more sensitive to matters of gender, race and religion. Considering its heightened stakes, shouldn’t “respect for family illness issues” – a category in which any of us could suddenly find ourselves – be added to the list?

“This is an inclusivity issue that isn’t just about emotions or microaggressions,” Nancy knows all too well. “It’s about life or death.”

In a society increasingly focused on recognizing and honoring individual experiences, Nancy’s is one shared by an ever-expanding, all-too-silent subset of suffering contemporaries. KardBoard House is an invaluable first step toward correcting this and, with Christmas approaching, would make an appropriate Secret Santa gift for office holiday parties everywhere.