The other day I helped a coworker of mine move. He's much older and a past addict, so there was a lot of knowledge and wisdom to be gained from spending some time digging through his past with him. Friends who had gotten clean, friends who had passed too soon, the good times and the bad times. The more and more stories he told me, the more I saw how my own life had been following this outline. Him being over fifty, his was a little more intense than mine, but I could see myself at fifty, spouting out the same stories;
"Over here is a gas station that would sell alcohol to us when we were teenagers"
"Oh, cool, over there is the house of the senior citizen that sold us Oxycontin so he could pay his mortgage"
"Oooooh, over here is the Taco Mac restroom I overdosed in."
But, nothing prepared me for what happened next, for the reality bomb that was set to blow up in my face. You may think you know addiction, you may think you know sorrow, you may think you know guilt, but you don't know shit until you've seen the light leave an old man's eyes when he finds a backpack that once belonged to his daughter, Laura Hope, now dead of a drug overdose at seventeen years old. You don't know pain until you've seen him open it and read her name on the notebooks, until you watch him pull out information on colleges. You've seen him find baby photos, childhood toys, clothing. None of that compared to this, this was new to him. This was fresh, this was foreign, and even worse, this pointed to not who his daughter had been, but who she could've been. To potential never seen, to a beautiful young lady who, now, would never exist. You don't know guilt until you can hear and see the gears grinding in his head as he processes the pictures and his own actions as an addict, and tries to see where it all went wrong. What he could've done.
It was, to say the least, a mindfuck of epic proportions. I pictured my mother going through the same thing, of having to pick up my stuff, of having to sort out what to throw away and what to keep, of having to see what happened to what was once her little boy. I pictured her feeling that guilt, and trying to process where it all went wrong, and what she could've done. And to be honest, I don't have an answer for her. I don't fucking know.
This was the first time I saw how my addiction and my actions affected others. This whole time I focused on the pain I was going through, and I never once thought about how much I was hurting the people who cared about me. I stopped answering the phone, and eventually they stopped calling. I refused help, I refused love, I forced them to give up on me. I was killing myself in front of them, and made them watch until they couldn't take it anymore. Then I had the audacity to feel abandoned and unwanted because they were gone. I saw how much I had hurt myself by hurting the people around me, I had my eyes opened to how feeling unloved made me unlovable, and a punch of perception hit me square in the gut. I felt my own weight looking at a father holding back tears over a backpack. It was heavy, it was terrifying, and for the first time in my life, that was OK.
I got lunch with my mom on Saturday.
Here if the facebook memorial for Laura Hope Laws:
https://www.facebook.com/liveforlaws/info
Her father and many other parents are doing some great things in overdose prevention and saving the lives of people who have overdosed, including passing an amnesty bill protecting those who call 9-1-1 in the event of an overdose and arming emergency personnel with Naloxone, a chemical that is 98% effective in reversing opiate overdoses. Here is their website:
http://georgiaoverdoseprevention.org/
