Not another statistic
I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready to tell my story. It was even hard for me to believe it was my story.
It’s something you rip from a headline — it actually did become a headline, sort of. An overlooked headline in a deluge of similar tragedies strewn throughout the news. Anyone who has asked me how it happened could find out in five seconds, just with my mother’s name and a quick Google search.
Nobody ever did, or at least they never told me about it. How do you tell an acquaintance, or coworker, or even someone you consider a friend, that your 58-year-old mother dropped dead after doing a line of coke with her husband, which turned out to be 100% fentanyl, given to her by one of her best friends who is now being charged with second-degree murder?
Yikes. Not exactly cocktail conversation.
But it’s something I carry with me every day of my life.
My stomach drops a little every time a relative calls me without a heads up.
My heart beats a little faster each day that goes by without a text back from my father.
I once had a panic attack when he didn’t pick up two of my calls in the span of an hour. It’s too early for him to be asleep, and too late for him to be out golfing. He didn’t have any trips planned. If he was driving somewhere, like to pick up dinner, he would have called back by now.
That was how quickly my mind jumped to the worst-case scenario, the nightmare that was the least likely. What are the odds it would happen again?
But this wasn’t just the product of bad luck, random chaos in the universe. My life shattered to pieces because my parents made a stupid choice — one bad decision, one night, that should have ended in a hangover.
It’s hard not to blame my parents. Not to be mad at them for doing drugs they got in a sketchy area in a hotbed of the opioid epidemic. It’s especially hard not to blame the woman who got the drugs for them, my mother’s former friend.
Mostly, I blame the people who laced those drugs without a second thought of who might suffer down the line. I blame the people who profit off of addiction, off of people just looking for a party with no clue what they’re actually putting into their own bodies. I blame the people in charge, the people who allow this to happen day after day.
The clogged court systems and the ongoing cluster that is COVID-19 seemed to eternally delay the legal process, rescheduled hearing after rescheduled hearing. The arrest didn’t even come until almost two years to the day after it happened.
It made it hard to grieve completely, to resume life. The threat of movement in the case loomed over us for four years. It hovered over my shoulder, intimidating me.
Sometimes it was an all-consuming anxiety, like that wait for a doctor’s call to give life-or-death test results. Other times, it just felt like an occasional nag in the back of my head, like the sudden reminder of an unpaid parking ticket or forgotten chore. Either way, it never really went away, even as my mom herself dissolved below the earth.
Now, there’s a trial date set for two months from now. We might actually see a conclusion to this years-long episode of Law and Order that my life has warped into. No matter the verdict, I know I’ll feel some sort of relief. But this chapter ending brings up a host of other complicated feelings.
To be frank, I never cared the outcome of the criminal investigation. That woman could live a long, free and healthy life and I wouldn’t bat an eye — as long as I never had to run into her. In truth, what she needed, what I wished for her, was rehab. A prison sentence won’t benefit her or my family, and it certainly won’t bring my mom back.
For years, I’ve felt myself grow through the pain and slowly shed the layers of misery I’d spun around myself after she died (ones added onto the depression and angst I already carried). I feel so much stronger, happier and more optimistic than I did when everything began. (Which isn’t to say I’d consider myself an especially positive or optimistic person now; I just might be almost back to my own personal baseline level of happiness).
In a way, the conclusion of the legal part of the battle feels like I’m shutting the door on her. I’ve felt her drifting from me more and more. I’ve had to consciously tether myself to her memory. And while I would never go back to those early days of shock and grief, at least then it felt like she was still hovering nearby, like she could walk in at any moment.
It’s those kinds of imaginary scenarios that kept me afloat the first year or so. If I tried hard enough I could will her to come back, to at least visit me in some magical sign. I would try various methods to force myself to lucid dream and speak to her. I’d bargain with God to bring her back to me — I’ve read that bargaining is actually a common, if not often spoken about, stage of grief.
It’s poignantly described by Joan Didion in A Year of Magical Thinking. Her irrational thoughts following her husband’s unexpected death made complete sense to me because I saw my own desperate brain on the pages, clawing for any semblance of hope that our loved ones hadn’t completely abandoned us, that there was a way to buy their physical form back from the Grim Reaper. Even if you haven’t read Didion, if you’ve lost a loved one unexpectedly, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
That line of thinking, while I don’t dwell on it anymore, is completely erased with the conclusion of the trial. If someone is convicted for her murder, she’s dead for real, forever. It severs one of the ties I still have to her in the afterlife, in a way.
And then there’s the issue of the darker side of the emotional plane: Rage.
If there’s nobody left to blame or punish, where will my anger go?
The answer is that it’s already directed in the same place, but it’s a vague and unsatisfying target: “society,” “policymakers,” “the people in power.” Even if they put my mom’s friend away, they’re not off the hook. That’s not really justice.
There isn’t one single person or event or law I can point to as the evil root of my trauma, which makes it even more complicated. Not to mention the fact that I’m angry with my own mother — but that doesn’t exactly get me anywhere.
I know a conviction can feel like closure and be a bright spot for survivors and families, but for me, it feels like a drop in the bucket of the larger issue. It feels like yet another statistic for an attorney general to use to pad their reputation. Without any real change, this will just happen to another person, then another, and another.
But those people aren’t just numbers. They have names, families and dreams. Most of all they are human and deserve compassion, whether they were taken because of a one-time fluke at a party or a years-long addiction. They all will have that person bargaining for their return to the earthly plane.
So no, this doesn’t feel like real justice or closure. Nothing has truly changed, in my own life or in society, and while I know I don’t have anything close to a perfect solution, I do know that the people who have power to intervene in these issues need to expend more effort into searching for one. Because everyone affected by the opioid epidemic deserves a more tangible form of justice.
The drug trade is a complex maze in the underbelly of our world, so it’s not exactly as simple as asking the government to fix it. A lot of politicians would rather blame individual users rather than take any action, this is true, but I also don’t have any real ideas that could help to offer them. Then again, that’s not my job.
All I can ask of anyone with any power is to see me, my mom, my family, all of us, as multifaceted humans with rich lives worth living, worth protecting. Not as percentages and soundbites. We deserve more than that. She does.
