Anyway, the organizers of the event read a piece I’d written about you a few months back and sent me an invitation to attend and speak at the comedy showcase. No part of me wanted to do this, so I passed the info along to Mom, who is eager to carry the torch. She wants to do the outreach and fight the battle and be involved.
This is nothing new. She’s always been involved. Growing up, she was a stay-at-home mom who was always available to pick us up for orthodontist appointments and sick days. She always kept the fridge and pantry stocked. She was always there when kids needed help—any kids, us or others. In middle school, when Chloe was incessantly fighting with her dad, Mom took her in for three months, no questions asked. She packed her a sack lunch every day. In high school, when Johnny’s mom, Grace, died from cancer, Mom all but legally adopted him.
Her primary role has always been Mom.
So, naturally, she’s no longer herself. She still lights up around Iris, but that’s about it. All her posts on Facebook are related to addiction, loss, grief, and isolation. It’s a whole other heartache to see her this way, this charming Southern lady who once glowed with her honeys and sugars and darlins and silver hair and green eyes and perfectly painted lips and ageless skin. It’s hard to see your mother in pain.
Iris is always bringing me Frozen Band-Aids to cover my owies. I have this teeny, tiny red dot on my knee that’s always been there, and Iris fixates on it. She touches it and studies it and says with great concern, “Mama, owie! Wha happen, Mama?” She’s so concerned with my being hurt. It’s hard to see your mother in pain.
Mom never expected this to happen. She feared and worried and fretted and obsessed and lost weeks and months of sleep—she knew it could happen, but a mother never expects her child to die. A child is supposed to bury a parent. There’s no way to prepare for the other way around. And now, where there used to be an innate buoyant light inside of her, a heaviness resides. A life sentence. The torture of waking up every morning and having to re-remember.
Plus, there’s a palpable stigma attached to overdose, especially heroin, that’s been hard for Mom to accept. It’s not an honorable way to die, like being a war hero or the victim of a natural disaster. There’s a hierarchy in death like there’s a hierarchy in life. When someone dies of breast cancer, no one questions where her parents went wrong. Sick people are victims; drug addicts aren’t. No one’s going on the internet and bashing a cancer patient for dying. One death feels out of a person’s control while the other feels like a choice—a very shameful choice. Although Mom has been spared complete and utter shame since you were “famous.”
“He wasn’t the stereotypical drug addict living under a bridge or in jail or stealing from his family,” she told me recently. “People revered him and honored him. No one looked at him and said his parents failed him. He was a high-class, functioning drug addict.”
Status is very important to Southern women.
Mom is very active and involved in her grief. She initially went to grief therapy and cried and screamed and pounded the floor—literally—until she dug down deep and had nothing left to say. The grief counselor put her in a support group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, but she couldn’t relate to that strain of tragedy. She felt different with her scarlet letter O, for overdose. She found a support group on Facebook called GRASP, which stands for Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing, where grieving mothers and other family members post photos and statuses all day long about the children they’ve lost, primarily to heroin. They post articles titled “Heroin in the Heartland” and “Breaking Point: Heroin in America.” They share quotes in script, surrounded by backgrounds of open sky, that read, “Your wings were ready, but my heart was not,” or “Those we have held in our arms for a little while, we hold in our hearts forever.” GRASP is the saddest place I’ve ever been.
The only place sadder is in the eyes of our father. He has no online support group. He doesn’t even know how to use the internet. Completely alone in his grief, he hasn’t talked to anyone since you died—not a therapist, not a friend, not a wife, not a daughter.
A few years back, you did an interview with Serial Optimist where you said Dad was “the funniest dude alive.” And he was. Remember when he knocked out his two front teeth attempting to play a harmonica and had to wear that retainer with two false teeth attached to the front? He would always take it out at restaurants and
