Written by APNC’s Executive Vice President, Morgan Coyner
Today, on International Overdose Awareness Day, we pause to mourn.
We take a moment to look around and feel the spaces left by the people addiction has taken from us. We remember not only that they are gone, but who they were before addiction became the loudest part of their story.
So, I want you to meet Linda. My momma. A daughter, sister, aunt, godmother, grandma, and friend. An absolute genius at Excel spreadsheets. A Bruce Springsteen superfan. Lover of Diet Pepsi, hot tea, and her cats. An avid mystery reader and DVD collector. A former UVA cheerleader. A seasoned professional with a successful career in health insurance. She was smart. Fun. Complicated. Loved. She was so many things before she was ever a person struggling with addiction.
And yet, by the time my mom died, addiction had eaten away at so many of the beautiful things about her and left a shell. I barely remembered the woman I just described. Addiction caused a slow and quiet unraveling. She wasn’t my mom anymore.
You meet people in that place, in the shame. They come to you when shame tells them to hide. Addiction tells them they are alone. It tells them they’ve gone too far, disappointed too many people, ruined too much, and become something other than the person they once were.
You wade into the darkness of people’s deepest shame with flashlights and lanterns, waving them forward, lighting a path toward hope, recovery, and redemption. You tell them this: I still see you. Not just the substance use. Not just the relapse. Not just the behaviors that brought them into the room. The person who existed before addiction. The person who exists underneath it. The person who can still become something they cannot yet imagine.
I wish my mom had been able to believe that about herself. That she could have remembered that she was adored, loved, cherished. That there was no road we wouldn’t have walked down to help her.
Losing my mom is what ultimately led to my own recovery. My sister and I stood in the Raleigh Airport a few days after my mom’s funeral. I was flying back to Nashville, where I lived at the time. She hugged me tight, held on for a minute, which she doesn’t usually do. When she pulled back, she kept her hands on my shoulders and said, “Don’t ever make me worry about you the way we worried about mom.”
In that moment, I saw that my addiction was doing the same thing to my sister that my mom’s had done to me. A month later, I had my last drink.
My mom’s story is one of thousands. And so is mine. We have lost so many people to addiction. And we have championed so many into recovery.
As August fades to September, International Overdose Awareness Day gives way to Recovery Month. Our attention turns from remembrance toward possibility. Today, we carry the people we’ve lost with us.
And then we turn toward the people who are still here. Toward recovery. Toward hope. Toward all the stories that are still being written.
