The Unstoppable Force
written by Jessica Fowler
The funeral home was filled with young people. While I
waited in the viewing line on a ramp that lead into the chapel, I looked around
at the men and women, mostly in their 20s, dressed to impress. If you cropped
out our bodies with a Photoshop tool and pasted it on to a picture of the
outside of a nightclub it would make a perfect billboard. Instead, we were on
our way to say goodbye to another person we knew who died because of substance
abuse.
Most of us had been in that line before or would be again
soon. If you put all of the people between the ages of 18 and 30 from my county
in a room together, you could spend days trying to find a single person whose
life hasn’t been fractured by substance abuse. There is a different feeling in
the air when you attend a funeral for someone who overdosed, a chilly undertone
that no one wants to directly address. The unspoken fact that nearly everyone
around you has grieved for this person already before, in their own way,
because losing someone to addiction is like losing them twice.
When my father overdosed in 2006, there was no trace of the
man who brought me roses when I was sick. There was nothing left of the person
who built pinewood derby cars with my brother for the church youth group. There
was no sign of the husband who gave my mother a gift every day for the 12 Days
of Christmas. He was gone long before that needle stuck into his veins, before
he left his house, his job and his church. He was gone the second a distracted
doctor wrote him a prescription for Adderall, scribbling away a decade of
sobriety without a second thought.
I mourned the man my father was long before he took his last
breath. I grieved for his convictions, the principals that he traded for a
poison. It doesn’t happen fast—years go by where you feel as though every time
you answer the phone, it’s going to be the news you have been dreading. When
you find yourself on the bottom of another person’s downward spiral, it
suddenly becomes so clear how you arrived there. That unstoppable force consumed
the person you loved long ago.
It’s not hard to find a scapegoat to blame. If it’s not the
doctors, it’s the dealers. The shadowy figures who lace heroin with Fentanyl.
The coroner’s exact words were, “John died from a bad batch of heroin”…as if
there were any good kind of heroin. A dozen others died that same weekend from
the same “bad batch.” More than 16,000 people a year die from opioids, but
somewhere in some shadowy corner of this world, someone who wanted to make some
extra money decided that that was not deadly enough. The drug baggies the
police found were stamped with smiley faces.
I remember a brief “before” time when my father was still
alive when I didn’t think a drug as monstrous as heroin could affect my life.
Then, a few months after my high school graduation I heard that a girl I went
to school with had overdosed. She was, in my memory, one of the most gorgeous
girls I had ever known and the type of girl a person would say had “everything
going for her.” Less than a year later, the same drug took my father.
Now, when I look around at the tear-streaked faces, my mind
instinctively wonders, who’s next?’ That may sound like a cynical thought, so I
should mention that we were waiting in line to view the body of a man who stood
in this same funeral parlor, flesh and blood, only four months ago when his
brother died from a heroin overdose. To even try to imagine the grief of his
parents who lost both of their sons to this demon substance is impossible. Your
mind just shuts down because even the thought is too much to bear.
While we’re waiting, I watch as a young guy ahead of us,
dressed in a long white T-shirt and shorts, trips and stumbles while moving up
the ramp. His voice travels down the long passageway, angry words I can’t make
sense of. I don’t have to know what he is saying to know that he is on
something. Even from far away, I can see a wild, unsteady look in his eyes.
There are others here too who have that same spaced-out look. I want to shake
them and force them to wake up to the reality around us.
We walk through a room with photo display boards and a
memorial video. I can hear a familiar piano melody and I know the song
immediately. “How to Save a Life” by the Fray, the unofficial anthem for those
left behind because of substance abuse. My throat catches when I see a video of
the two brothers standing together in their Baseball uniforms. Children in a
world that hasn’t started to sink beneath them yet. When I kneel at the casket
and see someone so young, it’s hard to believe my own eyes.
I hug his dazed parents and express my condolences. In
truth, it is hard to look into their faces for longer then a few seconds. To
see the exhaustion that I have seen in my own face and in the face of my family
reflected back feels like opening an old wound. Reliving that pain is something
I can bear, but my fear of standing where they stood again was something I
could not.
I remember when my mother first told me that my father was
an addict and that an addictive gene ran through our blood. She told me I was
old enough to know why my dad didn’t drink and had to go to therapy, and why we
were sent to live with my grandmother when he went to rehab. It was during the
blissful clean years, when I only knew a loving father and the word addiction
was like a bee buzzing by my ear, keeping me from the outside world where I
could play. I couldn’t know that the words she was telling me would echo back
later. That I would be fighting with her in a struggle to save my brother from
his dependency on alcohol. That the cycle of addiction would continue to repeat
throughout my life.
When my brother and I were watching my dad unravel, we swore
we’d never end up like him. We swore our lives would be different. I imagine
those parents said the same thing after they lost their son—that they would do
anything to save the other. But words and vows are worthless against the power
of addiction. Before it claims your life, it claims your personality, your
beliefs, even parts of your soul.
I don’t deny the culpability of the addict. I know it’s a
disease of choice. I’ve known others who have crashed on the rockiest of rock
bottoms and are now living wonderful lives, fully in control of their own
destiny. But no matter how hard you try to stop making excuses for the addict, it’s
the only way you can justify loving someone who is already gone in every way
that matters. It’s like loving someone who is possessed.
It’s one thing to lose someone. It’s another to lose someone
again and again and again, to that same unstoppable force. I feel like I am
losing my brother against something that I can’t fight. I’ve tried before and
lost, and I’m terrified of losing again.
Jessica Fowler is a fiction writer and poet from the suburbs
of Philadelphia. Her short story, “Anchored” was recently published in The
Philly Anthology (Vol. 1). Jessica studied journalism at Temple University and
when she is not working on fiction and poetry, she is busy writing articles and
blogs for funeral directors as the Public Relations Specialist at ASD –
Answering Service for Directors. Jessica is also an avid outdoor enthusiast who
loves hiking, camping, biking and swimming. To read more of Jessica’s writing,
visit her blog at characterisfate.wordpress.com
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