I spoke last month at the vigil organized by Tapestry in Pulaski Park for International Overdose Awareness Day (marked annually on Aug. 31) about the death of my nephew four years ago at age 27. His death came as we were beginning to experience the ubiquity of fentanyl in street drugs, and before there was widespread access to Narcan.
When you know a child from their beginnings, you see their essence. I remember playing with Jackson as a toddler. He had a toy with colorful buttons; when pushed, doors opened and animals popped out. A voice gave directions to press a button, and Jackson replied, “I don’t want the lady to tell me to press the button.”
He wanted to decide for himself, to go where he felt curious. These other memories: His parents taking him to computer classes, Jackson learning to build them, learning to restore radio consoles, buying parts from old men at flea markets. The old men remember him still.
As first of his generation, Jackson spent the most time with the elders in our family, and carried memories of his great grandmother and three grandparents now gone. He sat next to my father for hours as they made art on an early Apple computer.
Jackson put his smarts and heart to developing mechanical know-how. He valued doing it yourself, saving, repairing, and making things last.
He challenged authority. When diagnosed with Hepatitis C, Jackson was denied the lifesaving drug Harvoni. The state used a scale of severity of disease that afforded the drug only to those with advanced liver disease. Jackson challenged that, representing himself against state authorities. To this day, his parents receive thanks from strangers crediting him with saving their lives, thanks to access to Harvoni.
This is the good of Jackson. This, and so much more, lives on.
My prevailing memory is of a boy in jams, running out of the ocean with a boogie board under his arm, laughing.
There was much, too, that was terrible and traumatic, secondary to the addiction he lived with after being prescribed an excessive, unregulated supply of opioids following the extraction of his wisdom teeth. This coupled with his social anxiety amplified his risk.
A few weeks ago, I visited the site of the Memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing. At night, illuminated, empty glass chairs rest on a lawn kept green even in drought.
A large dark pond reflects numbers on concrete towers bordering the pool.
9:01 and 9:03.
The stillness of the pool is counterpoint to the terrible explosion in between when all was lost.
We do not have a large scale memorial, yet. No green grass lawn.
Our disaster is not over.
We are counting 1,000,000 since 1996 when OxyContin hit the market.
We come together from many pathways to grieve deaths that have changed our lives in ways we never imagined at the beginning. We make vigils and sanctuaries in time as we speak out for sons and daughters, parents, partners, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, friends, students, and colleagues, honoring each individual.
At the vigil, I spoke as an aunt, bereaved since June of 2018, when Jackson died. That loss motivated me to act. In his memory, I learned to use Narcan, and I carry it still. I have participated in syringe pick-ups with Tapestry, and I’m co-leader, with Laurie Loisel, of the Northampton Recovery Center’s peer grief support group for those who have lost someone to substance use.
This group has been meeting monthly on Zoom since April, 2020. Initiated by Hampshire HOPE and the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office and now an offering of the Northampton Recovery Center, we provide community for people grieving a loss, no matter the substance that led to the death, or the relationship to the person who died.
Some participants come to us in the days immediately after the loss. Others have been in this dislocation for years. Some bring multiple losses. All are welcome.
These losses bring particular feelings of shock, sadness, regret and guilt. They can be minimized, and stigmatized by judgment. We know grief is not something we will get over. It continues as love endures.
As group leaders, we offer readings for reflection, responsive poems, and a listening space without judgment. We share similarities of experience, and marvel at the uniqueness of each person lost to substance use.
Our group meets on the third Thursday of each month – the next one falling on Oct. 13, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. You can find the link on the Northampton Recovery Center’s website at northamptonrecoverycenter.org.
We will light a candle in memory and name our lost loved ones.
We bring their pictures. We speak of their worst and their best moments, and the moments in between.
For us, they began as our one in a million.
They are forever one in a million and so much more than that.
Amy Horowitz is a member of the Hampshire HOPE opioid prevention coalition run out of the city of Northampton’s Health Department. Hampshire HOPE members contribute to this monthly column about local efforts addressing the opioid epidemic.