(Editor’s Note: A friend of ours recently lost a grown daughter to drug addiction. With this touching so many people, we thought others might benefit from reading his lament for his daughters. The article first appeared in the Jesup Press-Sentinel, and is edited for space. –eeb)
By Derby Waters, Jesup, Ga. | On August 7 a young woman lay down to sleep and never woke up. She was a mother of two children, beautiful, highly-educated person, and my daughter.
She was also a drug addict. A great part of my heart is empty.
Waters
What I can feel of it is sorrow so profound there are no words to describe it. Almost 600,000 people in the United States will die this year, just as my daughter did. Death from drug use is among the top killers in this nation. More than 1,600 will die every day this year. That’s 1,600 more grieving families, 1,600 funerals every day, 365 days each year.
Anna Jo did not want to be an addict. She didn’t work to achieve her master’s degree to become an addict. She didn’t marry and have her children to become an addict. She didn’t plan her home and life to become an addict. But just as with so many other addicts, a physical ailment led to the use of pain pills and then stronger prescription medicine and ultimately a dive into the dark, soul-eating world of an addict— the ultimate destination for those with that addictive genetic component.
Just like many other addicts, my daughter tried to live in two separate worlds. One she hated but could not stay away from, and the other she loved and wanted desperately to stay in. Only she could not. And because of that, she was miserable, ripped into, living a lie in a world she desired and plunging into the other to escape her pain and torment, her shame and her inability to forgive and love herself. We tried any and everything to reach inside that other world and snatch our daughter, our sister, back to this world. Treatment, counseling and tenderness, tough love and pulling away.
Fear. Always we lived with the fear that the inevitable day would come as it does for most long-term users. It’s the day we feared but could not really comprehend.
We all worked so hard to avoid that day, and always the specter stalked just behind us. A shadow cast its darkness over all we did, taunting and pulling at our shirttails. We dared not look back lest it reach out and catch us, and so we raced from one episode to the next, trying desperately to hold onto that one family member who needed us, the one we willed to keep one step ahead of that shadow.
But in the end it came. And its endless depth still surprises that it found us. We could not imagine. Surely we could not love so much and try so hard and have it all end this way. It is not so. It is not so.
But it is.
The great majority of addicts do not want that life, but like Pavlovian slaves, they are controlled by beasts that will not let go.
Many more will die, and many more families will lose a loved one. It is a blight and a shame on our society that we cannot/will not do more to show them love and compassion and to give them the medical attention that this disease requires.
This community has poured out love and compassion for us. And for that we are so grateful. So many friends, so much love. Maybe somehow Anna Jo can know this, and it will give her comfort as it does for us.
Rest now, my darling daughter. You were loved so well.—Daddy.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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