Honoring Kyle by Remembering His Worst Day

Monday, August 31st,  was International Overdose Awareness Day, and I marked the day with a short online event in honor of my son, Kyle David Fisher-Hertz, who died of an overdose when he was 26. This is an essay that captures much of what we covered in that event. 

Last year the pandemic was not kind to addicts. A record number of Americans, more than 90,000 sons and daughters, died of a drug overdose in 2020, more than in any previous year--and 20,000 more than the previous year, when it seemed we were finally turning the tide and beginning to stem the steady increase in overdose deaths that had plagued us for the previous decade. This graph shows how fatal overdoses steadily climbed, with the previous peak passing 60,000 in 2017. The numbers rose to more than 80,000 dead the next year but dropped back down to 70,000 in 2019 before surging last year, with a huge spike in the first months after we were all sent into lockdown. 

The United States represents just four percent of the world’s population, but we were 25 percent of the world’s fatal overdoses in 2020. As this graph from last year shows, North Americans are dying from taking too many drugs at a far higher rate than anyone anywhere else in the world.

 

There is a serious sickness in our society, and our overdoses are merely a symptom of that sickness, which I believe is rooted in our mindless consumerism and the resulting lack of purpose in our lives. My daughter argues "lack of purpose" is a privileged excuse for drug addiction, but we are a privileged people in North America, and more money gives us greater access to drugs, so it makes sense that feeling a lack of meaning in our lives while having the resources to ameliorate our emptiness by getting high would lead to greater use. But I digress. 

When I told my daughter I would be opening the event by saying a few words about the overdose epidemic, she wondered what new thing I could say when so much has already been said about this issue. But I believe that even though we are years into this epidemic, the two main messages I want to share in both my new book, What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction, and in this essay, are still not familiar enough to most people.

The first message is that medication-assisted treatment saves lives. No one should be judged or stigmatized for taking Methadone or Suboxone or following any other medical plan to stay off street drugs. I wish I had known this myself when my son was alive. He and I wanted him to get Vivitrol, a monthly shot that blocks opioid receptors and cravings and doesn’t allow you to get high--but he had just turned 26, lost my insurance, and discovered that the state health insurance he had in Nevada didn’t cover that drug, which has the generic name Naltrexone. The clinic would only offer him Suboxone or Methadone. 

My son (shown here, sober at my wedding, 16 days before he died) called me the weekend before he died to say he thought if he couldn’t get the Vivitrol shot, maybe he would just take the Suboxone they were offering him. Tragically, I maintained a stony, judgmental silence, letting him know I would be disappointed in him if he went on maintenance drugs. I thought he was “better” than that. I thought he could just stop. I didn’t realize his disease was terminal until it killed him. 

Since then, I have had the opportunity to visit a methadone clinic, where I saw dozens of healthy young people run in, take their daily dose, and run back out to take their kids to daycare, to get to their jobs, to go on with their lives. If you love an addict, please know he or she has a deadly disease with an incredibly high relapse rate, as high as 97 percent without medically assisted treatment. I still think Naltrexone shots are a miracle; they now have shots that can block opioid receptors for up to six months at a time, and I hope more state insurance covers that medicine than when my son was trying to get that shot. But if the miracle shots are not an option, going on Suboxone or Methadone will provide the addicts we love and want to stay alive a bridge to wellness. We should be celebrating the people who go that route, choosing to live and giving themselves an opportunity to function again. I wish I had understood this in time to have not failed my son when he asked my advice. Instead, I believe my silence discouraged him from pursuing that solution, so instead of going back to the clinic, he got street drugs and took them until they killed him three days later.

My second message is for the millions of parents, siblings, friends, cousins and other loved ones who lost someone to an overdose in the past five years. Though early grief will shake you to your core and make you question whether you can go on, I am here to tell you you can survive and learn to carry your grief with grace if you just hang in there and practice self care like it’s your motherfucking job. You can have a life of peace and even joy after even the most profound and devastating loss. Post-traumatic growth is real. No one wants to be driven to their knees by loss and trauma, but all of us can, in time, with a lot of hard work on ourselves, allow our worst experiences to open our hearts and bring us closer to our true spiritual selves. 

And now I want to say a few words about what killed my amazing, brilliant son Kyle: He died not only because he was an addict but because he cared so much about what other people thought of him that he spent the last 10 years of his life always trying to one up himself and act crazier and more death defying than he had the day before. He started rehab “only” addicted to crack, but he probably thought he wasn’t as hardcore as the other addicts were until he was as addicted as everyone else to the most deadly drug of all, so he let the other guys in rehab teach him how to shoot heroin. I have an essay on my website about toxic masculinity--which is what Kyle was demonstrating when he kept risking his life to appear cool--and how it contributed to Kyle's death

But beyond that I want to say please, if you’re a young person who hasn’t done drugs yet, please don’t let yourself be swayed by your desire to impress anyone. If you’ve done some drugs, maybe dabbled in alcohol or marijuana, but haven’t yet done the deadly trifecta (crack, meth, and heroin), please don’t try to play it cool if someone offers you one of those. Please know you are loveable without laying your life on the line to look like what someone else wants you to be. No high is worth what you will be doing to your life if you take any of those drugs. And I am a person who has enjoyed drugs myself, so I am not saying this to discourage you from pleasure. I am saying this to save your life and protect your mother from tragedy.

At the end of our event, anyone who wanted to name and let us recognize someone they loved who

died of an overdose, was invited to do so, and we wound up talking about a dozen or so other people who had died by overdose. I especially wanted to remember two of Kyle's friends, one who died four months before Kyle did, Peter Parise (left), someone Kyle admired and felt a kinship with-- and whose death probably made Kyle feel more hopeless than he already did. Our sons' connection led to a friendship between me and Pete's mom after their deaths that has meant a great deal to me as I navigated these years of grief. And Samantha Owens, a beautiful young woman with whom Kyle lived in Las Vegas for a while, both of them and their third roommate all shooting heroin together. I had hoped in the intervening years maybe Sam (below) had gotten clean, but instead she died this year of an overdose. 

My son, just like Pete and Sam and all the other people we remembered that night, was more than his addiction, and even though we remembered Kyle on overdose awareness day, I want him to be remembered for more than his overdose. He was an incredible friend, a wonderful brother, grandson and son, a great skier, a lover of books, a comedian, a rock climber, a doting daddy for the few months he spent in his daughter's life, a poet and humor writer, a curious conversationalist and a fearless dancer. He lit up all of our lives, and since his light went out, we have all had to struggle our way out of the darkness.

I feel blessed I was able to include more than 20 original works by Kyle in my new poetry collection about him (which is available for purchase from me, local bookstores, Bookshop or Amazon). The poems of his that his friends read showcase his talent but also show how desperate he was to get well. The fact that Kyle will never write another word and isn’t here to read his own poems aloud to us is tragic, but I am so grateful that five of his good friends agreed to gather online with 50 more of us to read and listen to his poetry. We read five poems because on September 20th of this year, Kyle will have been gone five years.

The readers were (from top left) Evan, an old friend of his from Americorps in Seattle, who missed her time slot and was replaced by Ashley, an old friend who knew him when he was in recovery in California; Steph, Kyle's first love; Tommy, a songwriter who was in Kyle's last rehab with him and has stayed clean since shortly after Kyle died. Plus, right, George, his grandsponsor (sponsor of Kyle's sponsor); 
and, below, Dwight, a house manager here in Western Mass who had to call the cops on Kyle when he discovered him using heroin in the house. He drove them all crazy, but they all still loved him. They each said a little about Kyle, in words I found moving and inspiring. and then each read one of his poems. You can watch a  recording of the event here: https://youtu.be/AbXbzdwd3h0  

At the end of the event, Kyle's little sister, Jamie, read aloud from a text exchange she'd had with Kyle the year before he died. The words she shared (in the text displayed below) most vividly brought my son back to life and showed how smart and funny and wise he was, and why we all kept hoping he was going to be OK. I hope the event and this essay helps someone else say "Yes! That's a great idea," when their loved one talks about using medicine to help them stay clean -- because that's What I Should Have Said. 

YOU CAN ORDER MY BOOK NOW!

Hello, wonderful reader friends! I am so excited that my book is suddenly, magically available for pre-sales at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-i-should-have-said! 

So, question... is my website good enough for my new life as a world-famous author? Some friends who know about such things don't think so, but when I look at what I'd have to pay to have a good Word Press or Wix site, I just don't think it's worth it. Who is going to buy my book -- or not buy it -- just because of my website? Or am I thinking too small?  

My Book is Almost Here: I Need Your Address

 

Finishing Line Press tells me my debut poetry collection, is going into pre-sales at the end of this month. I am super excited to send everyone a postcard and/or an email with the ordering information as soon as it's available. If you want to know how to order the book early, which I pray you will all do as it helps determine how big a print run there will be, please send me an email at lanettesweeney@gmail.com with your mailing address and I will add you to my list! 

I had said a few weeks ago that I was going to post a blog twice a week, but then I posted a blog and nobody read it (really, it was so weird, after 100 + people read the one before, no one read the last one), so I thought, well, maybe twice a month is too often, so I've gone back to sporadically posting as the spirit moves me. 

Six poems from the collection have been picked up by literary journals in the past couple of months, including a poem by Kyle that he wrote for his sister Jamie. I'm thrilled that this book will also give my son a chance to have his poems out in the world, and it only just occurred to me I could be submitting his work for publication, too, so I will be working on that next. 

I hope I hear from many of you with your addresses. Don't be scared because it's poetry; I promise you will be able to understand the poems. Tell your friends who you think might benefit from a grief-recovery story, as well. And if you're in a book group, maybe you can all choose my book for one of your upcoming reads and invite me to your book group. I'd love that. I can feel Kyle smiling with me at that idea. 

Finally, I feel I have to add that it feels very strange to be excited about this book that came about only because my son is dead. Obviously, I would rather have my son than this book, but since I didn't get to choose, I'm proud to have been able to create this project from my grief, and I know the book is going to be a help and comfort to many people. Thank you all for your encouragement of me through this journey.

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Luckily, sharing our pain helps everyone

Several months after Kyle's death, his grieving sister Jamie made this art
of a poem Kyle wrote her, "Pipeline," which inspired the one I reference
at left, "For Those Who Need Science Before Faith." Or... maybe it makes
more sense to say that I inspired this poem by talking about my belief in
the pipeline with Kyle and Jamie when they were little children . I have
imagined it invisibly connecting us all since I was a child, though I don't
remember anyone sharing the idea with me. I am excited my book features
20 of Kyle's poems, including "Pipeline" as a companion piece for
"For Those Who..." My son's poems appear alongside 60 of my own.

After more than 20 combined rejections, three more of the poems from my book were accepted for publication by online literary journals this past week! I’m thrilled they were accepted in time to be listed on my book's acknowledgments page, and I was especially touched by the notes the editors sent me.

The editor of the online Amethyst Review said she “would be honored” to publish a long rhyming poem that I worked on for more than two years, “For Those Who Need Science Before Faith.” She said all the poems
I’d sent her were “very strong," However, the poem she accepted has been a hard sell: it has one rhyme scheme that carries across four sections and 30 stanzas and examines my and
my family’s evolving thoughts about faith in the midst of loss. The
fact that an editor saw
its value and wants to share it with her readers is just what I dreamed of and deeply moving to me. 

The editor of the online journal Please See Me said he's happy to publish another hard sell, the longest poem in my book, “The Body’s Expression,” as well as the collection’s title poem, which contains the message I am most eager to share with readers: “What I Should Have Said.” 

When I wrote to thank the editor, he wrote back, “Please excuse me for not saying sooner how important your writing is and how much I personally respect your willingness to turn your personal loss and pain into an experience meaningful to others. In the two years we have had [Please See Me] up we have read about too many such losses of young people and not everyone is able to share their stories with the necessary skill that aligns with candor.”

This comment made me think about David Kessler’s book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler, who survived the nation's first mass shooting and endured his mother dying of cancer when he was a little boy, has worked with the grief-stricken all his adult life. He co-authored with Elizabeth Kubler Ross On Grief and Grieving, the book that introduced the five stages of grief, and On Death and Dying. Then the unthinkable happened, and his own son died of an overdose at the age of 21, just after he’d started writing Finding Meaning. It seemed like a cosmic joke from the universe, leaving him feeling that his life was absolutely bereft of meaning. 

He realized immediately that he’d had no idea how profound the loss of a child was until he experienced it himself. While I’m sure he treated every parent with whom he’d worked through the years with great sensitivity, he said he now wished he could go apologize to every one for his previous lack of true understanding. That he was able to continue to write and publish this book is what gave his loss deeper meaning.  He knew that much as he would wish it otherwise, he was now going to be able to help many more people survive their horrible losses and revive their gladness to be alive because of his horrible new empathy. His book helped me persist in putting together my poetry collection, as getting this book and its message out into the world is how I am finding meaning in my own loss. Kessler continues to find meaning in helping other grievers through his website and Facebook group, created at the start of the pandemic.

Nearly all of us will experience deep grief and pain in our lifetimes, but those who are able to turn that loss into some kind of meaningful project or life's work that honors their lost loved one are best able to go forward with renewed hope. I’m grateful Kessler’s work helped affirm this for me. Writing my book was the beginning of my healing, and getting it out into the world will help me further by allowing me to reach other families who have undergone or are still undergoing the same pain. 

I’ve also received several notes over the four years of my grieving on Facebook and over the past week from readers of this blog telling me that my willingness to share my pain as openly as I have has been a help to them. 

How lucky I am that what is helping me (writing about my pain and sharing that writing) is simultaneously helping others. 

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P.S. Thank you John Sibley Williams, for your great video advising poets it’s all a numbers game and encouraging us to submit more of our work. You inspired me to do that, and it’s working!

#poetry #submissions #rejections #grief