Friends,
Several weeks back I was sitting at home, wrapped in an old quilt and cradling a mug of tea. As the bitter wind howled and I tried desperately to assimilate the words from my social psychology course, my phone vibrated. I looked down at it and the message simply read, “_________overdosed tonight.”
My heart sank to the pit of my soul.
Messages like that one are becoming more common within our communities as people are losing those they love to the opioid crisis gripping our nation.
I stared at my phone screen for a few minutes, feeling the embers in my belly begin to ignite. This text? It was a crisis text. It was, my heart felt, about being out in a scary, rough sea and desperately searching for a beacon.
The sender is someone who is a strong, intelligent and compassionate community leader. Street savvy and about social justice and inclusion for all. And they are one who has had to use naloxone kits on many occasions to save their people in medical distress from fentanyl. This person, despite those within their circle who navigate opioid dependency, has never used opioids themselves. Often, they express the impact it has on almost every aspect of their life, to live in fear that someone they care for will overdose and they won’t be there to “save them.” They have been terminated from a job they really liked, for using up all their sick days to stay home in case their person overdosed and then finally just stopped going to work, because, as they’ve expressed in our past talks, “How do you explain a situation like this to HR? I feel so ashamed. People don’t understand what addiction is like.”
I have learned so much from this person over time, and not the least of which is the anguish and isolation that grows within someone when they are trying to navigate real life experiences in communities that cannot speak with honesty, respect and openness about social and health issues from which many of us, simply by the very virtue of being human, can never really be exempt.
My heart wondered if that message, those three words on that cold and blustery night, was a pain-filled and angry response to the burden of not being there to save this friend too.
When I finally replied, I simply wrote, “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on inside.” In short time, a reply came back.
“I am so angry,” it read. “I am so f***ing angry and I just feel like I want to run through the streets and scream at the top of my lungs that people are dying! I want to go and speak to teenagers. Can you tell me how would I do that? I want to tell kids what it’s like to watch someone overdose and tell them how easy it is to become addicted to fentanyl. And that it’s everywhere and we have to talk about it.”
I realized I was slowly nodding my head as I read the reply.
Who better to explain what is needed than those with the lived experiences?
Today, as I was writing this column, another community member affected by a recent overdose death of someone they care for came into The Village. We went back into my office and, after checking in with how they were doing, I asked what’s happening out on our North Perth streets, as people try to navigate these recent deaths. They explained that, “It feels like people just don’t know what to do. Like, they don’t know how to handle close people dying from overdoses. That it could be them next.”
We talked about how grief looks like many things and about the beautiful team at North Perth Community Hospice. They asked, seemingly to no one in particular, how they are supposed to grieve for people that were “rough and kinda hard, and whose name was thrown around out there for getting into trouble or for ‘being addicted?’ How are we supposed show our love and respect?”
How do they, I wondered, as they went out into the street. And how do we, as a community, care for them as they grieve?
Take good care of each other, friends.
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Andrea Charest serves as director at the Listowel It Takes A Village location.
