Reflection on Overdose Awareness Month

August is International Overdose Awareness Month, a time for us to collectively and individually recognize, remember, and grieve all the people who have lost their lives to drug overdose deaths. This is not just about those lost in the last 10-15 years of what we know as the current “opioid crisis.” Yes, we have lost far more people since 2010 than ever before in history, but we can’t forget those who came before, those whose backs our current attempts to reduce these numbers stand. We often say in the recovery movement, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” But we can’t forget, we also stand on the shoulders of the thousands of people who died before we started paying attention.

People like my roommate, Jon, and friends Carl, Dickie and Spike in England in the late 90’s. Or Lourdes, Donnie, and JD in Portland, Maine, in the early 2000’s. Or Wayne, Mara, Doug, Jeremy and Rob in Bangor, Maine, all before 2011. I have so many that I can’t recall all their names, or even the event of their deaths. I just know they are always with me, floating along eternally tethered to my heart by a silken thread, their voices calling to me lest they be forgotten.

I have much fresher grief, too, people who are counted as part of this overdose crisis, like Mark and Sean and Corey and Delicia and Kealynd. Especially Kealynd.

I met Kealynd for the first time in a Chinese restaurant in Hyde Park, Boston, just around the corner from his group home. He was 21 and Black and Jewish and adopted and gay and full of light. He sparkled even in the dim and shabby booth we shared that night. I found myself transfixed, compelled, and totally drawn in by his little-boy earnestness. His wore his desperate desire to be loved like a cloak, unable to hide it from everyone he met as he walked through the world, wounded and sensitive and bright, and so deeply troubled. His trauma spilled out everywhere from the open wounds he couldn’t heal alone. I engaged with him as a recovery coach off and on for five years, visiting him twice weekly during his stints in jail, speaking frequently with his mother when he went missing. But more than a coach, I engaged with Kealynd with deep and abiding love, becoming one of the few people he would ever trust in his life.

Kealynd died of a methamphetamine overdose on August 28^th, 2021, at the age of 26. Sometimes I tell myself his light shined too bright for this world. Sometimes I tell myself the world and all our inadequate systems let him down. Sometimes I tell myself that’s just how it goes. Sometimes I tell myself I shouldn’t have loved him so much. Sometimes I tell myself he’s with me much more in death and helping me do this work.

Sometimes I tell myself that some may die so that others may live, something I’ve heard repeated many times over the years, a vague attempt at assuaging our survivor’s guilt.

Most of the time I know that’s total bullshit.

Because it begs the question – why am I so special that someone would have to die for me to live? Weren’t they special enough?

Kealynd certainly was.

My people – our people – have been dying for much longer than 15 years, unnoticed, unremarkable. We are at a point now that the current volume of deaths has become unremarkable, too. There is no zero-sum game (what is a zero-sum game?) in overdoses – that only some can live so others must die. We are dying much more than we are living. The sum doesn’t add up.

How much longer will we stand on the shoulders of those we’ve lost that we love so intimately, whose ranks grow by over 300 a day in this country? How much longer can we look away? How much longer can we continue investing more and more money and energy into things that have so clearly failed us?

Please, in the name of all of the Kealynd’s that will die today, on the shoulders of all of our loved ones, for the sake of all who are still holding on, waiting for us to figure it out… In the name of all the people you love who have struggled with chaotic substance use, who may be on either side of the final and unforgiving line of life and death – please fight for them, for us, for all of our fallen comrades – more than we can ever possibly remember – and for those still standing. Stand, and fight.