Running through the emptiness...

Nine months after my son died I ran my first half marathon. 

Never a runner, I found myself in desperate need of something to focus on. Grief takes different forms and for me grief meant I had to keep moving…running in fact…to escape the emptiness that was relentlessly trying to consume me.

It has been 2 and a-half years since I lost my son and I am still running. Doing everything I can to fend off the deep, austere, hollow feeling that makes me gasp for breath and clench my chest.

I still can’t believe he is gone.

Life has gone on, like I knew it would. I have managed through days and fought through nights, watching others live their lives and letting them think I am living mine. 

In reality though, I am just running.

I am running from the hollowness in the pit of my stomach, the tightness in my throat, the hole in my heart.

I am running from the fact that my son is dead.

I wonder if the thousands of runners that join me at the start line can see how truly broken I am. 

As we all see the sun rise and feel the promise of a new day, can they see the emptiness in my eyes? Can they sense the sadness that surrounds me? 

I have medals hanging in my house for each of the 23 runs I have completed since that first half marathon. Shining examples of how to avoid feeling anything. The same trophies that show others I have moved on with my life are merely reminders to myself that I am still running.

Running through life, with a smile on my face, hiding from the empty ache that doesn’t allow me to breath.

Because even now…after all these months have passed, I don’t want to stop running. I don’t want to feel what waits for me in the reality of my son’s death.

So for now I will keep finding solace in my ability to run, because as it turns out, running through the emptiness doesn't require a destination. 

Running from something or running toward something?

In the end it doesn't matter. 

Because it is the  slow, steady healing ability embedded within the run that is, for me, the destination.

Heroin isn't someone else's drug anymore

"America has been struggling with this silent assassin for decades. Year after year, our children fall prey to the siren that is heroin. States all across the country are reporting skyrocketing rates of intoxication, overdoses and death."

I am missing a lot of spoons.

This fact is not new to me. It is just a cold reminder of how addiction destroyed my son.

My spoons were used to further his habit, burned with now empty lighters that were innocently purchased with nothing more than candle lighting in mind.

For the rest of my life, every time I eat a bowl of cereal or indulge in mint chip ice cream, I will be reminded of the dirty drug that took my son.

I am the bereaved mother of an addict. This is my life. Every time I open a silverware drawer I am slapped with the death of my son.

In 2011, the year that claimed the life of my son, 178,000 Americans used heroin for the first time.(The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). 

With statistics this heinous I can’t be the only mother missing spoons.

I grew up in the 80's, in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of LA. Gasoline hovered around .85 cents a gallon (I remember this because my friend and I would scour the floor of her Honda CRX for loose change and always came up with enough to drive all day). Kids had to graduate high school without the luxury of the internet and the call waiting beep on your land line was sheer luxury. We didn’t have cell phones, or email or Facetime.

And we sure as hell didn’t have heroin.

The most dangerous thing I did when I was a teenager was lather myself up with baby oil and bake myself in the afternoon sun.

Sure marijuana was around and I had a couple of drunk weekends, but heroin was strictly off limits. It wasn’t even an option. Not only was it not accessible, but it was a 'junkies' drug. No suburban kid in LA in the 80's was cooking heroin and shooting up. 

It was taboo.

Of course cocaine was the drug of choice back then and I suppose that I could have found it had I looked, but heroin? No. Heroin has taken a place within suburbia that my teenage self could never have imagined. Because life was simpler when I was a teenager. There was no such thing as social media, text conversations or online video game playing.

I never imagined I would have a strong, handsome, charismatic son who would succumb to heroin and die just days after his 20^th birthday.

Heroin was not part of my life. It was a 'junkies' drug after all. An intangible darkness that I couldn’t fathom becoming a part of my life.

Yet, here I am, in upper class suburbia.

And there it is, staring me in the face every time I open my silverware drawer.