‘I couldn’t see the signs. I didn’t know what to look for’
At times, Sarah Reger seemed to be in control of her drug addiction.
But slowly and relentlessly, it beat her down.
She died two weeks ago, at age 34, in a sweltering basement apartment in Kitchener.
A used naloxone kit was beside her bed. Her car was gone.
No one knew how long she lay there before she was discovered. Other tenants and the landlord noticed a lot of flies outside her door, and called the police.
And now, “All I know is this pain in my heart from missing my daughter,” said her father, Jim Mason. His eyes filled with tears. “You never think this is going to hit you,” he said. “You never think you’re going to suffer through the pain of losing a child.”
Mason is a well-known classical musician and principal oboist of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. When we spoke on Tuesday, he was wearing a T-shirt with “Grand River Baroque Festival” on it.
His life is about as far away as you can get from illegal drugs and the predators who deal them.
But that didn’t help him, or his
daughter.
“I couldn’t see the signs,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know what to look for. I never used a drug in my life.”
Sarah was his daughter from his first marriage. She had an older brother, Nathan.
While Mason was separating from their mother over a period of several years, he made a point of spending as much time as possible with both of them.
She was active, precocious, “a handful,” he said.
She would be so hard to control that they sometimes had to put her on a leash when she was young.
Yet she could also be sunny and full of joy. He has fond memories of taking her fishing and going on road trips to the United States.
She married Dean Reger and had two boys, Kyler and Kaleb. They worked together at Beresford Box Company in Waterloo.
Everything seemed fine, until the couple separated three years ago. Sarah and her sons moved in with Jim and his wife, violinist Julie Baumgartel, and their two children, Zack and Buzzy.
Mason and Baumgartel made her life as easy as they could, caring for Sarah’s boys and taking them to school when their mom was at work. The boys saw their father on weekends.
But “she felt her life was hard as a single parent,” living in the home she knew as a teenager, Mason said.
She started drinking heavily. She got involved with people who introduced her to cocaine.
It wasn’t until much later that Mason found out that she had also smoked marijuana and drank alcohol in high school. She had made a copy of the keys to his car and taken it out without permission, sometimes while drinking.
A year and a half ago she admitted to her father and stepmother that she was addicted to cocaine. A friend had warned her: “If you don’t tell them, I will.”
She went to a rehab facility in the United States from June to October last year.
Mason and Baumgartel had been looking after her boys. They said that she was welcome to move back in if she went to meetings, and had her life straightened out.
But she couldn’t. She was supposed to stay single so she could focus on recovery. Instead she got into a relationship with a man who soon broke up with her. Once she was found in a parking lot, incoherent after using cocaine and alcohol.
She would abruptly cancel commitments at the last minute. She stayed away from family unless she needed something, and would often ignore calls and texts. She got involved with another man, who Mason described as a heroin user.
On July the 4th, Mason was in the United States when his cellphone rang. It was the Waterloo Regional Police, asking for identifying marks on his daughter’s body. He described the butterfly tattoos on her back. The officer said that his daughter had passed away.
Later, the coroner told him she had most likely died from a drug overdose, but it would be a few months before he would completely finish his investigation.
The funeral director advised him not to view her body.
“You don’t want to remember your daughter looking like this,” he told Mason.
Mason said he preferred to remember her in happier times.
The boys are handling their grief in different ways.
Six-year-old Kaleb speaks about his mother and asks questions about her.
But nine-year-old Kyler doesn’t talk about it.
Mason and Baumgartel have set up a fund for the children’s higher education and they are keeping the living arrangements consistent.
But Mason is haunted by his helplessness.
“What can you do to get them back?” he once asked a police officer about the struggle of loving someone who has an addiction.
The officer replied: “The only thing that works is when they want to quit.”
ldamato@therecord.com, Twitter: @DamatoRecord