Wall Street Journal article, video tell story of my son’s fatal OD
Iwas so brave, people said.
So honest.
So — how did they put it? — awful. A bad mom. A failure. An enabler. A libtard.
Or so others who read these comments told me.
The comments were among those responding to an article on how I lost my son to a heroin overdose that went national on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.
The article, written by reporter Dan Frosch, appeared online Friday and in print Saturday. It was accompanied by a haunting video shot by Adya Beasley and stunning photos by Carolyn Van Houten.
The project, sharply headlined “Opioids: The Mother Who Knew Everything and Saw Nothing,” had been in the works since late April, a month after my son Devin Glenn was found blue-lipped
and not breathing in his bed. As excruciating as it had been — and still is — to have lost my son in such a horrific and unexpected way, I agreed to let Frosch and crew step into my suddenly darker world in the hopes of enlightening an even larger audience than this column reaches.
I admit, it is easier to tell someone else’s story rather than be the story. Having the tables turned felt something like free-falling off a cliff with no guarantee of what lies below.
Frosch, ever the meticulous journalist, kept coming back again and again with more questions and observations over the months. He wanted to get the story right, he told me.
For the most part, he did.
And he made it as easy as extracting one’s heart from the chest can be.
But it wasn’t easy to read his story. It wasn’t supposed to be.
Still, I hoped it helped others understand that no matter how good a parent is, how knowledgeable, how watchful, how diligent, heroin can still slip in and wreak devastation and death. I’ve been writing that story for seven years. This year, it became my own story.
Not everybody got that message.
I made it a point not to read the comments at the bottom of the online story — 283 of them, at last check. Reading such comments can either be uplifting or soul killing, and I wasn’t willing to gamble on which one these would be.
But many of you made sure to tell me how nasty some of them were.
So it goes. We demean others as a defense mechanism. Our minds will us to believe that terrible things happen to others, not us, because we are different from them, better than they are. We blame to make sense of pain.
But there is nothing worse anybody can say to me beyond telling me my son no longer has brain function, so anonymous sticks and stones are just so many glancing blows.
I did, however, read the volumes of comments that came via Twitter, Facebook and in emails — some addressed to me, some addressed to Frosch and forwarded to me.
A tweet from Ivanka Trump read: Thank you Joline for having the courage to share your story.
It wasn’t courage; it was necessity.
Many messages were thoughtful, painful outpourings about how heroin had slipped into their lives.
I heard from the father who raised his five children in a smoke- and alcohol-free home. They went to church, participated in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Each was brilliant and talented. Fifteen years ago, he learned that his youngest son, the most brilliant of all, was a heroin addict. Thus began what seemed an endless cycle of rehab, relapse, finding and forgiveness until this August, when he found his son’s body on the bathroom floor, a toxic dose of heroin mixed with fentanyl in his veins.
I heard from the mother whose son, who had graduated at the top of his class from a major university, was a heroin addict. She was a senior corporate executive, and her husband was a school principal, and still they had been blindsided by their son’s addiction. He’s been clean five years now, has a good job and is about to be married. But the specter of heroin still haunts them.
One woman told me her son is on his fifth rehab stay. Another said she was sharing the article with her children as a cautionary tale.
Each of these folks already knows that heroin doesn’t care where or how you live. It doesn’t care whether you are rich or poor, black or white, educated or street-smart.
Opioid overdoses kill about 91 Americans each day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The STAT, a national publication focused on health and medicine, estimates that the daily death toll could rise to 250 if the crisis is not contained.
But before we can truly deal with the opioid crisis, we must strip it of the stereotypes and honestly admit that none of us is immune to its deadly allure. I wasn’t. My son wasn’t. Stories like mine are proof that terrible things, including heroin addiction, can strike any family. None of us is that different. None of us is that better.