The Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., is a festive place during the holidays. Live Christmas caroling fills a small but grand lobby every night as guests and locals like me gather around a 20-foot Christmas tree with blinking white lights and hundreds of shiny, gold ornaments. Nightly performers range from professional groups, such as the Congressional Chorus, to local school and community choirs. This evening, it’s the Washington Chorus, and they are wonderful.
This holiday season, like too many other families who have lost someone to drugs and alcohol, I am missing my little sister Jenny, who died in 2017 from prescription opioids. She was 44 years old, a college graduate, and a middle-class, suburban mother who hid her disease from us for years. Since her death, I have tried to be grateful during the holidays, but right now, hearing the Christmas music, I feel a tremendous sadness. The holidays bring back memories of growing up in Buffalo, New York: Three young sisters shoveling snow in our driveway with my father in his Buffalo Bills hat and each of us armed with small red shovels.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION MOVES TO EXPAND ACCESS TO ADDICTION TREATMENT PERMANENTLY
Our family’s story isn’t unique. Forty-six percent of adults have a family member or close friend who struggles with addiction. Since 1999, over 932,000 people have died due to a drug overdose. In 2021, the United States had 107,622 drug overdose deaths, a 28.5% increase over the prior year. Among the 21.6 million people in 2019 who needed substance use disorder treatment, just 12% received it.
The opioid crisis is supposed to be over by now, with the villains who perpetrated a fraud on the public (Purdue Pharma, drug manufacturers, pharmacies, and top-tier management consulting firms) paying more than $54 billion in settlements to fix a crisis they created and fueled for their own profits. But it doesn’t feel over, not even close. Our drug crisis in America continues to metastasize across the country largely due to shame and stigma, made worse by two years of isolation during COVID-19.
When I try to think about these statistics as human stories, there are too many to imagine, and I’m reminded of a quote from Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.” I know this to be true.
I experienced the entirety of my sister’s addiction and death in just six days at Kenmore Mercy Hospital in Buffalo. No previous interventions. No rehab, treatment, or relapses. Never forcing the moment to its crisis with a single family conversation about addiction. Just a monotone doctor telling us, “It’s the end.” I remember thinking, How did we miss my sister’s “rock bottom” — you were always supposed to hit that first, before the ending?
When I remember that week living in the hospital with Jenny, I can’t make sense of the story. I can only recall a series of gruesome incidents, one worse than the next: the first time I saw my sister’s beautiful light-green eyes with bubbles all over them like a monster, shuffling Jenny to the bathroom all night long, my mother signing “Do Not Resuscitate” forms, bloody bags of fluid hanging from Jenny’s bed, and finally, the night of her death.
Jenny died in the hospital with my parents on both sides of her bed holding her hands. It was late at night and very quiet. My mother wore a baseball cap. My father, a Vietnam combat veteran, took Jenny’s pulse until it was gone. My sister Colleen and I sat at the foot of the bed, looking at a perfectly framed picture of Jenny and our parents in the silence, an image I’ll never be able to unsee.
Our family’s story is a chilling example of the power of shame and stigma that prevent us from helping the people we love get the medical treatment they need. But I share our story during this holiday season with hope — hope that just one sister out there, one parent or spouse or friend, will take action and have a different ending to their story. I would have done anything to help my sister, but she never asked.
I’m not ashamed of my sister for having substance use disorder, but I’m so ashamed of myself for not being educated about it sooner. I failed her in every way a person can.
The holidays will never be the same for our family. I feel the tears coming as the Washington Chorus starts to sing “Silent Night.” Some of the younger children who are sitting on the floor up front sing along, and their quiet little voices quickly silence the crowded hotel lobby.
For my sister Jenny, and too many others this holiday season, “Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace.”
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Kelly O’Connor is a resident of Washington and the TEDx presenter of My Introduction to Narcan.
