“I have been living with survivor’s guilt for years now.”
We were lingering after dinner in an upscale restaurant in a small New England city, discussing the heroin epidemic that has ravaged the region for 15 years and the impact it has had on his life and tragically, that of his son.
“I can’t walk into the hardware store, or the local diner back home, without running into parents who have lost children to heroin. And my son is still alive. After 12 years of using, and quitting, and using again, he is still alive. It is hard facing those other parents, many of whom blame my son for their child’s death and blame me for his survival.”
A dozen years earlier, his son was involved in a serious traffic accident that left him with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and an addiction to opioid pain medication that eventually led him to heroin. Since then, of the 10 friends his teenaged son hung out with, only five remain. The rest have died of overdoses.
Mac has spent tens of thousands of dollars seeking out rehab clinics to help his son, going as far as Minnesota to find one that specialized in treating addicts with TBI. But the bigger toll has been on the marriage that dissolved, and on Mac’s own well-being after years of dealing with an addicted son. It is a burden that you can’t just put down. As he described it, “For the last 12 years we have been constantly circling the drain of his addiction.” As he twirled his finger in the air, the pull that kept him tied to his son was almost tangible.