I’ve often wondered since Daniel’s passing, why is it that people don’t like talking about the anguish from the aftermath of addiction or really death in general… This is what I’ve come to believe. Everyone loves a good, feel good come back story. But what about when addiction wins? The funerals, autopsies, and settling of affairs. The excruciatingly drop you to your knees, gutted scream of the realization that all hope is now lost. The realization that the day of reckoning you begged God for, will not be coming. There will now never be a day, where the hope of sobriety lasting, of treatment finally working happens. Where entire families are left in utter devastation. When mothers were never meant to deal with the unnatural effects of having to bury their children, so they cry out for their lost babies everyday. Where marital vows are destroyed and children are left without one parent or God forbid, both, clutching onto everything that parent has touched in an act of desperation to somehow stay connected with you. When your wife is able to cradle you like a newborn because all that’s left of your 200 pound body is a small vase of ashes that your she has set up in her home next to work boots and a hard hat that will never be worn again because she can’t bear to let you go. Where your son walks up to that vase and lays a hand on it, to introduce a friend to his daddy. Let’s also not forget the family members and friends who carry your pictures around in their wallets or small amounts of ashes around their necks to try and keep you close. When it’s nine months and still your family and friends are no closer to closure then they were on August 30th, 2022. No one talks about what it feels like to be sat down and told “Daniel’s dead he died in a porta potty this morning.” Or how the hardest part of every day is when my eyes meet in the mirror, the feeling of regret and longing weeping out of me “If I only knew then what I know now, I would of chosen a different path.” Screw the silence of stigma that creates a pain that leaves youth, men and women to die alone in cars on backroads, in porta potty’s, on bathroom floors. The Stigma of addiction kills and leaves families in utter devastation. YOU ARE NOT ALONE. There is no shame in desperately yelling out for help! Find yourself a lighthouse, a safety net and cling to it as if your life depends on it. It does. Everyone is hurting in one way or another, no one is immune to heartbreak and we’re all trying to find something to numb that aching pain.
- A lighthouse and a deeply pained person. Because each of us is both, in one way or another.
(These are a few things Daniel wrote in treatment and then this is the last picture of him ever taken on August 22nd, 2022 while in rehab. He died August 30th, 2022💔)
