High School Assembly - November 2014

I was honored to be invited to speak at a local high school assembly today, to share my families story. When the assembly was over, a young woman hugged me and thanked me, telling me how much it meant to her to hear it. This was the greatest reward I could have wished for, and the reason that I won't ever stop talking about my baby and everything that we went through to try to save her.

I have shared the speech below, in hopes that it will do good for others as well. 

There is no adult who can look at a teenager and say "I know exactly what you are going through", because life has changed since we were kids. But that’s OK, because the point of advice, of sharing our stories with you, is to hope that there is something within them that you will be able to relate to.

We can't tell you that you can lead a life free of mistakes, because for most of us, our lives are chalk full of them - that is what makes us grow into successful and wise adults.

What I can tell you, is that some mistakes change your life forever. Some of these life-changing mistakes can turn out to have a positive outcome, you can learn from them and make better choices, and become a wiser person.

Other choices will turn your life into a nightmare.

My daughters’ mistakes cost her her life. Her choices, and my reactions to them, have taught me many horrible things.

I’ve learned what it looks like to watch your daughter change from one person, who is good and kind and strong - into another, broken person who wants to be all of those things, but doesn't believe that they can be anymore.

All because of a series of mistakes.

I can also tell you what it is like to mourn that person. I can tell you what it's like to know that someone left your child to die, alone in a gas station bathroom - because those are the choices you make when you take drugs like heroin.

I can tell you that my daughter, Elannah Rose, did not overdose. She took a drug that would have killed her no matter what - it wasn't safe in any dose and there was always going to be a day that she died from it.

The craziest part of everything that happened to my daughter is that she was an addict for three years before we knew it. At this point, every time I tell this story, I feel compelled to acknowledge what I believe all of you are thinking. What kind of a mother doesn’t notice that her child is messed up for three years? This is something I think about every day.

I believed I was a good mom. I did everything I could to provide for my daughter. I talked to her about everything I was supposed to talk with her about. My husband and I made sure that our kids knew they were our first priority.  We ate together, we hung out together, and we did everything we could to prepare her for the world and to be there for her. But I still missed it.

There were certainly signs that she wasn’t alright. Looking back I can see them with perfect clarity. Unfortunately, the signs were never things that we knew to look out for. And because she was so good at hiding her drug use, and so good at appearing to be the same person that we knew, we missed it.

I will never forgive myself. Even now, two and a half years after she died, I lie awake at night thinking about everything I missed, and everything I lost. I don’t blame my daughter, I blame myself. That doesn’t mean that I don’t hold her responsible for her choices, but I was her mom, and I was supposed to know. And I was supposed to save her. From everything bad in the world.

That was certainly my job when she was thirteen. It was my job until the day she died.

When my daughter was sixteen, she started using heroin. She had convinced herself that she could try it and stop, just like she had been able to “experiment” with every other drug she had tried.

It didn’t take long for her to realize that she was not going to be able to stop. Within a couple of weeks she realized that she had made a huge mistake, and she asked for help.

The daughter I saw that night was trying to be sober for the first time in years. She was shaking and picking at her skin… she looked extremely ill and a little insane. It was such a huge and sudden change that I almost convinced myself that she was faking it.

For months we watched her. She begged us not to send her to rehab and we didn’t understand that people don’t get clean at home… so when, once again, our little girl seemed to be perfectly together, we believed her. It was as if all of our prayers were answered.

Throughout this time she maintained a job, she received promotions, she graduated from high school… the drug use came up a few times, but she was so capable in everything else that we didn’t understand that she had a major problem. And it was never heroin again, it was a drink at a party, or a little bit of pot. She was living a double life, and she was good at hiding her other one.

We did this little dance for the next few years. She slipped, we caught her and became more vigilant, she got herself together, we gave her back her freedom, she slipped, the cycle started again.

Until one day when I was opening our mail and there was a letter from a lawyer offering to defend her. She had been arrested for possession of heroin, and this was how I found out. She had spent so much time hiding her activities that she never even considered we would discover the arrest.

By then, she’d been clean and sober for months, as far as we knew. She’d been talking about joining the military or potentially looking into a law enforcement career.

Now she was a felon.

We took her to court, and I cried through the whole thing. I was terrified for her, terrified for her future. And every time we went to court, I saw a side of her I didn’t know. A side that was created out of this other life, this addict’s life.

Even then, we didn’t stop trying to save her. I was so convinced that it was all my fault that I kept trying to fix everything. I kept believing the things she told me. I believed that I was helping her.

And then she got high at home. I caught her smoking heroin in our garage, and I had to kick her out.

This whole time… all these years of helping her… we had two other kids in the house. It never occurred to me that she would be using in our home with her brother and sister there. We had never found any evidence of drug use in the house; we had never actually caught her high.

I didn’t understand an addict’s behavior. I didn’t understand how good she was at hiding things. And even those things I should have understood, I didn’t want to believe those things about my daughter.

But this time I couldn’t ignore it. She was putting our other kids at risk and I couldn’t allow that, couldn’t risk losing them. Elannah Rose was an adult, our other children weren’t even close, and we couldn’t continue to make them suffer because of her choices.

Kicking Elannah Rose out was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was also probably the best decision I made from the moment I found out she was using up until that point.

It wasn’t long before she begged to come home, she finally agreed to go to rehab, and she was willing to do anything not to lose her family. And she did. And we had a wonderful break from all the craziness, and she was back for a while.

The problem is, the heroin had changed her. It had altered her body chemistry and she just couldn’t feel good anymore. And one day, it was worse than not be able to feel good, she hated what she had become, this person who never felt right no matter how hard she tried. So she tried to cut her wrists open, and she was taken to a mental ward and placed on lock down.

And she got better again. And she was given medication that helped normalize her. But she knew she would never be right, and even though she went to a new rehab facility, and eventually got through to sober living and then came home, she never liked herself again. She never really believed she had a future.

She was grateful to have a chance to be a big sister again, to do it right. And she did for a while. She helped her little sister with her homework, she shared a room with her baby brother and cuddled him when he woke up at night. She loved them, and she wanted them to know it.

But eventually her meds needed to be adjusted, something in her life shifted, she met up with the folks she used to use with… and she couldn’t maintain anymore.

A few days before she died I started feeling like she was slipping, and I mentioned it to her, but she’d made so much progress that I didn’t want to press her too hard. I just asked her to talk to me if she needed help. She teared up, and smiled, and promised.

A day or two later she stayed up late cuddling with her dad and me and watching some goofy TV show. The next day she skipped her AA meeting to go out with a friend. They were supposed to be studying, but they were shooting up heroin. That was the last choice she ever made.

I still can’t remember what they said when they came to my house, I know I kept asking where she was, and that my husband collapsed on the floor. And I started screaming. I don’t remember a lot about the next few days. I remember different things at different times, but even though it was only two and half years ago, it’s the foggiest part of my life.

I do remember picking out her grave-site. I remember lying down under a tree, and looking up and knowing that that would be her view forever.  This little person who had been with me for more than half my life was going to stay in this place until her body was no more.

And that is what I thought about for months. Her body decomposing in that box, images of it would wake me up screaming at night, until I got to the point where I just tried to avoid sleeping.

I’m not sure I will ever be normal again. At least once a day I have to talk myself out of crying in some public situation. My emotions are always boiling just below the surface. This is not because I’m a woman, it’s not because I’m an emotional person, it’s because my heart was broken, and that is a real thing.

Sometimes, when I think about Elannah Rose, I am grateful that her struggle is over. I don’t think I can say that without sounding a little nuts, but it’s true. I am so grateful that she doesn’t have to fight her addiction anymore and that she is at peace. But I also know that my struggle will never be over. Parents are never supposed to bury their children, it is not how the world was meant to be.

And I am here, telling you this, because even though I know that I cannot ask you to live mistake free, I hope that some of you will be able to learn from mine, and from my daughters.