Being a parent
changes us. It turns us into people who base our decisions on the welfare of
others, people who take as much or more pride in the accomplishments of our
children as we do in our own, people whose very existence is defined by our
relationship to another.
Parenthood lifts us
up to the greatest joys, giving us the ability to persevere through sleepless
nights, find patience when we believe that there is none, and to live with
teenagers.
It also makes us
infinitely more vulnerable, as our world can also be shattered by our
offspring. Their bad decisions become our own failures, their loss is the end
of existence as we know it.
I have felt that
vulnerability for years. First as the mother of an addict, and with increasing
intensity with every relapse. And over the last 21 months I have felt that
vulnerability as someone who lost part of what was most precious to her.
When my daughter
died, I started counting life by days, and eventually by months. I’m not yet to
the part where I think in terms of years – much like when we first have a child
and we count each new joy by the hour, I count life by the emptiness that was
left behind when my daughter died.
I want you to
understand who we are. I have always been a bit of a wall flower. I would much
rather watch events than be the center of attention. My daughter, Elannah Rose,
was my polar opposite. She was ready to take center stage from the moment she
was born. She ran head long into any adventure she could find.
Elannah Rose
barreled through life without fear, she collected loved ones along the way and
continuously impressed us with her ability to be confident and comfortable in
any situation. She started out with such an extreme measure of confidence that
it was hard to see beyond it into the troubled young lady she became. She was
precious to us, and we were prepared to do anything to make her life
successful, including uprooting her from our original home in northern
California, to come to La Crescenta, and all it offered.
We picked La
Crescenta not only for the proximity to my husband’s family, but also for the
schools, and the somewhat small town atmosphere that seemed so appealing and
just a bit surprising this close to the city – at least to me, since my
hometown actually was one of those typical small towns where you can’t go to
the grocery store without catching up with everyone you know, every neighbor is
in your business, and as a kid when you stepped out of line, your parents knew
before the dust settled.
The first few years
here seemed like paradise, even though this neighborhood was probably always a
touch out of our budget, we found a way to make it work because it was well
worth it to have our kids grow up here.
When Elannah Rose
got into middle school, we knew that she was struggling a bit with the more
complex social structure and relationships, but there was never a sign that
things were desperate for her. We were still sitting down to dinner together
every evening, her dad still checked her homework every night, and we saw many
of her friends on a regular basis. She still seemed to confide in us about all
the right things, and we made sure that we had all of the important
conversations with her, so that she could make wise choices about boys, drugs,
school. In all of the areas that we were supposed to provide guidance, we made
sure to.
By the time Elannah
Rose got to high school, things seemed to settle down. She found her niche in
the drama classes, she joined comedy sports, and her social circle grew. We
thought that she was thriving, as a matter of fact, I regularly confided in my
friends on how lucky I was that her teenage years were so easy.
Our idyllic life
was shattered when, at sixteen years old, Elannah Rose confessed that she was
using heroin, and had been using drugs of one kind of another for the past
three years.
I can’t describe
our horror. Elannah Rose had, in recent history, displayed complete shock and
disgust over stories of drug use at school, being particularly disgusted when
one of her friends was caught smoking pot. How could that girl be the same
person who was now telling us that she wasn’t sure she could control her drug
use anymore?
At this time,
Elannah Rose was working part time and doing incredibly well at her job, she
was also generally doing ok at school, and I can’t say that we ever noticed any
specific decline. She was still highly involved in her extracurricular
activities at school and was excelling in her dance classes. I kept wracking my
brain… how had we missed this?
We missed a lot. In
hindsight, I almost guarantee that if I was more alert to the risks, I would
have seen the signs. Like any other parent of an addict, I can find a million
ways to blame myself. But I also know this…
Elannah Rose was
what is considered a high functioning addict. High-functioning addicts like
Elannah Rose appear to be extremely successful, happy, and productive
individuals who on the outside, just don’t give off signs of their addiction.
How terrifying.
Even now I don’t know what to do with the idea that I could have had a person
with such a horrible problem living under the same roof and not have seen it.
What a complete failure. As a mother, as a human being. To not notice that this
perfect creature that I made and raised was in such a dangerous state of mind
and of health.
I don’t know if I
will ever live through another day and not feel how much I failed her. And if
every person in this room were sitting in judgment, I would understand. Because
I was her mother. I was supposed to see it. I was supposed to be alert and to
be paying attention. What was I doing instead?
I mentioned that
Elannah Rose had already been using for three years by that time. She tried
speed for the first time when she was thirteen, in the girls’ bathroom at
Rosemont Middle School. She got the drugs from another student. In her time as
an addict, she found it exceedingly easy to get access to any drugs, whether
she was obtaining them from another student, or from people she met at our
local convenience store, she could find someone to give her drugs if she wanted
to.
For weeks after we
first found out she was using drugs, I felt like I was living with two
different people – my daughter who was so together that you couldn’t believe
that she was doing anything, and this other person who picked at their own
skin, couldn’t keep her hands from shaking, and hid homemade heroin pipes in
her room. I remember at the time I wondered if she was exaggerating her
behavior to mess with us. At some point, I did actually convince myself that
while she may have tried drugs, her actual use had been hugely exaggerated.
At Elannah Roses
request we kept her addiction a secret, even from most of our family. A few
people knew, but only just enough to keep her in line – to scare her with cop
stories about drug busts and jail, addiction stories from another recovering
addict, and anything else we could think of to help her. Keeping that kind of a
secret takes its toll.
When Elannah Rose
seemed to get it together again, we believed that she was sober. We thought our
home detox methods were actually successful.
We were so naïve. I
later found out that she was only behaving normally because she was using
again.
Unfortunately, this
realization came after a few more cycles involving relapses. Each time we would
threaten to send her to rehab, and each time she convinced us not to, and to
continue with her horrible secret.
During this time my
husband and I fought daily. We talked about divorce. I was convinced that it
didn’t matter how much we loved each other, we would not make it through
Elannah Roses addiction. This addiction, which wasn’t even ours, was going to
come between us because we could not agree on how to handle it, and how to
handle our daughter.
This whole time, we
were trying not to let life suffer for our other children. And we may have
fooled ourselves into thinking we were doing a good job, but looking back I can
see how unhappy our household was.
I became so
frustrated that I regularly snapped for no reason. I was a different mom, a
different person. I think it was kind of a safety mechanism, I tried to control
everything else, because I couldn’t control my daughter’s addiction.
This went on for
about two years, during this time Elannah Rose lied to us regularly,
successfully passed home drug tests while maintaining her drug use, and refused
to acknowledge her problem with any real conviction.
Shortly after her
18th birthday, Elannah Rose was arrested for possession. She didn’t
tell us, like everything else in her other life, she did everything she could
to keep it a secret.
I found out about
the arrest one day when I opened our mail and there was a letter from an
attorney offering their services. This was what life had become. A series of
nightmarish surprises that ruined any comfort we could find on a regular basis.
Now we were dealing with court, trying with renewed effort to get her into a
rehab program. Desperate for anything that would save her.
My desperation made
me believe that she was clean at an opportunity. I’m sure it’s easy to judge,
from the outside, how stupid we were. How gullible. But let me remind you that,
yes, we caught her doing bad things, but she was always functional. Except for
the first time that we found out, she never displayed signs of her addiction.
Her performance at school didn’t change, she was still dancing, and she was
still working and had received a great promotion at her job. She was still
highly functioning. She was still lying every day.
A few months after
her high school graduation, I caught Elannah Rose smoking heroin in our garage.
Even when caught
red-handed, Elannah Rose wouldn’t admit to using. By now we knew that she couldn’t
continue to live with us without endangering her brother and sister. We agreed
to kick her out of our home, as she still refused to go to a detox or rehab
facility.
It only took a few
weeks of couch-surfing for Elannah Rose to realize that she wasn’t willing to
lose her family over her addiction. She agreed to go to a rehab facility and we
checked her into one in Tarzana.
After two
consecutive visits where we heard about other patients being caught with drugs
on hand, we agreed that it would be best to move her. Elannah Rose moved to a
recovery center in Culver City, which appeared to work.
The change was
amazing. Not only was she in rehab, but she was going to counseling and
surrounded by people who wanted to overcome their addictions.
Elannah Rose did
very well for a time. Eventually, she slipped and used marijuana. Her relapse
changed her. She became moody and difficult. She stopped participating in her
recovery, begged regularly to come home, and eventually became deeply
depressed. She began cutting herself to fight the need to do drugs.
Eventually she cut
her wrists so badly that she was transferred to a lock down medical facility. I
cannot describe the horror we felt at seeing our pint sized daughter, arms
bandaged, locked up in a fenced in area with deeply sick people. It might have
been the best thing for her. By this time her chemistry was so altered from the
drugs that she needed medication to help her achieve normalcy. Her doctors were
given the chance to find the right medication to help her to do so.
Once her chemistry
started to normalize, Elannah Rose recovered beautifully. She went from the
ward to Casa de las Amiga’s in Pasadena, where the strict program worked for
her. She once again seemed to thrive, to fit in well and start to make
connections. She started to seem happy, like her old self. It was a dream come
true.
We looked forward
to our weekly visits. We attended family therapy with her. Once she moved to
sober living she would walk down to my office to have lunch with me, or visit
after work. She was my baby girl again. It was amazing.
During one of our family
therapy visits I broke down. The theme for the night was to talk about our
biggest regrets.
After years of
desperately trying to keep it together, I couldn’t answer this question without
losing it.
I am sorry that I wasn’t a better mother. I
am sorry for everything I missed. Maybe if I had been older, wiser, had more to
offer her, maybe she would have been ok. It was my fault. All of it. She was
just a little girl that first time… I should have been there for her, she would
have made better choices.
I was sitting in a
room full of parents and their daughters. Most of them probably financially
better off, some of them less well off. I was the youngest mother, some of them
were grandparents. Addicts and parents alike corrected me, if it was my fault because
I was a young mother, what was their excuse?
My daughter held my
hand and did her best to explain that these were all her choices, and that
nothing I did made her an addict. She lovingly explained to the room what I had
given up in order to raise her, and everything she loved about me.
I think about this
almost daily. It is a gift to have heard it, I carry it with me because I
cannot carry her with me.
Eventually, Elannah
Rose came home. She wanted a chance to be a good sister, and she was. She
helped Abby, our middle child, with her homework every day. She spent every
moment possible with her brother, who was three at the time. She had their
names tattooed on her wrists so that if she ever got the urge to open them
again her love for her brother and sister would remind her of what she had to
live for.
We had months.
Amazing, wonderful months in which she was perfectly her old self. I thank god
for this gift, because it ended swiftly and suddenly.
One night, she
didn’t come home on time. I was so angry. She had skipped her AA meeting to go
out with a friend, she was supposed to be doing homework, but she was not. She
was shooting up heroin, for the first and last time.
I was in our
bedroom, my husband had decided to wait up for her in the living room.
I heard the door
open, and something fall. It was my husband, when I came out he was sobbing on
the floor. There was this woman standing there, repeating over and over that
Elannah Rose was at the coroners, and I kept asking if I could see her. I don’t
know how many times she had to repeat it. I started screaming, I couldn’t stop.
At some point I turned around and Abby and Noah were standing in the hall.
Still screaming, I bundled them up to take them across the street to my in laws
house.
I still can’t pull
the details together in my mind. I remember trying to get my brother in law to
understand what had happened without actually saying it. I remember that woman
asking to speak to someone who could keep it together.
I remember that the
whole time that I was ranting about my daughter being late, she was dying. I
was angry at her while she was lying alone in a gas station bathroom, breathing
her last breaths.
I kept asking to
see her. I wanted to hold her. It’s not like the movies or TV, I never got to
say goodbye, I didn’t identify her body, and in later, weaker moments, I would
pretend that there was a possibility that it wasn’t her.
Time became
fragmented as we prepared for the funeral. I would sneak away to comb through
her Facebook page, to look through pictures of her and to watch videos. Someone
uploaded a picture of her laughing and I couldn’t stop watching it. I couldn’t
stop because I would never hear it again.
I will never see
her again. When she was an infant I had nightmares about bad things happening to
her, now I have nightmares about her decomposing body. I can’t sleep on my own
and I have to sit in my car every morning and cry so that I won’t cry during
the day, or in the evening when my kids need me.
It’s been 21
months. I don’t know when I will be better.
My poor kids, Abby
and Noah, now have to deal with me worrying about everything. It might be worse
for Abby, who can remember a time when I didn’t freak out and assume she was
dead if she didn’t answer the phone.
Strangers have to
deal with the discomfort that comes after they ask me how many kids I have,
because I refuse not to acknowledge Elannah Rose, and eventually I have to tell
them that she is gone.
I’m sharing this
with you because I hope that my loss can do some good. I hope that my daughter,
who wanted to make a positive contribution to society, can do so through her
story.
I was careful not
to use the word “overdose” tonight, after reading an obituary for Phillip
Seymour Hoffman last week in which the writer says that Mr. Hoffman “did not die
from an overdose of heroin — he died from heroin. We should stop implying that
if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine.” It’s such a simple and true statement. My
daughter didn’t overdose. She died of her addiction, which was an illness she
couldn’t manage, and there was no amount of the substance that she was addicted
to that was safe for her to take.
I have spent a lot
of time thinking about how I will keep my remaining children safe, since
Elannah Rose died. I am not in law enforcement, I am not prepared to fight a
war against drugs, and I am not interested in living a life that feels like I
am at war with any part of my environment.
What I can do, is
live like I am in a village and look to my neighbors to do the same. I love OUR
children too much to live in my home like my neighbors are strangers. Having
come from a small town where everyone is in everyone else’s business, I can
tell you that that is much preferable to living in a town where not a single
neighbor came running when I was screaming bloody murder. Or the code of
silence that kept my daughters friends from telling me when they learned she
was using. Or that same code of silence that allowed me to keep my daughters
addiction a secret when I learned she was using.
I will never pass
by a child who is in need. I will make sure that my home is open and safe to
any of my children’s friends, I will be there for any of our kids who need help
or who need help recovering from poor decisions. As much as I prefer to stay in
the back ground, I will stand up in front of any crowd to raise awareness and
wake up my community. And it is not our kids that need to be awakened, they see
what their peers are doing, whether they speak up or not (and they must learn
to speak up). It is our parents that need to band together for the good of our
children, to wake up to the dangers that face them, and to do everything in our
power to be the village that watches out for them together.
