I recently received a message on myspace from an old high school friend of mine. She went through the whole “How have you been?” routine, letting me know that she had some important news for me and felt bad that she had to get back in touch with me this way. She then went on to say that a mutual friend of ours from high school has passed away due to a drug overdose. She apologized for losing touch and coming out of the blue with information like this but she also wanted to make sure that she told me with enough time to spare for me to come back to New York if I chose to pay my respects to the family. I told her to send my love to everyone based on the fact that it just wasn’t possible for me to actually get up there at this point in time. She let me know that it wasn’t a problem and we parted ways yet again. I heard from her a few days later in regards to the details of the funeral and I was shocked to hear about everything going on up to her death.
She suffered from drug addiction for as long as I’ve known her so knowing that she’d passed from an overdose wasn’t really a surprise to me. It’s unfortunate that it happened but again was no surprise. Her mother had her in and out of rehabilitation clinics for quite some time. She was addicted to cocaine, pain medication and meth as far as everyone is aware of. She was also addicted to alcohol, and I’ve known for years that she was a 2 pack-a-day smoker so the combination of drugs in her body at any given time was enough to be lethal to anyone. She was a very petite girl, so I’m surprised that her body held out on her for as long as it did.
After a conversation with her mother, my friend found out that her daughter had gone through quite a bit of intervention over the years but nothing really worked. No one gave up on her, and her mother believes that it’s the reason behind her going deeper into her addictions over the course of the last few months of her life. Her mother blames herself but everyone there helped her through that, informing her that an addiction to this degree couldn’t be helped by anyone involved.
It’s unfortunate that she’s passed, I have no doubt in my mind that she’ll be missed by her loved ones. I didn’t know her very well – we passed each other in the halls, spoke a few times but I never really let myself get close to her, knowing that she hung with the type of people whom I refused to associate with. She was a sweet girl, there was just so much going on with her life that no one understood, it’s a shame it came down to this.