Pubdate: Sat, 14 Jun 2014
Source: News Journal, The (Wilmington, DE)
Copyright: 2014 The News Journal
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/1c6Xgdq3
Website: http://www.delawareonline.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/822
Author: Kelly Bothum

DELAWARE IS FULL OF HEROIN'S HEARTACHES

FAMILIES, FRIENDS OF USERS ARE COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS 
AND ADDICTION

Sitting on the couch in her grandmother's Brookside home, Danielle Eby
looks like any other tween girl. When her eyes aren't glued to the
game on her iPhone, she's in the kitchen hunting for a snack or
chasing one of the family's three dogs.

But at 10 years old, Danielle knows more about Delaware's drug culture
than many adults. She knows what heroin looks like. She knows where
people buy it. She knows how people act when they take it - lethargic,
sluggish, like they're floating outside of themselves.

And she knows what it feels like to lose someone because of a drug
addiction. Her father, Daniel, died last October after an accidental
overdose in the family bathroom. Danielle was home when it happened.

In Delaware's fight against drugs and addiction, Danielle is among the
collateral damage. She and many other Delawareans have no choice but
to live with the emotional void that remains after losing someone who
couldn't overcome their own fight with substance abuse - a battle that
often lasts years.

For Danielle, whose eyes and mouth resemble her father's, it means he
won't ever be there to pick her up from school or meet her first
boyfriend. He won't make sure she's home by her curfew or cheer her on
at her high school graduation. He can't walk her down the aisle or
become a grandfather to her own kids.

The closest Danielle can get to him now is looking at one of the
pictures hanging in her room or wrapping herself up in the quilt her
grandmother made her from her dad's clothes. Some days she pulls out
the drawing she and her friends made after he died, the kind with
swirly letters, puffy hearts and promises to never forget him.

"I miss him," she says, quietly. "I miss my Dad."

All walks of life

About 15 people die each month in Delaware from a suspected drug
overdose, according to statistics from the Delaware Division of Public
Health. Not all are heroin-related - they also include alcohol,
prescription and illicit drugs. In some cases, it can take months to
figure out the actual cause of death.

Victims come from all walks of life - rich, poor, Greenville, Milford,
white, black, old, young. But state data from October 2013 to March
2014 show a few similarities among the 85 overdose deaths: the
majority happened to white men from New Castle County. The average age
was 42.

"This is not just something that happens in one neighborhood or a
certain group of people," said Rita Landgraf, secretary of the
Delaware Department of Health and Social Services. "Addiction is a
disease that crosses all lines and lives. And its impact goes beyond
the person with the disease. It truly affects the entire family."

Her father's addiction was the reason Danielle's grandmother,
Christine Eby, went to court for guardianship of the girl seven years
ago. It's why he stayed in the apartment above the garage for a few
years and not in the house with his daughter. His battles with alcohol
and heroin caused him to do things a dad shouldn't do, like steal
video games from his daughter for drug money.

Danielle didn't always understand why her father wasn't around when
she was little, said Eby, who is her granddaughter's primary
caregiver. She sees her mother only occasionally. But as Danielle got
older, it was hard to keep Dan's addiction a secret, especially after
the time he overdosed in her room, leaving a trail of heroin powder on
her dresser. After that, he talked to her about addiction, what it
meant for him and how much he didn't want drugs and alcohol - or his
battle with them - to be part of her life.

Despite his personal struggles, Dan found joy in fatherhood. Eby said
he was the one who took Danielle to the doctor, the dentist and kept
up with her school counseling. He made her flashcards to help with her
math homework. He timed her when she brushed her teeth to make sure
she wasn't goofing off.

"I didn't realize everything he was doing for her until he was gone,"
she said.

Telling the truth

Liz Perkins keeps her own statistics about the impact heroin and
prescription opiates are having in Delaware. They're in a notebook
filled with the obituaries of young people - most she doesn't know -
but whose situation suggests a sad kinship with her son, John Jr.

John was many things - a ladies man, a Red Sox fan, a doting dog
owner, a big brother. But he also fought a 12-year battle with
addiction that ended in 2011 when the 30-year-old died from an
unintentional heroin overdose.

When writing John's obituary, Perkins chose to note her oldest child
died "after a long struggle with addiction." It's not the kind of
admission most grieving parents make, but she did it to let people
know that addiction isn't a family secret to hide or only whisper
about among friends.

That's what happens too often, she said, especially when families
allow themselves to believe that drug abuse only happens to other
people. Denial and shame are powerful conspirators that give strength
to the idea that something else - anything other than addiction - is
to blame.

So the resulting obituary is a vague accounting of an otherwise
healthy young person without an exact cause of what led to their
death. As she clips these obituaries in local newspapers, Perkins has
learned to recognize the code words - suddenly, at home, in his sleep
- - as hints suggesting a darker, more troubling life.

Perkins didn't want that - for John or his family. Instead, she told
the truth, as aching as it was.

"After I wrote that in the obituary, one of John's friends said, 'You
must have been angry with him.' I wasn't at all. I was, and am,
heartbroken," said Perkins, who started a Delaware chapter of GRASP,
which stands for Grief Recovery After Substance Passing. "I wanted
people to know. I can't imagine not doing it."

Nothing replaces the ache

Dan Eby was 35 years old when he died the evening of Oct. 4, 2013,
after losing consciousness in the bathroom at home. It was Danielle
who called her grandmother just after 6:30 p.m. to tell her that her
father went into the bathroom and never came out. He wasn't answering
her, either.

At the time, Eby was across town finishing up a job with her car title
business, the one Dan had helped her with since she started it eight
years ago. Dan was her only child, the one she raised on her own, and
now she couldn't help him when he needed it most.

Eby's husband and a neighbor tried to break in the bathroom. They took
the hinges off the door and wrestled with the doorknob. But Dan was
slumped against the door, making it impossible to open.

"I'm listening to them trying to break down the door. They're kicking
it, beating it," she said. "I'm calling 911 and screaming at people to
get over there to help."

Half an hour later, Eby found a sea of emergency, police and fire
personnel in her home. She will always be grateful to the firefighter
who positioned his body so she couldn't see Dan carried out of the
house. A police officer told her Dan was taken to the hospital. That
gave her hope that this overdose - Dan's fifth - would finally help
him break the chains of addiction.

But Dan wasn't in the emergency department. He was in another part of
the hospital. In her gut, Eby knew what that meant, even before the
doctor came in with the news.

"I told them, 'I want to go see my son. They told me he because of he
way he had been laying he might not look good,'" she said. "I said,
'That's my son. I need to be with him.'"

'I don't need treatment'

Eby said Dan's death certificate lists an adverse reaction to cocaine
and heroin as the cause of death - a combination more commonly known
as a speedball. Dan had struggled with addiction for 15 years, using
different drugs, including marijuana and crack, over the years. But
alcohol and heroin held the biggest sway.

He was clean for a few years in between, including when he served time
in prison. He was on methadone for about four years, but problems with
alcohol forced him out of the program. Eby said for a time he bought
suboxone from someone off the street, but he was still using heroin.

He had been to rehab, but the changes never stuck long-term. As he got
older, alcohol was his biggest trigger. His personality changed when
he drank. He was arrested for a DUI. A couple times, he OD'ed while
shooting up drunk.

"I told him, 'Dan, you're going to kill yourself,'" Eby said. "He
said, 'I don't need treatment. Nothing is going to happen to me.'"

But last summer, it seemed like Dan was closer to quashing the
addiction within him. At least, that's what Eby likes to think. He
still drank, but he was down to using heroin once a week. He helped
out more with the business and for the first time, talked about his
plans for the future. He moved out of Eby's garage apartment and back
into the family home.

That made his death in October all the more painful. Eby keeps the urn
with his remains on a shelf near the bedrooms. She made two quilts
from his clothes - one for her and one for Danielle. But nothing
replaces the ache.

"People try to tell you all kinds of things you should have done.
Tough love, threats, everything. But they're not living it," said Eby
said. "When he was growing up, it was just me and him. We were like
best friends. You can't just throw that out because of an addiction."

'I think Brian's dead'

It's the call no mother wants to answer, doesn't want to think about,
even when her child has been struggling with an addiction for more
than a decade. In this case, it wasn't heroin, but a powerful opioid
that many heroin addicts also use.

Donna Holefelder took it around 2:45 a.m. Oct. 15, 2013. Holefelder
was out of town caring for her ailing mother. It was her former husband.

"Wake up, Donna. I think Brian's dead."

Brian, her 29-year-old son, was found in his bedroom at home in Bear,
face down on the floor, his body stuck in an awkward position. He
wasn't breathing. It's likely he had been there for a few hours.

For more than a decade, Holefelder had watched her son try to fight
his way out of a spiral of anxiety and depression. Growing up he was a
happy, popular kid who was a member of the National Honor Society and
played drums. But those smiles that came so freely in his early years
disappeared around age 17, when Holefelder and Brian's father
divorced. Then the family home caught fire just before Brian headed
off to college at the University of Delaware.

He began experimenting with alcohol and marijuana. There were other
drugs, too, but the biggest problem became Adderall, a prescription
stimulant he took after being diagnosed with ADD. He knew how to play
up his problems so doctors wrote higher amounts of the drug.

At one point, Holefelder started locking Brian's medication in a safe
so he didn't have access to it whenever he wanted. She doled them out
one at a time.

Resources: Where to get help

Going without Adderall prompted Brian to look for other drugs. Over
the years, he had bought heroin and oxycodone. But Holefelder believes
he had never taken Opana - an opioid painkiller more powerful than
oxycodone - before the night he died.

When he was younger, she staged an intervention with the hopes of
sending him to a rehab. But he wouldn't go. "He thought he was bigger
than his problems," Holefelder said.

This wasn't a life Brian wanted. He watched friends grow up, go to
college and start families. He felt like he couldn't follow along. He
tried to go to college on three occasions, but it seemed he couldn't
make it work. He enjoyed working with people with disabilities but he
couldn't keep the job.

Holefelder tried to help where she could, but Brian needed a lot of
attention. He called her at work. He sent her multiple texts. At
times, it felt draining.

"I had resigned myself to thinking that probably he would struggle for
a long time," she said. "I thought probably he's going to be living
with me for a while."

But she didn't expect that phone call. Or to bury her oldest son a few
days later.

Pain never ends

The longer Perkins works within the addiction community, the more she
learns.

For starters, she knows some of those deaths in her notebook aren't
overdoses but suicides, young people who intentionally took their own
life rather than stare down another day of addiction. By focusing on
20- and 30-somethings she has missed several other addiction-related
deaths, especially since the average age of a fatal overdose victim in
Delaware is 42.

Nothing in that notebook will bring John back, but Perkins keeps at
it. And she remains a daily presence in the battle for increased
education and awareness about addiction. She was a key force last year
in the fight for the Good Samaritan bill that prevents prosecution of
anyone who reports an overdose. This year, she is pushing for
legislation to expand the use of opiate overdose drug nalaxone in the
community.

Just last week, she gave bags of some of John's old clothes to
residents of a local Oxford House who lost their belongings in a fire.
John was something of a clothes horse, always dressed to impress, but
Perkins hadn't had the heart to weed through his stuff. It hurt too
much to see remnants of his life.

But the Oxford House fire was an epiphany. She spent the weekend going
through his clothes, settling on which ones she would give to the men,
along with some new items she purchased to help them out. With some
help from a friend, she was able to personally deliver everything to
the house where the men were staying.

She wanted them to know the story behind the donations, who they were
from and how very much she wished her son had wound up where they are
today.

It was an emotional experience, but one that reminded her the push for
education, prevention and awareness never ends.

"I see John in all of them," Perkins said. "This pain, it never ends.
You can never get over it. It won't go away until I stop breathing."
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MAP posted-by: Matt