Lauren Sisler, welcome to Heart of the Matter. Great to have you.
It is so great to be with you, and just thank you so much for this opportunity to spread some words of encouragement. And it’s an honor to talk with you, Elizabeth.
Well, I thank you. And I want to start with something that you actually wrote, you said about your book, you said, “This is a story of how hurt becomes hope. My parents’ deaths tore me apart. Understanding and sharing their stories has helped put me back together.” It’s been a real healing process for you, hasn’t it?
Woo, man, I’ll tell you what, my parents passed away in 2003. And what’s crazy to me is as the years have gone on, I feel like a lot of healing has been done. And honestly, I didn’t think that the amount of healing that I’ve experienced since the minute that I committed to writing my book to where I’m out at now and putting all those things on paper could actually continue that healing process in the way that it has. And it has been absolutely instrumental.
And if nothing comes from this process, and my hope is that this book will get in the right hands and that it will impact people in a profound way. But regardless of what happens, I think that this process has been incredible. And I truly believe that throughout the years, grief certainly isn’t linear, but I think getting to this place where I’ve been able to experience this level of healing has been so profound for me. And I just hope that it can be read and seen and heard by many others who might be experiencing various circumstances and things that certainly have created some turmoil in their lives. And-
Sure.
… it’s the goal-
There are a lot of books out there written by parents whose children suffered from addiction or people who themselves suffered from addiction. There aren’t so many about the child of two parents, not one, but two who battled addiction. So, your book is a bit unique in that respect. And I was struck by the fact that you say you really actually… Were you in denial or did you not know that your parents were addicted to painkillers?
I think it’s twofold. Hindsight’s always 20/20. You look back and you think, “Wow, well, maybe that was an indication that something was wrong.” I remember my dad would fall asleep at the drop of a hat. We’d be watching a movie, and literally the remote’s in the air pointed up at the TV and he’s dozing off on the couch. And I just always thought, “Well, maybe he was just tired. Maybe he had worked a long week. He commutes over an hour each way to work every day. He’s just tired.” And so, I couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on as a teenager. I didn’t understand addiction. I didn’t understand the symptoms necessarily.
And I also think too, I put myself in that bubble. I compartmentalized a lot of things. And I think a lot of that was due to the fact that as a gymnast, I was very competitive. And it was like I would go out there, I would do what I had to do, and then box it up and put it on a shelf and keep moving forward. And I think a lot of that was what I did as a young teenager, as my dad battled with alcoholism. It was something we were aware of, it was something that we knew. But honestly, it was one of those things that compartmentalized. He would relapse and then he’d go sober for six months. And so I would just forget about that relapse, that little bump in the road, and just continue pushing forward.
And so, I think that that’s where I really did a good job of shoving it onto the rug and not really acknowledging it. ‘Cause my parents were the heroes. They were the ones that were out there and always there to lift us up, always there to pick us up when we were down. And I felt like that my parents were just two really strong people that could just combat and overcome anything. And it was just hard for me to comprehend that. So looking back now, I’m like, “Wow, there really were a lot of things that potentially could have been indicators that there was a problem.”
Your dad served sometime in the Navy. You say he suffered from PTSD from that? Do you think he was self-medicating with alcohol?
Yeah, I think that was a big part of it. And a lot of that I actually learned after their passing, because I had gotten ahold of some of their medical records. And was actually reading through some of the medical records where he had been meeting with the counselor at the VA medical center where he had worked and was going through basically these sessions. And had admitted to when he starts drinking, he can’t stop. And it’s becoming a major problem with his relationship with his wife and with his kids. And he wanted to do what he could to avoid hurting his family even more.
At some point, both your dad and your mom had surgeries. So, your dad was already battling alcohol and dealing with the VA and issues that he was having. But then they both had surgeries. What were the surgeries for?
So, my mom had been diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. And really that just was a lot of pain that she was in that required multiple surgeries over the course of time. And she’d actually gone to this doctor for her neck fusions. She had had two neck fusions. And once she was released from the doctor, she had learned that there was this pain management doctor in town that was recommended to her by someone there in the office. And that’s who she began to see. And that’s where she really started to transition into this healing process.
So, she had been released from her neurosurgeon and transitioned to this pain management doctor hoping to help her. And it was like the dominoes just fell from there. You see the domino effect, right? So she’s going to this doctor, and next thing you know she’s being prescribed one medication. That’s not working. Now it’s the next medication. And you constantly just see my mom just on this hamster wheel of pain.
My mom was really good at putting a smile on her face and just very active in the community. We would go to church on Sundays, she’d be at my gymnastics meets, she’d come to practice. And she did a great job of masking that pain. I saw it a lot more in the household, but when she was out and about, you just saw things to start to decline. If you took mom in the late 90s to the early 2000s, she just started to slow down. You could just see that aging process. But when you’re in it and you’re that close to it, you don’t see it as well. But then you look back at pictures and you say, “Okay, I see some differences there.”
And then my father actually had chronic back pain. He had a permanent TENS unit in his back. And basically had the remote control that he could pop on the zinger and it would help to mitigate some of the pain that he was having in his back. And that was really his struggle and when he had started taking medication for that. And so I do, to answer your previous question as well, think there was some medication, obviously the alcohol stemming from the PTSD. And then of course the pain that he was experiencing, I think was all very cyclical in that…
So, both your parents were experiencing a lot of physical pain. And they were taking these opioids to relieve that pain. At what point did the addiction to the opioids kick in, do you think?
Well, mapping out the timeline, 1999 was when my mom had started going to this neurosurgeon when she was starting to have the pain. And then it started with the prescription of Oxycontin once she had the surgeries. And then eventually those prescriptions ran out, then she went to the pain management doctor. And then my dad started seeing the same doctor. And so I really think, if I had to put a timeline on it, I would say that around 2001 is probably when maybe things started to shift.
I think it’s hard to pinpoint because I feel like it’s such a process, just a slow process of, let me just take a little more, let me take a little more. But around that time in 2001 is when we really noticed both of my parents sucking on the fentanyl suckers, which are for breakthrough pain. Of course, at the time, I didn’t understand it. I just knew, “Oh, these are helping them with their pain.” Did not understand the potency of it, the magnitude of it. And it just was normal walking around the house with a sucker in their mouth. That’s just normal. And so, it just became a normalized situation. And in reality, it was that push, I think, over the bridge, so to speak, from managing chronic pain to now becoming dope sick. And now becoming reliant on those medications to get them through their day.
Were you seeing any signs of the addiction looking… I mean, I know again, you’ve spent a lot of time looking back and going through medical records and investigating. But in real time, did you see anything that worried you? Did you ever stop to think, “Wow, you guys are taking a lot of this medicine.” And were you aware? Was it in the zeitgeist yet that fentanyl and Oxycontin were serious drugs with highly addictive properties that were dangerous? Or was that really not known at that point where you were?
Honestly, it was not really known at that point. I think that that was… It’s crazy because after their passing, then all of a sudden, you see these headlines start popping up about Oxycontin, about opioids, about these narcotics, and the fentanyl. And what’s crazy about the fentanyl too is I feel like really, obviously it was so new back then, and my parents, my mom, my dad was actually not prescribed fentanyl, my mom was. And she had the pain patch because she couldn’t manage the Oxycontin, and that was the reason that the doctor switched her in the first place, because she couldn’t manage it. So obviously, red flags, red alert, something’s going on. Let’s just move you to this thing so you can manage it. But oh, by the way, fentanyl was an even crazier, more highly potent, highly addictive substance.
And it was a pain patch, it was a time release. She was on a 72-hour cycle. Every 72 hours, let’s cycle it out with the next one. Well, eventually that wasn’t working anymore, so then he dropped it to every 48 hours. And so, it was just crazy to see that cycle.
But my mom was so by the book that I felt like just knowing her and just seeing how she operated in life, mom could certainly not be abusing it. There’s no way that she would do anything or take something off label. There’s just no way. But in all reality, that’s exactly what was happening. Again, I’m not in her medicine cabinet saying, “Oh, well wow, she must’ve taken too many pills today.” But when you’re getting a 90-day supply of Oxycontin in the mail and your 90-day supply of mail-in drugs, at one point there were over 300 and some odd narcotics prescribed to my parents at one time. I don’t understand how one human being, one person could be prescribed that much and think that that’s okay.
And that, I think, was the hardest part is just comprehending, like how in the world did it get this out of hand? And how was nobody sitting here saying, “Okay, we need to assess this. We need to check on this.”? But I also think back in the early 2000s, pain management was new. It was the new thing that was springing up and…
No, there was a time when you don’t have to live with pain. And we need to take pain seriously, we need to treat pain.
Yeah. And of course, everyone talks about, and you see this on the different shows and books that have come out and movies since then, the whole pain scale thing, right? The smiley faces. On a scale from one to 10, which smiley face are you or frowny face are you? And I think that that’s when pain management came more acceptable and people were like, “Yeah, you don’t have to live with pain. Here, I can give you this magic pill that’s going to make you feel better and there won’t be any repercussions from it. No consequences.” Right? That wasn’t the part people were promoting on the backend.
This was all during the time when Purdue Pharma was heavily marketing Oxycontin as this brand new miracle drug. Do you think your parents fell prey to that or to doctors who didn’t know enough? I mean the mere fact that your parents were going to a pain management doctor and getting all these prescriptions filled that were… And he was steadily upping the dose and upping the dose and the frequency of the dose. I mean, it sounds like you’re describing a pill mill. Was that a legitimate doctor’s practice? What was going on, do you think?
Well, at the time, I do believe it was a legitimate practice. I will say that we have been a part of the Purdue Pharma, the Sackler Family lawsuit. And I did actually request to get medical records from that particular doctor. And ran in circles, was put on hold multiple times, cut off the line, could never access those. Now granted, I will say back in the early 2000s, my guess is those medical records are probably not available. A lot of those things end up getting purged. It was before everything was put electronically into a system. So thankfully, I did have a lot of my parents’ medical records in a file to be able to sort of backtrack the timeline of things.
But I do know that doctor is now currently still in Virginia working under a different, I guess, practice. And I think, from what I understand, I think he left the states. And I don’t want to misspeak on this because I don’t know the timeline for him. I wish I could answer. I don’t know. There’s always been part of me that would love to go sit down with this doctor and just be like, “Hey, what did you know then and what do you know now? And if you could do things differently then that you would do now, how are you practicing things differently? How are you prescribing things differently?” I would be really curious to know, and maybe that’s something I should put on my to-do list to have those conversations.
And really, it’s not intended to be an attack on anyone, because that’s not the goal at this point. I could get frustrated, get upset, and kick and scream. But at the end of the day, I think we’re all growing and we’re all trying to figure this thing out. And I don’t want to put the blame on anyone specific. My parents are grown adults, they’ve made choices. I mean, obviously my parents made the choice to put the fentanyl patch in the freezer, cut it open, and suck on it, knowing that it could ultimately result in respiratory failure.
But what led them down that path, just like anybody else that struggles with addiction, nobody wakes up saying, “I’m going to shoot heroin.”, or, “I’m going to take this drug to get high.” Nobody does that, right? Unless it’s a recreational use drug. Which at the same time, even if they’re planning to do that, they still think they’re going to wake up the next morning and be fine to go to work and live their life. And this is just for fun and it’s just a hobby.
Did you ever see them dealing with the dope sick withdrawal? I mean, because withdrawal from opioids is so intense. And so, I remember listening to a doctor who specializes in addiction talking about withdrawal from alcohol can kill you. But withdrawal from fentanyl won’t kill you, but you’ll feel like you want to die, you’ll feel like you will die. You’re that sick. Did you ever see your parents going through that?
Yeah. That’s the crazy part, because there was one time in high school when I was at home, and my brother, I think, had been off at the Navy at this point, ’cause he graduated two years before I did. And I remember my mom getting really mad at my dad. I’m talking absolutely furious. Never seen my mom mad like this, ever in her life. Throwing things, just like furious. And I was like, “What is going on?” I could not process what was happening. I just remember seeing this look in my dad’s eyes, of just sadness. And he was crying. I was like, “I don’t understand it.”
And come to find out, my mom, my dad had actually borrowed or taken my mom’s medication. And it happened to be the last of her medication. And so, it created this explosion. And then my dad pretty much said, “Everything’s fine.” Mom was like… She was so apologetic. And it was like, once again, no explanation, just swept under the rug.
Kids often have a sixth sense about their parents. Did you ever have that? Was there ever something in yourself and looking back maybe about your memories where you realized, something’s not right?
Elizabeth, I think hindsight’s always 20/20, but there were definitely cues along the way, things that now I look back on that were red flags. And one thing for instance was back at Thanksgiving when I was home from Rutgers visiting family. We woke up Thanksgiving morning, was expecting to wake up and start cooking for the day and getting ready for the festivities. And unfortunately, we wake up to my father. He was on the couch. He had fell asleep on the couch that night and he was barely breathing. And it was just at that point, complete chaos.
My mom is like, “Call 911.” My brother runs down the stairs. We run down the stairs to find my dad barely breathing. And my brother pulls my dad off the couch and I go call 911. And there’s just a lot of confusion like, “What’s happened?” Well, we ended up going to the hospital, and at this time, I had just turned 18 years old. And I think at this time, we’re just confused as to this whole chain of events. And really as a young teenager, college student, I just thought that my dad had a bad reaction to medication. That’s what was presented to us.
We got to the hospital trying to understand what happened. My dad was okay. He was going to survive. He was going to go to another hospital for further evaluation. And to us, to me, my cousin, my brother, my family, we were told that he will be okay. And it was just a bad reaction to medication. And for me, what does that mean? Well, that’s the cholesterol medicine, that’s the blood pressure medicine. Maybe it just mixed together. It was a new medication that he’s taking, and it had a bad reaction. So, I could not comprehend that day that my dad in fact overdosed on a lethal amount of fentanyl. That was not the way it was presented to us.
And so really, I was blind to the fact that this was all happening and my parents were aware of it, but we as a family, were not. All I could think in my heart and my mind was, “Thank goodness he’s okay.” And I didn’t ask any more questions. He’s okay. He’s going to live, he’s going to survive.
So it’s crazy because I do think that as young adults, but even now in adulthood, and I think that we’re all guilty of it. Or I don’t know if you call it guilty, but I do think that we try to compartmentalize things. Not my problem, not something I’m going to face head on. And I think a lot of times, we lean out and instead of lean in. And I think now, was it my job to ask questions? Was it my job to know? Not necessarily. But I do think to myself, I wish that I would’ve been more equipped to ask questions, to be okay with asking questions.
And I think that’s where this whole prevention piece comes in. I think the great work that you all are doing at Partnership to End Addiction is literally to provide the education, provide the empowerment for people to say, “Hey, maybe I need to start asking questions here. Maybe something is amiss here.”
But I think my parents did such a darn good job of trying to brush it under the rug. Because I think they were feeling the weight of it all and the shame of it all. And they didn’t want people in on their little secret, so they thought they could operate in the confines of their secret, keep it all together. And I think that’s what addiction does. You become a superhero at hiding things, at manipulating and changing the way people view you, or at least you think.
And I say that, I don’t want to say it’s my biggest regret, but I do wish there was someone there encouraging me to ask those questions. And to maybe have those conversations and to better understand what was happening. Because my dad’s alcoholism was apparent. But again, as a kid, I just brushed it under the rug. “Oh, my dad’s fine. He’s great.”, and would just go about life. And I think that’s what adults are good at. And now as a new mom, I’m sure these are lessons that I’m going to be taking myself to realize that we got to be honest with those around us. And we also got to be honest with ourselves. And I think that’s half the battle, being willing to have those conversations with others. But we got to have those conversations with ourself, when things start to go on the decline.
So this whole Thanksgiving incident happened during your freshman year at Rutgers, where you were going to college on a full gymnastics scholarship. And you go back to school, and then you get a call in March and it’s from your dad. What does he tell you?
When I got that phone call, he first said, “Hey, I need your brother’s number.” And he was pretty frantic. And I read off his number and he says, “Okay, I’ll call you back.” Within 30 seconds, he calls me back. And that’s when he informed me that my mom had died. And what’s crazy about that is I just talked to them several hours before. Before I’d gone to bed, I was studying for exams, and so everything seemed normal. Talked to mom about gymnastics. She always wanted to know every single thing I was doing. And I was working on this new skill combination. She was so excited about it. My dad had just celebrated his 52nd birthday. We were talking about that, how proud he was. And I was disappointed that I didn’t get to celebrate his birthday with him for the first time in my life. But I was like, “This summer when I come home from Rutgers, we’re going to celebrate big.”
And it is crazy because nothing seemed amiss, other than financially things were an upheaval, because I’d actually sent my dad a card and had said to him, “P.S., I’m going to buy you that truck that you’ve always dreamed of having when I become a doctor one day.” And so, I do think that I was definitely aware that there were some financial stressors, but I had no idea the magnitude of it all. I mean, the house was about to… They were literally, they had our house on the market being sold. There was a for sale sign out in front of our house. And they were doing everything they could to get that house sold so they could get out of all this debt they were in and not have to file for bankruptcy.
And you didn’t know any of that?
Not a clue.
Was any of that related to the addiction, do you think?
I think that it certainly played a factor, because I think ultimately what happened is, it becomes rob Peter to pay Paul. There were checks being written for $10 to the electric company. There were checks being written for just minimal amounts, really to just keep the lights on. And those were things I was not aware of, because I didn’t know what their financial situation was. I didn’t have a running log of what was supposed to be paid. I just know that my parents asked to borrow money from time to time…
From you?
Not from me, no, because I didn’t have a job. So my parents always said, “Focus on schoolwork, focus on gymnastics, we’ll handle the rest.” And they weren’t coming to me for money. But I also found out after they passed away, I had credit cards in my name that they were using to purchase stuff. The Christmas presents that I got that Christmas I came home from Rutgers, were all purchased on a credit card in my name. They couldn’t afford it. I mean, everything was in complete upheaval.
So, I do believe that it feeds itself, right? Addiction, the pain, the financial stressors, depression. I mean, how could you not be depressed when your house is about to go into foreclosure and you’re losing your car? Your dignity, everything goes away. And so, you just feel like you’re clawing your way out of this situation. And it makes me sad just to know that they were experiencing all of this, just probably pain, remorse, regret, shame, all these things they were experiencing. And that they never really had a chance to speak up about it and share. Because I think that they probably felt the weight of that and just didn’t want people to know just how bad it was. And I think ultimately, they probably thought eventually they’d be able to climb out of it.
Your dad told you in that phone conversation that your mom died. Did he say how?
I had no clue. Middle of the night, after 3:00 AM, it’s dark outside. I’d just talked to them. Mom’s 45 years old, what could have happened? And my brain could not process. Other than the fact she’s no longer here, my brain could not even think about what the crap just happened. What in the heck just happened? “Get on the next plane you can.
So, what did you do?
And I’ll be at the airport to pick you up.” That’s what he said. “Get on the next plane. Be at the airport to pick you up.”
And that’s what you did.
I called my brother first ’cause he said he couldn’t get in touch with him. He said, “Call your brother.” So, I called my brother. And that was it. Called my brother, quick phone call, packed my bags. And then it was just chaos because I didn’t have enough money to get an airplane ticket. So, my roommate had to buy me a ticket on an emergency credit card, which was a total disaster ’cause it didn’t even have a big enough limit on it to buy a plane ticket. I mean, so it was just complete a whirlwind. I didn’t have a car on campus, had to figure out how I was going to get a ride to the airport. This was before Ubers and all that stuff existed.
We’re calling the airline. You didn’t just log onto an app and book a flight. We’re calling the airline frantic like, “I got to get a flight home. What do I do? Where do I go? How do I get there?” It was just insanity. It was complete and utter chaos. And looking back on that day, I’m still thinking to myself, because I think we process trauma in different ways. And I think specifically in this case, there’s a lot of black holes. So I can see one flash frame of like, “Oh, I remember sitting here.” But then it’s a black hole and then a flash frame of here, and then it’s a black hole. And so-
So, you got on the flight, you arrived in Virginia. And your dad wasn’t waiting for you to pick you up, it was your aunt.
It was my uncle.
Your uncle.
It was my uncle and my cousin who I was really close with, pulled up to the curb. And I’m sitting here processing this because I had not talked to my father in hours. But we lived out in rural Virginia, so it wasn’t uncommon that we hadn’t spoken to each other. He didn’t have a cell phone. I figured he was at the hospital. So when they pulled up, I’m literally thinking to myself, “He’s still at the hospital, he’s still taking care of things. He just didn’t have time to get down here to get me.” And I assumed we were going to get in the car and drive an hour home to where I’m from and where I live. And that’s where my dad was going to be waiting for me. And then my brother would be there as soon as he could get home from the Navy, from Norfolk, Virginia.
And what did your uncle tell you?
As we started driving out of the airport, we made it about a hundred yards. And he specifically recounts me looking at him and saying, I was sitting in the middle of the backseat of their car, and I said, “I just want to see my dad. Where’s my dad?” And he had to pull the car over at that point. And he knew that he was going to have to deliver news, he just didn’t want to have to do it right there. He didn’t know what my reaction was going to be, so he wanted to get me in the car and get me somewhere where I could feel a little safer. And he just wasn’t sure what my response would be.
And he told you that your dad had also died?
Yep. He put the car in park and turned around. And it’s crazy ’cause I can still feel the gravel underneath the car as he puts it in park and turns around and looks at me and said, “I’m sorry, but your dad passed away too.”
You lost both your parents within hours of each other. How? You must have asked, how? They’re young, how did both your parents die? What did they tell you?
That was the hardest part of this whole process. And that’s one of the biggest questions of, you immediately want to know the how. How did this happen? And I think what’s crazy about it is in my 18-year-old self, I went into shock and then I went in straight to denial. Because I did everything I could to avoid understanding and knowing the truth. And I don’t know if it’s because I had a suspicion that something was wrong or if ultimately, I just focused on the fact that they were no longer here. And I think it’s twofold. I think it’s both. I just drilled down on the fact that they’re not coming back. And I literally just told myself this story for years, that my parents were dealing with medical problems and that my mom had medication. And she was reliant on it, and she just was having to take too much. And it ended up being too much for her body to… I just used that term like, “Oh, it was too much for her body to handle.”
Right.
And then your dad dies five hours later. Well, most people would assume that it was suicide, that he took his own life because he was in distress. But I basically manifested it as he was so heartbroken that he had a heart attack. His heart stopped. And so it was just this story that I kept telling myself. Both of their deaths, Elizabeth, were ruled accidental. They did do an investigation to determine that, but I always had questions ’cause nobody was there that night. Nobody was there to really dissect that and understand how it all happened.
Your aunt did try to tell you the truth about your parents and their addiction, and the role it played in their death. And you say you actually for a long time, refused to accept it. In fact, you didn’t even look the toxicology reports from their autopsies for how many years?
10 years.
10 years? Because there was a part of you that actively, vehemently did not want to know.
Did not want to know. Because if I saw that written on paper, then I had to acknowledge it as factual and truth. I think there was also some fears too, that maybe I would run into some photos and maybe some pictures and things that I didn’t want to see. There was none of that. There were diagrams, which was definitely hard to see, just outlining different things. But I just did everything I could to run from it.
And when I say yes, I did everything I could to avoid the truth. And she tried to, in a very loving way, share the truth. And it wasn’t all at once. It wasn’t like, “Well, this is what happened, and you just need to accept it.” It was very loving and it was very, over time, just sort of leaning into it, we would go fisticuffs. I’m telling you, I would fight her, I would cry. I would kick, I would scream. I would get angry with her. We would be talking to somebody that we would know, even if it’s an acquaintance or a friend or even a complete stranger that really has no weight in the game. And she would share a piece of what my parents were going through, and I would cut her off so quick.
Yeah, you actually said in an interview, it made you angry ’cause you thought it would shame your family in some way.
I thought she was the enemy because I just thought, “There’s just no way. There’s just no-”
So what changed? What changed for you and why did you finally read the reports?
I got to this intersection where I think, number one, healing. I had experienced that process, the grief process, and gone down sort of that road to healing and felt like, “Okay, I can start to open up a little bit more about it.” And then honestly, I was wearing the weight of the world because I knew something was wrong. I was telling this story, I had told this story so many times, even to my teammates at Rutgers. People that are medically trained just didn’t ask questions. They didn’t think my story added up, but who are they to tell? “No, that’s not right.” People just let it be, let it be. And so, I would just tell the story over and over and over again.
And I finally got to a place where I think after a lot of healing had happened and that grieving process had transitioned to feeling anger and then to really wanting to know. Like, “Okay, what really did happen?” And it was just peeking that door open ever so slightly just to peek around the corner and say, “Okay, let’s peek around the corner to truth.” And then I would slam the door shut, and then peek back around the corner. And it was like little by little I felt, as I was healing and understanding, that I really did start to have that curiosity.
Okay, so what led them down this road? Because you have all these questions like, what? How? What? How? And it’s like, I’m running from this, but I’m actually growing curious now because I need to know, I need to understand. And I think around the seven-year mark is when my aunt finally had the opportunity to share with my colleague at WTAP in Parkersburg, West Virginia. It was the first TV station I’d worked at as a sports anchor and reporter, shared with my colleague openly what had happened.
And I’m in the other room, I’m cooking dinner for everyone. It was the first time that I didn’t come running in that room, fisticuffs ready to just like in outrage. I let her talk. I didn’t interject anything, but I let my aunt share. So I think deep down, I knew the lies I was telling. But I was telling these lies so well for so many years that I just said, “Well, I’m going to roll with it.” You tell these lies for so long. It’s kind of just like, “Well, people aren’t asking questions, so I’m just going to roll with it.”
When you finally did read the toxicology reports, what did they say?
Tell you, it was hard when I opened up that first page, because I see their name written out. I see the date of birth and then I see the date and time that they were declared dead. And I think that was the real reality of it all, to see it in writing. And then basically it outlined that they both died due to accidental overdose. And it basically outlines what was in their system at the time. And both my parents had been on several different medications, some for depression, but it outlined that both of them had a lethal amount of fentanyl in their system. My mom actually had more than my father with the percentages of what that looked like.
And then it went on to basically each one had about a one page typed up paragraphs of the account. So obviously, my dad’s account of what happened with my mom because he found her, and it outlined that. And I think that was probably the hardest part because I suddenly now have a visual of those moments of when he found her, and what he did to try to save her. And ultimately, his efforts failed. So, he finally called for help. And at that point, it was far too late.
Why do you think, how do you think, was your dad heartbroken and trying to relieve the pain? In other words, he’s just lost his wife, he has to know she overdosed on fentanyl. They’re both aware of what they’re each doing. How is it that just hours later, he could ingest also a lethal amount? Do you think it was an accident? Do you think he was in just so much pain… He had just called you and your brother, his children, to tell them their mother, his wife that he adored, was dead. Have you wondered or pieced together what he did in those hours and why?
This book has created such a high level of healing, because those black holes that we talked about, Elizabeth, have started to be pieced together. Illustrations of what had happened were pieced together, because I do think there is peace that comes with knowing.
Yes. The not knowing it eats you away.
Yep. And I will tell you, in the process of uncovering this, the craziest part of this whole story is I went and spoke at my high school in… It was 2021. And 8th through 12th graders, I go speak, I go to another event. I get a message that night from a friend that says, “Hey, I wanted to share this with you.” We come to find out there was an eighth grader there at the school listening to me speak, went home to dad, told dad that he was at the school and heard this ESPN sports reporter. Came to share her story. The kid starts reciting and talking about the story, sharing the story with his father. And his father stopped him and said, “Son, I was the one that responded to the call that morning.”
Oh, wow.
So, when I tell you… And talk about crazy, because I was actually supposed to speak in 2020. Well, pandemic happened. This young man would’ve been a seventh grader, not even in this school. He would never have heard me speak. So this literally becomes the bookends to my story, to my book, because this deputy, Eric Thwaites, literally filled in so many holes.
What did he tell you?
He went into the house. My father at this point, was on the floor. And he had been on the phone with someone from LifeNet trying to get in touch with my brother. And when he excused himself from the phone to get my brother’s social security number, he came back to the phone and on the other end, you could hear a loud snoring. And so at that point, he had collapsed and the woman on the phone called help, called the Sheriff’s Office to let them know that something had happened. At some point in time, we don’t know the timeline of when he actually took the fentanyl.
It kicked in right there.
It kicked in. It took over 20 minutes for… The timeframe of everything we lived out in the country, so at that point, when they arrived, my dad was already declared dead. And Deputy Thwaites had said, at that time, when he was young, in his early 30s, he thought that my dad committed suicide. But what he told me after talking to him when we interviewed him for the book many years later, he said, “Lauren, knowing what I know now…”, he worked with the Drug Task Force for many years, almost a decade. He said, “Knowing what I know about drugs, what I know about addiction, and what I know about your story and what I saw that day, your dad died with the phone in his hands. He was doing everything he could to get you and your brother home.” He said, “If your dad had wanted to take his life intentionally, he could have found many ways to go do that and would not have made you and your brother a top priority.”
And I don’t think there’s any way of knowing truly what was going through my dad’s mind. I’m sure he was absolutely devastated. “How am I going to go on? How am I going to continue to live?” But I also think too, he was feeling the pain. He was obviously dope sick because he had already done this at Thanksgiving with the fentanyl. And thought, “Okay, I need to ease the pain. And what do I do?”
So yeah, so many dark holes, so many blank spaces that I could not comprehend through this process. And I just, it’s amazing to finally get slivers of the truth, to be able to piece together, to better understand how things became so unraveled so quickly, and ultimately took both of their lives.
You wrote in an interview, “It did not mean our family was tainted. It just meant the drugs were potent and mom and dad were vulnerable, and didn’t find effective treatment in time.” They could be anybody.
Yeah. Yep. I think that my parents are a perfect example of nobody being exempt from addiction, nobody being exempt from a drug and, or substance taking over. I think that we as humans, experience such an array of emotions and at any given moment, can fall victim to what these drugs can do to people. We can take action that maybe in our right mind and our right self would never do, but I think we as humans, also become desperate. And I do think that my parents were desperate. But honestly, I just believe that maybe they felt too proud. We can get through this. We’ll do it, we’ll do it together. They had each other. They were kind of feeding off of each other. As you said, this can happen to anybody. And I think that my parents are such a perfect example of that.
And one thing that Deputy Thwaites had said, when he entered the house, it made no sense to him. Because he said, “This is a happy home.” He was looking at the pictures on the wall, walked into my room, saw the medals and trophies, saw a family that was put together, that was happy, that was successful, that seemingly had it figured out. And that was really hard for him to piece together as a young professional in law enforcement, to understand that this picture that we paint what a drug addict is, is certainly far, far, far from the truth.
In this case, the drug addicts were a man and a woman who had raised two amazing kids who were off in college and off serving our country. One of those addicts had served our country honorably, had struggled with pain, had led wonderful, happy lives. They were normal people, the people next door. It’s just yet another example of how people struggling with substance use disorder do not fit that stereotype we’re also quick to use, because it helps us think, “It couldn’t be me. It can’t be me ’cause I’m not like that.” It could be, could be anyone.
Lauren, your book is amazing. It’s called Shatterproof: How I Overcame the Shame of Losing My Parents to Opioid Addiction. Your story will help so many people. It’s a story we haven’t heard a lot, and I think it’s a story we need to hear more of. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Elizabeth. And thank you all so much for all the great work that you’re doing to just bring a voice to this, and to help people feel supported and not alone.