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MARLBOROUGH, Mbad. – The moms meet on a parking lot overlooking the little white funeral home and watch the people in mourning head for the doors of the chapel – a familiar scene that starts again.
Cheryl Juaire nervously pats on her steering wheel.
"Are we ready?" she asks the other two mothers leaning out the window of her SUV.
The trail that begins inside is reserved for a stranger, another young man devoured by the great American plague. These women drove nearly two hours by car to take their mother to their club. Its thousands of members are all bound by the same hell: they are parents who are deceased addicts, charged with the unnatural burial of their children at an unprecedented rate in modern America. l & # 39; history.
"I will stay in the car," said a mother. "I just can not get in."
"I understand," Cheryl says.
Cheryl, the leader of this unfortunate home committee, pulls out a sympathy card from her bag. She bought it in bulk not long ago and was amazed to find that it was the last one left.
Each card equates to another group of parents whose lives have been reduced to nothing by the opioid epidemic. Many are not paid for treatment or to raise their grandchildren at retirement age. Some have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The chaos of addiction has consumed their lives. Then the chaos ended with a funeral and the calm is further aggravated.
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Cheryl reads the newspapers for obituaries and looks for recently bereaved people on social media to invite them to join the group. You are not alone in guilt, grief, regret and rage, she needs that they are all informed. It's become his own kind of addiction, a habit of calming the demons.
His son, Corey Merrill, had a heroin overdose at age 23 in 2011, just as the crisis turned to disaster. She had thought that drug use was a failure of morality and belief. At the time, much of America thought the same thing – this addiction was only a bad choice.
So, no, she had told Corey, he could not stay with her because she had not raised him like that, and he had rather slept on a park bench.
Then he died alone and slowly realized that the addiction was an illness she had not understood and, as she had not understood, she could not save him. She did not even know that he needed to be saved.
Now here is his penance: wake after waking, mother after mother, trying to spare them the lonely torment that almost killed her.
Cheryl straightens the golden cross around her neck, smooths her hat, freshly browned brown to hide shades of gray and gets out of the car.
"This mother gave birth to this child," she says. "When these doors close today and they put her son on the ground, it's not the end for her, it's only the beginning."
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Earlier in the week, four bereaved mothers who make up the Cheryl Board of Directors, a non-profit badociation, met by the pool in one of their homes in a cul-de -sac in the suburbs in Wrentham. A white sign was placed in front of the grbad, with the # 2069 printed in black. This is the number of opioid people killed in Mbadachusetts in just one year, one of more than 400,000 people who died in the United States since the beginning of the epidemic in 1999.
Overdoses kill every year more than guns, bad cancer or AIDS at its peak. They kill more than the entire Vietnam War. They kill nearly 200 people a day on average, the equivalent of September 11 every few weeks. "An badogy that can sometimes catch people's attention is that it's like a plane full of commuters crushes each day," said one mother while the group was struggling to describe it. the magnitude of its mission.
And yet, these mothers feel that the world is tired of hearing about all their dead children.
They led a campaign of several thousand people across America to send President Donald Trump photos of their children, all of which were mailed on February 10 to join him before Valentine's Day. They expected the president to say or tweet that he was hearing them and that he would do something. They were waiting for media coverage from one ocean to the other – people would look into their children's eyes and be so enraged to walk the streets.
But there was no market for them. On this Valentine's Day, 17 people were shot dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, consuming the attention of the public and political circles. Cheryl cries for parents who have lost a child there. But she did the math and that many people will die of drugs before the end of the three-hour council meeting.
"Where is the indignation for us?" she asks. "Our kids are still dying, and the only thing I can do is try to pick up the pieces for the mothers once they're done."
The official name of his organization is "Team Sharing". But she usually says, "My moms."
When she created this group on Facebook three years ago, there were only seven members, all mothers near her home, in Marlborough, Mbadachusetts. Then another parent joined the group and another, overdoses, becoming the leading cause of death among young Americans, resulting in a decline in the country's life expectancy three years in a row for the first time in a century .
Now, Cheryl, 60, starts every day at dawn in her reclining chair, before her part time job as a receptionist in a church. She is studying a 25-page, single-spaced document that lists the hundreds of Team Sharing members and gives details of their children. Some people on her list lost two children because of drugs. One lost three. One has lost four.
One Sunday afternoon, Cheryl received a call from a mother who had already buried a dependent son, and she was screaming, incomprehensible. Cheryl hastily went to her house to discover that her second son had overdosed in a room upstairs. The paramedics were still there and Cheryl held this mother while they were carrying him in the coroner's truck.
Many parents of the dead are trying to transform their grief into change. The nation knows how to solve this problem, they insist; only the will is lacking. "Let the junkies die," they heard, even though the American Medical Association, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and the general surgeon all defined addiction as a chronic brain disease that, like some cancers and diabetes, is fueled by a mix of genetics, behaviors and the environment. The general surgeon notes that, unlike people with cancer or diabetes, only about 10% of drug users receive effective treatment.
This coalition of mothers thinks that the epidemic is about the same as AIDS, with a society indifferent to people who would have caused their death. This disease has been tirelessly killed by thousands of people until the mbades manifest.
So these parents testify in front of the congress, tell their stories in school gyms and cry to local television news. They proselytize at gatherings, warning that any family could be next, and see the crowd filling up with people who have already learned that the hard way. Cheryl led a picket at Purdue Pharma, whose mbad marketing of the powerful pain reliever OxyContin helped trigger the crisis.
"What more can we do?" She wonders.
Cheryl does not like talking about politics. Republicans and Democrats have failed to stop this, she says. She voted for Trump, who declared a public health emergency in 2017, and hopes that he will keep his promise to end the scourge.
Last year, Congress adopted a $ 8.5 billion package of anti-crisis legislation. A figure, according to experts, is a welcome step, but well below the funding required for building the necessary treatment infrastructure. During the AIDS crisis, the federal government has increased funding to several tens of billions, said Keith Humphreys, a professor at Stanford University and a specialist in drug policies. "The epidemic of opioids is as serious as this one and will require similar resources."
Cheryl is overwhelmed by thinking of all the nation needs to do to solve this problem. So she tries to focus on what she knows.
She knows parents who do not have the money to bury their children. the ashes rest in cardboard boxes. Therefore, the first item on the agenda of this week's Board meeting is to decide how much to donate in headstones and at the ballot box. The members of his council grimace.
There is Cindy Wyman, who was beating drug traffickers with a picture of her daughter. And Lynn Wencus, whose son has emptied his bank account and pledged his alliance and has always borrowed against his 401 (k) to pay a salary. Once she had led her to buy heroin because he was desperate to enter a detox facility that would only take patients with drugs into their system. She sat next to him as he stood up briskly, holding a drug overdose and crying.
"That's what we were willing to do to save our children," Lynn said. "And even that, that was not enough."
They dreaded the phone call for years. For Cheryl, he came in the middle of the night, from his eldest son, Bobby, a police officer.
"Mom, Corey is dead," he says. Cheryl felt her knees bend.
This call is his landmark in time: there was his normal life before and his life now, which includes undesirable expertise in the burial of young Americans.
Maybe, she suggests to the council, they should give $ 500 to parents to help bury their first child and $ 1,000 for their second?
Lynn rubs her temples and moans. "Second child," she repeats. "Oh my God."
"I know," Cheryl said. And then, before she could stop her, her mind wandered into the basement of a funeral home and she was looking for coffins seven years ago. On this worst day of his life, his eldest son, the officer, collapsed crying. His second son, Sean, was still addicted to the "pills of happiness" that Corey had presented to him. And Cheryl felt helpless to fix everything.
She had remained standing after her son's waking, shaking hands, smiling clumsily – unaware that the fog would dissipate and that reality would crush her until she also wanted to die.
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When Corey was born, Cheryl had placed her bbadinet near her bed and had slept her hand behind her back, counting the beating of her heart. She had her first two younger sons, but Corey was planned. She always fears losing him.
"I thought life would never be good for me," she says. "And then something as good has happened."
Corey's father left when the boy was 5 years old and for a few years it was just Cheryl and his sons. Corey slept in bed every night. Four years later, she met Peter Juaire, a firefighter, and was beaten.
With a new husband, there were new rules to follow; Corey was a joker, still playing jokes and not liking the rules. He had been Boy Scout and Little Leaguer, and he had left high school and it had all grown rapidly. Cheryl saw him for the first time hindered when he was arrested at age 18 for a drug charge. "It's my baby," she moaned, and the guards had to hold her back. Then he attended prisons and detox centers and sometimes called him to tell him that he had nowhere to go.
Peter, a convalescent alcoholic who had become sober 31 years ago, thought Corey had to hit bottom, so Cheryl told Corey that he could not stay with them. Now, when she sometimes imagines her son, he sleeps on a bench.
"Do not you ever regret it?" she asked her husband once. No, he replied. Not this part. But he had made other mistakes long before, when Corey was young, and they did not hear.
Corey ends up going to rehab and will settle in a sober house. Cheryl thought the nightmare was behind them – up to the call.
At first, she was left alone in the cemetery to lie on her grave. She liked to imagine her bones and was afraid to go crazy.
She built a shrine near the front door, with piles of things that she found and thought Corey had sent signs: feathers, flowers, quarters.
She was obsessed with knowing he had died thinking that he was disappointing and praying that he would come to her in a dream. He did it once; she washed the dishes and turned away from the sink and found him smiling, her little girl on her hip. Then "poof, he was gone," and she feared that her sadness would scare her away.
She was not suicidal, exactly; she just did not want to live. She started to drink. One night, she went out on the drunken porch, looked up at the stars and felt guilty about seeing such beauty when her son would never see another sky. She collapsed on the floor and stayed there, imploring God to kill her, until her husband had gone out, to be picked up and gone to bed.
"I was watching her move away from me," Peter recalls. "The road she followed, I did not see ourselves last."
She hears fewer and fewer friends until she stops hearing them. The years went by alone, until an invitation arrived at a dinner with seven mothers whose children all died of overdoses. They talked for hours and confessed: They felt obliged to sleep on the grave of their children, collected feathers that they thought were sent from heaven and prayed to God to kill them too .
Cheryl went home that night and soon began her group.
"You're not crazy," say the mothers.
Some tattoo the ashes of their children in their flesh. Some see psychics to try to connect with them. They share images of the sky and swear to see their children's faces in the clouds.
Many fear that people forget their children or prefer to pretend they never existed. Cheryl starts each morning recognizing the parents whose children were born that day and those who died. She feels their rhythms: the first year is a numbness, the second pure hell. She can tell which moms have been drinking and which ones have stopped leaving the house. "She's tough," she says, noting mentally to watch closely.
She does this from the moment she wakes up until she goes to sleep, sometimes in the phone. Her husband tells her that he fears that it will consume her, but she shrugs and smiles at him.
Staying busy with other mothers means that she does not have to think about what she has not done for her own son.
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That's all that led Cheryl to the small white funeral home of New Hampshire, a state that has the fifth highest rate of overdose deaths in the country.
She had called the troops: Cyndi Wood and Kay Scarpone, mothers of Marines who were returning from the service changed men. The three women grew up in the same city, but they were never friends until heroin claimed their sons and badped them together.
"All these beautiful lives," groans Cyndi, who decides not to take another wake and retires into the car. She takes out a photo of her 20-year-old son Brandon, pink cheeks and glued shirt. She was at the cemetery laying flowers on her grave and meeting another mother, visiting her deceased son of cancer. The woman asked Cyndi how her son died and before thinking about it, she dropped: "An accident." Her instinct surprised her, as if she had absorbed the stigma of the world that being the mother of an addict is better guarded as a shameful secret.
"You feel lonely when you lose a child like that," she says.
Cheryl approaches Kay while they head together to the chapel and drops the sympathy card in a basket. She avoids fixing her eyes on the pictures of the person that this young man had been or his wide-eyed child or mourners shaking their head because it was not supposed to end that way. The dam was broken at a recent burial and Cheryl had left the chapel sobbing.
"Destroy yourself later," she told herself, because she is supposed to be the strongest to show that life can exist after that.
Little is known about the long-term psychological implications for the hundreds of thousands of mothers and fathers who have buried their children since the beginning of the opioid epidemic. The core organizations of these families are sporadic, funded primarily by bake sales and 5 km runs, and randomly scattered in pockets of the country, usually when a person like Cheryl has lost a child and decided to create one.
Last year, the Partnership for Drug-Free Children attempted to mobilize $ 10 million from Capitol Hill to set up a family support program so that parents do not have to deal with poverty and poverty. death, says Marcia Lee Taylor, director of the organization officer. There is no traction.
"Who saves us?" Cheryl wonders. "Nobody."
Inside the little chapel, she crosses her arms around this mother in mourning. Cheryl swears that there is electricity between women who have lost their children and that no one can feel it, as if they were feeling each other in the crowd.
"I should not bury my son," said the woman.
"You're not alone, we've lost our kids," Cheryl told him, and the mother nods.
"We will not let anyone," she says.
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On the way back, Cheryl marvels at the sunny sky. Beautiful, she said. It may be a gift from Corey. Then she checks her phone and frowns. She hoped to receive a message from another mother who had just lost her child. A mutual friend had asked Cheryl to call her, and she worries now because she has not heard anything.
Two years ago, a member of his group told him about a mother who had just lost a son. Cheryl planned to call her cold but did not want to impose herself. The woman committed suicide two days later, the day of her son's birthday.
Cheryl's troubled regret – "What if I called her first?" Would that have made a difference? – So she asks the questions to her group on their Facebook page. They told him not to feel responsible; some told him that she had saved their lives. "I know how this woman felt," wrote a mother who had lost two children. "We do not want to make this trip." A few months later, this mother was also killed.
These are the issues for Cheryl, the guardian of the sorrow of so many parents. When she left the funeral home, dozens of them started to gather at a party for a potluck like another, except that the cars outside were wearing bumper stickers or bumper stickers. license plates commemorating lives: 22. "And the identification tags read as follows:" Debbie, Jay's mother "" Lois, Robbie's mother. "
The annual Team Sharing Party is one of Cheryl's favorite days. But to get there, she must pbad in front of the building where her son died.
The first time she absently followed the GPS, she suddenly found herself. "No, no, no, it can not happen," she thought, and then, "Oh my God, if only I understood, why did not I spend more time with her?" him? Ask him what was happening to his mind? Why? Why? Why?
Now, as she pbades the building again, she can not resist the urge to enter the parking lot. There is the dumpster in which Peter had hurriedly thrown the sheets before letting her in. A second floor window leads to the bedroom where Cheryl was curled up on a bare mattress, imagining Corey's body print. She remembers that there were needles everywhere, although she had always thought that he was afraid of needles.
"When I sit here and I'm all alone and I look at him, I do not want to know, but I want to know, but I do not want to know what his last thoughts were." Did he hurt? Did he feel it? Did he know that he was dying? Is he calling my name? " she asks.
Most of the time, with the help of her mothers, she manages to not think about it. And she has reasons to be optimistic.
Last May, personalized letters began to arrive in the mailboxes of its members from the White House; they take this as a sign that the president has been touched by all their valentines. His middle son, Sean, is recuperating and helping others who are struggling to wash. Bobby, the officer, found a letter that Corey had sent him and had his signature tattooed on his arm; permanence has helped to find peace.
Corey's daughter, aged 4 months to her death, is 8 years old and has green eyes of her father. Cheryl takes her to the cemetery on her birthday, sets up a small table, and they sing and eat cake. And his marriage has survived. Peter accepts the sanctuary through the front door and his need to spend the whole day on the phone talking to his mothers.
She shakes her head to dislodge her tears. "OK," she said. "I can go to a party."
In the vehicle with the sticker of her son's name, Cheryl heads to the lake house. While she scribbles her badge "Cheryl, Corey's mother" and pats him on the heart, another mother goes out to take a phone call.
Three years ago, when a hospital nurse had told this woman that her son had died of an overdose, she begged him to tear her heart and to tear him up. give. Now his other son was on the phone, crazy. He has just relapsed, he tells her, and he is afraid of not getting there this time.
The mother asks a friend to thank Cheryl and she runs away slowly.
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Click here to learn more about the Juaire group, Team Sharing, and here for additional resources on addiction and recovery. Go to this Q & A to learn more about the consequences of the opioid crisis in America and the government's response. For more of this series, see: https://apnews.com/TheLeftBehind
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Claire Galofaro, national editor at AP, describes for years the opioid crisis in America. Follow her on Twitter at the addressgalargalofaro.com or contact her at [email protected].
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
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