Eyes Filled With Hope

This weeks featured image is one of my favorites of our family. We were very happy and excited. It was an important milestone in our children’s lives. Evan and Lauren were heading to college and along with that experience was the range of emotions that parents and children face during such wonderful moments.

Knowing now all the details provided by discovering Lauren had a heroin addiction, many hours talking with her, and seeing her medical records I can see things I did not see when we posed here. I love Lauren’s expression in this picture. She is very happy and, in the days represented in the image, and others like it, smiles were much more frequent for all of us. Knowing  what had been going on in her life then, I can now see a lot of hope in her eyes.

After Lauren passed away, I learned that this was, in fact, a time filled with the hope of a new beginning for her.

Earlier that summer Lauren and her mom took a long weekend to visit Laurens Aunt in Massachusetts before she left for college. Nereida and Lauren always loved shopping together, Lala (Lauren) was, after all our fashionista. This would be the perfect opportunity for them to spend more time together and say goodbye to LaLa’s Aunt before she went off to school. On this trip something happened to Lauren she did not expect. She began to experience withdrawal symptoms from not using heroin for a few days. By the third day she was in full blown withdrawal. If you have never seen someone in heroin withdrawal it is like having a severe case of the flu and multiplying it many, many times over, it’s painful.

From Lauren’s medical history, and comments she had made in my presence at the last detox she was in, I did discover that it was a result of this trip that Lauren realized, for the first time, she was addicted.

There were a few things that happened that summer that might indicate that Lauren was trying to figure out ways to stop using heroin. Very late in Lauren’s Senior year she made a sudden decision to not attend UCONN (University of Connecticut). She was accepted to any of the campuses she desired but wanted to go to one of the satellite campuses. LaLa was always a home body, she had never expressed any interest in going away to school. The night we returned from visiting the campus she explained to me that she thought it might be a good idea to go to a Christian College, perhaps, in Florida. I was very surprised, but our hope was that she would go to a Christian College at least for the first couple of years away from home. Having attended a Christian High School, we felt it would make the transition to college life easier for her. Going to college, being away from home, carrying more responsibilities are issues every young person leaving home faces and we wanted to provide as many factors we could to make the experience a successful process. Looking back now I really wonder if she was beginning to understand that her heroin use was out of control. Maybe she saw something that night that caused her to be concerned. I do know that several years later, as I sat with her and a young girl Lauren connected with who worked at the last Detox Lauren was at, Lauren opened up to her like I had never seen before. She told her how she had hoped that when she went away to college it would be a fresh start: New friends, a clean slate, a new beginning.

Working as fast as we could to make this happen we scrambled to get all the paperwork in and everything went great. Lauren asked us if she could go down to Florida a week earlier to stay with my sister in Boca Raton. Lauren loved Boca Raton, her first-choice college in Florida was only one town over in West Palm Beach, but she wanted her brother Evan to be at the school with her, he told her he was committed to go to Southeastern University in Lakeland FL. so she ended up going there to be with him. We were actually very happy about that.

I would like to think that she wanted to use those days before school to get her mind ready for the changes and detox herself, but I have no way of knowing. I do know that when the check in day had arrived Lauren’s anxiety was fully out of control. This coupled with the fact that she was probably still going though serious withdrawal turned much of the time we were there into an emotional roller coaster. What should have been a very enjoyable and exciting week turned into a very difficult time for all of us, including Lauren. Most of our time was spent trying to convince her to stay. In the end we asked her to commit to at least two weeks, if after two weeks she felt she could not stay, then she could come home. The day before we were to leave, she told us she would stay if she could get a part time job and take as many courses as possible. LaLa loved to work, I think it kept her busy, but it also provided her a measure of self-worth, which she needed.  It is possible that she was trying to just keep herself too busy to get back into drugs.

In that conversation with the girl from detox Lauren shared that she lasted about four months. Then one night someone from campus recognized her as she was pumping gas. They asked her “Do you like to party?” Unfortunately, she said yes. I wish I knew why. Maybe she was having a bad day, maybe her anxiety was out of control, maybe, like so many before her she thought, ah, just one more time. I will never know. Lauren went on with a statement marked by finger quotes, “Like every addict I thought I could just use once a week, and keep everything in control. Once a week turned into the weekends, and soon I was back to every day.” Everything in me wishes she said “No” that night. That she had drawn on the courage (and strength she demonstrated in so many other areas of her life) that helped her decide to go somewhere other than UCONN (I am not saying that any of her issues related to a specific school they did not), and to eventually stay at Southeastern. If she had things may have been different, but she didn’t. Every “no”, every positive step toward recovery is one more strand of steel in a person’s armor of resistance and protection against addiction.

Looking at this picture reminds me so much of the precious little girl who filled my life with joy. Of course, she was not perfect, and neither are we, but this is who she was before heroin and mental health battles railroaded her life. To a very dear friend Lauren confided that once she did heroin nothing else mattered any more. Drugs, especially heroin, may for a short time mask your hurt or pain, but they will never be the solution, in the end they will always make matters worse. The solution is realizing that everything can be overcome in life, but very few things can be overcome alone.

What I wish most is that she told us when she came home from Massachusetts that she was in the biggest battle of her life and desperately needed our love and help. We would have given both in overwhelming measure, and perhaps, then, her hope might have become reality.