Letter 9 – Wholesome Drug Seller

Dear Garrett,

I don’t know when I first realized you were doing drugs. Sometime in middle school. Experimenting with your friend Liam. Or with the boy down the street. Pot, I think it was. Or the things that are derived from marijuana. Probably you were doing other stuff, too, and I didn’t know. But what seemed like occasional experimentation at some point turned into something else.

It wasn’t always terrible. In fact, it mostly wasn’t terrible. Everything felt normal, with some concerned conversations along the way followed up with sincere vows to not go down that road. But you did. You did go down that road and I didn’t really get it until it was too bad. I’m sure now it was worse than I will ever know.

Why did you do this? Why did you keep on doing this until you lost the people that cared about you? I don’t have that answer. What I know is that you were doing drugs, and then at some point you were trying to sell drugs, and then you died. I didn’t know about a lot of this until near the end, or even after the end. You never wanted us to know what you were doing. Of course. You wanted us to love you. You wanted us to see you as a wholesome being. And at the same time, you were doing drugs and then selling drugs. I think you trying to be, some kind of wholesome drug seller.

I think you believed you had it all under control. But I can only think that there must have been such an ugly side to it. I can’t imagine that ugliness felt good, and it may have pushed you even further down that path. When you come into contact with that kind of darkness, how can it not influence how you feel about yourself?

I saw you struggle. So many times, I felt that I was as much your therapist as I was your mom. I really, really wanted to help you. We saw different people in an effort to find you the support you needed, but it never worked. Should I have been more forceful about that? I don’t know.

What really bothers me is why did I find such great people to help us after you died? Why couldn’t I find you a great person to help you when you needed it the most? It feels so unjust. Here I have these amazing supporters right when I need them, and you didn’t. Why couldn’t I have found someone who was right for you? I regret not finding you the right help at the right time. And I really regret that you slipped so far away from me without me understanding it. You wanted my love, and I loved you. You wanted to be my beautiful child, and you were. You were trying to be so many things at the same time.

Sometimes you were so honest, it felt like a breakthrough. A reset of our parent-child relationship. These intense moments felt so significant. But in everyday life, that intensity cannot be sustained. We drifted back into our everyday routines, and I lost you.