Narcan

I keep on thinking that I’m okay, that I’ve got this. I’m way out ahead of my losses. They’re managed. I’ve grieved for long enough that it’s simply how I live. I think I’m fine. Maybe not fine, just accustomed to the normalcy of grief, of living without them. 

I am used to the absences. I maintain relationships, connections with my dead. Normally, Grief just walks along with me and we exist in that comfortable silence you share with your oldest friend and closest love. We are always together, familiars.

Scrolling through social media I discover that it’s Daughter’s Day and seeing photos of mothers with their daughters doesn’t break me. I don’t even feel sad, just worried for the newly bereaved mothers experiencing the pangs anew with every smiling picture, square after square of evidence that others have what they do not. I turn it off and get a text from a friend who noticed the day, thought it might bother me. She sends me a message. My lack of a daughter, my writing and speaking of my own baby girl gone, changed the way she saw the day, the world. She wanted me to know that she saw Thistle when she saw my sons walking to school together, shoulder to shoulder. “She lives in each of us lucky to know you.” My tears, then, were not tears of grief. They came from being seen, from pride over Thistle’s legacy. It was like she graduated from high school or something, which she would be doing this year, had she lived.

I see my friend who lost a brother the same year that I lost my Irish Twin. It’s been a long time since we saw each other. Maybe it was the year before the brothers died, mine of cancer, hers of pain. She asks how many brothers I have and we both fill with tears. Despite some dozen paper calendar years of time, we are right there again, face to face with the space where our brothers should be. We are familiar with the ache, broken-hearted in a honkey-tonk bar. The band plays. People drink and dance and laugh. And so will we. In a minute or two.

Then, sometimes Grief steps out from behind a wall like a childhood tormentor, probably a sibling, and announces her presence with a scream and a brass-knuckled punch to the throat.

Tonight, I went to a training to become a trainer on Narcan administration, just because it was being offered, because the overdose deaths in my state last year were the highest ever, because I taught for so long that it makes sense for me to use my teaching experience to help others. Also, I frequent places that people might overdose, libraries, parking lots, everywhere. 

I listen to the information. The signs, blue lips, clammy skin, death rattle of a snore, slow or absent breath. I ask questions. Highlight the steps on the handout. Call 911-Narcan-Rescue Breaths-Wait-Repeat. I even volunteer to go to the front of the cold classroom and demonstrate with Manny, the rescue head and torso.

At the end, I collect my supplies. I sign my forms and tuck my Narcan into the REVIVE pouch, to keep at room temperature for the next three years, or until I need to restock. I go to the trainers, as I always do after a class, to thank them.

“I appreciate the time you’ve spent here tonight. It’s so important.”

“Our pleasure,” and they think they’re done but I can’t stop.

“My older brother died of an overdose a few years ago. I guess, if someone had just been prepared, if they had known… So, you know, thanks.”

While the messy words drop out, they turn to me and I see that they know. There’s something stiff in their bodies and familiar in their eyes.

I grab my stuff and go.

And I know that if I administer my two doses and save two people, if I train fifty people who save two people each and who train their own fifty people, if there is Narcan in every space, in every hotel housekeeping cart, if a million ripples come from his death,

he will still be gone.

And I will never hear his laugh again, that explosion of pure bliss, of life experienced to the fullest, of nations explored, of rivers traversed, or insults thrown and babies rocked. That deep voice that sang to his babies and to my own, probably to me, is quiet.

And this time, Grief has me by the throat.

Choking, sobbing, I thank her, because most of the time, I can’t remember all that I loved about him. I can’t feel his light because he did so much to hurt everyone around him for years before he died.

 “People are not addicts,” the trainers said.

I know that he was lost to pain, too, to powerlessness, to the fact that life stops being exciting and miraculous.

And I cry for my big brother, my champion, the entertainer, my hero, my home.