My best friend in high school was a brilliant musician. I was the science nerd, but he could play any instrument you put into his hands. Music theory came EASILY to him! (can you imagine?!?) He knew random details about all the great composers and even composed his own music. It drove me bonkers! Because I admired him. Because I envied him. Because I looked at anyone with that kind of mind-boggling in-born talent as an absolute mystery.
For some unfathomable reason, he "adopted" me. He wanted me to sing cluster tones with him and join the early music ensemble. He wanted me to change from an academic major to a voice major (and he was very convincing!). When I was the shy new girl holed up in my dorm room, he would come and knock on my window. There he'd be, standing in snow up to his knees (he was brilliant, but never practical) with a cup of hot chocolate from the cafeteria just for me.
"Come out for a walk!" he'd call in his soft round voice.
We would stroll around campus in the early darkness of a northern Michigan winter - me talking about my classes or parents, him insisting I listen to his new mixtape with his favorite recording of "Stabat Mater" or something by Dufay, or the best part of some symphony, etc.
The biggest theater on campus is an enormous, covered, but open-air, amphitheater. In the winter, when the snow piles made everything eerily quiet, the auditorium was a dark echo-y wind-whistling cave, protected from snow, but full of crunchy deer-brown leaves. We'd climb up onto the stage and peer out the windows at the frozen lake. We'd stop on the stage, peeling the edges of the linoleum tiles, sitting and talking on the very same spot where, earlier that summer, Aretha Franklin or the Beach Boys or Yo-Yo Ma had poured out their professional-musician hearts. Our amateur-musician hearts liked to occupy those same spaces. As we sat on that stage, I would play with his hair (it was always dirty!), and he would tell me about some of his struggles at home - how he didn't feel comfortable telling his parents that he was gay, how he sometimes used drugs to help him feel alive or calm or happy or forgetful. I was wide-eyed as a very sheltered, very studious girl, but I loved him for sharing everything with me, even the scariest stories that I really didn't understand.
One time we took a choir tour downstate and I napped on his shoulder all the way back up north. We had a yearly ritual of listening at least once all the way through the entire Wagner Ring Cycle - 15 hours of heavy, loud German opera. I loved it all because I felt, the whole time, that this extremely special person somehow thought that I was special.
Eventually we grew apart - went to different colleges in different states. I stopped being so shy and so sheltered, and he grew to be a bit more practical. Our personalities met in the middle as our lives moved in different directions. One day, I heard that he had had a massive stroke while on break in college. His brain had been damaged. Instead of being a brilliant musician, he now had to re-learn just how to walk and talk. He had to move back in with his parents and heal, regain his independence, come to terms with what his new brain would and would not do for him. No longer could he just look at a piece of music and hear it playing instantly in his head. His effortless musical genius gave way to an earned musicality as he relearned how to sight-read, how to play harpsichord, how to sing all over again. Years later, after he'd come back to his music, he asked me "Is this how it was for you?" "Yes", I told him. I had to work, study, and struggle for my music - while it had been as natural as breathing for him. Now he had to work for every note.
He finally told me it hadn't been a stroke. He didn't tell many people until years after he had healed - still an amazing musician- but never again with the effortlessness he'd had before. Not a stroke, but an overdose. His brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long. An overdose. And it took away a part of him forever.
I was sad that he had been injured, that he had lost such a beautiful part of what made him so utterly amazing, what made him my teenage hero. But I was also sad that we live surrounded by such stigma that he (and many others) didn't even feel safe enough to tell people what had happened to them or their loved ones. That friend I lost to a "heart attack" in his 30s? Overdose. The one who had the fatal car accident? Overdose. Beautiful people who may have been saved with a little help and a lot of community awareness. This happens ALL the time. Someone you know. Someone you love. Someone who is special and amazing and unique. It's not only the drugs that kill them. It's the shame. It's the secret. It's the denial - "Not in MY family!"
Yes, in your family. In our family.
Last fall, I went to a Naloxone training session presented by Progressive Alliance at the Buzz Cafe in Hendersonville . Members of the Asheville-based harm-reduction agency, "The Steady Collective", taught us how to recognize the signs of an overdose, administer treatment, and interact with first responders.
We practiced filling syringes. We practiced injecting into orange peels. We learned how to hurt someone just enough to make them just a little bit angry with you if they wake up, and if they didn't...to give them naloxone.
The beautiful part, I learned, is that naloxone can only help. Though it might not be pleasant to have a stranger rub your sternum with their knuckles or yell in your face or stick something up your nose, you will in no way cause permanent damage by using naloxone. If it's not an overdose, you may give someone a headache. And if it IS an overdose, you may have just saved a life.
Any treatment is better than no treatment during an overdose.
We were each given a little two-pack of naloxone nasal spray - each less than the size of a box of tic-tacs. I carry that around in my purse. I gave away the first two bottles to some friends who said "that's a great idea - I want some". I have a little note in my calendar to replace those little spray bottles before they expire (though latest research finds that even 30 year old naloxone retains up to 90% efficacy!)
That teeny little spray bottle, had it been in the right hands at the right time, could have contained years of painful rehabilitation, a college degree, relationships, jobs, and the most effortless musical talent I've ever seen. In a little spritz.
I wasn't there. I couldn't have been there for my friend. But maybe I can be there for someone else. Someone else special and beloved, someone interesting and mysterious, someone adventurous and kind, someone who could go through a rough patch and come out of it safe and healthy instead of damaged or maybe even dead.
If you think "not in my family", please think again. We ALL know someone. I would highly and personally recommend signing up for the next Naloxone training session at the Buzz this Sunday, August 25, at 2pm.
The Buzz: Sober Social Bar and Cafe
225 South Grove Street Hendersonville, NC 28792
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