Heidi wrote this when she first discovered her daughter was using heroin, back in 2015. It grabbed international attention and was read on NPR in Washington D.C. It should be noted that she wrote it under the pseudonym of Ella Crosse to protect and respect Amara’s privacy and illness. It should also be noted that when Heidi wrote this, she knew nothing about addiction as a disease and would have been more understanding about what her daughter was going through.
A Letter to My Addict Daughter
By Heidi Overson
I’ve lost you. Gone is the baby girl I held in my arms while whispering my words of adoration. Gone is the little girl whose fingernails I painted a soft, innocent pink, while we sang “I love you, you love me” with Barney on T.V. Gone for now are the dreams I had for your life as I watched you walk into your Kindergarten room on the first day of school. Dashed are the hopes and pride that swelled up in my heart as I saw you sing in your school’s choral concerts, as you went on your first date, and as you walked down the aisle with high school diploma in hand—how could I fathom I was watching you march toward the devastation called addiction?
I shared in your excitement as you, with a gleam in your eyes, told me about the man that wanted to date you. “This could be the one, Mom,” you said. He was the one—the man that injected the vein in your arm with your first dose of heroin. How many times he did after that, I don’t know, but you were hooked. You eventually overdosed and died, and in a twisted sense of irony, he was there to resuscitate you. I’ll never forget the call I got from the hospital, late at night. You were there, recovering, but they released you before I arrived. You ran back into his arms, and you both ran, and I began the mad search for my daughter, who had suddenly become a stranger to me. Shock turned into denial, which evolved into anger and then unimaginable sadness and loss. My little girl was gone.
The night you overdosed, I started looking for you at your house. I let myself in, only to find the police had been there before me. I saw papers strewn around your floor, drawers wide open and your favorite childhood stuffed animal lying symbolically abandoned on the kitchen floor. Clutching it to my chest, I sobbed and slowly walked through every room. Your bedroom, where all the drugs were found, was cold. A window was open, and the January wind was seeping in. I closed it, but the cold and the auras of evilness and death clung to me. “Where are you?” I sobbed as I left.
From then on, life would never be the same.
The night you overdosed was just the beginning for us, but only one night in your long love affair with drugs. We soon discovered it wasn’t just heroin—you relied on meth and prescription pills to numb your insecurities and life’s pain.
I thought I could fix it all. I thought it would be simple. I had no idea what our family and I were up against.
I eventually found you, and managed to get you into treatment, thinking three weeks in rehabilitation would bring you back to what we knew, but I was wrong. You always went back to him, back to the needles, spoons, fine white powder and brown liquid in your veins. The battle to get you back is far from over, but I am determined to win. However, it’s clear to see how much the drugs have altered your old persona and brain, and I’m now dealing with a new person. Your family and friends have seen you lose weight as your health deteriorates, your body unbelievingly still functioning despite all you’re doing to destroy it. We’ve seen you turn into a liar and master manipulator. You’ve learned how to twist and turn facts and situations to where we are hanging onto the string of hope you’re dangling in front of us. In the beginning, we gave you money, bailed you out of drug-induced debt, gave you rides—always giving you the benefit of the doubt because we thought you were on recovery road. You mocked our naiveness. We later learned that what we were doing was called enabling.
We’ve talked to you through jail phones, with a glass partition between us. We’ve seen you stand in front of a judge multiple times, taking his lenient sentences, you promising you’ll never go back to the drugs again. You snowballed even him.
There are days we can’t cope with your addiction. All of us have felt the need to shut down—sometimes hoping that if we could just shut our eyes or sleep for a while, the nightmare would go away. In the beginning, losing you consumed all of us. We cried every day. We couldn’t put in a productive day at work. At first, our co-workers showed us much sympathy and understanding, but as time wore on, even they got tired of the long journey, saying you belonged in jail and not wanting to hear about it anymore. We went to support groups, but found even sharing our sorrow wouldn’t change anything.
Knowing you overdosed and “losing” you to the drugs has been like experiencing a death. I’ve said that many times. It was a sudden death of the daughter we thought we knew, and we went through all the mourning that happens when someone dies. The grief has been overwhelming. I tell you this now, over and over, but you look at me expressionless, as if all you can think of is when you’re getting your next hit. Do you care what each high symbolizes? If I could sit by you while you’re using, I would tell you what each syringe is full of: This dose will send your mother into despair and heart-wrenching fits of sobbing; your next hit will throw your father to his knees, as he cries out in pain, “What did I do wrong?”; the next will saturate your little brother’s pillow with tears of anguish, fear and disappointment; and your next will rock your little sister’s world, as her young brain tries to wrap around the whole concept of addiction. All of our sorrow aside, we’ve seen the other faces of addiction. We’ve seen you lose your license, your car, your house and old friends. Your credit is ruined, and it will take a miracle for you to ever get a loan or a decent job or to get back into college. Your addiction has cost us thousands of dollars.
When I do get to see you, I hold you and close my eyes as I give you a kiss. For a few seconds I feel like I’m once again kissing my little girl’s smooth, soft cheek, and there is hope. But when it’s time to let go, I’ll look into an addict’s eyes, and we both know it’s all changed. We’re both fighting a demon, me lashing out at it with fury, while you’re pushing it away and then pulling it back because you’ve become numb to its evilness and only want the deceptive comfort and rush of pleasure it always brings you.
It’s been a whole year, now. I don’t know where it will go from here. I see you taking promising steps forward, which turn into leaps backward. Our family’s shock and sorrow have evolved into a fight to just keep you off the streets—and breathing. You disappear for weeks, and we hear reports of people seeing you walking the city streets without any shoes, hair in disarray. How many of your purses have been stolen? How many strange houses have you “squatted” in, begging for a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat? How much sleep have you lost, as you restlessly walk and shoplift and hide while you’re high on the stimulating effects of meth? Can I ask you, daughter, is this the life you enjoy? Why? All I know is we have been dealt a devastating hand that we will probably forever be trying to beat but never understand. I will tell you this, though: Until the day I die, I will fight to get you back and see you live the life I dreamed for you as you were growing up. I love you, you love me, forever my baby you’ll be.