FIGHTING DEMONS: ROBB'S STORY

My name is Nancy Courtemanche. I'm the mother of Robb Rierdan. Robb's
not here to talk for himself, [he] died from an overdose of heroin.
This is his story.

When I think back of Robb as a little boy, when he turned about 9, he
went from being a happy boy to a sad boy. I wondered about that a
lot, and it continued to just kind of hang around him. Then, at about
age 13 we moved up here to Ferndale, and I think it was about that
time that Robb began to experiment with marijuana and maybe some other drugs.

Move forward a couple of years and his behavior had changed quite a
bit. He was very talented musically, very talented artistically. He
was hanging in what he called the alternative crowd, and was very
caught up in that world. There seemed to be a lot of alcohol and
drugs in that world and it was very hard for me to watch.

He left home and was living in his friends' apartments, crashing on
their couches wherever they would let him. I think at that point,
around 18 or so, is when he got really involved with crank. He went
from a normal weight down to 108 pounds. He looked like something out
of a concentration camp, and I did not know what was happening. I
didn't know the symptoms of crank use, I just saw my son dissolving
in front of my eyes.

He told me later that he took himself off of crank, which was
probably more difficult than I can even realize as I look back. I'm
pretty sure after that he never used crank again, [but] I think it
permanently damaged him.

After [that] he was clean for probably six or eight months, and then
he discovered alcohol. He would drink himself into blackouts where he
didn't know what had happened for even a whole day nor two sometimes.
I think at that point the bipolar disorder kicked in. It came to
dominate his life as [the] years passed.

One of the things I'm realizing now is that there is a vicious circle
[for] people who have mental illness using drugs ... Robb may have
had a predisposition to depression, and the drug use made it worse.

His art was still amazing and his guitar skills were amazing, but the
drugs at certain points [would] affect his ability to play, and there
were a couple of bands that told him that if he didn't straighten up
that they would not allow him to play with them any more. And that
was pretty devastating to him.

When he was 23 he was living in Eureka, and I know that many of his
friends were using heroin. He called what he did "recreational
heroin," where you smoke it or you shoot it once in a while but you
somehow don't manage to get hooked onto it. It's just something that
you play with. I remember in 2003, he came to me and asked me to take
him to the doctor so [he] could get medicine. And I said "Why?" He
said, "Because I'm hooked on heroin." I was devastated. I had no
clue. But I went to the doctor, and he got the medicine, and he got
himself off of heroin without going into rehab. He did it by himself.
It was awful. He was sick, he was sick, he was sick, and then he got
over it. And he promised me he would never use heroin again.

For the next couple of years, his depression got worse. He was taking
a lot of meds -- for the bipolar, for everything that he had. He had
a lot of pain. One of the things that happens with depression is
people withdraw. They lose their appetite, they don't feel like going
anyplace [or] doing anything, they don't have any energy. Decisions
are overwhelming. The creative juices that they may have had at one
time slowly begin to dwindle away.

I talked to Robb about choices, about good choices and bad choices.
Toward the end, in the last year of his life, the consequences of
[his choices] caught up with him. He got a DUI and lost his driver's
license. He had lost his transportation, so it was hard to get around
with his band equipment. He had steep fines he couldn't pay.

His friends would get upset with him because he would drink so much
when he went out to bars that he would get in fights, or he'd get so
obnoxious they would ask him to leave. And then he would feel really
bad and he would withdraw even further. It was very sad for me to
see. Very sad.

I didn't know what I could do. I was helpless. He always appreciated
when I would help him, and I encouraged him to do everything that he
wanted to do. I would help him with transportation. I would help him
buy art supplies. And it got to the point where that didn't even
help. He just kept withdrawing more and more. I felt at some point
that he was in this box where the sides got so high that he couldn't get out.

The last few months of his life were very sad. One thing that he did
want to do was to go up to Seattle to visit his friends. He was
really excited about that. So he went up there, and he was gone for a
week. And when he came back, he wasn't right. I was suspicious and
very afraid that he was doing something -- I was telling myself it
wasn't heroin.

He got back on Thursday night. We went out on Friday and had a really
wonderful afternoon together, and when I left that day, I thought
maybe things were going to get better. And the next day, at 4:30, I
got a call from his roommate, and he told me Robb was dead.

That's when a parent goes into denial. You don't believe it's true
until you drive up and you see the coroner's car is there and the
police are inside and you go in and you see the body of somebody that
you have loved for 29 years. And you see this shell.

The word went around the community very fast that he was dead. Some
people thought that he had committed suicide. I talked with the
coroner, who was absolutely wonderful, and he said that no, it was an
accident, that the lethal dose is 1 cc, but Robb died from 1.04 --
that's four one-hundredths. I don't know what that looks like, but I
imagine to myself that maybe that's a half a drop, so my son died
from a half a drop more than what it took to be within that line of
where you could shoot heroin and survive.

It devastated his friends. There was so much hurt, so much sorrow, so
much guilt, and so much anger. And so many of his friends reached out
to me, came to his service and talked with me. A lot of [them] have
stayed in touch -- I've known quite a few of them since they were 15
or 16, and now it's 15 years later and we've gone through a lot
together. And some of these friends have gone through the drug scene
and have gotten clean now and are really, really tired of seeing so
much drugs in the scene, like, "Couldn't we do this without the drugs?"

The interview with Nancy Courtemanche was conducted by Monica Topping
of KSLG radio as part of a series she produced with Mike Dronkers
about drug use on the local music scene. "Lifestyle: Addiction in
Humboldt's Rock Scene" begins airing Saturday, Feb. 10, at 1 p.m. on
KSLG 94.1-FM.