THE ADDICT WHO TRIED, AND FAILED

In the end, there wasn't a lot to say about her.

Her 14-year-old daughter, who lives with an aunt, is working on a
picture to express her feelings.

Her 8-year-old son, who lives with his father, was shocked at the
suddenness of her death. He hopes that she is happier in heaven, he
tells the crowd gathered under the oak tree on this cold November
evening. He cries.

Her mother said the young woman loved her children. She also loved
tie-dyed T-shirts, tattoos and music. Her grandmother. Chocolate. And
those funny, slip-on, cheap plastic shoes in bright colors.

Her mother found a pair of those shoes after the young woman died last
month of a drug overdose.

The police report said the young woman's friend heard her stop snoring
at 4 a.m. When he woke at 9 a.m., she was not breathing. He called
911. As he hung up the phone, the dispatcher heard him say, "Hide
everything." Paramedics could not revive her.

It is a tough crowd that assembles at the Martin County park for her
memorial service two weeks later, just several days before
Thanksgiving. Some of the mourners still are using drugs. Removing
valuables from view and then locking their cars is an automatic
precaution for most in recovery. They warn each other and the
"normies" (non-addicts) to do the same.

The Rev. James Minshew, priest at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Port
Salerno, does not need a prepared sermon for this event. He has given
this talk before, at memorial services for too many others, dead too
soon and too young of alcoholism and drug addiction. This one, just
33, had tried for almost half her life to get clean and sober.

That trying, perhaps, is what brings more than 100 people to this
service to remember her. There are fellow alcoholics and addicts in
recovery. A teacher who remembers her as a student. Women who cared
for her children. Former lovers. A therapist. Dozens of friends and
acquaintances who tried to help her over the years, only to watch her
crash and burn again and again in the hell of addiction.

No heroin chic here. No glamor in the short life or sudden death or
the Jesus-on-the-cross tattoo under the skirt. A friend in recovery
speculates what the dead woman must have thought as she watched her
soul rise from her drugged-out body: "Man, I was so wasted."

She never stopped trying to get straight, returning to recovery
programs, asking for help. She didn't intend to kill herself. She
used. The disease of addiction told her that she could get away with
just one more high.

Her troubles are over now, Father Minshew said. She has gone on to a
better life, healed in Christ. One day, we will see her again. If her
sad death spurs even one person in the audience who is still drinking
or drugging to get help, she will not have died in vain.

No one can understand or explain this death, he said. He compares her
situation to cancer patients. One gets treatment, and lives. Another
with the same cancer gets the same treatment and dies. So it is with
alcoholism and drug addiction.

The pain of the children, weeping for their dead mother, moves even
the most stoic to tears. The priest wipes his eyes as he moves through
the crowd, offering hugs and words of comfort to her relatives and
friends.

As darkness creeps into the park, her mother asks everyone to hold
hands and form a circle. She takes handfuls of the young woman's ashes
and walks around the circle, scattering them from a paper cup. In the
end, she turns the cup upside down and a gust of wind lifts the last
dust of her daughter skyward. The priest begins the familiar prayer:
"Our Father, who art in heaven..."

The crowd breaks up slowly. Those in recovery head for dinner and
meetings with others in recovery. Many speak of gratitude for sobriety
and sanity. "I know," one woman said, "what happened to her could have
happened to me."

Those still using drugs and alcohol have secured a stash of chemical
comfort for the long night ahead. What happened to her, the disease of
addiction tells each one, never will happen to me.