Family Blog

In part three of this series, I’ll examine addiction, withdrawal, and the role of fentanyl in our current crisis.

Somewhere around April 2018, fourteen months after Jamie’s untimely death, I started to slide into a hopeless state of mind and felt a heavy veil of depression surrounding me.

I lied; I cry inside, privately every day. I still love you and will until the day I die and then we will see each other again. My grief will never end-I will learn how to integrate it into my everyday life.

In part two of this series, I’m going to examine the link between mental health issues and substance use disorders, which is the clinical term for addiction. As you likely know, our son Jamie…

The following blog post is taken from a longer piece about Jamie, written by his grandmother, Anne Werner Richardson. To read the entire piece, please click here. These recollections are…

Dear Jamie,

Your Aunt Melissa sent me this: (Author unknown)

“The moment that you left me

my heart was split in two

one side was filled with memories

the other side died with you.

In the year-plus since our son Jamie died from a fentanyl overdose, we have learned a lot about addiction, mental health, and treatments for both. I’m going to share some of that here. This is Part One of a multi-part series.

First of all, I don’t cry every day, but…

Our hearts are still broken after 14 months. The pain never leaves and we miss Jamie so much. He was such a presence with so much energy…

For a year I have struggled with a question: How could my smart, handsome, kind, caring, giving son give up everything he had for drugs?

Dear Jamie,
It has been one year since you left this world and us. Not a moment goes by that I don’t think about you, feel overwhelming loss and wish desperately things could’ve been different…