“My son died of an overdose and I'm ashamed to tell people”
After a death from drugs, many parents find themselves editing the story: a heart problem, an accident, or nothing at all. The grief often follows years of worry, relapses, emergency rooms and calls in the night, so some of the mourning began long before. In a study of 106 adults in England and Scotland bereaved through drug or alcohol use (Templeton, Valentine, Walter, Bauld and colleagues, Addiction Research and Theory, 2016), people described stigma toward both the person who died and the family, and responses from professionals and others were more often negative than positive. In a survey of 571 bereaved parents (Feigelman, Jordan and Gorman, Omega, 2011), those whose child died from drugs reported grief, mental health problems and stigma much like parents bereaved by suicide, and more than parents whose child died of natural causes or in an accident.
What to check first
It helps to notice who knows how he died, who doesn't, and what telling or not telling has cost so far. Some parents tell a few people the whole story and others a shorter version, and both can change over time. It also helps to check the parent's own health and drinking, since the years before the death are often exhausting in themselves.
What could be going on
Bereavement after a death from drugs or alcohol: Fits if the grief is tangled with stigma about drugs and with the years of worry before he died.
Shame: Check whether the shame is about how he died, about yourself as his parent, or about what others will think.
Bereavement guilt and regret (Li and Stroebe): Fits if your mind keeps going over what you did or didn't do: the money, the last call, the times you said no.
Grief (complicated, disenfranchised, anticipatory): Could be grief that started long before the death, during years of waiting for the call.
Telling them apart
Bereavement after a death from drugs or alcohol: The grief may carry the weight of public stigma about drugs, and of the long years before: relapses, hopes raised and dropped, nights waiting for news. Some people may hint that the death was expected or chosen. The parent may feel they have to defend the son as well as mourn him.
Shame: The shame may be about the self more than the death: what kind of parent this makes them, what the neighbors think. It tends to make people hide, change the story or stay away from support groups. Keeping it secret can leave the shame with nowhere to go.
Bereavement guilt and regret (Li and Stroebe): The mind may keep returning to decisions: giving money or refusing it, calling the police or not, the last argument. With addiction, almost every choice can look wrong looking back. The parent may feel they should have been able to save him.
Grief (complicated, disenfranchised, anticipatory): Grief may have started years before he died, while he was alive and slipping away. When the death came, some parents felt numb, or a relief they are ashamed of. That earlier grief, often called anticipatory grief, is part of the picture.
Questions to carry
- The last time I chose not to say how he died, what was I afraid would happen?
- What do I want people to know about my son besides how he died?
Also said as
- my daughter overdosed and died
- lost my son to drugs
- how do i tell people my child died of an overdose
- people judge me because my son was an addict
- grieving an overdose death
- my son died from fentanyl