I Lost My Son to Addiction. No, Privilege Didn’t Protect Him
January 29, 2025 at 11:45PMIn this adaptation from For the Love of a Son: A Memoir of Addiction, Loss, and Hope by Scott Oake (with Michael Hingston), Oake recounts how his son Bruce went from experimenting with weed to becoming a full-blown heroin user. A stable, privileged upbringing was no prophylactic against the disease of addiction. Bruce’s aimlessness post-high school, the never-ending series of lies he told his brother and his parents, and the constant arguments were all precursor to Bruce’s eventual death from a heroin overdose at age 25.
There’s an excited energy in the gym. In the world of recovery, your “birthday” is the date you stopped using, and we’re all here tonight to celebrate three guys from the program who have achieved a full year of sobriety—the first sixteen weeks as a resident of the recovery centre, completing the Bruce Oake program, and the rest of it out in the world, taking the skills they learned in here and using them to build a healthy new life for themselves.
One graduate, who seems a little nervous, reads his speech to the audience off his phone. It consists of a series of bullet points, the first of which is simply: “I love this place.” No matter their talents at public speaking, I find all of these men and their speeches incredibly moving. They’ve been through something very difficult, and they’ve survived it. Now they’re on stage, expressing gratitude and sharing their stories in front of their friends, family, and fellow alumni. But it’s the third speaker tonight who really makes me choke up, because he reminds me so much of Bruce. Like my son, this graduate comes from a well-off family and enjoyed the kind of privilege growing up that some people think protects them from the dangers of addiction. Unfortunately, they’re wrong.
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The Only Narcan Vending Machine in Alabama
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Pain and Suffering
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Flipping Grief
“This is loss. Memory, damp and compact as clods of earth, is dried out in the marketplace and burned as turf.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/29/i-lost-my-son-to-addiction-no-privilege-didnt-protect-him/
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