Several weeks ago I was writing a paper on gender and drug use and interviewed one of my professors, Dr A, for it, because he worked with drug and alcohol patients for a little over 20 years (I’m a social work student).
Last Thursday my father informed me that my second cousin, Samantha, died from a drug overdose. She was only 16 years old. I only met her twice when she was 8, and our families weren’t in touch, so I really didn’t know her but it’s sad all the same.
Dr A is an avid newspaper reader and likes to talk about various articles at the beginning of class. Today he got his papers out and said “Sara I have an article you’d find interesting” and hands me a section of the NY Times from 3/11/04. I read the article title, “Death of Girl, 16, Spotlights Hard Drugs in New Jersey Suburbs.” I looked at the picture of the girl and then read the name underneath and exclaimed “oh that’s my cousin!” Dr A was mortified. I explained that I just found out last week and that I really didn’t know her. I think he felt awful about giving me this article but I assured him it was really okay.
There are times when, as a character in a book I read said, you “look around for a crack on the floor to trickle gently and unobstrusively into.”
Sounds like it was just such a moment for your professor. He probably still feels bad, but like you said, he didn’t know. If he brings it up again just keep telling him it’s okay.
What an odd moment that must have been.
There was a writer whom I read in Oprah’s magazine, that was doing research on some extremely rare kind of Brain Cancer or some such thing and whether or not the power of prayer from prayer groups “carpet bombing” heaven with gobs of prayers helped at all. ( I think that was the gist of it. It’s been about 2 years.)
Anyways, the writer ended up *getting the exact form of cancer * . That weirded me out to no end. She ended up dying.
My brother died of a heroin overdose about fifteen years ago.
Years later, after a rash of ODs caused by some unusually pure heroin hitting the streets, video footage of the paramedics working on him before he died started turning up in news reports on one of the local stations. Until then, we had no idea that a camera crew was there at all – it just went into the stock footage pool.
That was a bit spooky. Of course, after someone close to you goes out that way, every story you hear on the subject seems somehow “about them,” but it was still odd to be thinking of him and then “Hey!”
