When in Pain…Share It Helps

An old friend of mine from college recently lost her son to a drug overdose. He had been accepted to medical school and would soon graduate college. This wonderful young man was at a party where there was Fentanyl, and frankly, that ended his life. How does a parent live through the devastating loss of a child? It’s more than incredibly hard and so very sad.

A couple months later, I was meeting a whole bunch of friends in Las Vegas, and while my friend and I had not seen each other much over the past thirty years, I just reached out and asked her to join us. This simple weekend trip turned out to be a very important step in her recovery. So many people have gone through heart-rendering pain, especially when you have lived as many decades as we have. Sharing those stories and how people move forward is a gift. It will always be impossibly hard . . . but including her in our three days away was a real beginning for her. Reaching out with a crazy invite to “just come” felt like a good thing to do. And of course, ice cream and margaritas help.