Professor’s New Memoir For Son Who Died

READ ’EM WEEP –

Sept. 26, 2024 – Professor Emerita Patricia Roos didn’t hesitate to include addiction as a cause of death in the obituary for her 25-year-old son, Alex Clarke. Though devastated by his heroin overdose, Roos felt compelled to take a stand.

“Writing the obituary was my first act of activism,” Roos said. “I wanted Alex’s life to mean something, for him not to be just another statistic.”

Roos kept writing – and researching. She applied a sociological lens to examine the systemic factors contributing to addiction and the shortcomings of the nation’s predominant approaches to addressing the overdose crisis, especially a reliance on the criminal justice system. The result is Surviving Alex: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction, a sociological memoir published by Rutgers University Press in May.

“I want people who’ve lived through this to know they’re seen, and I want to reach those who think it could never happen to their family,” said Roos, who joined Rutgers Department of Sociology in 1989 and retired in 2020. She dedicated the book to both her son and her husband, Lee Clarke, who had also joined the sociology department and penned one of the book’s most emotional chapters.

Roos will discuss the memoir on Thursday, Sept. 26, at the Rutgers Global Village Living Learning Center in New Brunswick (Douglass campus). It chronicles Alex’s addiction and explores the need for treatment alternatives to conventional paradigms, which are focused solely on abstinence. The free event includes a panel discussion about such harm reduction methods with activists and a Q&A session.