GRIEF –
March 20, 2025 – It’s stunning that it took the death of someone I love dearly to show me how deeply fear and shame are embedded in the way we treat people with an addiction. One year ago this month, police found the body of my nephew on the front seat of a borrowed car in a gas station parking lot. Austen Smith was 29. He’d been addicted to pain pills, on and off, for more than 10 years. On some level, Austen knew the risk he was taking in those wee morning hours, but opioids had hijacked his brain. This time there was enough fentanyl in whatever Austen took to kill him.
The risk-taking piece is no surprise. Austen always pushed for more out of life. As a tike, he’d be the first into the deep end of the pool or off the diving board or down the water slide — backwards. On hikes Austen went straight up the mountain, if possible. It was Austen who pulled the cousins away from screens for a fishing trip or game of football. In his late teens, Austen started using pain pills to relieve the distress of Crohn’s disease. Sometime in his early 20s he got addicted.
