My Son Died Of A Fentanyl Overdose. Here's What No One Is Telling You About This Crisis.

Randy, the author's son, is pictured in 2015.

My son Randy died in 2018 from an accidental fentanyl/heroin overdose. He was 31, engaged and 10 days away from receiving his college degree, with a great job awaiting him. More importantly, he’d been sober for two years.

On the eve of his death, Randy’s wonderful fiancee had gone to bed early, and he left without her knowing. She found him dead on the kitchen floor in the early morning hours.

People are sometimes shocked hearing me say the word “dead” or “death” or “died.” It seems too jarring — too harsh. Friends use terms like “passed” or “passed away” or “slipped away,” as if that makes the loss of my child less devastating or easier to handle.

The grief I felt was beyond shattering. It was as if my entire being was made of crushed glass, with every breath and every movement unthinkably painful.

Friends encouraged me to write about Randy and his addictions, which began in junior high school. They suggested it might shed light on this catastrophic epidemic that is killing a significant part of a generation.

But I wasn’t ready.

I tried to reassemble the pieces of my life and figure out how to move forward. I worried about my other son, Billy, who had lost a brother and had his own grief to deal with while also raising a young family. Writing required clear thinking, which seemed impossible, but I wanted to do something proactive about addiction in hopes of bringing about change.

Randy is seen fishing as a child. "He always loved it," the author writes.

So, 10 months after burying my son, I began teaching creative writing to people who were transitioning into a housing facility after living on the streets. Looking out at my first class I saw faces that had missing teeth or knife scars, or were deeply lined with sorrow.

These people understood my son’s addictions and understood my grief. Many of them were drug-sick from withdrawals. The class was for them to write their stories of addiction and what they thought the solution was. Nobody agreed on a solution.

As a suburban mom who wrote a weekly newspaper column from the comfort of home, I wasn’t prepared for their stories. Several students were trafficked as children; others suffered physical and mental abuse and incest. There was sex work, drug-dealing and rape. The women in class seemed worse off than the men. Some showed up with black eyes.

They wrote about such violent childhoods that I began a weekly therapy session to process all of it.

The class was a revolving door. The pull of drugs drew many of my students back to the streets. I lasted a year. My quest brought very temporary relief to a very few instead of enacting one iota of change.

Not every addict grows up in a tough situation and ends up on the street. Randy had a carefree suburban childhood with opportunities galore, which wasn’t anything like my students’ experiences. He played sports, had lots of friends and had a stable home life. I believed my boy was safe.

Randy had absolutely everything to live for, but he shared one thing in common with my students: Once drugs were introduced into his life, there was nothing that his family, nine times in rehab, house arrest, or a bright future could do to loosen the grasp of heroin and fentanyl.

The tentacles of addiction have no boundaries and can grab ahold of anyone’s child.

Randy, right, and brother Billy are pictured as children.

It took me four years before I was finally able to write about my beloved son’s death . I wrote of my grief as a parent, Randy’s efforts to get clean, and the well-intentioned friends who suggested that I let him hit rock bottom, even if rock bottom meant burying my child.

I felt relieved to finally explain to the world what it feels like to have a child die from an accidental overdose. What I didn’t expect was the overwhelming number of emails from parents across the country whose children had also died from fentanyl and heroin.

They all said the same thing: They were stricken by unbearable grief, they’d tried everything to save their kids, they felt ignored by the medical community at large, and they wanted to do something to stop the deaths.

I realized that deep down, we all shared a sense of having somehow failed our children. Even though the government, churches, schools, medical and psychiatric communities, and Big Pharma hadn’t found an antidote to drug addiction, somehow we mothers and fathers should have discovered the answer. We saw our children punished by the legal system and shamed by the common belief that they simply needed more willpower or better character.

I learned from the responses to my article and the interactions I had with these other parents that, like love, grief is also universal. I am still in contact with several of the mothers who emailed me. We are tethered together by something that has changed us in ways we never expected or wanted.

The number of opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. has risen dramatically since Randy died, and overdose deaths linked to synthetic opioids have skyrocketed. Should we as family members be experiencing this kind of pain? Should we as a country be experiencing this kind of loss? What can we do?

Billy and Randy pose for a photo. "This was a year before Randy died," the author writes.

Making matters even worse for many of us is the unintended cruelty from those who’ve never had — or lost — an addict child. Recently, a longtime friend told me that Randy might be alive today if I had let him go to jail.

Yes, some people still try to soften things and say our addict children are now “at peace and no longer suffering,” but let’s call it like it is: Since 2018, hundreds of thousands of our children have died of accidental overdoses from drugs that are much more powerful than the human body is built to withstand. There is no known answer in sight, and stronger drugs are in the pipeline .

At the end of 2023, the U.S. population totaled about 336 million. That same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized the equivalent of 381 million lethal doses of fentanyl. As a parent who’d been in the trenches fighting for my child’s life, I had no clue that the servings of this poisonous opioid in our country had surpassed the number of people who live here.

What’s to be done? I wish I had answers. Throwing money at the problem hasn’t worked, and neither has incarcerating addicts or counting on them to hit rock bottom. The pill farms and cartels seem way beyond the reach of any government officials.

Maybe we need to trade compassion for character lectures. Maybe we treat the addict as a patient instead of a criminal. Maybe we give credence to a recent study that identified inherited genes with direct links to addiction disorders, instead of blaming them merely on bad parenting.

All those parents who emailed me have asked what they can do about this growing problem — and about their grief. My journey of trying to help those who are in a terrible struggle has proved mostly fruitless, but I’ve learned one part of the solution: We need to talk about addiction. Openly. With grief, perhaps, but without the stigma attached.

Randy and the author are pictured skiing in Utah.

Parents are reluctant to speak about their children’s addiction problems. An acquaintance, whose own child died of an accidental overdose, originally told me that her daughter had died of a stroke, even though she knew about Randy. I understood why she said that.

We are often met with judgment and with less understanding than those who have sons and daughters with other diseases. I remain hopeful that openness about addiction is a way to stop it before it puts a death grip on someone else’s child. That is why I’m writing this today.

We must treat this as the crisis that it is. The outlook is grim, so the noise from parents whose children have been killed by lethal drugs must get louder. We need more voices to join us — and we need people who will listen and then help us find solutions. The death count is growing. We can’t do this alone.

Need help with substance use disorder or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline .

Karen Wallace Bartelt was a weekly newspaper columnist for The Oregonian and has written for many other publications. At the beginning of her writing career, she studied under noted authors ― and fellow Oregonians ― Ursula K. Le Guin and William Stafford. She worked at Paramount Pictures in its heyday. She enjoys teaching creative writing to unhoused people who are transitioning into stable housing. A third-generation Portlander, she spends a lot of time in the rain, and skis, rides horses and enjoys her family. She can be reached at ksweekly@aol.com .

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