More Than Our Ends: A reflection on sisterhood, addiction, and loss – PART V

The following is a true story about love, and loss, and how the emotional rollercoaster of addiction affects so many. We are deeply humbled by the opportunity to share such a personal story from one of The Prompt community’s most prolific and beloved writers, Sarah Razner.

The story has been broken into five parts, which have been posted each day this week, to honor Jenna Razner. Read the prior installments here: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. Today, we are also posting the story in full, here.

This summer, for the first time in a long time, my worry began to ease. It felt like maybe her battle wasn’t just in a ceasefire, but maybe the battle lines were receding. Maybe it was over. What I neglected to remember in my hopeful, blissful naivete is that just because I didn’t witness a fight didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

The week before Jenna died offered no sign that the tide was turning against her.

Our family was on vacation, and we had some of the best days we had with each other in years. The weather was beautiful, and our inner storms were calm, with little bickering or anxiety. We just enjoyed each other’s company, and Jenna was all smiles as we strolled through the zoo, and she rode on roller coasters and water slides with our niece and nephew.

It was a blessing, and I thought it felt too good, but I didn’t want to jinx it by saying it out loud.

On the ride home from the Wisconsin Dells, I shared with Jenna a quote that had resonated with me from the book I was reading, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab. At the point of the story, an evil god tells the main character about the difference between him and the gods in whom others seek comfort and aid. Unlike them, the evil god says, he “will always answer.” Jenna responded that it also described addiction, and how the drugs and the alcohol will always be there to answer, but never solve the problem.

If that was a signal to me of where her mind was, and that the addiction was baiting her, I missed it. We all did.

From her friends to her counselors, no one saw any warning signs.

Less than a week after that conversation, my parents and I found her in her bed, unconscious. At first we believed she was sleeping, and the noises she was making were snores. We later learned that they were gasps from a lack of oxygen called a “death rattle,” a sign of a drug overdose. Although we were aware that after breaking her ankle a couple years ago, a friend of hers, addicted as well, had given her narcotics and she had used them, it wasn’t on our radar that she considered using them when alcohol had always been her drug of choice.

That August night, as we stood in the emergency room, I thought about the many times we had been there and we thought we would lose her. Those would’ve made more sense, as they were usually preceded by days of use and signs we couldn’t ignore. But this night bore none of those markers.

Over and over, we asked why, and we continue to. As much as I want to find out what had happened that day that suddenly led her to use, I also know that in my understanding of addiction, although flawed and incomplete, I can find an answer that will bring me some peace: Sometimes there is no reason, sometimes there is no logic, sometimes the screams within you are so loud you can’t ignore them. We had seen it before, only then Jenna was here afterwards to help us try to understand.

This time she couldn’t. There was too much damage.

Jenna would not come back and make this make sense.

When it came time to say goodbye, “I’m sorry” flowed from my mouth on repeat.

No matter why she used, she would’ve never wanted this outcome, and I wished we could’ve stopped her, that we would’ve known what was happening and been able to help her. I wanted better for her, for my parents, for my sister and brother-in-law, for our niece and nephews, for us all. I wanted a different ending, and the fact that Jenna didn’t get one felt like I had failed her, although I know that’s not true. Just as she had tried her best, we had tried ours too.

It’s hard to find something to be grateful for in your worst moment, but if there was one blessing, it was that in Jenna’s last moments we got to be with her. Addiction can be a lonely disease and the deaths caused by it can often be lonely, too, as we so often feared for Jenna. But she was not alone. She left surrounded by love.

She was 38, I was 29, and we were both too young for this.

***

When writing Jenna’s obituary, there was very little debate over how we would term her death. For us, to omit the disease would be to gloss over what she had endured and to relegate her life as part of the sober community as less important when it meant so much to her and to us. If we hid it, it felt like we were ashamed of it—and by extension ashamed of her—and we were not ashamed. It was our hope that by being truthful we could both honor Jenna and help others who were suffering to know they were not alone.

Since then, people have come to us with stories of their own Jennas—their siblings, their children, their spouses, their friends–who suffered from addiction and who had succumbed to it, as well as those who were still fighting it. In the weeks after she died, we became very attentive to the news and obituaries, clocking each time a death from drugs or addiction appeared. Every week, there has been at least one.

In 2021, 106,699 people died from drug-involved overdoses in the United States, an uptick of nearly 15,000 from 2020 and 54,000 in 2015, and more than 80,000 in 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control. From 2015 to 2019, an average of 140,557 lost their lives to excessive alcohol use. It led to the deaths of one in five people ages 20 to 49, and one in four in ages 20 to 34, per a Centers for Disease Control Study published in JAMA Network Open. The pandemic only caused these numbers to rise, with the number of deaths with excessive drinking as the primary cause rising 30 percent—a 23 percent jump over the typical 7 percent or less increase seen in the two decades before.

It can be easy to let our eyes glaze over such data, and to not let the full human impact of that hit. Numbers are cold. They don’t have personalities, or dreams, or loved ones waiting at home for them. They don’t sing their hearts out to Billy Joel, or to sip coffee in their backyards on crisp mornings, or have children who see them as their hero. They are simply another tally tick, another statistic, and as long as it’s a statistic and not as our neighbor, it’s easier not to care, and to fall into the trap that if it doesn’t affect us, it doesn’t matter.

But to fail to recognize addiction as an epidemic of this scale is both ignorant and a tragedy.

Like the epidemics of gun violence and Covid, it will one day affect you if it hasn’t already. The rarity in our country is not knowing someone who suffers from addiction, but not not knowing someone who does. How widespread is addiction? According to Brain Wise and the Centers for Disease Control, more than 20 million Americans age 12 and older suffer from substance abuse disorder. When including tobacco and alcohol addiction, that number shoots to 153 million. In the past year alone, 53 million have either misused prescription drugs or used illegal drugs—that’s almost 16 percent of the population of the U.S. Based on these statistics, it is very unlikely that we all don’t know multiple people who suffer from addiction or at least know someone who does. The thing is, you may just not know you do.

Although we are taking strides in bringing more awareness to addiction as a disease, stigma persists. Too often we see politicians and pundits decry the number of deaths from fentanyl and then proceed to use someone’s addiction to ridicule them or blemish their reputation. If we want to make progress in battling addiction, we must treat it and mental illness as a whole as we do other illnesses like cancer where there is no judgment or fear of repercussions.

We know that when we leave people to suffer in silence and shame, diseases like addiction thrive.

So often, Jenna resisted asking for help out of fear of sharing her struggle, but help is what saves us and we need to create environments where people feel safe enough to step out of the shadows and ask for it. If we don’t, it is only going to cost more lives, lives with so much potential, lives that have changed and could change the world.

We know that a tragic ending doesn’t have to be their story.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, three out of four people recover from substance abuse. Seventy-five percent. That is extraordinary. In my time with Jenna, I had the privilege of meeting many people who had decades of sobriety to their name, and who served as a reminder for those coming to recovery anew that a rich life with joy and happiness is possible. They show that addiction is not a death sentence, and that hopefully, if we can address it head on and meet it with empathy, we can raise that success rate, and reduce the number of lives lost.

I will not pretend that this will be easy, but I believe if we work at it, both individually and as a society, it is possible. We can push for better resources, more funding for recovery programs, and further inclusivity. We can make change all on our own by offering support and a space of non-judgment to those in our lives who are suffering with mental illness, as well as to their loved ones. We attach so much meaning to words, and if we make an effort to counteract the connotations of words like addiction and alcoholism and addict, it can change perception.

This could be as simple as no longer saying, “Diana has a problem” when describing addiction, and instead saying, “Diana has a disease.” It’s one word, and yet it creates a shift in perspective, removing the shame and the stigma. A problem implies there is something wrong, that a person needs to be fixed. A disease implies sickness, a need for treatment, and hope for healing—and there is so much hope to be found.

***

It’s always in hindsight that connections are the most obvious. We don’t see all the strings and how they intertwine as they’re laid one by one, but only once we can look back at them in their entirety.

Since Jenna’s death, I have been hit with reminder after reminder of the ways—both minute and gigantic—she has shaped my life. Despite my initial resistance to coffee, I now spend more money at Starbucks than I should, instigated by her job there. Every time I pass a dead animal on the side of the road, I make the sign of the cross as she always had. Her repeated invitations are the only reason I ever stepped foot in a gym, and her waxing kit and tweezers are why my eyebrows are not a disaster.

I don’t drink. I’m careful in relationships. I understand the importance of caring for my mental health, practicing self-love, and choosing someone who loves and respects me. I appreciate classic TV, oldies tunes, and anything with Ryan Gosling. I try to act with compassion, and tread the earth with more gentle steps, having learned that we never know what someone is really going through. I deeply appreciate family and what it means to be a sister.

I am writing this today, because without Jenna, I may not be a writer at all.

As I struggled to stay afloat in the first years Jenna was sick, I picked up my computer and poured my thoughts into fiction, fashioning a life preserver out of words and imagination. It led me to write short stories and novels, and for a period of time, work as a reporter. No matter the medium, Jenna was there, bleeding into everything from a news report on staying sober in Wisconsin, to short stories helmed in familial bonds, and the first novel I wrote when I was 20, ironically about a girl mourning the death of her sister.

After writing almost daily for more than 10 years, Jenna’s death left me straining to string more than a few sentences together at a time.

I couldn’t help but see the poeticism in it. I had found my words with Jenna, and with her loss, it was only fitting they went, too, and that when they returned, they were for her.

With Jenna’s passing, we were privileged to learn the ways that she had shaped other’s lives, too, guiding them with a gentle hand. Former students shared how as their teacher, she made them feel seen and special like few others had. One mother gave my mother a picture of her daughter with Jenna and told her how Jenna was her daughter’s favorite teacher. Coworkers past and present told us how much they loved working with her and the light she brought—the kindness, the caring.

Her friends from her sober community, many of whom I had never gotten to meet before, told us stories that will forever remain with me. Like the ones who said she had inspired them to stay sober, and helped them through the darkest moments of their lives. And the man who said that in the days before she died, he and Jenna had been working together to reunite a woman with her dog. And another who told us that for months, unbeknownst to us, she had met with him every week at the library to teach him how to read.

Addiction takes a lot from people—their sobriety, of course, but also their mental stability, their logic, their survival instincts, their support systems, and for too many, their lives. For those who love them, it rips away the person they knew and can make the memories of the good times with them foggy and hard to reach.

I had lost sight of much of the good over the past few years, but as people filed through, offering their condolences and memories for Jenna, I felt like she was right in the room with us, all the parts of her shining through, some of which I had forgotten, some of which I was just meeting for the first time. Yes, Jenna was complex, a mix of black and white like we all are, and within those intricacies of humanity was so much good, so much love, so much heart.

At the end of the wake, after the funeral home had cleared out until it was just immediate family, my sister, Katie, and I approached Jenna and knelt at her side. Laying my hand on hers, I told her what I had too often held back: I was proud of her.

In her 38 years, though they were too short, Jenna had fought hard, she loved hard, and she had done well. She had left a mark.

***

The leaves have begun to change in my hometown, a sign that time continues to pass. For the first time in my life, Jenna and I will not share a fall together. There will be no trips for caramel apples with her, or jack-o’-lantern carving. We will not dress up or go trick-or-treating with our nieces and nephews. She will not scare me with scary movie clips, and I will not hear her ask us to go with her to FrightFest ever again. This magical season she so loved will now and forever conjure up memories and missing, and that hurts like nothing ever has. And yet, my mind can’t wrap around the reality of it. But this is our truth.

Recently, scrolling through Instagram, I came across a quote that read, “The autumn is for those who find beauty in the ending,” and I immediately thought of Jenna.

Of course, she saw the beauty in the season, in life, too. After enduring many endings and beginnings, Jenna was able to find even the smallest sliver of good in each phase of life. I am far from understanding her ending—why it had to be this way and why it had to be now—and I don’t think it’s possible to see beauty in her end. But my sister Jenna is more than her end, and amid the grief and the sorrow, I am unable to deny that Jenna has left a vivid swath of beauty in the lives she touched in her wake.

Her memory will outlive this season, and her colors will outshine what took her.

As I watch the leaves tumble from the trees, I am reminded of one more lesson fall offers us, one Jenna tried so hard to learn and that will help us endure as we navigate life without her:  Even after the leaves fall and all seems cold, dark, and desolate, there is always hope for spring. From what we think is dead, new life will sprout, and we can always begin again.