There is a story about this picture. No matter how likable and happy I look, you can mostly thank the artist for that. I do. The sketch was made from a picture snapped at the funeral of a young man, a child of a family whose children I helped raise together with my own. I was looking at the cross above the entrance to the church from near the graveside in the churchyard.
These funerals of young people are far far too frequent. Very powerful synthetic drugs seem to be the killer too often. My generation navigated the post Vietnam War scene with Asian heroin in abundant supply and there were overdoses and deaths then too, but mostly, I think, of people whose bodies had already been weakened terribly.
The young people in their early to mid-twenties, we lost them too, but more to car accidents or crazy stunts. So, I feel a difference. This young man was two years clean and died suddenly of a synthetic narcotic. I don’t think he wanted to die. His funeral filled the church as it filled our eyes with tears, to overflowing.
I don’t know what to do about this change, but I do know that it is a change for the worse. This foreshortening seems to mean fewer chances to help, fewer chances to get treatment.
The homily was right in this: Treatment must be our first, second and seventh recourse. Relapse is part of the disease. Recovery takes time, lots of it. It takes lots of love from all of us. I just feel that the window is closing more and more now.