I spend much of my time at work figuring out how to improve access to evidence-based treatment for individuals with addiction, especially opioid addiction. I attend conferences focused on opioid addiction. Over the past several years, it has become a common thing at those conferences for people to openly talk about loved ones lost to opioids or about their own opioid addiction story. However, it is still difficult for people outside those circles to speak publicly about their own or their loved one’s opioid story. That’s why I am always somewhat startled — albeit pleasantly — when I come across an obituary like this one:
Megan’s Webbley’s father, Edwin Webbley, submitted the obituary. Edwin tells us in the first sentence that his daughter died of an addiction. We learn later that it was opiate addiction, beginning when she receives the prescriptions following a severe injury. He speaks of her cycling through rehab and jail. He is matter-of-fact in his narration. Just as a father would be about his daughter’s cancer or any other deadly disease.
Edwin speaks of his daughter with love. He says, “Though shadowed by opiate addiction, Megan enjoyed a big smile and an infectious laugh. She loved all kinds of music, dancing, and doing her makeup. Empathetic in the extreme, she was the underdog’s biggest advocate. And against all circumstances, when she could be, she was a loving, gentle and doting mother. Just last year, she spent a few hours in the pool with all four kids (the youngest has since been adopted by a loving family), and it was a rollicking, madcap outing featuring a waterslide and peals of laughter. It was at that point when she was the happiest we had seen her in years.”
You also feel a father’s heavy heart in the way he phrases the last sentence of that description. But what you don’t see is Edwin blaming and judging Megan in any way. His reserves judgment only for the machinery of the state that is supposed to protect kids and ends up punishing mothers who struggle with addiction.
There is still a lot of stigma about addiction, though there may be less of it in some places which have borne the brunt of America’s opioid epidemic. In those places, like Vermont, where Megan lived, almost everyone knows someone with opioid addiction. Still, when faced with a child struggling with addiction, many parents ask themselves, “Where did I go wrong?” They feel ashamed of the things their children with addiction do to support their habit. All that guilt and shame multiply many times over when their children succumb to addiction. Can you imagine what it takes for a father in Edwin’s shoes to speak so unflinchingly about a child dying from addiction? To not care what anyone will say or think about her? Or about him as a father?
In the climax of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, when Dumbledore tells Harry to stop saying, “You-Know-Who” and advises him to “always use the proper name of things.” He explains,
“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
This memorable line from the first book in the series that didn’t make it into the first movie. Perhaps, realizing its importance, the director included it in the second movie, only giving it to Hermoine instead of Dumbledore.
Megan Webbley’s obituary reminds me of that line. As I visualize Edwin thinking about what to write, I imagine him telling himself what Dumbledore tells Harry. He decides not to shy away from naming what killed his daughter. Calling it out makes a dent in the stigma associated with addiction. It makes others talk about it openly too.
We lost about 70,000 Americans to drug overdoses in 2017, nearly 70% of them to opioid overdoses. If 70,000 obituaries and eulogies every year were to name it as Megan’s father did, it would make more than a dent in the stigma. It would blow it out of the water.
Let’s give addiction the Dumbledore treatment. Let’s name it as we name any other chronic or deadly diseases that afflict our loved ones and us. That is one of the most significant ways in which we can honor the memory of Megan and others like her who lost their lives to it.
