“We all want to see a reduction in overdose deaths, but punishment is not the answer,” Dr. Tamara Olt, a mother from Peoria, Illinois who lost her 16-year-old son Josh to an opioid overdose in 2012, said at a recent news briefing.
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While families across the country celebrate Mother’s Day, far too many of us will have an empty chair at our table. I lost my son, Mark, to a preventable overdose. For over 100 years this country has attempted to eliminate illicit drug use by arrests and imprisonment. And for over 100 years this punitive policy has failed. This failure is evidenced by over 110,000 lives lost to overdose in 2023.
Naming DRDs [Drug-Related Deaths] as ‘special deaths’ also stems from the high levels of disenfranchised and complex grief. Disenfranchised grief is grief that is not acknowledged by the social network of the bereaved, or by wider society; this is usually applied on people that “didn’t deserve to be grieved over”. Such grief can be seriously detrimental: those experiencing complex grief struggle to find meaning in their loss, and can remain confused by their feelings, particularly feeling that they don’t have the right to grieve.
This is the story of Dr. Tamara Olt, President of the Jolt Foundation and Executive Director of Broken No More/GRASP (Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing) and how she was able to come to terms with the all the what-ifs and to find a way through the paralyzing self-blame and to channel her grief to help others. In Josh’s name.
The Denise mentioned in this story is, of course, Denise Cullen, the Founder and past Executive Director of Broken No More/GRASP. She has devoted over 10 years of her life, after the death of her son Jeff, to helping others to find a way to live with the devastating pain of losing a loved one to an overdose.
“One of the things I struggled with the most was the guilt and blaming myself. How did I miss it? Why did he use drugs? I literally went back from the moment he was born to the moment he died, thinking, What did I do wrong as a mother?
I was the strict mom who always said, “Don’t ever drink, don’t do drugs, nothing.” Since my kids couldn’t come to me, I thought maybe I should’ve been more open. But I’ve discovered that some people threw their kids out on the street, and they died. Other children died literally in the room next to their parents. Everybody did things differently, but we still ended up in the same place, with our loved ones gone. That helped me to stop the “what ifs.”
“Everything we’re doing wrong with the opioid epidemic is really based in stigma. When I started reading and understanding the problem, and what works and what doesn’t work, I couldn’t refute the evidence. To me, the solution is clear. It’s about harm reduction. You’ve heard the saying, “Oh, they need to hit rock bottom.” Well, we who work in harm reduction don’t believe that. Rock bottom is dead.”