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“Fo ro aga fo!”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, though I knew. She was overdosing. I’d seen it before, but not like this.
Not when I loved the person who suffered.
Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she began to convulse.
Will opened his backpack and pulled out a vial of naloxone. I watched helplessly as my mom’s body convulsed. I saw the scar on her stomach from the cesarean she’d had to deliver me. She was my mother and she was dying and I could do nothing to stop it.
“Call 911,” Will said.
I pulled out my phone and called.
Will administered three doses of Narcan before my mom started to respond. Narcan is short-lived, but needs to be spaced apart to be effective. By the time the paramedics arrived, she was stable, but hot, agitated and slurring her words.
She fought the paramedics, wouldn’t let them touch her. I had to fix this.
“Mom,” I said forcefully.
She blinked rapidly, then recognized me.
“Violet, what do you want? Go away. I told you over and over and over! Go away! Go away! Go away!”
I stepped forward, squatted in front of her, looked her in the eye. Her hazel eyes were pale and watery, but they focused on me.
“You need to go to the hospital. There’s something wrong. They can help you.”
“No. Don’t wanna. You can’t make me. Can’t make me. Can’t make me.”
Completely ignorant that she was naked, she tried to get up, then fell down hard. She started to cry.
It took all my strength not to break down and cry with her.
I crawled back into the tent and found the backpack that I had given her two years ago, to keep her important papers. I had a copy of everything in case she lost her identification and Medi-Cal card. I had to make her copies three times already. Fortunately, everything was there in the front pocket, along with a large baggie of fentanyl, a baggie of marijuana and several rolled joints.
I handed the drugs to Will. He couldn’t take her legal marijuana, but the fentanyl was illegal and he would destroy it.
I gave her ID and cards to the paramedics. They looked at me with pity, but I ignored them.
“Can you 5150 her?” I asked.
A seventy-two-hour psych hold might get her dry enough to comprehend what was happening in her life. If I could talk to her when she was sober—no drugs, no alcohol in her system—maybe I could convince her to go to a clinic. I would pay for it. I’d take out a second mortgage on my house to help my mother get clean.
She was going to kill herself if she didn’t get off these damn drugs.
When I opened the tent, she could have already been dead. Luck, God, I didn’t know what or who intervened, but she was alive and I wanted to save her. I didn’t know if I could do this again. I didn’t know if I could open the tent next time.
“We can’t force her to come with us,” one of the paramedics said.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Can’t you see she’s dying?”
Will put his hand on my arm and said, “Let me try.” He squatted next to my sobbing, naked mother. I walked away. Maybe seeing me had set her off. Did she hate me so much that she would rather die than get the help she needed?
I walked over to the food table, though I wasn’t hungry. I felt dirty and angry and so deeply sad. I had done everything I could think of—and things I didn’t think of but Will had—to get my mother off the streets. An apartment. ID. Drug rehab. Medical attention. I got her disability benefits and that just blew up in my face because she used the money for drugs. I didn’t know what else to do.
But she was my mom. How could I just turn my back on her when she’d raised me? It wasn’t perfect, but I had a house, food, school, clothes. She and my father fought all the time until he was killed. He was drunk, drove into a wall—thank God he hadn’t killed anyone else. I’d been thirteen, thought without the fighting and drinking that everything would get better.
I was wrong. I just didn’t know how bad things had gotten until my mom lost her job because of her addiction, then our house.
