“Our daughter lived on her own. She partied hard and we kept telling her to slow down. We didn’t know exactly how bad it was until she overdosed.

We knew something was wrong when she missed family dinner because that’s not something she would bail on. I kept calling her and there was no answer. My brother-in-law lived closer to her in Mobile and got there first. She was unresponsive and couldn’t speak. We got her to the hospital but didn’t know what happened to her.

My husband searched the room she rented at her friend’s house and found discharge papers—she had been in the hospital a couple of nights before with an overdose. She stopped breathing and had been without oxygen before they got her to the emergency room. They brought her back, and she released herself against the doctor’s orders the next morning. We were devastated to see it happen twice. We later learned she had gotten Xanax from a friend and didn’t realize the pills were fentanyl. They were causing the overdoses.

Our wonderfully beautiful, intelligent, funny daughter was in a catatonic state for a week. For a while, we thought that she was going to be that way for the rest of her life with round-the-clock nurses and care. The doctors saw there was damage to her brain. It was hard to come to grips with the fact that this wasn’t an accident, she did this harm to herself.

Before she got out of the hospital, we thought we had talked her into going to rehab. But when I picked her up, she was belligerent and said she wasn’t going. I finally said, ‘I can’t keep contributing to this. Call me when you’re ready to get help,’ and left. That was the first time we stepped back and tried to disconnect. My sister-in-law took me to my first Al-Anon meeting.

We got a call the next day that our daughter was in a hospital in Mississippi. She had overdosed again. My husband picked her up and our oldest son talked her into going to rehab. She left the next morning and stayed for a month.

I couldn’t eat, all I did was sleep. I didn’t want to be here. I am grateful that my sister-in-law took me to that AA meeting because I realized how far I had let this bring me down. I had to get back to myself before I could help my daughter.

You look back and try to understand what happened. Hers started with prescriptions. She went through severe depression when she was a teenager, and they put her on Xanax. When she was 17, she had a major operation on the knee she had hurt badly in ballet. They gave her OxyContin and that combination of drugs was more than a lot of people can handle. I think that’s where it all started.

I think we have all said my kid wouldn’t do something like this. Our daughter had the best of schools and everything she could want. Why would she need to do these drugs? It is an eye-opener that this is in all walks of life.

Fentanyl and opioids are epidemics we are sweeping under the rug and not talking about. When we started getting our daughter help, we realized our neighbor’s son had just gotten out of rehab. We lived beside each other for a few years, but we didn’t know that we were going through the same thing.

Taking a step back, I saw how I had changed by constantly worrying about her. It is so hard when your addict or your alcoholic is your child. We give much of our lives to guiding them and keeping them on the right path. All of a sudden, they are teens or adults with this problem. You have to disconnect or you will go crazy. We learned the three C’s in Al-Anon: I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it, and I can’t control it. These are so freeing. I realized all I could do is love her and try to get her help when she was ready.

She is dealing with brain damage that affects how she speaks and expresses her thoughts. It is frustrating for her, but we are grateful she has come as far as she has. The doctor says she is young, and there is a good chance her brain will heal.

She has been clean for a year and just got her one-year AA medallion. She has always been very determined—what if she could have gotten that addiction monkey off her back sooner. I think that she is an inspiration to others and wants to pass on what she has learned.

I don’t think I will ever not be terrified with the constant worry of what if she goes back. What if she does this again. But somebody in my Al-Anon group said, ‘What if she doesn’t? Enjoy this time instead of wasting it worrying that she will do it again’.”

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September is National Recovery Month. We have so much to learn from people in recovery or family or friends who lost a loved one to a drug overdose, so I am sharing some of these stories throughout the month.