Sick and struggling…that’s what addicts would say about themselves and others…how is so and so? “Sick and struggling,” would always be the reply. It’s hard to think about how my little girl left this world…but she went to school with a boy named Jake who was one year older than her. They were never close: just thrown together socially as kids often are…even sharing the limo for a prom or two. Maria always said she couldn’t stand him…in that benign way of hers that really meant he hung out with her boyfriend when her boyfriend wasn’t with her.

The night she died I sat with my stepson, and said: “Maybe the paramedics didn’t do their job in the ambulance…maybe they let her die.” My stepson, in shambles at this point, said to me: “Do you know who was in that ambulance?” “Jake,” he said, “And Frank’s first cousin.”

I became inconsolable: the thought of those young people who knew Maria when she was Maria…fighting in there to bring her back, bring her back to all of us…with two more shots of Narcan in the ambulance…after giving her one in her room…to bring her back to all of us. What was it like for those young people who knew her to do all they could to save her? Did they see her in those moments as the Maria they knew? Her spirit left in that ambulance. Did she rise up to see Jake working on her frantically, and thank him as a final irony before she went away?

At her wake I saw a blonde woman kneeling at her casket, and I heard her softly say, “Goodbye, little sister.” It was Michelle from rehab; who was assigned to Maria as her “big sister” on the first day she got there. Michelle, who was there to guide and protect her…how did she feel? Maria’s lawyer came to her wake. She was due in court on the twenty-third. They spoke on the phone a few nights before. He looked like he’d lost his own child. There were people there who held her as a baby, people who held her as she cried, people who held her as they danced, and people who even held the dope for her. They were all there. How did they feel?

All the young people who loved her unconditionally…who only saw the glamour, the jokes, the glitz…the one who would emerge from all of this even more splendid than before…the little cousins; and the ones who were like cousins. Some couldn’t say goodbye. They were too shaken to the core, so they used their art to keep her alive: as in the first song written for her, beautifully titled: January Sonata, for the January that would change so many lives forever. Some have said she’s impacted more lives than most people who lived to be ninety. I say that’s just being kind. No one remembers or suffers like a mother.