After the wake and the funeral there was so much to do. I couldn’t bear the thought of taking all the Christmas decorations down and packing them away. I just wanted to get rid of everything; it was all so sickening and overwhelming. It was nighttime and my husband and sister and brother-in-law were sitting in the living room. I went upstairs for a moment. I knew one of the six-foot Christmas trees was now bare and standing in the dining room. All of a sudden I came running down the stairs with a vengeance. I heard my brother-in-law nervously ask me, “What’s the matter?” I was already out of breath and the rage was taking over. I ran into the dining room and I got hold of that tree. Six-feet tall: just the right height for a drug dealer, just wide enough to be overpowering but I didn’t care. I fought as hard as I could. I started ripping from the top, as if I were gouging out eyes, scratching into a face. I kept the destruction going. I was murderous in my rage. I pulled and ripped until my arms bled from the pine needles. No one dared move off the couch in the living room to stop me. The tree was every drug dealer, every bag of dope, every Christmas that was stolen from me; it was every song ever written about heroin, but I couldn’t win. No matter how hard I fought I could not win. In Neil Young’s song, The Needle and the Damage Done, he says, “Every junkie is like a setting sun.” Then what do you call the mother left to mourn? I stopped fighting and fell on the floor in the branches and the pine needles, the mother on the floor who lost to the drug dealer, the mother who lost…everything. There is no euphoria in heroin, Pink Floyd…only this: this beaten broken woman on the floor…this is what it’s really like on The Dark Side of the Moon.