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Her first email arrived at the newspaper a year ago — a bone-weary mother reaching out, looking for advice columns for people like her, whose kids are addicted to drugs or alcohol.
“We as parents are clueless what to do or who to go to for support,” Dona Overstreet wrote. “We ask ourselves all the time what did we do to cause this and what could we have done to prevent it?”
Her second email arrived last month:
“I lost my son to addiction August 28, 2019 … ”
Any advice she found, or help she sought, was too little, too late.
Last week, Overstreet sat in a Starbucks near Military Circle, sharing her family’s struggle with a reporter — a story she was once too embarrassed to tell.
“People are quick to judge,” she said. “On the outside, we were the model suburban family. Nice house in Chesapeake. Good jobs. Two kids. I was even the PTA treasurer.”
Appearances no longer matter. She doesn’t care if the customers filtering in and out of the coffee shop notice her tears or hear what she’s saying. She hopes they do. The only thing left — the only thing that seems truly important — is finding a way to help others who are grappling with this same grief.
“No matter what we did, we just couldn’t save him,” she said of Alex, who died at 32 after spending half his life battling substance abuse. “Now we have to go on.”
Overstreet says her daughter, Rachel — two years younger than her son — has never had Alex’s problem. His started in ninth grade at Hickory High School, when a friend gave him some Adderall, a drug widely prescribed for attention deficit disorder.
“His grades had been slipping and then suddenly they jumped back up,” she said. “We thought he’d just gotten a handle on it, but then he told us about the Adderall. So we thought, huh, maybe he needs that to focus. We took him to a doctor and got his own prescription. It seemed like the acceptable thing to do.”
But Alex, always an introvert, discovered that doubling his dose would produce a speedy feeling he liked.
“And then he started mixing it with alcohol,” Overstreet said.
She and husband Greg — they’re now divorced — clamped down on their son and got him into counseling.
“We didn’t realize it was addiction,” she said. “We thought he was having behavioral issues — a phase that would pass.”
But Alex found ways to keep drinking and getting high.
“My son was always kind, except when he was drunk — then he could be really nasty. He’d vomit on the floor and not even clean it up. The only time he seemed regretful was when he’d see me cry.”
Alex started stealing from his family — money from his mom’s purse, items from the house to pawn — while his parents slept or went to work. When he was 18, he swiped his mother’s Suburban and rear-ended another car.
"He was out of control. Our house was in chaos.”
Alex wound up serving a few months in jail.
“I feel awful admitting it but that was the best summer of my life,” Overstreet said. “At least I knew where he was. And there was peace in our house for a while.”
The cycle became a blur, played out over years. Eight rehabs. Thousands of dollars spent for therapy and treatments. Periods of relative stability and hope that would always shatter. One substance defeated, then simply replaced by another, like opioids.
And the endless nights would begin again, waiting for that dreaded call from a hospital or police.
She hid it well.
“Nobody knew. I told no one. When I did, people would say mean things, like, ‘You spoiled him.’ Really? We treated him just like we treated our daughter and she’s OK.”
Overstreet felt isolated, when in fact she was far from alone.
In courthouses across the land, prosecutors find themselves dropping cases midstream because an addicted defendant died — overdosed between arrest and trial.
Legal problems are stressful for anyone, said Colin Stolle, the Virginia Beach commonwealth’s attorney, but they can leave addicts feeling especially desperate.
"Most judges would tell you that’s their biggest fear — letting an addict out on bond and they end up overdosing,” Stolle said. “We will never arrest our way out of this problem.”
Nancy Parr, the Chesapeake commonwealth’s attorney, said she noticed the correlation several years ago and started matching autopsy reports with court cases.
Her numbers aren’t perfect — some of the dead had open cases, others were on probation.
Still: “Over the past 4½ years, we’ve counted 16 people who were in our court system who overdosed and died in Chesapeake. When that happens, it weighs heavy on everyone who’s been involved in that case.”
Overstreet tried tough love. When Alex got kicked out of a halfway house in Wilmington, North Carolina, for drinking mouthwash, she left him on the streets there for weeks — the first of several times she would let him be homeless. When he threatened to jump out of her car as she was speeding up the highway to yet another rehab, she told him to go ahead.
"You’re killing yourself anyway, son.”
She could never completely let go. She kept his cellphone bill paid — “that was my lifeline to him." She bought him a tent when he was wandering the streets of Virginia Beach, put him up in hotels when the weather was bad, got him a battery-operated DVD player.
“But he just sold everything to buy alcohol or drugs.”
In January 2019, Alex agreed to another stab at inpatient rehab — his last.
"When it was over, he said ‘Mom, you’re wasting your money. No more. It won’t help.' ”
By then, his liver was failing — worn out by all the substance abuse.
The Overstreets took their son home and held his hand while he died.
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“I blamed myself, his dad, everyone but Alex — and actually, it wasn’t his fault either. People think addiction is a choice but it’s a disease. Why can I drink a glass or two of wine but he couldn’t leave the bottle?”
Throughout her son’s troubles, Overstreet logged countless hours of her own in counseling sessions and support groups. But after his death, she said, she couldn’t find a group in the area dedicated to this particular kind of loss, a place for people who’ve known her helplessness and frustration, sorrow and exhaustion.
Overstreet is starting one — a local chapter of an organization named GRASP — Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing.
“I don’t know all the answers,” she said. “No one does. But I’ve seen now that a whole lot of people are dealing with this. And we need to talk about it. We need each other. No one else can really understand.”
The first meeting is Feb. 20. There’s no cost to attend.
Contact Overstreet for details: dona1155@gmail.com or text 757-943-1328
Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com