Remembering J

NOTE: We will not be using the full name of J in order to protect his identity. We also apologize for the downer nature of the past few postings, and hope you take comfort in knowing that the next few will be more uplifting – not to mention with recipes.

This morning, I woke up to the news that Corey Haim, famous for being one of the teen heartthrobs of the 1980s, had died, potentially from a drug overdose. It probably came as no surprise to people who knew of his addiction problems. It came as no surprise to me.

But then I stopped. I read an article on one of my favorite sites, The Frisky, about Haim’s relationship with his friend, Corey Feldman, after their series, “The Two Coreys,” was cancelled. (See the article here). Apparently, Feldman refused contact with Haim until he finally kicked his addiction once and for all.

I know that Feldman is taking it hard now. And believe it or not, I know how it feels. I was once put in a similar position with a drug-addicted friend, and I made my choice. And now he is dead.

J was a friend of mine when I was at Pierce College in the Valley. I loved him dearly. He was a lost soul who seemed to connect with mine, whether it was through coffee at Starbucks or fun dinners. We laughed easily with each other. I seemed to understand him in a way that other people didn’t really get, and in me he saw the quiet desperation, the looking for someone’s soul to connect with mine.

We talked all the time, and our conversations were very frank and intimate. However, we soon crossed a threshold that my poor 19-year-old mind couldn’t understand. It was the world of pure and total addiction.

J struggled with very serious depression. He tried everything he could to take care of it. There was electroshock and the talk of removing his frontal lobes. He did a lot of charity work – I always felt that, knowing him the way that I did, it was because he wanted to help others simply because he couldn’t help himself.

But what scared me the most were the pills. He would tell me stories of the pills he was mixing, drugs whose names that I recognized, that he was mixing to see how he could get the best high. They were frightening for me to hear, told in such incredible detail that it was horrifying for someone as young and dumb as I was at the time. I couldn’t stand hearing how my friend was hurting himself.

I didn’t even know what to call this – back then, prescription drug addiction was something that people didn’t really understand. The drugs that J was mixing for himself were the drugs that were making huge amounts of money for top pharmaceutical companies, and were considered miracle cures. No way could they be abused, right? It wasn’t until much later, when stars such as Heath Ledger succumbed to prescription drug overdoses, that people understood the dangers.

Meanwhile, I was so disturbed I didn’t know what to do, and my heart was breaking. Who could I tell? What could I do? I made a choice, and it was something that I regret, no matter how many people told me that it was the right decision at the time. Although he was hurting me while in a locomotive pattern of destruction, sometimes I wish I was standing on the train with him, and wonder if he would had lived if I was there.

One day in June, while we were instant messaging each other, I told him that he needed help. He should go get treatment for this. Otherwise, “I can’t be your friend anymore.” And I left it at that. I barely talked to him until a month before he died, and even then our conversation was strained. I got lost in my work – my journalism skills were growing, and I was taking off. In the month of April, I won a major award for my writing and was asked to be the features editor for my campus paper – a huge step.

On April 29, 2002, J walked into his parents’ room and collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital , but it was too late. His heart had stopped. The news spread like wildfire among the community. My friend Michelle and I were sending instant messages to each other, and she told me about J. She said a mutual friend told her, a guy named David. He worked at my campus paper. When I saw him that Tuesday, I pulled him aside in the newsroom.

“David,” I said. “I talked to Michelle the other night. Is it true?”

“About J?”

“Yes, about J!”

“Yeah, he’s dead.” He said this nonchalantly, as thought it was a whatever thing that a human being was dead. I began to freak out. This was all my fault, I thought to myself.

The funeral was one of the most disturbing things I had ever been to. I was sitting with a group of girls I used to consider my friends; girls who I knew, when he was alive, used to snicker about J and say how horrible he was. I was upset with him in life, but I never said he was a horrible person.

Images of that day are forever burned into my memory: the beautiful day and the wind in the air, the open grave waiting to take J in, his mother shaking in her pink dress, screaming into the air, “No, G-d, no! Don’t take him away! Don’t take away my baby! Don’t take away my ba-a-by…” Her screaming still haunts me, as does the memory of her son and the choice I made.

Even though J’s life ended – his desire to be a pharmacist, his wonderful piano-playing skills, his smile that caused his eyes to sparkle slightly – mine was just beginning, with all its great adventures. I found it slightly unfair that I got to enjoy my life while J’s was cut so short. While he was buried at 22, three years later, when I reached the same age, I came back from potential death from my blood clots, met the love of my life and graduated from college – three things he never got to accomplish in his life.

It took me years to come to terms with his death. Ari thinks this is because I hold onto things a lot longer than the average person. I think it’s because I feel guilty that I got experience the beauties of life – dancing at my wedding, watching new lives come into the world, experiencing the beauty of how life moves in the direction that it should – while he didn’t get to see the incredible nature of it all.

But I remember one night, as my now-husband was holding me tight. I was reminded of something J said to me one night as he was giving me a huge hug. “Oh, Reina,” he said. “I hope that one day you will find someone, the right guy, who will just hold you and take care of you. You need someone like that in your life.” Somehow, he knew. He just knew.

I think that J would have loved something like YBK the way it is now. I think he would have enjoyed eating the food, laughing with my husband or comforting me during such difficult times. I really wish he understood what he would sacrifice for his addiction. There were years of happiness to be had together. I wish I did not think of him and think of his sobbing mother as they were burying him. I wish I didn’t have to live with this one regret.

I encourage those who may know people with drug or alcohol addiction to tell J’s story. Tell his story alongside Corey Haim’s, Heath Ledger’s and all the other people who have succumbed to addiction. Tell them about J missing out on this beautiful world, this incredible life. Tell them of all the people who he couldn’t give his love to, who he couldn’t share his heart with, all because of depression and drug addiction, because there are people still on this earth who will always miss him and the joy we could have had together.