Jude Dimeglio Trang

Reading has been a life-long joy, what I look forward to, where I take comfort, where my mind is stimulated and my spirit is fed. Our home is overflowing with stacks of books, sticky notes jutting out, underlines and notes making them uninviting for other eyes.

Writing is how my inner self is best expressed. It is the bridge between what has happened and how I think and feel about those events. With the simple action of writing, I am urging myself to focus my mind, listen to my heart, absorb my physical world and translate the entire mix into words.

My husband, John, and I lost our 25 year old son to an accidental heroin overdose.

In the wake of his sudden death, we wrote a journal every day for a year, recording our feelings of unbelief, anger, hope, despair, sadness, regrets: the process of grieving. Our musings are the spine that holds all the separate pages of our book together, as we recall the 10 year journey with our son and his battle with heroin addiction with hopeful attempts and bitter failures as he stumbled on a path for lasting recovery.

As we tried to understand why and how this happened to us, I dug into the past, searching for clues in our family, our community, and our society. We are passionately open and honest in writing about our failures and regrets because we are convinced that only by letting light into the secret and hidden places will shame and stigma disappear and lives be saved.

Our memoir is our gift to all those who are struggling with addiction, to those around them, and to all those who have lost someone they loved to addiction.