and the dirty-laundry hamper—the last places her children would look. “We lived like that for years; it was our new normal. Until they go off to rehab, you don’t realize just how dysfunctional your life has become.”
In the beginning, Jamie and Drenna had, like most parents, isolated themselves—until it dawned on them, at the Families Anonymous meeting, that they were living a very similar nightmare. “I stayed away from my other friends because what do you say when people ask you, ‘How are your kids doing?’” Jamie said.
*
Christopher was two weeks into his first residential-treatment stay when word reached him that a good friend had fatally overdosed on 30-milligram oxycodone pills and other narcotics. It was Colton Banks, Drenna’s son.
“It tore me up pretty good,” Christopher remembered. “Colton was the nicest guy ever. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask him for a ride, and he’d get out of bed and come and get you.”
Christopher recognized the location of his friend’s death immediately. His body was found at the home of a middle-aged man, an opioid addict who’d been prescribed hundreds of the pills from a Roanoke pain clinic three days before. All but twelve of the pills were missing, a police search warrant confirmed, in a painkiller-selling scheme that placed Colton, nineteen, on the campus of Radford University, where he was selling the pills to pay back a drug debt from the day before.
“We got most of our pills from him,” Christopher said of the middle-aged addict. “He’d get four hundred thirties [Roxicodone], then some fifteens [Roxicodone], Xanax, and Klonopin all prescribed to him at once by the same crooked doctor. You can use a lot and still make five thousand dollars a month off that, if not more.”
The weekend of Colton’s death was supposed to be his last hurrah before getting clean. He had an appointment with an addiction specialist lined up for Monday—he’d stuck not one but two Post-it notes on the dashboard of his car reminding him to go.
Colton died at eleven-thirty on the morning of November 4, 2012, All Saints Sunday, while his parents were in church. A few hours later, when a policeman showed up on their stoop to say that Colton had “expired,” they were initially confused. Expired? No, their younger son was dead.
To add insult, no charges were filed against the middle-aged dealer, because it’s impossible to pin blame on a single batch of pills when an autopsy rules “multiple toxicity,” as it did in Colton’s case, the police chief confirmed.
The Bankses fumed, then and now, about that. “I want to go kill the bastard,” Drenna told her husband, but he persuaded her to stop and think about their other son.
And she did, though she sometimes sat outside the man’s house in her car, her gun on the seat next to her, anguishing and hating and praying for her son.
*
Two years before Colton’s death, a family friend in Fredericksburg, Virginia, lost his son to a heroin overdose, and Drenna remembered thinking, “Why can’t you control your kid?” She apologized, later, for having judged. She had monitored Colton’s Adderall when she learned he was abusing it at age seventeen. She’d grounded him soon after, when she found pot hidden in a briefcase under his bed. She’d sent him to a twenty-eight-day rehab at nineteen after he progressed to pills.
“At first you’re just so embarrassed,” Drenna said. “You think you’re doing right as a parent, but then these drugs take over their life, and nobody talks about it because it’s this dark, hidden secret.”
At the funeral-home visitation, Drenna had Colton presented in an open casket, wearing a flannel shirt she’d just bought him from Kohl’s, pants, hat, and his favorite boots, the ones he wore four-wheeling. His hands were arranged so they clutched a necklace he’d recently borrowed from his older brother, a silver fish medallion with the inscription wwjd.
She remembered her handsome bearded boy borrowing it from his brother’s nightstand, telling her, “I may not be as good-looking as Kevin, but I do pretty well with the girls.” And they both laughed.
She would remember that moment every day for the rest of her life—especially when she stopped by Burger King on his birthday to order his favorite meal (a cheeseburger with fries and sweet tea), and when she poured dressing on her salad (“He’d use ranch, and he’d think the bottle had a small hole when it didn’t, and invariably it’d go all over the place”).