his friends to see this person they knew who was no longer here. This was the star athlete, the kid who stood up to bullies. Colton was everybody’s protector, everybody’s friend. He had a good home life. He really had it all,” she recalled, tearing up.
“They think they’re invincible.”
Three months after Spencer left for prison and two years after Scott Roth’s death, the Bankses used their nineteen-year-old son’s funeral to send a message to his opioid-addicted friends and their parents.
Though Christopher Waldrop was away at rehab and not allowed to come home, Jamie made a point of sitting next to one of his high school friends at the service, in an increasingly familiar role.
She and a handful of other local moms were preparing to out themselves and their families, understanding, finally, that survival had to trump shame. Jamie pledged to help her son’s friend find a bed at a treatment facility the moment he was ready to go. “His parents were in total denial,” she said.
She would tell Christopher later how Drenna Banks stood at her son’s funeral, her voice quavering, and begged her audience to let Colton’s death be the last:
“For the longest time, I didn’t know what God wanted me to do, but now I know,” she told the mourners, chucking her prepared remarks in favor of an impromptu call for treatment. “There are so many families struggling with the same thing Colton has been struggling with. It’s insidious, and it’s evil, and it’s not just pot.…And I know there’s a social stigma attached to this, but don’t hide. Don’t hide from it.
“I know there are at least three other boys here that I know Colton wants me to help. And you know who you are.…I know now that I’m supposed to be here for you boys, and we’re gonna make it through.”
*
The following Mother’s Day, Jamie called Drenna and asked her to come over because her husband was out of the country, and she didn’t know what else to do. Christopher was close to relapsing, Jamie suspected, if he hadn’t already. He was at home visiting her, having checked himself out of an Asheville, North Carolina, aftercare program—against his counselor’s advice. After four months of sobriety, “I was tired of all the rules,” Christopher told me later. “I wanted to drink again.”
Jamie begged Drenna to talk some sense into her son. And Drenna tried, telling him that Colton would not want him to be using again; that it wasn’t fair for his mom to have to wonder every second of every day if she would be going to his funeral as she did Colton’s. He insisted that he wasn’t using heroin and that he hoped, eventually, to make Colton proud.
But the drinking would lead to poor choices, as it usually did, and before long the usual signs presented themselves in the form of stolen checks and pawned laptops; in Christopher continuing to lie through his teeth to his mom, over the phone from Asheville, that he was not doing drugs.
Drenna advised Jamie to drive the four hours to her son’s apartment and show up on his doorstep, unannounced. “You’ve got to go down there,” she implored her friend. “You’ve got to go look at him and pull up his sleeves!”
Jamie arrived at her son’s apartment to find cases of beer and a bong in the middle of the living room.
“Hand me your phone,” she said.
Her stomach sank the moment she clicked on his text log and found scores of messages to and from drug dealers. There was no need to pull up Christopher’s sleeves—the needles and bags of heroin were right there near the beer, tucked into his shoes.
“I was like, shit, here we go again,” Christopher remembered.
*
What he needed, said his counselor, whom Jamie had called in for advice, was “another fucking spiritual experience, and I have the perfect place”: an abstinence-based rehab in the Montana wilderness.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Christopher. “I hate the wilderness.”
“Then you can join the Asheville transient society,” the counselor said.
Christopher pleaded for help from his mom. Surely she could not abide him becoming homeless.
But Jamie said she would no longer help Christopher finance an apartment, a car, a cellphone, or even food. “We’re not enabling you anymore,” she said.
Instead, she spent a week in an Asheville hotel room with her dopesick son as he detoxed, toggling between a hot shower and the toilet, prepping for his return to rehab.
A day into the detox, Christopher decided he was ready for another