Anniversaries – Opiate Nation

August 2, 2026

Anniversaries are remembered for a host of different reasons: they mark events that are special to us for one reason or another. Important milestones in our lives. They are milestones that we can look back upon and see from the vantage point of having traveled some distance, usually with at least one other person as in a wedding or new job or new child. Birthdays are a type of anniversary as we celebrate another year of living.

They are times of reflecting on the past year or years and a shared journey in life –as two people or as a community or as a nation. The word comes from the Latin annus meaning ‘year’ and vertere meaning ‘turn’ – the turning of the year. And these anniversaries can be either a celebration or a memorial or sometimes both.

Anniversaries are a time to connect with others, with loved ones or people who hold the event as important. We ponder our shared history and the things that make a day particularly significant to us together. Public holidays are anniversaries of victories or tragedies or rituals of common traditions and core values and beliefs. These times of remembering together are honoring what people did and they build and strengthen bonds of community and friendship and love.

August 2^nd, is the 12^th anniversary of our son, JL’s, death from a heroin overdose. As you can imagine, it is not an anniversary celebration but a memorial. Yet memorials hold many of the same characteristics as other anniversaries: reflection, a shared journey, and honoring a person.

For us, the anniversary of JL’s death is a time for us to reflect, once again, on our son as a child whom we loved and who died too soon. To remember how much his 25 years enriched our lives and the things we learned from him. To remember the things that made him a great friend to others like his loyalty and sense of humor and his love. And of course there are the sad memories of how the opioid epidemic of the 2000’s swept him and so many others into addictions that ruined their lives before they even had time to grow up and experience life as an adult.

Memorials can also cause us to look to the future with a new sense of purpose and direction as we adjust to life without our loved one. This particular ‘epidemic’ has caused many, many parents and loved ones to work tirelessly in various ways to try to prevent other families from going through the trauma of having a child addicted to something that ruins their lives. All the recent efforts from small ones to large national organizations are memorials that have grown out of the ashes of these lives.

August 31^st is the 25^th anniversary of International Overdose Awareness Day (IOAD). For the millions of families and friends who lost their loved ones, it is an anniversary of remembering – a memorial for – all the accidental deaths of those who lost their lives in the greed-fueled scourge called the opioid epidemic.

Head to the new GIFT OF NEED YouTube channel and find podcasts with guests about addiction, drugs, trauma, grief. To hear our story, listen to Episodes #7 & #8.

https://www.youtube.com/@judedimegliotrang

Also, for information on IOAD and how you can help or find events:

International Overdose Awareness Day: 31 August

(Translation into most languages at tab to the right)

“We were trying, all of us, so hard, and he just wanted to live.” (1)

Ursula Rauh said this about her brother, Tommy, after his death from a fentanyl overdose and a dozen stints in rehab in ten years. He became addicted to Oxy’s at 23 after being prescribed an unlimited amount for tendinitis and a year later, another prescription for wisdom teeth extraction. Sam Quinones retells the family story in The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Times of Fentanyl and Meth. “The tragedy wasn’t just the death of her brother; it was all the time, effort, love, and pain that the family traversed, the hoping and living for the smallest encouragement.” (1)

When my husband, John, and I returned from Australia in May, we decided that we needed to address the decades of files we had saved and ‘stuff’ we had accumulated and ‘stuffed’ away in closets. We have shredded and recycled dozens of boxes of documents, cleared out half the books in our library, and now I have moved on to scanning and sorting thousands of photos. While I was pulling bins of photos and albums out of closets, I came upon a few more file bins. I sighed out loud to John, “Oh boy…more of JL’s file’s I’d forgotten about.”