I woke up at my girlfriend’s apartment and I hung out for most of the morning with her.
At around 11:30 a.m. I started driving to my mother’s house. On the way to my mother’s house I saw a familiar face. It was a client that I had while I was working at Aware Recovery Care a few years back. He was a young man, a kid that had severe fentanyl addiction, as well as some pretty severe mental and physical disabilities. Aware is a private treatment company so you have to have good insurance to get into their in-home addiction treatment program, most homeless people have mass health. The only reason this client was with Aware, was that he was a special disability hire with the post office who provided him with Blue Cross insurance. This client lived with his mother, but had experienced homelessness for nearly 7 years prior, living on Mass Ave struggling with severe drug addiction. When I picked up the case he was using fentanyl daily. I worked with him for about 5 months and his fentanyl addiction burned through his life. I worked diligently with this young man, he would sleep all day, experience severe depression, and eventually he was fired from his job. At Aware we would work on teams, oftentimes a nurse, 2 recovery coaches, and a family educator. It was only myself and the nurse on this team and we fought to get a scholarship from Aware for the young man to stay in the program even though his insurance got canceled. It was a fight but we succeeded to get an extra month, and I was able to get him mass health and into detox. I hadn’t seen him after that until this day. I pulled my truck over alongside of him and I began yelling to get his attention. Finally he noticed me and I said hey remember me you were my client, and then I said what was your name? I’d forgotten his name, I’m terrible with names. He remembered me and he told me that he was living in the shelter in Lowell with him and his mother. He also told me that he was still clean off of fentanyl. I asked him if he had been clean off fentanyl since the day I got him into treatment and he said yes. It was good to see this man that I had worked so hard to help, still avoiding that dangerous life-taking drug. I was sad that his mother and himself were living in the shelter, and I told him that at some point I would come by and visit him.
While driving from Lowell on 495 to my mother’s house on the Northshore I saw a mother duck getting ready to cross the speeding highway with a row of ducklings behind her. I was moving about 65 miles an hour and there was nothing I could do. I watched in my rearview mirror as she began to make her way across the highway, ducklings in tow. A great sickness overwhelmed me and I thought about that mother duck and her ducklings getting smooshed by all the cars driving super fast on the highway. Then I thought to myself, this is the way of the world, these types of things happen all the time. I realized that throughout my life I’ve seen so many horrific things, I’ve experienced so many horrific things, that it dawned on me that all life is caught in a delicate balance and sometimes there’s nothing we can do to stop the horrificness of our shared experience.
I went to my mom’s house and I spent some time with her, Charlie the dog, and Weezy the cat.
I left my mom’s around 4:30 p.m. and then I drove back to my girlfriend’s house where I spent the night.
I decided to call out of work and use one of my sick days. It’s my last week, and I just didn’t feel like going in.