A deeply touching memoir about addiction, grief, and loss…
Street takes readers on her family’s journey of pain and loss as she recounts their history dealing with her son’s heroin addiction. What began as a prescription drug for pain management after he got his foot crushed in the hydraulics of a Bobcat, became an addiction for David and he got hooked on morphine. He was fifteen at the time. He soon began experimenting with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs. During his twenties, his experimentation with various drugs came to an end when he found heroin and it became his drug of choice. Numerous traffic violations, court cases, jail time followed. Along came multiple relapses, which only added to the grief of Street and others in the family. Told from her own viewpoint and passages from David’s journal entries, Street’s narration describes her son’s behavior with unbiased perspective, and she is achingly honest throughout, particularly about how as an addict, David repeatedly drew his family into his dangerous orbit. Street’s prose is crisp without any hint of melodrama as she describes David’s relapses that never helped him gain distance from his addiction. Instead of emerging on the other side with a semblance of a life still intact as Street and other family members hoped, David lost his battle with addiction in 2014, leaving his family to bear the loss. He was thirty-nine at the time. Raw and heart-rending, Street’s candid take on her family’s experience is both eye-opening and relevant, particularly in today’s time of the opioid epidemic.
The Last Stop
By Patricia Street
Pub date September 15, 2021
ISBN 978-1952112560
Price $30.00 (USD) Hardcover, $14.95 Paperback, $7.98 Kindle edition
