Bob CollinsIf you heard about the heroin user who died alone of an overdose in a Moorhead, Minn., apartment, you might have moved on quickly to other stories. Even as heroin use is becoming an increasing scourge in our area, ignoring the stories of the destruction in its path is far too easy.
That’s why today’s Fargo Forum interview with mother of Jordan Larry, the man who died of the overdose on Tuesday morning, is worth reading.
She shared her story as she went through her son’s things on the evening of his death this week.
The drugs changed Larry, his family members said. He stopped smiling, stopping cracking jokes. And he took up new habits.
“Lying, stealing,” Jackson said.
“Manipulating?” her son Sonny Jackson, 17, suggested.
“Yep. All of that,” she said. “Having him live here was horrible because I love him, but it broke my heart because it’s like being a hostage to someone’s addiction. Where’s your wallet, where’s your purse. Is there anything missing? I had a lock on my bedroom door for years.”
She threw him out. He became homeless. She took him back, she said, describing the pain of being the mother of a troubled son.
She didn’t have the answers then. And she doesn’t have the answer now for other parents of children who are, or soon will be, addicted to heroin.
“I don’t ever want anyone else to have to find their 24 or 23-year-old child on the floor, dead from a heroin overdose,” she said.
