My son Jacob, my youngest child, my only son, was the light in our family. He was handsome, athletic, artistic and creative, adventurous, silly, sentimental, affectionate, joyful. He brought laughter and love to everyone, everywhere, always. On Thanksgiving weekend of 2020, Jacob flew home to visit. Less than 46 hours later, we found him dead in the bed of his childhood bedroom, his little dog Sophie next to him. In the anguish, despair and screams of disbelief that followed, we had no idea of what happened. The only clue found was a Xanax pill in his pocket, and a text to an old high school acquaintance asking for some. There lay my son…under a yellow sheet in the entryway of our home. Seven hours until the coroner came to pick him up, and then seven months to find out confirmation in his report, that he died from a counterfeit pill, dead from a normal looking pill that had hidden a lethal amount of illicit fentanyl, enough to kill five people, something we had never heard of and had no idea even existed.
To say that the holidays, since then, will never be the same is an understatement. We had already bought our Christmas presents for him. He had already bought his plane tickets to be with us for Christmas. My dear friends, who came to help me those horribly black days after my son died, put up my Christmas tree for me. I can not even begin to describe the feeling, seeing my dead son’s unopened presents under the tree. The anguish. The despair. The trauma.
One minute my son was enjoying a holiday weekend with his family; the next minute, he was gone. From one. single. pill. All of his goals, plans and dreams, taken from him in an instant, poisoned to death by a pill. Our family is forever broken; the never-ending void and silence created by my son’s absence is deafening. He had always been the wonderfully noisy one. My son loved deeply; we deeply loved him. The pain I live with, the hole in my shattered heart, cannot be described in words. Gone. Just like that. Our family will never be the same. I ache to see all three of my children in our family photos. An empty space, where he should be. My poor daughters, navigating life without their brother. Our little, broken family, forced into this hellish, horrible journey forced upon us. My Jacob, my angel…I love and miss you fiercely, my beautiful, beloved Jacob-boy.
Forever 24.
Love, your heartbroken mama