# 15 Some families stop keeping their secrets and tell the truth regarding self-administration of fatal substances by adult family members.

The Washington Post has placed the below account on the front page of their August 1, 2016 issue.

Consistent with the three topics Coach Crain reminded us of during the pre-game prayer (In life we can choose our faith, our friends and what we put into our bodies) and referenced in earlier posts, the mother of Ryan - in the excerpt below - examines how her son's choice of friends should have been a flag to her that something in the son's life was amiss.  Similarly, this blog's posts are validated when the mother reports that her son, she learned, was injecting Heroin between his toes.

Finally, loved ones are surfacing as ones who deliberately seek truth over denial and express a desire to use the death of their loved one and his/her story as a motivation to save even just one life!

In this sense, the truth can be a blessing to the living.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/after-their-children-died-of-overdoses-these-families-chose-to-tell-the-truth/2016/08/01/b4e7c55a-38af-11e6-8f7c-d4c723a2becb_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_additionobits-1045am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

He’d recently become friendly with older kids in the family’s Manassas, Va., neighborhood. “I should have said no to these boys, but I didn’t realize they were swarming down on Ryan because they knew his mom was sick and would have opioids in the house,” she says.

Soon Ryan was smoking cigarettes, and then drinking beer and using marijuana. “Before we knew it, he’d become addicted to drugs.”

Heroin eventually became Ryan’s substance of choice — and now 21, he begged for help to defeat his addiction. Hawe says that her son, always compliant, completed more than two years’ worth of treatment and seemed to be on the right track.

On a bitterly cold afternoon in February, Ryan came home — happy and loving as usual — after a day on a construction job mixing mortar. He showered, grabbed his keys and headed out for a few errands — first to the bank, and then to the mall to buy his fiancee a Valentine’s Day gift.

At 6 the next morning, the phone rang in the Hawe home. It was a friend of Ryan’s, telling Hawe that he couldn’t rouse Ryan. “But there was no waking Ryan,” she says, “because he had been dead for hours.”

His cause of death was accidental fentanyl poisoning. Hawe says her son had injected the narcotic between his toes.

Within days, Robert Hawe had modeled his son’s obituary after one he’d seen elsewhere. The couple agreed that was important to tell people how Ryan died, to maybe change some minds about drugs.

“I had many miscarriages before he was born,” Lorretta Hawe says. “I always thought God had a purpose for him. If we reach even one person with his story, then maybe that’s it.”