My ex-husband and I were at a park near the morgue.I and other close family members had several startling experiences in the weeks and, especially, first days after he died, and felt sure Kyle was there causing them. I spoke out loud to him when I was alone. I wrote a journal to him as if he were reading over my shoulder. My son’s death, unlike all the others I’d endured, caused me to develop an immediate, compelling interest in life after death. Then, inexplicably – for all of us who are not addicts – he spent all day and night Monday shooting heroin and meth until he died early Tuesday morning. They told me this story over video chat, Kyle asking with a nervous laugh: “What does she know that I don’t?” I found the story upsetting, but only because I worried about what Kyle’s relapses were doing to Maggie, not because I imagined her terror prescient.ĭuring that video call, Kyle seemed excited about a new job he said he was starting on Monday, and he spoke by phone and video chat to several sober friends and family members throughout the weekend. Their toddler was saying things that gave them chills about how Kyle would soon be gone forever. He and Maggie’s mother, Amber, exchanged a look over Maggie’s head. She screamed hysterically at him that she knew he was about to leave her and never come back. He came home promising he was fixed and wouldn’t be leaving again, but she was mysteriously inconsolable. Though Maggie didn’t understand her father was an addict, she knew he’d been sick and had spent a few days in a hospital getting well. Only his toddler seemed to sense what was coming. When he relapsed the week after my wedding, it was a disappointing setback, but he immediately checked himself into detox, which seemed like progress. We’d all beamed to see him, sober and doting, cheering as his little girl sprinkled rose petals down our backyard aisle as my flower girl. Though he’d had a couple of relapses, we were relieved that he was finally acting as a father to his child. He’d graduated from a long-term recovery program, reunited with his daughter’s mother and fallen in love with his 2-year-old, Maggie, after missing most of her babyhood. My son had struggled with addiction for several years, but in 2016 his future looked hopeful. Then my 26-year-old, strappingly handsome son, who had danced with me at my wedding earlier in the month, was found dead of an overdose in a Best Western lobby bathroom. The childhood fantasy I’d had that I was being watched over by my father, who had died at age 24 when I was an infant, had long since faded, right along with my imagining I could blink or wiggle my nose to make magic. I had lost many loved ones – my grandmother, a close uncle, my in-laws, several friends, even a younger sister in childhood – but I’d never wondered if they could see or hear me, nor what had become of them. As we arrived, I wondered how many of my fellow audience members felt, as I did, that this event was going to leave them deeply disappointed.īefore my son died, I gave almost no thought to life after death. The 1800-seat arena was mostly sold out, filled to the rafters with Caputo fans and grieving family members all hoping they would be chosen for a live reading. My mother paid $500 for our tickets and drove us five hours from our home in Western Massachusetts as part of a wildly extravagant effort to give me what she knew I wanted most - a chance to hear from my son, Kyle, who died of an overdose in September of 2016. In February of 2018, my mother took me and my adult daughter to see Long Island Medium Theresa Caputo at a stadium show in Reading, PA. The three women who loved Kyle most went looking for him at a Theresa Caputo show a year and half after he died.
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