My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
When I was nine years old, my cousin died of a heroin overdose at nineteen years old.  Most of the grownups around me were very sad, but I didn&#x27;t really know my cousin very well; he lived on the opposite side of the country, and he was a full decade older than me so the times I <i>did</i> see him we didn&#x27;t really play together, and so I wasn&#x27;t really able to feel &quot;sad&quot; about it.  People I don&#x27;t know die every day, I can&#x27;t feel bad for all of them (cold as that might sound) and my cousin dying wasn&#x27;t terribly different.<p>Fast forward eleven years, on my twentieth birthday, and I had a realization: my cousin was the first person I had known that I outlived, and I felt this sudden sinking feeling.  Why had <i>I</i> been spared when my cousin had been taken so young? Why did <i>I</i> get to spend more time on earth then he did? It&#x27;s not like I was some sort of cosmically better human than him, I had been a dumb teenager who was just lucky enough to not have friends who were willing to talk me into doing drugs.<p>I started asking my parents about my cousin, and it made me somehow feel even worse when I found out that my cousin had a bit of a downward cycle with drugs throughout the tail end of high school, tried joining the army in the hope that it might straighten him out, it didn&#x27;t, and just fell deeper and deeper until he eventually died. Alcoholism seems to run in the males in my family (with the exception of my dad and me, strangely), so this sadly wasn&#x27;t even really something completely unexpected.<p>Addiction is tough, I feel really fortunate to have dodged that bullet.  I can&#x27;t even pretend to know what addicts to hard drugs are going through.