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A voice of change
More than a dozen Randolph County residents bared heart and soul to share stories for my latest book, “Drugs Did This.” This is one of those stories.
The book was conceived after I heard heart-wrenching stories during a candlelight vigil in front of the Randolph County Courthouse in Asheboro in the summer of 2018. The speakers, many of them in tears, were family members of someone who had died from overdose, people who had overcome the demon of substance abuse themselves, and people with loved ones still enslaved by their addictions.
The event was sponsored by the Community Hope Alliance, a growing grassroots organization, incorporated in December 2017, that is committed to providing resources and promoting substance use education, awareness, prevention and safety by coming together to reach the community with compassion and care amidst the opioid crisis.
The Courier-Tribune contributed to the project by allowing previously published stories and pictures to be reprinted in the book and by allowing staff photographer Paul Church to take pictures to accompany stories written for the book.
The book has two purposes: to raise money for the multi-pronged mission of the Community Hope Alliance — every penny from book sales goes to their work — and to raise awareness of the toll drugs are taking on individuals, their families, and, in fact, on every single person in Randolph County.
“Drugs Did This” is for sale at the Community Hope Alliance office, 1406 N. Fayetteville St., Unit L, in Asheboro; office hours are 6-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday. It is also available via www.peacelightpress.com or by sending a message to chip.womick@peacelightpress.com. The book, a 118-page paperback, is $15.
— Chip Womick
According to the Randolph County Emergency Medical Services, 47 overdoses were reported in November 2019.
• 23 females
From January through November 2019, there were 617 overdose patients reported in Randolph County.
Four days after Christmas in 2016, a call to Claudia Marini’s home east of Asheboro shattered the holiday cheer: Her daughter, Maddie, had overdosed.
Marini knew what to do. She shifted into got-to-go gear, never mind that she was laid up, recuperating from hip surgery a week earlier.
“We had gotten the phone call so often,” Marini says, “I knew the routine, sadly, which is no routine any parent, anyone, should have to go through.”
The things she needed to do: Get dressed; put up the dogs; get in the car; drive as fast as you can to the hospital; and then have the conversation, the same conversation as every other time: I love you, Maddie. This has got to stop.
But this time the caller said: “Don’t come. We’re working on her.”
Waiting for the second call was excruciating. When it came, Marini remembers the look on her best friend’s face as he walked into the room where she sat on the edge of the couch, her hands clasped tightly together, tense: “Let’s go,” she said. “We need to go.”
She remembers Ken shaking his head and then the words, “She’s gone. She didn’t make it.” Everything after that is a blur. “It’s a really good thing that I went into shock,” she says, “because I really have no doubt: I would have died when I heard that news. I would have died. I wanted to die.”
There are still days when she goes through the motions from sunup to sundown. Sometimes in the stillness of the night, she cannot believe Maddie is gone.
“There’s this unbelievable desperation of wanting her back so bad — and actually trying to figure out how to make that happen, and then, coming full circle, and realizing and telling myself that it can’t happen. I don’t even have the words to explain the hell that it feels like internally. And the pain.”
Madison Bailey Marini died Dec. 29, 2016, in the bathroom of the fast-food restaurant where she worked in the Stokes County town of King. Paramedics arrived too late.
She was 22.
Captivating and beautiful
After Maddie’s death, Marini talked to newspaper and television reporters because she wanted news stories to be more than matter-of-fact accounts that another young person had died of an overdose.
She wanted the world to know who her daughter was. That her addiction did not define her. That she had a captivating personality and loved to sing. That she was someone’s child. That she was loved. That she had dreams of becoming a forensic anthropologist. That her grandmother lovingly called her “Bones” because she spent so much time watching the TV show — about a forensic anthropologist — by that name.
“When Maddie walked into a room, just something happened,” Marini says. “She just commanded that room. She was breathtakingly beautiful.”
The people in a room might not remember her name later, or even know it, Marini says, but they would remember Maddie.
To keep her daughter’s memory alive — and to raise money and awareness in the fight against substance abuse — Marini established Maddie’s Mission and Maddie’s Miles 5K, both of which help fund a Winston-Salem nonprofit called Phoenix Rising Inc. Its mission is to support drug court in Forsyth County; to fund treatment; and to launch awareness campaigns. Marini sits on the Phoenix Rising board of directors.
Treatment was not an option given to Maddie the last time she was in court. On that court date in October 2016, a few days before her 22nd birthday, Marini says her daughter was “fed up with being sick and tired” and ready to go to rehab.
Marini asked to talk to the judge. She wanted to tell him a little about Maddie and her desire to get help. Maddie’s attorney presented the request. The judge brushed it off, saying that a defendant older than 18 did not need her mother speaking for her. As for treatment, he added, when he sent Maddie to jail, she would get clean.
The jail was overcrowded, and Maddie was released early on her promise to get a job and show up every week for a drug test. She got a job at Taco Bell in the town where she was living with her grandparents.
In the few weeks she was there, she received an award from a district manager for being an exemplary employee. She seemed to be doing well. The old Maddie was back.
And then she was gone. Marini believes that if the judge had made a different decision in October, a decision to mandate rehab, it might have saved Maddie’s life in December.
ADHD, drugs
Young Maddie tried ballet but was too fidgety to hold delicate poses. Soccer was more her liking, running up and down a field under the open sky.
But singing was her biggest thing, a talent she displayed in a youth community chorale and the school chorus. She enjoyed posting singing videos on Facebook and counting the “likes” despite her mother’s lectures that something shared on the Internet is forever. Today, Marini is grateful for those videos.
Schoolwork came easy to Maddie, but she was tagged as a problem in the first grade. She was too loud. She did not like naps. She could not sit quietly at her desk. Most every day, her teacher wrote notes about Maddie’s transgressions. Maddie thought the teacher did not like her. Soon she did not like going to school.
Maddie was diagnosed with ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“As a mom,” Marini says, “when she was in school and having difficulty, we took her to the doctor, and they put her on medication.”
Maddie and her mom went to therapy together, and Maddie had individual sessions, which she continued off and on into her high school years.
Marini regrets the decision to put Maddie on medication.
“She was just unique in a great way. Unfortunately, we don’t really foster that in kids. We want them to be a certain way.”
″... But you don’t know what you don’t know ’til sometimes it’s too late. I thought I was doing what was best for Maddie. I didn’t want her to get in trouble anymore. I didn’t want her to feel that way when she went to school.”
Marini wonders if the drugs Maddie took as a child, and well into her teens, contributed to future struggles with substance abuse.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that Ritalin and all that medication is very much addictive,” she says. “And doctors don’t do a good job of helping kids and adults wean off of that and find other alternatives.”
Starting to spiral
Depression and anxiety dogged Maddie in middle school.
Once again, she did not want to go to school. She did not feel like she fit in. She often lashed out at her family. Again, Marini turned to professionals. “We did hospitalize her because we didn’t know what else to do. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.”
When Maddie was discharged, she was carrying a paper bag filled with medications. Then, Marini thought she was doing all the right things to help; now, she wonders. “It was just this circle, this vicious circle, that she could never get out of.”
Maddie lost interest in soccer around the same time her mom caught her smoking cigarettes. Marini was shocked. Maddie, the athlete, would never do something to impair her ability to sprint the length of the field for hours. Maddie skipped practices, so, on game day, the coach kept her on the bench. She quit.
Marini decided that a small private school might serve Maddie better than public school and enrolled her in a Catholic school in Winston-Salem. Maddie loved the idea because she would get to live with her grandparents in King.
And, she did better, until high school, when she met a boy who was not a good influence. Marini had been missing Maddie, so they decided she would return home and go to Randolph Early College High School at Randolph Community College.
As she got older, Maddie sometimes stopped taking her ADHD medication for stretches of time. By high school, she stopped altogether.
“She never liked taking the medications,” Marini says. “She didn’t feel like it made a difference.” Looking back, Marini says she’s not sure the drugs had much of an effect either, besides making her daughter sleepy. Of course, when Maddie was sleepy, she was quiet in school, the desired effect.
Also, in high school, Maddie started self-medicating, but her mother did not know that yet. The boy Marini thought they had left behind in Stokes County started showing up in Asheboro. Sometimes, when Marini thought Maddie was in school, she was spending the day with him. One Thanksgiving, Maddie ran away; she went to the boy’s house.
Maddie’s moods fluctuated. Sometimes she was sad and unhappy, sometimes volatile and angry. Marini attributed the occasional sadness and anger to teenage hormones and the social trauma of high school.
Then Maddie stopped worrying about how she looked. She slept more. She picked at her fingers, but that was not too alarming; it was a habit she’d also had as a child. She brushed aside questions about sores her mom noticed on her body. It was just acne, Maddie said.
Before long she was struggling with her studies. At a parent/teacher conference her sophomore year, a teacher noted that Maddie was starting to spiral. Had Marini considered that Maddie might be using drugs? She knew Maddie was smoking, Marini said, assuring the teacher that they were working on that.
The teacher said Maddie was exhibiting classic signs of someone using methamphetamine. Marini was blindsided.
“It felt like I had been knocked down by a bulldozer.”
‘They had a pain’
Maddie denied it, but the teacher was right.
“This was just a whole world I knew nothing about,” Marini says, “so I didn’t know the signs.”
In trying to fit in, to find her niche, Marini says, Maddie gravitated to the wrong crowd, kids with similar issues, kids who were struggling, kids who made bad choices.
Years later, when Maddie was deep into addiction, Marini talked to her about her choice of friends. Maddie replied that her friends were the only people who understood her.
Marini was frustrated. “I thought, gosh, how could those be the only people that understand you? Those aren’t people making good choices.”
She gets it now. “They had a commonality. They had a pain. They shared it. They understood. And there just weren’t enough resources and understanding at the time to pull those kids out of where they were.”
Maddie’s drug use progressed to pain pills, eventually to heroin. She went to jail for petty crimes and probation violation. She stole things from her mom and grandparents she could pawn for money or trade for drugs. She was caught shoplifting.
Marini and her family tried smothering love, nurturing her daughter in every way they knew how, and tough love, kicking Maddie out for not following the rules. Nothing worked.
Maddie knew she could come home, but she also knew her mother was not going to allow her to use drugs, so she bounced from place to place, staying with her grandparents, or with friends.
Marini knows of four times her daughter overdosed. Once she was stabilized at the hospital after an overdose, Maddie would be given a list of treatment facilities and released.
“We’d always say, ‘If you let her go, by the time we make the phone calls, by the time we find a bed, she’s gonna be sick.’ And that’s what happened every time. Every single time.”
Drug users call it dopesick: Maddie would go into withdrawal — her body craving whatever drug currently had her in its grip.
She was in and out of treatment. In a span of four years, she checked into one facility four or five times and was kicked out of another for not following rules. Whenever she had been in treatment for a while, the “old” Maddie would resurface, happy and smiling.
“When they’re using for so long,” Marini says, “they become this other person that’s not the person that you raised and remember. It’s just this other person. And when they get clean, the person you remember comes back.”
‘My time to shine’
Christmas Day 2016 is the last time Marini saw Maddie alive.
She was the old Maddie, not the sullen and argumentative Maddie, but the Maddie whose smile lit up rooms. She complained about gaining weight, a good sign. A “skinny” Maddie usually meant she was using drugs.
On this day, Maddie was plump and laughing as she opened presents. She rushed from the room to try on every new piece of clothing and gleefully returned to show her family.
“It was like she was 5 years old,” Marini says. “We hadn’t seen Maddie like that in a long time.”
Twenty days earlier, on Dec. 5, Maddie wrote her last journal entry — ninety-eight words full of the optimism and hope her family saw on Christmas Day:
“This journal is going to be all about my new independent life and my time line of me achieving everything I set my heart on. This is the first time I have been truly single and doing everything on my own.
“As of right now I am still on probation, have a pending charge, no license or car, not in school and still living at home. I work at Taco Bell. My goal is by the end of this journal all of that will change. I am done being a screw up. It is my time to shine.”
‘Tell them you love them’
Marini says she hopes that, through Maddie’s Mission, she can offer a voice that changes a parent’s life or the life of someone struggling with addiction.
She encourages parents to ask questions and to have uncomfortable conversations with their children if something does not seem right. It’s better to make them angry, she says, than to regret doing nothing.
But, above all, let children who are struggling know they are loved.
“Don’t forget, even when they’re at their worst,” she says, “or they’re being horrible, or yelling, or screaming, to constantly just tell them you love them, and to give them that extra hug.”
In the early days of Maddie’s struggles, Marini thought she knew the answer to the question of whether addiction is a choice or a disease. She thought Maddie simply needed to make better decisions. Now she says she understands that Maddie, and others shackled by drugs, suffer from sickness, mental and physical, that requires professional help.
“It’s just so damn difficult,” Marini says. “It is so difficult. And sometimes it is just easier to stay in the throes of it and live that life than to go through the hoops of what it takes to get clean.”
In the perfect world, she envisions fully funded treatment, no questions asked, for those who want it, start-to-finish programs that encompass detox, rehab, counseling, and life skills to help participants get back on their feet.
Maddie wanted to quit.
“It had nothing to do with her not wanting to,” Marini says, “but she couldn’t, and it wasn’t because she didn’t try. Nobody would ever willingly choose to live the kind of life somebody who’s on drugs and addicted lives. It’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible.”
