She torched the red blanket.
The covering was what Linda Lary saw her son, Michael, wrapped in as he lay on the floor, dead from an overdose of heroin last December, two days short of his 28th birthday.
“I thought of all the blankets to put on him, don’t put a red blanket on him. I don’t know why. I still don’t know why.”
Linda has been asked to speak this Tuesday at a town hall meeting in Indianola, organized by the Mississippi Department of Mental Health. It’s designed to spread the word about the abuse of opioids — from prescription drugs to heroin — that has reached epidemic proportions.
Her instructions: Talk two minutes about how she and her husband, Lacy, missed the signs of Michael’s addiction, which was about seven years along before he confessed to them that it had progressed to heroin.
Linda doesn’t know how she can keep it that short, or even really how to answer the question.
“Every parent misses it,” says Lacy.
The signs are always in hindsight.
Linda and Lacy have pieced together a lot about their son’s path to and struggles with addiction — from what Michael told them in the final years of his life, and what they’ve read in the journals he kept while in treatment.
They have decided to be brutally honest about Michael’s story — despite how painful it can be to go there — in the hopes that it might give comfort to other families caught in the same nightmare and help others avoid it.
The first thing to know about Michael is that there’s no way you would have pointed at him as a youngster and said, “That’s a future drug addict.”
His father describes him as “an average little boy,” but he really was above average. An honor student at Bankston Elementary School and Pillow Academy. An all-star defensive end in high school. He was well-liked, independent — he told his mother in fourth grade that he didn’t need her help anymore on his homework — and fearless.
At Ole Miss, Michael pledged a fraternity and was in the National Guard. He seemed to have his act together — or as much as anyone can at 18 — but it was that first semester in college when he was introduced to opioid-based drugs. He had contracted meningitis, a painful infection of the brain and spinal cord. The physician who treated him prescribed 60 doses of a powerful narcotic — about six times more than what was prudent, Lacy contends.
That was all it took to trigger Michael’s brain to desperately want that chemically induced euphoria to keep coming.
At first Michael satisfied the urge by buying the painkillers on the street, but eventually that became too expensive. A trainer at an Oxford gym introduced him to heroin, a much cheaper alternative.
There are two fears that a person has before using heroin for the first time: the fear of how you will react, and the fear of sticking a needle into your body. What the Larys learned later was that Michael had gotten over that second fear in high school, when he was introduced to injectable steroids as a way to enhance the muscle-building effect of his workouts with weights.
When the Oxford trainer died of a heroin overdose, it panicked Michael. He rushed home, distraught, and spoke to Linda nine words that floored her, shamed her, left her feeling isolated: “Mom, I’ve got to tell you, I’m on heroin.”
Suddenly, Michael’s past behavior made sense. He was constantly changing residences. He was short of money, even when he was pulling down $70,000 a year selling cars. He was always too busy for his parents.
“He was like a falling star,” says Linda. “You could never get hold of him.”
Then began the intensive efforts — always expensive, perpetually frustrating — to break Michael’s addiction. A supposed wonder drug that suppresses the urge for opioids ultimately didn’t work. Nor did three stints in rehab, including a couple of facilities considered Mississippi’s finest.
Like most everyone who enters the world of rehab for the first time, the Larys assumed it would fix Michael.
“We thought we sent our baby off to the best there is,” says Linda. “He’s cured.”
Michael checked himself out after five weeks. A day later, he was hospitalized in Greenwood after overdosing on heroin in a dingy motel room.
His family, ever hopeful, was encouraged, though, when Michael stuck out the entire 60 days at the third rehab and even lined up a scholarship to cover the $2,000-a-month cost of drug-testing, counseling and other after-care.
Always a good salesman, he got a job at a swanky shop specializing in outdoors apparel. He shared a nice house in Ridgeland with two other recovering addicts who had been sober for a year. Michael stayed clean for five months.
Then came the hysterical call one Saturday last December from Michael’s girlfriend that he had relapsed.
Linda was finally ready to follow Lacy’s urging to use “tough love” and stick with it. On the following Monday, they had a three-party teleconference with Michael and his counselor.
They told Michael they’d be taking away the truck and cellphone they’d provided him. But they also encouraged him, telling him they knew he could beat the addiction.
The message seemed to sink in. When they hung up, Lacy says, Michael had them convinced, and probably himself, that his relapse was a “little blip on the screen” and he was snapping back into recovery.
Michael spoke that afternoon with his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor for 45 minutes and was planning to attend an AA meeting that night. He had a load of laundry in the washing machine and Fox News on the TV. And, for reasons unknown, he decided to shoot up one more time — an antidote nearby just in case he overdosed. By the time he was found unconscious and it was administered, it was too late.
The Larys say they aren’t trying to scare people with their story. Nor are they saying they made all the right decisions as parents. What they do say is that no family is immune.
“You can have the best parents in the world and be a drug addict,” says Linda.
And leave your mother with a red blanket she can’t stand to look at.
Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
