Every time she sees a drug overdose making headlines, Cece Brown said her heart feels heavy.
Most recently, it was when 27 people from Huntington overdosed. A friend of hers, another mother who had a child overdose, texted her about how awful some of the comments were she had seen circling around on Facebook. Brown usually kept herself away from those comments - every time she saw one, she'd tell herself to just keep scrolling.
But this time, she didn't
"They believe it's a decision, but it's not," Brown said. "It's a brain disease. They were saying things like 'they deserve it' or 'we should take them out and shoot them somewhere.'
"Really bad things - things that if you had cancer, no one would say."
Things she wouldn't want anyone to say about her son Ryan, who in April 2014 overdosed fatally. He had been struggling for years with a heroin addiction. He had gone in and out of recovery for a while, but he was doing pretty well before his last incident.
Brown isn't staying silent anymore, and she definitely won't just keep scrolling. In the two years following her son's death, she has waited for something to change, for someone in West Virginia to get the ball rolling and combat the state's high number of overdoses.
She's waited for someone to change the conversation about overdosing to be more compassionate and to separate a person from his or her addiction.
She had hoped that someone would try to organize an Overdose Awareness Day, a day recognized around the world that aims to end the stigma of drug overdoses. No one ever did, so she decided to organize one herself. All it took was a few phone calls and learning how to operate a Facebook page.
Brown is inviting everyone to commemorate West Virginia's Overdose Awareness Day Saturday on the steps of the state Capitol. In addition to a series of speakers and a naloxone training session, Brown is inviting people to bring a pair of shoes to the event to remember any family or friends lost to an overdose.
Attendees will pile the shoes high on the south side steps as a visual reminder of how many people are lost to overdoses every year in West Virginia. The event will run from 10 a.m. to noon.
Brown admits she has never done anything like this before, but her family says she was made for this sort of thing. In her day job, she deals with a lot of committees and subcommittees. She's used to working in a group to delegate responsibilities, define an objective and make measurable progress toward a goal.
"My one worry was getting a sound system," she said, laughing. "I had been saying that I needed to get a microphone and speaker, but apparently that's called a sound system. This is my first time doing an event like this, so I really didn't know a lot of what to do."
Brown and her husband Bobby never imagined their son would become a heroin addict. He was a smart kid, and funny, too. They remember how he could make everyone around him laugh.
The family still has plenty of pictures of Ryan sitting on the mantle in the living room. Of all the pictures the parents have kept, it's a photo of the side of Ryan's face they love the most. It was taken a few years ago, and you can't even get a good look at his face in the photo.
But you can see a warm smile stretching from ear to ear. That's the way Brown wants people to remember her son.
When it came time for Ryan to go to college, he decided to go to West Virginia University.
"I knew that WVU was a bigger school and everything, but I thought the right thing to do was cut the leash, as you would, and give him some independence," Brown said. "My older son went there and did fine, so I thought, 'well OK.'
"Boy, was I wrong."
He came back home to Charleston with a heroin addiction. Friends the family had known for a long time stayed away when they heard about Ryan's addiction.
When the Browns would walk through the supermarket, they would catch the eye of friends they had known for years. Those friends would quickly turn their heads away to look at anything else. For a while following their son's overdose, they felt invisible.
Brown said she thinks about her son every day. She runs through a list of things in her head of all the ways Ryan might still be with them. Maybe if he had gotten a Medicaid card sooner, maybe that would have allowed him to get into a program to keep him from relapsing. Maybe if they had paid closer attention to him when he went away to college, he would never have found heroin.
"The grieving never stops," Brown said.
So instead, she's created "Ryan's Hope." It's just a Facebook page right now, but she hopes to turn it into a nonprofit organization in the coming months. She hopes that the state's first Overdose Awareness Day tribute at the Capitol starts to break the stigma that so many families feel when someone they love overdoses.
Reach Jake Jarvis at
jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com,
304-348-7939 or follow
@NewsroomJake on Twitter.