Remembering Elliana: Thinking About the Day She Died

As I try to reconcile my granddaughter's death on July 18th, the relationship to so many things come to mind as I think about the things we did and said on the day she died.

Her birthday and mine are exactly six months apart. She liked to ask me how old I would be when she turned a certain age. She would have turned eighteen years old ten days after she died. I will likely be sixty-five-and-a-half years old that day. 

Candace, Erin, and Elliana were all told as small children that I would be their best friend until they found best friends their ages. Candace and Erin found their best friends in elementary school. Elliana loved hanging out with me well into her teen years. She was my travel buddy, she was my biker babe, she was my best friend, and she was my equal-opposite.

I had the ability to devise schemes to get what I wanted without getting caught. She would try to make deals to get what she wanted immediately in return for future actions that she would rarely meet. I was small and quick. She was large and slow. I could hide almost anywhere. She stood out anywhere she went. 

Neither of us were popular in school. I managed to survive among the big guys by helping them with schoolwork and by helping them solve problems. Elliana would take her mother's makeup to give to people so they would like her. Though I wasn't accepted in any groups except the stoners, I could hang out in most groups because there was someone in there who I had helped. Only a few people wanted to be friends with Elliana. She was not accepted in any group, except the stoners, and then she had to have something to offer.

Both of us experimented with drugs. 

I didn't know what I was doing, but I remember smoking pot laced with PCP once. I did mescaline several times. I've snorted cocaine, I've free-based cocaine, and I've smoked crack (which is the same thing except free-basing is done at home), but I was never a cocaine consumer. I pretty much stuck to pot as my drug of choice. The two drugs I have done the next most often are tobacco and alcohol. I smoked more than I drank, but I was a half-a-pack a day smoker. I still drink. I haven't had one since February of last year. I may have one later today, but I probably won't.

Elliana didn't know what she was doing, either. We noticed that she began using pot as a young teen, but later she was caught with pills at school. She told me that they were "percs," which was slang for Percocet when I was a teen. Percocet is an opioid-based prescription painkiller. However, the pills she was caught with were more identifiable as a fentanyl-laced blue pill that is commonly used in place of more conventional opioids, like Oxycodone. It is far more deadly than heroin and is sometimes sold as heroin. 

She didn't live long enough to develop a drug of choice. Unlike my experimentation with drugs, her experimentation ended with her death, which is more similar to a few of my classmates who died of heroin overdoses.

I told her that smoking fentanyl was like playing Russian roulette. Eventually, the game turns into suicide. 

Suicide is something that I have thought about since I was a child. It isn't that I've wanted to kill myself, but I morbidly imagine what various forms of suicide must feel like. 

If smoking fentanyl is suicide, I don't know how it feels, but I do know what it looks like. Elliana died the fifth time she overdosed on fentanyl. I found her the first and third times she overdosed. She was staying with me because we could not find any other place for her to stay. She overdosed on my bed. She looked so much at peace as we were frantically trying to revive her. We called for medical aid, but we were able to revive her because Bryan had some Narcan here. All that peace left her when she came to and argued with us about what to us was twenty minutes of panic, but to her was falling asleep one minute and waking up a minute later. 

After that, she stayed with her grandmother, her aunt, and, eventually, her father. He was able to get a two-bedroom apartment, and it seemed her revolving door of places to stay had come to an end. It also seemed as if the outpatient treatment was working. She was going to the gym daily, losing weight, and dealing with the reality that her mom and dad were keeping tight reins on her. She was looking healthier, and she was behaving well. 

Though I feel tremendous loss with my granddaughter's death, I am at least comforted by knowing that she peacefully went to sleep that night, never to awaken again. 

She, Gemma, and I spent the day together. She seemed to be well-adjusted. I asked her about a concern her father had, but she assured me that she had everything under control. 

We talked about her birthday. She had not met the criteria about restarting her education for me to buy her a car. We agreed that I would pick her up on the morning of her birthday and then I would pay for her book a good hotel for two days on the first day that she would be able to book her own hotel. She told me what she wanted. I assured her that there will be swanky hotel that we can find at a reduced rate through booking websites that hotels use to get unrented rooms producing some income at the last minute. She thought that was cool.

We all went back to my place where we worked on some things. Her last project was spray painting a wooden table. She hadn't finished it that day, so the plan was for her to come over the next day unless there was something that conflicted with it. Otherwise, we would do it another day.

When I was diagnosed with cancer, she wanted to spend as much time as she could with me. It would be simple for me to pick her up early the next morning, and then we could hang out until we could roust Gemma out of bed. She understood that when I said that we could postpone it if something conflicted with it, that I was talking about her having an appointment she wasn't aware of, or something like that. 

What is rather eerie about all this were the last words I said to her: "If I don't see you tomorrow, I will see you soon." 

Rather prophetic, eh?