Text Me, Save Them

I arrived at the house to find a cherub face peering out the window. I knocked, looked into an un-curtained window to see someone slumped in a chair. It was getting dark and there were no lights on. No cars had gone by, no sign of life on this quiet street.

My children are scattered throughout the country, usually not a good thing for seeing the grandkids, but in this case it is a good situation. They had connections in distant places, connections that I needed now. How this all got started, I can’t remember now, but it is working, and that is the most important thing.

Back to the cherub face. I knocked; no answer. The door was unlocked. The face stayed in the window. “Come in,” it said to me. I opened the door. The woman didn’t budge. It was summer, but the house was cool and the child had little on. I got him ready for the trip. I was tossed between just taking the child and leaving, and taking the mother, the woman, also.  I call her “the mother”, but she was nothing of the sort. How could she have lived in such a void? Was there no family, no concerned neighbor?  She apparently had three children, I found out later. Where was the father? Where were the doctors who delivered these children? Was she not addicted at that time? Where was the State? How had she started down this path? My thoughts were drifting as I got things ready. In the whole bureaucracy, did personal privacy, rights of a person overpower the life and safety of the children? Those in the wake of someone’s poor, often lethal, choices?

I had brought food and   beverage and gave some to the little one as I placed him in my car seat. I started the car, then went back in.  She was small, but dead weight as I maneuvered her also into my car. I went back once more. I lit a fire in a container that would burn slowly until I was out of the area. And then hopefully burn this hovel, for this was no home, to the ground. My debate again had been whether to take the woman.  But I wasn’t a murderer. That was something she was slowly doing to her own life and family.

I guess we were, or could be considered, a vigilante group. Perhaps our society was getting too distant, our families too remote, to maintain themselves.  Was it really the jurisdiction of the government to maintain order in our lives and families? We are a group of people who has taken this project on – to save what precious lives we can.  I am a widow; the ages and gender and circumstances vary among our group. We are in contact   mostly through the internet. Most of us are grandparents, and when a situation arises that needs to be addressed, as this one, we are in touch by text.

I am headed for a destination recommended by my contacts. Then I will visit my son and grandchildren. It will be a long drive, one overnight and one extra stop, but I have packed for it. I was cautious about not being seen as I packed up the woman and child, but I mostly took the back roads. I was approaching the drop-off suggested.

The unloading place for the woman was remote. I left her with some warm clothes, water and basic food for a few days. This was probably more than she had done for that child. I had no regrets, no reservations. This would be her last opportunity to clean herself up.  Or die. And her last opportunity to be in the presence of the precious cargo sitting in the car seat.

Perhaps other agencies had to follow protocol, follow due diligence, paperwork, the hierarchy. We had checked on those who had “fallen through the cracks”.  There were just too many, too many innocents, born into addiction, into unthinking sexual relationships, into lives of poverty and devastating futures. Our method had its limitations, but our thoughts and discussions drifted to mandatory birth control, remote islands for drop-offs as “tough love” methods for forced withdrawal for addicts. Our discussions drifted to the enormous cost in the medical realm, human services, child welfare, shelters, families and society, crimes committed on businesses, family items pawned to support habits. We pondered the limits to which we would each go to help someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t help themselves, and who were hurting others. We had often been in touch with relatives who were so exhausted in their attempts that they had given up and they now approved, praised, encouraged our methods and gave permission, and often helped. Others in our group “kidnapped” the addicts on their own with leads from the community. Police, hospitals, and courts shared our frustration at the recidivism, but the laws, or something, had to change because every system was on overload.

How could we do these “kidnappings”? We easily justified our senior civil disobedience because these addicts were not only killing themselves, but were killing their families and our social structure, sometimes literally. And we hoped others in the community would join us because the numbers were just tipping too far.

Epilogue: What encouraged this literary response to a national crisis is that had the story above transpired, the child would still be alive. Sadly, so very sadly, the three-year-old child, the cherub face in the window, overdosed on his mother’s drugs and died in the spring of 2017. In the past year, the grown sons of two of my closest friends died from what was likely a chance encounter with drugs and situations that were untimely and lethal to them. These situations are a small sampling of the drug problem in this nation.

DMDorosz