She was the sunshine, and then she was an earth shattering darkness…

As many of you know, I lost my younger sister Amber to a heroin overdose in June of 2013. She was 21 years old. She had yet to meet the love of her life, had not had children, hadn’t gone to college or found her dream career, she hadn’t gotten married, she had barely done anything; anything but drugs that is.

She was well accustomed to the street life, to the point that she actually lived on the street for quite some time. She grew used to experience in beatings, rape, prostitution, panhandling, sleeping on cold sidewalks in the snow, abandoment, pain and crushing shame. Yet she never had the chance to flourish, to become all that she could have been. The crushing shame became too much to bear.

You who didn’t know my sister, or who knew her slightly, may have your assumptions as to who she was, based upon the things she did. I want you to realize that what people do is not always who they are; sometimes something gets a stronghold over a person and they lose themselves within it. She was bound so tightly by the chains of heroin addiction, that Amber in her true essence faded out slowly. If you loved her the way her family did, you could still find the real her somewhere behind those saddened blue eyes, though.

How did she go from sparkling to sunken in, so drastically, so quickly?

That is what eats away at me the most. You don’t know the Amber that was all vibrance and long red hair, cascading laughter as she ran wild in the park, or splashed me in a blow-up pool in our front lawn. You don’t know the way that it felt when your heart was broken and her arms were around you, sharing your pain with you. You do not have memories of her beautiful smile radiating through you, because when it came out, the sunshine came out with it.

You also never heard the way she sobbed when she was alone and thought nobody could hear her.

You didn’t play barbies with her, or have contests to see who could hula hoop the most times (we reached into the thousands on multiple occasions). You didn’t have forts, choreographed dance routines to songs by Disney bands, bike rides and adventures in the woods with her. You didn’t see how she loved to climb trees and get dirty; how she was carefree and exhilarating. She was so many things in which I was too timid to be. She had spunk.

The thing is that behind every heroin addict who dies so young, there is always a story.

Each of these people have someone(s) out there with a whole lifetime of memories; photographs that show a time when heroin was not in the picture (literally). Behind every statistic is a family who is still grieving years later, remembering their version of their Amber who once was. Remember when you pass judgment on addicts and say cruel things about their lives or deaths; you’re also talking about a little girl or boy who watched Scooby-Doo with their siblings on Saturday mornings, with a bowl full of fruity pebbles.

You also don’t know the pain they carried.

You don’t know the sexual abuse, physical and emotional abuse which she’d endured since she was a small child. You don’t know the inner struggles that she was weighted down by. You didn’t see the scriptures or the cross in her purse after she died; the only items along with a devotional and a picture Sierra had colored for her. That was all that held any meaning to her. You know she died, you know she overdosed on drugs, but you don’t know the secrets and fears we shared.

You don’t know who she was, and I can never expect you to, but I can ask that you have some sympathy and an open mind when it comes to loving people who are addicts, and an understanding towards the pain of a family who has lost one. In reality it is really no different from the pain we would have endured, had she died from cancer. We watched her suffer, we lived in fear of losing her, and then we did; with a 21 year limited lifetime of beautiful memories.

You can tell me that she chose it, and I will tell you that she didn’t choose to be traumatized and mentally ill. I will tell you that she may have chosen to try drugs the first time or two, but before she died she wasn’t consciously making a choice any longer, because she wasn’t consciously my sister in the way I’d alway known my sister anymore. I can also tell you that we all choose a lot of things that are bad for us, all of the time, and she was no different than you. We are all sinners. We all fall short of God’s glory.

My sister was beautiful, inside and out. My sister was not heroin… heroin was what she did; who she was had many more layers beyond that. These layers are sacred to those of us who remember and hold onto them dearly. I will never stop missing her, but I believe she’s finally at a peace she couldn’t ever find here on earth. I believe she’s vibrant again, running along the edge of the water, red hair flying out behind her, laughter bubbling out into the air around her.

I pray that the next time you see a drug addict, instead of shrugging them off, laughing at them, degrading them; this time you’ll stop to talk to them and love them. Remember my sister’s story, and how someone, somewhere, probably has their own story about this person. A story not about how horrible heroin is (which it is), but about how precious and unique the person using the heroin is; if you only take the time to notice it.