---

Dear Editor:
In today's drug crisis, deaths happen every single day and it's really easy to scroll through your Facebook feed and see all of these mass-overdose situations and memorials and think "at least it's not my kid." But what you have to realize is that the person who died was someone's child. You can only sit back and think it'll never happen to you or your family for so long until it does.
If there's one thing I'm completely certain of, it's that no family ever really recovers from losing a child to addiction. No family ever fully recovers from losing a child, in general-not just from a drug overdose. It's an unnatural sequence in that children are supposed to bury their parents, not the other way around. When parents have to bury their children it's as if a piece of them is lost forever. A gaping void of emptiness is left behind that is never again filled. The sad part of the whole drug epidemic is that more families than ever before have had to endure that type of eternal heartache and loss.

Jason Good
Clearwater, FL