Toxic Drugs and High Hopes
This issue reckons with death in the midst of public health crises and how I want to help. Guided inquiry into memory and healing is offered.
On September 21st, it will have been four years since my brother died in the intensive care unit of the Regina General Hospital after being taken off of life support due to no brain activity.
He actually died the first time five days before that when the toxic drug he ingested stopped his heart and he went into cardiac arrest. Because the war on drugs punishes people who need help, no one around him wanted to call 911. I try not to think about that too much. When someone finally did, the weary paramedics went to the wrong address.
My magnificent brother, a person who survived countless near death experiences in his reckless obsession with flirting with that line between death and life, laid on the floor, without oxygen, for precious minutes. Too many minutes. Cell death started and then multiplied, extinguishing his life-force energy like a blackout. Irreversible damage.
When help finally arrived, they were able to jerk his body back to life, but he died again at the hospital. They jolted life back into him another time and sent his body to the ICU. They didn’t call any of us until the next morning.
There is no more liminal space - where hope attempts to negotiate with science and reckonings don’t feel fair - than the goddamn fucking ICU.
At his bedside, I felt shy talking to him, this same person who heard my first thoughts for years. I started with whispered promises that everything could be different. Hey buddy, I know things got out of hand. I know you didn't mean it. Just wake up, ok? Sang songs to him from our childhood, hoping my a capella version of Never Surrender and 21st Century Digital Boy might trigger something in his brain and wake him up. I thought of what might be going on behind the shell of his body, his face obscured by so many tubes, with the same intensity that he once described the cosmos to me. Leanne, we can’t even understand it, our brains aren’t even ready to receive the full mystery of the universe. You have to believe. You have to let it show itself to you.
I watched nurses and intensivists come through the room with carefully held faces. I worked in a hospital. I knew a thing or two about carefully held faces. I hated them. I felt violent urges toward them. I wanted them to believe in Luke. To generate a miracle. To do the impossible.
On his last Friday night alive, my little brother and sister and I gathered around him, his stillness all wrong. I’d had an inappropriate amount of wine with my dinner before my sister drove us to the hospital, and I walked through the quiet, dim unit with my chin raised, a bored glare on my face to suggest nothing could hurt me. I was ready. I could take it. Whatever.
In reality, every inhale felt like the one you take after screaming at the top of your lungs. World’s saddest, scared-est punk.
Luke never regained brain function. The most impressive thinker I’ve ever met, a person whose thoughts and comments still twist up my mind like riddles or clues to a deeper plane of existence that I still can’t seem to enter, had a brain bleed wash over his neuro pathways like a tsunami, wiping out home, history, hope.
In 2022, I gave my portion of Luke’s remains a burial at sea in the waters of the Coast Salish peoples. This beach is where kite-surfers play and sunset enthusiasts sit with friends and contemplate the universe. I think he would have loved it.
Luke was, and still is, larger than life to me. One year older, he fit every big brother archetype: bigger, braver, protective. He could read me like no one else ever could, knowing when I acted or spoke in interests that didn’t align with my own authentic dreams or goals. It annoyed the hell out of me to be called out like that, but in retrospect, he inspired some of my best qualities. The work I contribute to others is informed by my professional training, but the heart in it comes from knowing how conversations that lead us back to the Self are nurturing and life-altering like nothing else. He and his musings never fit in to professional, polite society but I do and I carry his words and his spirit there.
System Failure
Like most who die from toxic drug poisonings, Luke received care from the health care system not long before he overdosed. In fact, he’d tried to find treatment for over twenty years, but services never quite fit.
This is why so many people are dying from toxic drug poisonings. People who use substances are not losers who can’t get their lives together, they are people who need help from a system not able to meet their needs.
In March of 2023, I attended a talk with BC’s Chief Coroner, Lisa Lapointe, on the toxic drug crisis in this province. She mentioned that in the Coroners’ research, they identified that around 100 000 people in BC are using substances and want to somehow change their relationship to that use. The province is apparently equipped to help less than 3000 of those people. Imagine the outcry if those numbers applied to people with cancer, or sick babies, or covid infections, or other socially acceptable things to need help with.
While leaders and helpers debate what the best course of action for treatment and recovery is, the province has responded by hiring more coroners.
Let that sink in.
Remember your horror when the media reported that cities purchased temporary morgues after the covid-19 pandemic swept through cities? Temporary morgues! We exclaimed. What is happening to this world! Nothing new. It’s just scary when it happens to the so-called deserving patient.
Enter: the burnt out helper
I’ve been teaching in the university setting for nearly a decade. I’ve met hundreds of students, spent hours that probably add up to days or even weeks of my life reading their papers once for the message, another time for the red pen comments/edits. I’ve studied the thoughts of new helping professionals extensively.
They write about their lives and their work. I used to read queries like how do I get my boss to be more understanding of social justice principles?
Now I read how do I keep going to work when I know I’ll see death? I had to use Narcan 6 times last weekend.
The ethical dilemmas they explore in their final papers have gone from how to speak up when I hear racist comments as a white person to I found someone I worked with for years dead in his tent and I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore.
These people are at the very beginning of their career and already they see the work that most of us would consider to be the very worst day at work.
Their wages and benefits are not on par with the devastation they manage.
When I think of my brother’s death, I think of the workers he encountered in the 20+ years he tried to get help. I know they were there for him when I couldn’t be. One of the hardest truths is that Luke and I weren’t talking when he died because I was so angry that he relapsed over the summer and couldn’t come to our family reunion with my nephew. That mattered more to me than checking in with him. While I was away, resting in my smug, sober superiority, Luke was supported by the system. Some kind person sat next to him and talked about values. Blue collar dudes on their lunch breaks welcomed him to AA meetings, even when he showed up drunk or in his bathrobe. I’m so grateful for that.
I want to give back.
I want to support the people who are doing the work that the coroner’s service has identified we are massively underfunding, under appreciating.
Because it’s not that 100 000 - 3000 = 97 000 people are waiting idly for their turn. It means that 97 000 people are living in pain. They still have needs, they get sick, they ask for help. The pressure of that gaping, screaming, massive need simply lands on fewer shoulders than would be adequate to provide services without turning the self inside out.
Announcing High Hopes: The Luke Stepp Legacy Project
High Hopes is a project meant to support people working in the area of mental health and addictions treatment.
I am offering 6 free sessions of counselling, either in person or online, to anyone located in BC. This is a $900 value. When I’m done with one person, I’ll move on to another. The Luke Stepp Legacy Project will be around for as long as Heart Work is.
Any person working in the field of mental health and addiction services is welcome to apply. Recipients of the project must live in BC because I am registered/licensed to practice only in this province. There is a short application to help me with choosing a recipient, you can find it on my website:
https://leannestepp.com/highhopes
I’ll review applicants and choose one by my birthday, October 23, making a sad time of year (his death date of Sept 21 to my birth date of Oct 23) into something generative. Finally.
I pretty much started my therapy business so that I had a container from which to do this work. I got the idea for High Hopes on a beach in the thick of my grief days, but knew I had to have a professional container from which to offer that support. Perhaps that makes me the worst business woman on the planet (to start a company just to work for free) but I’m not aiming to be the best business woman anyways. My goal is to use this one wild and precious life to answer a calling I’m still learning to hear.
Please share the above flyer/image with your networks. Feel free to apply.
Any questions or comments on the above? Please reach out to me directly at Leanne@heartworkguide.com
Guided Creative Inquiry
Before we can show up for others in dark times, we must know and check in with ourselves. Creative writing provides structure to swirling thoughts, revealing meaning where it seemed there was only mind-chaos. You don’t need to be in grief to share this experience with me and other HW readers, it is for anyone who ever knew and loved another person.
Start with a moment of silence.
Natalie Goldberg recommends 10 minutes in meditation before starting to write. When I take the time to listen to her advice, the words that emerge come from my heart, my writing voice untainted by my over-active mind, always ready to CONSTRUCT and CREATE and DO STUFF. Really, anything you ever read, listened to or watched that touched your heart came from the heart of the person that created it. So just sit and listen to your breath. If 10 minutes is so long that you’ll skip this part, fine. I get it. But do 5. Or 3.
Take a piece of paper and write for 10 minutes about a memory of a perfect, ordinary day spent with someone who isn’t in your life anymore.
Maybe it is your child when they were little, your parent you’ve lost touch with, a partner you’re no longer with but cherish the memories of, or someone dear who has died.
Do not edit yourself as you go. Let the words tumble out in whatever mess they show up in. You can always go back and make the language flow, if you want to, but the point is to turn the reflection into a somatic activity by writing by hand onto paper. Don’t let yourself daydream about the person and the day until you get the right words on the paper. That’s your mind interfering with your art! There will be time to look back on what you wrote later, you can add stuff then. Literally just write out that memory as it comes to you.
What did the light look like? How did your body feel? Get into each sense and see if you can locate how the memory interacts with that sense.
If you cry, that’s ok. It means a vulnerable, tender part of you has shown up to the page. You’ve created the necessary conditions for your mind to ease back and truer, realer, harder-to-manage parts of you to step forward. What a gift. Welcome that part.
If you don’t cry, you still did the exercise right. Gold star for everyone.
List the activities you got up to with that person. What values shaped those choices?
Read your memory over and let the presence of that person flood your creative space. Look at what you did with them. Write down a brief list of what that was. Bike ride at sunset, baking buns on a snowy day, belly-laughing in the back of catechism classes and getting kicked out by the mean nun, sharing your first really nice kiss on a dock at a lake while your friends partied behind you. Looking at your list, what values seem present in each of those interactions? Love, adventure, playfulness, a sense of justice, musicality, the list is as long as people that walk the earth.
Feel into how that value shows up in your life now.
I say feel and not think because these memories and values live inside of our bodies in a somatic way. When I remember the adventure that my brother taught me to ruthlessly seek out, I can feel the excitement of what we might discover in my chest and it tingles my skin.
Get into your body and bring to mind the memory you wrote about, the activities you did with that person and the values you identified. Where do you feel that presence? Does your chest feel warm? Skin tingle? Do your cheeks soften into a smile? Your belly kind of ache? No wrong answers here.
Now the fun part: be a little detective in the rest of your life. Watch for that feeling in other moments. When I walk onto the field of a music festival, it’s Luke-adventure energy that makes my chest burn with excitement. When a new date starts with the person saying “are you cool if we just like, go on an adventure?” it’s the values my brother taught me to cherish that make my hands tingle as I reply OH SURE, I GUESS SO as nonchalantly as possible.
If you recalled a parent who made your chest feel warm, do you get that feeling when you hug your own child or grandchild? If it was a childhood friend whose playfulness makes your cheeks ache, does that feeling show up when your work bestie cracks you up on a Monday morning?
Watch for these little moments of synchronicity. Our loved ones never leave us.
Take a few last, deep breaths. Do you notice any spaciousness within you that wasn’t there before you did this activity? Are there emotions and sensations that were welcomed in? Do you feel a little nostalgic or sentimental? Do you feel anyone’s presence? Be with this softer, sweeter side of you for a while. This more authentic version of you, the you that your loved one knew and related to, probably hasn’t gotten to feel present or recognized in a while. Just breathe into this space for a little bit. The real world will come for you soon enough.
xo,
Leanne
