I am having a rough time dealing with the death of my younger cousin. He passed away, my aunt figures, sometime during the night of the 21/22 September. Given the recent deaths in the community, the heroin he was snorting was probably laced with fentanyl to make the infamous Blue Drop heroin that tore through my town earlier this year. (type blue drop heroin in on google and you’ll pull up a number of articles on its impact here in Marion.)
I’m not sure why Ethan’s death is hitting me particularly hard. Perhaps it is because he was only twenty-three years old? Because he was, as an older cousin calls us, one of the five of us known as the “baby cousins”? Maybe it is simply because I could not see him one last time. There was no wake to attend. I saw pictures of him. I held his ashes in my hands before throwing them up into the wind to be spread of the Catskill mountains. I heard stories of this goofy boy, the only boy of our section in the family. Now, when people name us off (Holly, Sarah, Ashley, Ethan, Stevie) there will be this void. There will be a name, a memory, but no one to fill the spot as we four girls continue to age.
I think about on this cousin of mine and remember the few times we met. His and Ashley’s reactions to my falling into a pond, unable to swim, and their panic. Sarah bouncing with excitement when Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” came on the radio when we threw them a little going away party. “Ethan, it’s our song!” We, my sister and I, still giggle at that memory.
Ethan was loved in his community in Upstate New York. I did not know him well, and I wish that was not the case, but talking to his other cousins up there and hearing stories about him from people who had known, made me feel as though I did know him.
Heroin stripped the people who loved him of him. I watched my aunt cling onto the bag containing her baby boy’s ashes as she broke down. I watched my aunt place these ashes on her son’s bed until the ceremony the following day. I watched her collapse and beg for her baby boy back. Having watched that, seeing this pain, I am angry with Ethan. I am angry at the dealer. I am angry that this stuff is not off the streets yet. Perhaps this anger is why I cannot move yet, why the Earth has yet to start turning again.
