In January 2018, we lost our dear son,
Jaime Yates. He was 33 years old. Although Jaime was taken from us so young, he had achieved many of his dreams during his brief time here. He lived a life filled with music, art, travel, DJ'ing, creating, producing, and developing music for clubs, radio, festivals, and video games. Music was his passion, and he left a treasure trove of compositions and finished chart-topping productions. Jaime was a loving, wonderful son, an exceptional friend, and a sensitive, beautiful human.
He will always be greatly loved and missed.
When he passed, Jaime was living and working in Victoria, BC. We knew Jaime struggled with a substance use disorder for many years and learned that it had escalated toward the end of his life. After a Vancouver, BC., hospitalization in July of 2017, which came in response to an attempt to quit substances without support, he began working towards sobriety. Then came the night in January when we received a call and learned that Jaime was in the hospital once more. We flew to Canada to be by his side. He was intubated and unconscious. We had alternating moments and days of hope and sorrow for the next two weeks before he passed. Those two weeks and the choices we were forced to make on Jaime's behalf left us with additional pain and trauma we were unprepared to process.
We learned from the police report and the hospital records that Jaime had overdosed on a combination of substances. There was no definitive explanation as to how or why this had happened. We learned that we would need to wait for as long as a year for the coroner's report because there were so many substance-use-related deaths in Victoria, BC., the city could not process the number of cases any faster.
It is unimaginably painful to be grieving the death of our son, but it was doubly challenging not to know what had happened to him. Finally, we received the coroner's report that confirmed what we had discovered about his last days. We already knew that after many years of sleep deprivation, Jaime had developed a sleeping disorder that left him unable to sleep longer than a few hours a night without medication. He had been taking prescription Xanax, which helped considerably. However, we learned that when he ran out of his Xanax, rather than wait for a refill, he took a street drug manufactured to medicate like Xanax. Tragically, the pill had been laced with a lethal amount of Fentanyl.
After Jaime's death, we sought grief support in various ways. We returned to our AlAnon meetings, went to community grief support groups, and tried multiple forms of therapy.
We found that we could not find the type of support we needed. We experienced a massive gap in support for substance-use loss, and we learned that this type of grief is particular. Grief of this sort can be compounded with other types of grief, like the anticipatory grief of helplessly watching a loved one fade away before they eventually pass. Often, this goes on for years before a final loss.
Disenfranchised grief is also commonly felt due to the stigmas surrounding substance-use disorders. This grief may not be openly acknowledged, socially accepted, or publicly mourned. Parents, family, and friends who experience these types of losses often find they cannot relate to others and are speaking a different grief language about their loss.
In our search for support, we became determined to educate ourselves about general disenfranchised grief as well as substance-use disorder loss. As an RN, I was certified as a Grief Support Specialist and a Thanatologist.
In October 2020, I began working with children doing online grief support, and in October 2022, we launched our first facilitated online adult grief support group. Since then, we've offered ongoing individual and group grief support for adults and children both in-person and online on a range of disenfranchised grief topics.
We sincerely hope that we can bring comfort, support, and healing to others experiencing similar types of loss.
