Mother Takes Own Life After Son’s Overdose

“Thanks, heroin, another victim.”

Those were the chilling words an Ohio mother recently wrote in a suicide note, hours after learning her own son was dead of an overdose.

Related: A Letter to My Heroin Addict Daughter

“Please don’t weep for me,” 60-year-old Barbara Fultz said. “I am ready for this rest.”

It was her birthday, Sept. 2, when word came that her son, Jason Hess, 35, had died of an overdose. Hess battled his addiction for 15 years and needed resuscitation from two additional overdoses in the weeks leading up to his death. His father begged him to not put the family through it again.

Hess told his father he “wanted to make things right” the night of Sept. 1, the Mansfield News Journal reported. John Hess, Jason’s father and Fultz’s ex-husband, found his son’s body the next morning.

He is certain the final overdose wasn’t an accident.

“As soon as I looked at him, I knew he was gone,” Hess said. “I sat back in the chair and said my goodbyes.”

“I think he was just tired,” he added.

Eleven hours later, Fultz, the young man’s mother, tragically took her own life. She left notes for her daughters and grandchildren, the Mansfield News Journal reported. She was found lying behind a headstone in a cemetery behind her home after taking a bottle of Valium.

“If I had my druthers, 100 percent of family members with a loved one going through drug or other addiction would get support,” said one addiction specialist.

“Life is no longer enjoyable; I have been like Samson holding up the pillars too long,” Fultz wrote in one of the letters. “Today, Delilah cut my hair.”

The case highlights how incredibly traumatic, sad, and exhausting living with, loving, or caring for an addict can be. While no one knows the extent of the help Fultz or the Hess family sought throughout the course of their son’s addiction, health care providers say loved ones often don’t know where to turn. Nor are they sure they should ask for support because of the shame they often feel.

“If I had my druthers, 100 percent of family members with a loved one going through drug or other addiction would get support,” said Cathy Herndon, an Indianapolis-based certified health education specialist with experience in drug and alcohol education and prevention.

“So many people take this on as their own and there’s a point where you do everything right as a family — and you still lose a child. You just don’t know what to do. But when you start talking with others, you realize you’re not alone. There’s just this mechanism that sometime turns on within a person, an addict — and there’s not anything anybody can do,” Herndon told LifeZette.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”Heroin Use in U.S.” source=”http://www.asam.org”]94% of respondents in a 2014 survey of people in treatment for opioid addiction said they chose to use heroin because prescription opioids were “far more expensive and harder to obtain.”[/lz_bulleted_list]

Resources within just about any community that families might find supportive and anonymous include Al-Anon and NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).

“Most drug addictions have what’s called dual diagnosis,” said Herndon. “Many times [the addicts] had depression first and they didn’t ever really get diagnosed as having depression — so they started using drugs, and the drugs overshadowed the mental health issues. It’s not until they get sober or clean that they realize there’s a mental health issue at play.”

Herndon also recommends a non-denominational organization called the Stephen Ministries, or any local church. If these organizations don’t offer support services themselves, they typically point families in the right direction; they understand the importance of connecting people with the right resources.

Related: Foster System Flooded with Orphans of Addiction

“We have a very poorly designed mental health system in our country. Resources are not easy to access for most people and once you do access them, you have to really advocate for yourself to sometimes get to a place that’s best for you,” said Herndon.

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Outside help can be critical for everyone, because an addict in and out of the system — as Hess was — is typically treated as a criminal, not an addict. The elder Hess told the Mansfield News Journal that something needs to change.

“I don’t have an answer, but let’s find one.”

“Instead of probation rotation, offer some help,” John Hess told the Mansfield News Journal. “In order to make a heroin addict quit, you’d have to put them in prison for life. They already have a life sentence because they’re dealing with heroin.”