A family's brave choice to talk about addiction

The most heartbreaking part of my job is talking to parents who’ve had to bury their own children.

And the most inspiring part of my job is talking to the ones who emerge from that ultimate darkness into the light of trying to help others avoid their pain.

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Sandy and George Marx, a Somerdale couple who lost one child to an opiate overdose and saw both of their children struggle with addiction, were incredibly brave and unflinchingly honest in sharing their story with me a few weeks ago.

That story will be published soon, but before it is, I wanted to acknowledge them and what it means that they came forward to tell me about their loss and their hopes for the future.

They sat with me and photographer Jose Moreno for an hour, answering my painful and personal questions with grace and candor. They listened while their daughter, Samantha, shared her harrowing recollections of at least nine overdoses.

They told me, tearfully, about finding their son in his bedroom after kicking in the door when he failed to answer their banging to wake him in the morning. George, a volunteer fireman, and Sandy, a former volunteer EMT, knew it was too late as soon as they saw him.

Drug addiction still carries a stigma, despite some changes in attitude over the last few years as the opiate epidemic spreads out of cities and into suburbs.

Each time I write about addiction, I hear from people who say they have no sympathy for those who allow drugs to overtake their lives. People who say addicts are flawed, broken, not worth saving. People who say their lives were worthless, that their families failed to raise them right, that their sickness is a choice.

All of those attitudes are wrong. But they exist, which makes the Marxes’ speaking out all the more powerful.

“Most people don’t recognize (addiction) for what it is, which is a mental disease, a mental disorder,” George Marx told me.

“(Addiction) does not discriminate,” Sandy Marx said. “It doesn’t care who you are. They are not junkies and lowlifes. … They are lawyers, doctors, professionals.”

“They are everybody,” Samantha said.

Patty DiRenzo introduced me to the Marx family. She knows too well the pain they’re enduring — her own son died of an overdose in 2010 — but also the impulse to keep others from suffering his fate. Since he died, she’s been working to save addicts’ lives and call attention to the opiate epidemic.

I’ve talked with her several times and each time I meet her, I’m amazed at her tireless energy, her fearless nature and her willingness to talk to anyone and everyone who’ll listen to her message. Six years after her son’s death, she still gets emotional talking about how his memory drives her. She wants to bring addiction out of the shadows and into the light, where it can be seen and conquered.

“When my daughter was using, I was embarrassed,” Sandy Marx told me. “I didn’t come out of my house. I went to work, I came home, and I didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t tell anyone.

“Now, I tell everybody. I don’t care who you are. I talk about my son; I talk about my daughter.”

Phaedra Trethan: (856) 486-2417; ptrethan@gannettnj.com