On December 07, 2018, my cousin, Marquis Hinnant, was pronounced dead due to a drug overdose.

When my sister called me that Friday morning, I didn’t know how to absorb the information. It was surreal. I didn’t start crying until I heard my sister cry—a sound I’ve heard only a few times in my life. I could not get over the fact that I just saw him the week before.

He was living with my sister at the time and I invited her, her children, and him over to my house to decorate for Christmas. He hung up the garlands and the wreaths up around the beams of my porch. He helped me bake a delicious batch of chicken wings. Before my sister left with him and the kids in tow, they debated staying longer because I  used the last of the Calico Jack for more eggnog.

The wreaths and garlands he hung still curl around my porch to this day, a quiet reminder that there’s one less family member of mine in the world.

Unfortunately, Marquis was not the only addict in my family. My mother’s siblings and nieces and nephews have an extensive history with heroin, cocaine, and other substances. Most of my mother’s siblings had tried illicit drugs at some point in their lives, and over half of them were (and still are) addicts. Most of this was a product of their upbringing. My mother was raised with nine siblings in a poverty-stricken household. Her mother was a heavy smoker, having died of lung cancer in August 1994, and her father was a violent alcoholic. The financial and familial strains have pressurized most of my mother’s siblings into the drug-addled teens they were in my mother’s youth and the dependent adults they are today.

The origin of drugs in my mother’s family began with my mother’s uncle, Bubba Do. Heroin was his poison of choice and it is suspected that, through influence, he was the reason it became my aunt Joan’s poison as well. Aunt Joan is the oldest of my grandmother, Catherine’s, nine children and the first to fall to addiction. My mother speculated that either Bubba Do, or the father of Joan’s children, introduced her to heroin. Thus, the spiral began.

Slowly, the poisonous influence spread from sibling to sibling, until only my mother, her twin sister, Bridget, and older brother, Jason, were the last sober Hinnant children. Two-thirds of my grandmother’s children were drug addicts. It didn’t stop at heroin; pills and cocaine came into the mix.

My mother recounted a time when she was with my father and one of her sisters was visiting. My parents were in the kitchen when my mother heard a loud, hard sniff. She peaked and just saw her sister sitting in the room. She didn’t think much of it at the time but suspected that her sister had just snorted cocaine. Otherwise, her addicted siblings did their best to hide their various poisons from the sober siblings . However, my mother recalled another instance where one of her siblings was hiding cocaine in the freezer and, whoever they were hiding it from, shot at their house in retaliation!

Regrettably, not much has changed since my mother’s formative years.

Some of my aunts and cousins have swapped hard street drugs for prescription narcotics, like Percocet, Ambien, Xanax, or Klonopin. Sometimes, these are not legally acquired. Illicit drugs continue to grip my family. That’s not to say that all of my relatives refuse rehabilitation centers. One family member of mine frequents them, staying sober for a month or two at a time before being released. Ironically, the momentum of leaving the rehab center and reentering the world pushes him right back into drug use. He has long since settled into the rhythm of rehabilitation centers and drug trips.

Consequently, my mother kept us well away from her family members. We were raised in Willingboro, NJ, a whole hour away from Newark, NJ, where my mother’s family is from. She despised the rot caused by substance abuse and wanted a life for her children that was untouched by all of that. My mother succeeded, but not without causing a schism between her children and her siblings’ children.

I grew up shy and reserved away from my extended family. I learned in my preteens that some of my cousins, aunts, and uncles were using, and that widened the chasm between us. Based on what little I knew about drugs and addicts growing up, I felt almost haughty towards my cousins. In my mind, drug use, and consequently drug addiction, was a choice.  I was not the only one that felt this way about drug abuse and drug addicts. After all, addiction and substance abuse wasn’t added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until its 5th edition, which was released in 2013.

So, it seemed to me that my family members chose to wreck their lives and the lives around them, and I felt largely intolerant towards their behaviors.

Thus, the origin of the wedge. My distance wasn’t entirely prejudiced. Illicit substances have the power to turn people into static versions of themselves, full of tropes and unsavory—but expected—behaviors.

An example of the latter is theft. Drug addiction is expensive, and to fund their habit a few of my cousins stole money, electronics, and precious items from their own family. I remember one summer, a few of my cousins (the male cousins;  the men in my family are lost) stole video game systems from my brothers and my cousin’s five-year-old son. We never recovered the goods.

For a long time, as a consequence, some of my cousins weren’t allowed over or to be left alone in our home. One of my uncles always begged for food and took multiple plates at family gatherings for just himself. I thought it was gluttony until I overheard my mother and cousins talking about how he’d spend his government-given checks all on smack or coke and then come to them for basic necessities.

Even after all this, I couldn’t place myself in the position of a drug addict nor could I feel pity because I couldn’t understand why someone would choose to steal from their relatives or ask for goods in times of hardship to feed a habit that was slowly killing them. I didn’t understand the lack of control until I was older and recognized some of my own vices for what they were turning into. My wall of intolerance stands proudly to this day, but since my cousin passed away, I’ve come to recognize the latent family trait for what it is—a deep-rooted illness and a generational curse passed down through impoverished circumstance.

And so, there are now small holes in my wall, pockets of sympathy and sadness and pride for the relatives that can conquer their curse.

Finally, at Marquis’s funeral, one of my cousins who was addicted to percocets, and stole more than $2,000 from his own mother, stood up and talked about substance abuse in the family and how we all need to come together to conquer our curse. I was surprised that he was the one to come and say such a thing ( in front of his mother, no less), instead of shrinking in shame, denial, and pain.

Nonetheless, I morbidly hope that my cousin didn’t die fruitlessly. I hope this will be the catalyst for destroying the cycle of addiction in my loved ones so they could be who they really are. Marquis was, however briefly, beautifully his actual self in that period of sobriety.

This isn’t the first drug-related death in the family. My uncle, Dante “Squeaky” Caeser, whom I never met, died from complications of HIV/AIDS, acquired from a tainted needle. Despite his death, my addicted relatives stayed their course then and I imagine they’ll stay their course now. Sadly, we discuss this at family gatherings out of earshot of the little ones, but there’s much inaction. Therapy isn’t talked about in my family. It’s considered a useless expense. Besides, we’re all grown. We’re all responsible for ourselves. How does one tell another grown adult how to live their life?

As I mentioned before, rehab centers, for the few that utilize them, are merely revolving doors and don’t hold off the curse for long. I hope the children of our family are kept far away from such behaviors, but even they are experiencing exposure. Perhaps addiction can’t be quelled in the older generations, but hopefully, the youth will see the devastation of substance abuse and choose a path that keeps them far away from our family curse.