Sorry, this is long -- over 2500 words and I haven't even gotten to the hard part, but as I have struggled to deal with the anger surrounding my god daughter's overdosing, I'm left trying something different. While this forum is long-defunct, since I've mentioned Nasia a couple of times here, it seemed appropriate that I post this here. My god daughter, Lanasia Roshea Warner, passed away two weeks ago. While there may be some evidence of foul-play – the police have an open investigation and are being typically uncommunicative – Nasia most likely overdosed. And Linda’s and my story, as her god parents, is the same as anyone’s who has ever loved an addict. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nasia’s story begins with a woman named Jennifer Person, an illiterate street woman struggling to raise her two boys in Washington, D.C. Linda and I met Jennifer when we were street missionaries for Exodus, a mission that tried evangelizing street kids and then doing social work for their parents. Jennifer was the one parent who most used our services. One day after Linda and I had departed Exodus, got married and relocated to Easton, Maryland, we got a call from Jennifer. “You gotta get me out of DC or else JB is gonna kill me.” JB was her erstwhile boyfriend and he was a brute of a man. One day while watching me and another guy struggle with moving a refrigerator up a narrow fire escape, he laughed at us “college boys” and he carried the fridge up himself the final two flights. JB had been pimping out Jennifer and beating her when she tried to refuse. Jennifer had no teeth and was much sought after for blowjobs. We brought Jennifer to our house, but it was a traumatic stay. We were newly married, and really didn’t have any house rules per se and Jennifer was too independent, being older than us and having lived on her own most of her life. And then she discovered all of the liquor left over from our wedding. Jennifer soon left, tried moving in with a much-younger boyfriend, and when that didn’t work, tried a couple of halfway/transitional homes, but those stays never lasted long. We didn’t see her much those years, but after four years, she found herself a good, if simple, man and together they combined their disability checks, and secured a passable residence in Cambridge. Jennifer’s next-door neighbor was a striking young addict named Eve Warner (she was born on Christmas Eve) who had two daughters: Keyshara, who had been placed in foster care with Eve’s own foster parents, and Nasia, who was two at the time. Eve had MS, which had only been diagnosed when she was receiving pre-natal care for Nasia. Turns out there are two forms of MS, one that can be treated with a pill and one that requires shots. Eve, who had a needle phobia, of course had the latter form of MS, and was never adequately treated for MS over the course of her life. Nasia, being two, was cute as a button, and Jennifer, who was an experienced street mom, soon swept up Nasia and Eve into her care. That was how we met Nasia, and how Jennifer came back into our lives. She wanted to show off her new god daughter. Jennifer spent her last years thinking that she had failed her two boys. (Note: she didn’t. We have since talked to her oldest, and most troubled son, Johnnie, and he is sweet and has married an equally sweet woman who just gets him.) We were equally captivated by Nasia, who was rambunctious and dainty at the same time, and showed no fear of strangers. We saw a lot of Jennifer that next year. We were able to facilitate a reunion with her long-lost brother (yay internet) and he even visited once from Philadelphia. And we saw a lot of Nasia as our kids loved having a “younger sister.” Jennifer suffered a stroke and passed too early. At her funeral, the saddest was Eve because she knew what Jennifer had been contributing to her little family, and Linda and I decided that the best way to honor Jennifer’s memory would be to replicate her role in Nasia’s life. And so we became Nasia’s god parents and for the next five years, we played the role of Fairy God Parent: we bought her roller skates and a junior science kit, we bought her back-to-school clothes, and we took Eve out for Mother’s Day and Nasia for her birthdays. These years were chaotic for Nasia. Her mother, ever in search of her next fix, jumped from house to house as she couldn’t pay the rent, leaving a string of angry landlords, and most of Nasia’s toys and clothes behind as she’d escape in the night. Nasia changed schools repeatedly as Eve went from Cambridge to Hurlock and back to Cambridge again. All the while her untreated MS was robbing Eve’s mobility and she could no longer walk up steps. Eve ended up in a nursing home, which would have been good enough for her, but she was terrified of losing Nasia to foster care: she had been a foster child herself and her eldest daughter was in foster care and the last bit of control she had left was to keep Nasia. So when Nasia was in fourth grade, we brought her to live with us. It was always going to be a temporary stay since we were in the process of securing in-home nursing care for Eve. We made a room for Nasia out of our dining room, which weird as this sounds, actually worked. Not wanting her to have to change schools yet again, we committed to taking Nasia to school, and back again, every day, 25 minutes away. We met with the teachers and guidance counselors – I got called to the school at least three times – and for the first time in her life, Nasia had someone checking her school work. In other words, we went from being the cool aunt/uncle to real parents, and Nasia wasn’t ready for that. She struggled to fit in. We started eating dinner in the living room, since Nasia was living in our dining room, and we’d try to watch a couple episodes of The Last Airbender and Nasia didn’t have the attention span to sit still through a children’s cartoon. She fell asleep to Mulan. Star Trek, was of course, right out. We have a small house, she didn’t have anywhere else to go, so she would lie on her bed (in the dining room) crying, “I just wanna go home. I just wanna go home.” But there wouldn’t be a home, not for just Eve and Nasia ever again. The last step towards qualifying for a home nurse required that Eve stay drug free and in a rehabilitation nursing home for 60 days. On about Day 50, Eve, still chasing her lost youth, and a man, signed herself out one night and got herself high. She wasn’t kicked out of the nursing home but she did lose her chance to get in-home nursing care. Linda and I didn’t have the heart to tell Nasia that she wouldn’t be going to home to live her mom and we urged Eve to tell her, but she never did. If we couldn’t tell Nasia about Eve’s failings, how could Eve? The one activity that we discovered that Nasia liked, that we could provide while she was living with us, was singing. So we signed her up for lessons and encouraged her to lean into the school chorus who was slated to sing at elementary school graduation on the last day of school. I, myself, had spent years mocking the notion of graduation from 4th grade or even middle school. Talk about a false achievement. But when you live with someone for whom success in school is not guaranteed, who has been to three elementary schools in four years, whose mother is uneducated, well, then 4th grade graduation is actually a big deal. Nasia learned The Star Spangled Banner and Battle Hymn of the Republic by heart, and yes, the Eastern Shore is red. She practiced her program songs with her voice teacher and she even had a recital. Nasia was struggling in school but the music was her lifeline and she was so proud to be able to sing in front of her mom. On the last day of school before graduation, I went down to pick Nasia up and she was gone. Everyone at the school was very aware that Linda and I were not Nasia’s legal guardians, and while they had been helpful when I could help them, they stonewalled. Nasia was gone and they wouldn’t tell me. I drove to Eve’s nursing home and discovered that she had checked out that day. A friend of hers had hit on this great money-making scheme. She rented a large, four-bedroom house and she filled with folks like Eve with guaranteed disability and food stamps. Eve counted for double because Nasia also received disability. This woman was running her own un-licensed nursing home and bringing in about $6000/month, which is a pretty good income for an under-educated woman. Nasia never made it to the last day of school. Nasia never got to sing in graduation. Eve was so happy to be out of the nursing home that she couldn’t think of anything else, and it’s not like she could drive anyway. Fourth grade had been a grind for Nasia and that she even finished at all was the evidence of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. In later years Nasia would describe the experience as if being kidnapped. Eve had been promised her own room for she and Nasia, but when the woman’s son moved back home, Eve and Nasia were moved out to the living room with Eve on the sofa and Nasia sleeping on the floor. When we tried to report this to social services, they said that Nasia was with her mom and there was nothing they could do. It was hard for us to see Nasia for a couple years. Eve was guilty for having moved Nasia into a house where she was sleeping on the floor and the woman didn’t like us coming into her house, given that we had tried to report her and all. We could catch up with Nasia when a friend of Eve’s mother would take Nasia in for a weekend or two. Now this woman was strict and ran a very tight household and Nasia couldn’t cope, so we would take her occasionally, giving her respite from her respite as it were. The summer after fifth grade, Linda got Nasia an invitation to a brand-new summer camp that had been started for children of incarcerated parents. No surprises here, but Nasia’s father had spent time in jail. Linda was the librarian of the camp and so she got to see Nasia at camp for a week for the next five or six years. Nasia and Eve would eventually move down to Salisbury to coach surf with another of Eve’s friends, which just took Nasia even further away from us. Eve would eventually no longer be able to live without skilled care so she was placed in a really crummy nursing home. The last parental thing that Eve ever did was to formally make this last friend the legal guardian of Nasia. We had asked Eve a couple of times over the years to have her designate us as Nasia’s guardians, we even took the foster parenting class, but Eve couldn’t pull the trigger on giving up her daughter to white guys. For Nasia’s nineth and tenth grade years we only saw her at Camp Agape, but she knew where we were and we had long earlier made her memorize my phone number. One evening I got a call from her. The woman she was living with had had enough of Nasia and she was taking her to Cambridge where I would find her, dumped on the front porch of someone who reputedly knew Eve. There was no one at the house when I got there, just Nasia sitting amidst all of her belonging stuffed into black trashbags. If there is a better metaphor for a ruined life than having all one owns put into trash bags, I don’t know what it is. So I loaded Nasia up and brought her home where we put her in our daughter’s room. Then I made one of the worst decisions of my life, I took Nasia back to her old high school on Monday. She had moved around so much in her young life, I thought it would be better for her to finish the school year where she had started it. And then we’d start her at Easton High in the fall. Except that friend of Eve’s was at school when we got there. I have no idea why she’d go there, she was the one who had abandoned Nasia to an empty house just two days earlier. While Linda was frantically trying to find a lawyer, I was talking to the school about making arrangements for Nasia’s custody. Until they found out that this woman, who had never shown up in school, never even officially registered Nasia for school two years earlier, was the legal guardian and they were bound to return Nasia to her care. Part of me understands, this woman was scary. We’d crossed paths visiting Eve in the nursing home and she was accompanied, like she was a cosa nostra kingpin, by three very large, lurking, men. So Nasia went back. We did get to see her again at Camp Agape and Linda and I both met with Nasia to try to convince her to just come home with us. This time, we’d be the ones kidnapping her. Nasia was torn, but in the end, she chose what was familiar to her and she returned to Salisbury. Eve, meanwhile, was slowly rotting away and getting worse. There was no physical therapy at her nursing home and she was bed-bound. She couldn’t walk anymore, which we had expected, but we were surprised to learn that vocal cords can atrophy too when a person spends her entire life laying down. We found a better nursing home in Easton and arranged for Eve’s transfer. It wasn’t a great nursing home, but it was better than that pit in Salisbury. And given that we figured that Nasia would venture to Easton more often, because she remained devoted to her mom til the bitter end, it was a win all the way around.