Back in July a close friend of mine died from a long battle with heroin addiction. And I’m still trying to figure out ways to not cry like a baby when I’m reminded of her. Which is constantly. Maybe we all need more time to heal. But it’s not getting easier like everyone says it will.

I’ve always had a strong distaste for drug abuse and drug addicts in general. And then I met her. I met someone who didn’t make excuses for their behavior, who always owned up to the shit they did, who did so without shame and without letting what other people thought get under her skin. And I loved her regardless. She never compared her addiction to having a disease like cancer, and thought of me when others did saying what I go through having cancer was far worse than what she was choosing to do to herself.

She just couldn’t stop doing it. She made this amazing impact on my life, and I always thought I had more time with her never just accepting that the path she was on was going to be a short one. You couldn’t stereotype her like you could so easily countless others. But when a poem she wrote went viral after her death, the outreach of support was overwhelming… as were the numbers of strangers sharing her story condemning her. Before I knew it and within days of her untimely death, she was viral news content for every media outlet that could get their 10 seconds of her for clicks and traffic to their pages. Headlines were misleading, purposely written to incite argument and fuel the disease debate. When that wasn’t the point to be made. The point was my friend had died, and wasn’t here to defend herself to countless strangers. Now that the media circus has died down I want people to know how much she was loved, and how hard it is for us to cope with the loss of your trending topic of the week.

I miss my friend, and I wish that she were still here. There’s never enough time to say the things you want to say, and we take time for granted that the ones we hold the closest will be there tomorrow. I didn’t get to see her before she died, and I have to live with that. I think about what I should’ve done every single day, just take some time and GO see her because I knew this would happen. There are no photos of her and I together, I have nothing but her memory to look back on. We were in the middle of a film project highlighting the big disease debate over addiction, with her to be the concluding argument. The footage has been sitting collecting dust. She’s gone. What do I do now? Take nothing and no one for granted, ever.

Delaney Farrell was more than a statistic, I want everyone that googles her name to remember that. And that just as so many did, I loved her dearly. Her absence opened such a hole that cannot be filled. So the next time you comment on social media that some heroin addict deserved to die, remember this.

I lost someone I loved to a heroin overdose…

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