**About 7 months after Sarah died, we had her headstone placed at the cemetery. This is what I wrote for the ceremony.** Hi everyone. First of all, I want to thank all of you for being here today – I know everyone’s had a busy week and it means the world that you took time …

**This was written by Sarah’s friend and Melting Pot manager, Rich Kearney. Hearing these words helped me see my sister through the eyes of the people who stood by her, day in and day out, never questioning her heart. They will always hold a special place in my heart, and I will be forever grateful …

Hi, everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Munchie – Sarah’s older sister. I want to start off by thanking everyone for coming to celebrate Sarah’s life, and to offer our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you who has reached out to us over the past few days. It …

**This piece was written for a writing project called “On Coming Alive.” Parts of it might seem familiar because I incorporated pieces of some of my other blogs.**  My sister was a heroin addict. While she wasn’t your stereotypical, stuff-of-crime-dramas, visibly strung out drug addict, her demons were real nonetheless, and they threatened to take …

  “Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your …

“I love the way she survived. Survival looked good on her. There were no dark marks under her eyes. Maybe deep inside, but I liked the way she looked through them and laughed at life. She did it gracefully. She’d walked over glass and through fire, but still smiled. And, honestly, I’m not interested in …

  “If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?” – Jodi Picoult   359 days ago, my little sister killed herself. At the very same moment that my then-fiancé and I were …

“Each of us will have our own Fridays – those days when the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world lie littered about us in pieces. We all will experience those broken times when it seems we can never be put together again. We will all have our Fridays. But I testify …

  “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this, as well as friends. Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said, was nowhere to be found. Then said my friend Daniel, …

A couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, a friend I hadn’t seen in years sent me a message. We reconnected on Facebook a few months ago; she had read some of my posts about my sister and reached out to me. The gist of the message was that she had found the strength …

Over the past few years I’ve seen far too many “RIP” status updates for people who have died at the hands of their demons. Part of the reason I felt the need to share my sister’s story with the world when she died is because I was sick of people pretending that their loved ones …

Every single day, 365 Americans die as a direct result of drug use; 120 of those deaths are overdoses. This means that approximately 135,000 people in the U.S. lose their battles to addiction every single year. It doesn’t matter how these people died, or what their drug of choice was. What matters is that each …