It’s Time to Talk About Prevention

The following article was written by the father of a young man, shortly after his son’s death from a drug overdose. Kasriel Benjamin was 25 years old and lived here in Crown Heights.

The last place you want to be is in a room full of people where they divide you into the following groups: Only Child, Long-Term Illness, Siblings, Overdose, and my personal favorite, Sudden Death.

We had already gone around the wide circle of chairs in the support group, each set of parents struggling to say their child’s name out loud, as well as the date and cause of death. These included: two brothers who drowned on a Caribbean vacation, an 8-year old girl thrown from a car crashed by a drunk driver, a teenager found hanging in a motel room, a fall from a hotel balcony, an asthma attack, cancer, murder, assisted suicide…. who can listen to this stuff? The first time I heard this wrenching roll call, I cried; not for our son, Kasriel, who died at the age of 25 from an apparent drug overdose, but for the stifling pain that seemed to fill the air like a thick, suffocating fog. We were newcomers, here just weeks after the horror of that guided missile phone call; others had been coming to this support group for years, some for decades.

They say there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think there is one more. I call it: What!? This is like denial, but many levels higher, like the difference between 1st and 4th degree burns. It’s where you begin to question the faulty cosmic framework that suddenly messed up and got it so wrong. After all, a child’s death is something you read about in the paper while eating your Cheerios.

That’s why, for me, the disbelief seems to overshadow everything else. It’s obvious the family they really meant to target is living somewhere in Queens or the Bronx, eating Chinese takeout and watching the evening news, totally oblivious to the fact that they narrowly missed the axe. After all, Kasriel lived in Crown Heights, had gone through the Lubavitch school system, had a job and close friends and was close to his family. At one point he had even completed most of a Semicha program. Kids like this aren’t supposed to die from a heroin overdose.

One thing you learn over time is that while you may wish differently, death is not even a teeny bit temporary. Another thing you learn is a lot of stuff about your kid that you never knew. We had no idea Kasriel had so many close friends or affected so many people’s lives — or that so many people, besides us, loved him. Of course, Kasriel was smart, loving, generous and a wonderful human being just like every child, of any age, who dies prematurely. One family we heard of was so tired of idolizing their lost son to the point of sainthood that they agreed to have one evening where they talked about all the things he did that drove them crazy.

A friend, shocked to hear about Kasriel’s death, suggested that there should be
a special word for the grief parents feel when they lose a child. He was right.
Only when you have gone through such a personal tsunami, can you understand how new and unexpected the feeling is. For those in the group who had lost their only child, the future seemed to grind to a sudden halt, their genes crashing into an inconvenient roadblock. I felt guilty that we had nine (yes, 9) more, as if somehow, like a long-ago Costco purchase, having children in bulk had finally paid off.

Yet while the pain for us is still raw, with good days and bad, entry to this club does come with unexpected, I hate to say it, benefits: a loss of naivety, a deeper range of emotions, a focus on things that might actually matter, zero tolerance for petty squabbles, less fear of death and a feeling that if the worst thing that can happen to you has already happened, well, it should be clear sailing from here on.

MeanwhiIe, what I miss most is Kasriel’s huge bear hugs and the matching smile we got each time he came to visit and, this may sound cheesy, but the fact that though he was a grown man, with a job, an apartment and a well-developed, fatal drive to fill some vast emotional hole, he still called me Daddy.

Yehuda Benjamin

On January 8th, 10 Teves, at 7:45 pm in the Oholei Torah Ballroom, both men and women in the community will be gathering for a special event: “We need to talk about prevention,” to highlight the need for increased awareness and understanding of the pervasive drug problem in Crown Heights.

Among the featured speakers are Dr. Brad Reedy, a nationally renowned expert on parents and parenting and their relationship to children involved in drug use, and Lewis J. Abrams, an addiction counselor and specialist with unique knowledge of the drug problem within the Jewish community. We urge every parent to attend. The event is being sponsored in the memory of Kasriel Benjamin.