‘He brought us profound joy but suffered terribly’

     “Brady Michael McDermott lived his life full tilt and loved the people he shared it with fiercely.”

     Those words appear in Brady’s obituary, written by his uncle using sentiments shared by those who loved him most, his family and friends.

     Brady would have been 33 on March 2. He was 30 years old when he died of a drug overdose on April 11, 2015, a senseless act of murder according to his mother, Debbie McDermott of Monticello. A man in Cedar Rapids is now serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling Brady a lethal amount of fentanyl. This April marks the third anniversary of Brady’s passing, and his family wants to share their story to hopefully help other parents, other families, fighting addiction.

     “I wanted to celebrate his life,” said Debbie. “I just love my boy, but he had a disease.”

     That day in April was a Saturday. Debbie described it as a “beautiful Saturday morning” as she headed out of town to be with her hospice patient in her final hours of life. In hindsight, later that day Debbie and her husband, Denny, would be faced with their own tragic loss.

     As Debbie returned home that afternoon her phone rang. Her sister from Anamosa just said, “You need to go! They’re doing CPR on Brady!” Debbie’s nephew and Brady were living together in a condo unit in Cedar Rapids at the time. Her nephew arrived home to find Brady unresponsive and called medical personnel and law enforcement officials.

     The McDermotts headed to Cedar Rapids, but Debbie said the car ride seemed like a blur; everything was going in slow motion.

     “As a nurse, I just kept thinking, ‘Get me to him. I’ll revive him.’”

     Unfortunately, their son passed away before they could get to him.

     When they pulled up to the residence, they were allowed through the front door, but that’s as far as they could go. Brady’s bedroom was taped off like a crime scene where he was discovered found.

     “They wouldn’t let us see him,” she said. “We were told we had to wait for a detective to take photos, but no one told us that he passed away.”

     Debbie said the place was quiet, “quiet like I’ve never heard before.”

     When they were finally allowed into Brady’s bedroom, his mom just sat down and held him for the longest time.

     “That’s when our world fell apart,” recalled Debbie.

     Back up 10 years prior… In 2009, Brady was attending a friend’s wedding when he accidentally got burnt from a bonfire, suffering extensive burns. He spent time in the burn unit at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics recovering. Debbie said he was given a lot of morphine for the pain, as well as Lortab, a prescription pain medication.

     That addiction to the pain medications advanced and it became harder and harder for Brady to get his hands on the Lortab.

     “His addiction was a gateway to the addictive opioids,” said Debbie.

     Knowing their son had a problem, they tried to get him counseling but Brady’s work and personal life interfered. They know he tried NA (Narcotics Anonymous) as well.

     “As parents we offered every approach to try and get him off Lortab as things progressed,” Debbie said. “But he told us what we wanted to hear.”

     Little did they know at the time, but Brady started obtaining lethal drugs such as heroine and fentanyl and opioids illegally, off the black market.

     “We had no idea and his friends never knew of Brady’s using.” Debbie shared that, according to his toxicology report, her son had enough fentanyl in his system the day he died to kill six grown men. “We had no idea what he bought on the black market.”

     A spoon and syringe were found in his room, though Debbie said he did not inject anything into his system.

     “There was never a thought in our minds that Brady committed suicide,” she said. “I feel he was murdered; he was murdered by the black market. He did not want to die.”

     Brady was able to hide his substance addiction from everyone.

     As a career nurse for 35 years, Debbie said she’s seen a lot of death in her life. “When it’s your child, that’s a completely different story. It was so tragic for our family.”

     Six days before Brady’s death, the McDermott family was together for Easter, memories that are now cherished.

     “Brady brought us profound joy,” his mother said with the biggest of smiles on her face. “But he suffered terribly even while battling his own addiction in silence.”

     While the McDermotts wish to share their story about addiction and drug use, to add to that tragedy is the fact that Brady’s death left his 8-year-old son, Collin, without a father.

     “It’s sad that a child was left behind because of opioids,” said Debbie. “Brady was such a terrific dad. Collin was the apple of his eye.”

     Brady’s obituary states: “The pride of his life was his son, Collin, a 5-year-old boy who shares his father’s blonde hair, blue eyes and indefatigably playful spirit. ‘This kid makes my heart melt,’ he wrote under a photograph of Collin on Facebook. ‘I seriously feel like the luckiest dude in the world.’”

     Debbie said she and her family tried multiple ways to help them cope with Brady’s loss: counseling, a medium, and support groups.

     “You do whatever you have to do to live through something like this,” she said. “But the pain was so awful.”

     Debbie said she saw herself move through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

     “Forgiving myself was extra tough. I’m a nurse and I couldn’t save my own son.” Debbie admitted to having thoughts of suicide because “the pain was so bad I wanted to stop breathing.

     “I couldn’t fathom life without him.”

     While the first two years after Brady’s death were so very hard for her, Debbie has made it her mission to learn about the ever-growing drug and opioid crisis. She said knowing what killed their son, it was hard to accept the truth with the stigma drugs carries with it.

     “For me, it’s been an inward journey,” she said.

     Knowing the shame AIDS and HIV carried with it in the 1980s and ‘90s, Debbie said the same is true today with opioids. “It’s everywhere. It’s here.”

     Debbie started following the Facebook page for the Iowa chapter of a national organization called “I Hate Heroine.” The page was started by a mother in Dubuque (whose first name is Vicki) who lost her two sons, both to drug overdoses, hours apart on the same day, April 9, 2016.

     “What is it about April?” asked Debbie of her son also passing away in April the year before. “I slept for a week because of the horror after meeting Vicki and hearing her story.”

     She said reading other parents’ stories about how drugs took so many young people’s lives has been devastating.

     “A lot of moms tell me it never gets better, but a loss like this is so terrible. I felt so weak spiritually, mentally and physically.”

     After a successful career in nursing, Debbie just could not remain in the profession any longer.

     “I just had to go grieve,” she said. “I suffered from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). Anything with death was so tragic for our family.”

     The loss of their only son, brother, and uncle was a huge change for the McDermott family.

     “It blew a hole in our hearts,” said Debbie. “Time helps but we miss him terribly.”

     Debbie wants people to know that there is help out there for those battling drug addiction. “It’s a disease and it should be treated as such with great compassion,” she said. She wants the stigma broken.”

     “This is my story,” concluded Debbie. “It’s all I’ve got.”

     Surviving Brady Michael McDermott are his parents and biggest fans, Denny and Debbie McDermott; sisters Kelli and Megan; a son, Collin Michael McDermott; adoring nieces, Stella and Scarlett; Grandfather Arlan Ditch; and loving uncles, aunts and cousins.

A letter to parents who have lost a child

     Ram Dass, an American spiritual teacher, wrote a letter some years ago to a family who had lost their young daughter. Although he wrote it to these parents specifically, everything in this letter applies to anyone who has lost a child.

     Denny and Debbie McDermott want to dedicate this letter to their late son, Brady Michael McDermott, and to all parents who have lost a child…

     “Dear Steve and Anita,

     Rachel finished her work on earth, and left the stage in a manner that leaves those of us left behind with a cry of agony in our hearts, as the fragile thread of our faith is dealt with so violently. Is anyone strong enough to stay conscious through such teaching as you are receiving? Probably very few. And even they would only have a whisper of equanimity and peace amidst the screaming trumpets of their rage, grief, horror, and desolation.

     I can’t assuage your pain with any words, nor should I. For your pain is Rachel’s legacy to you. Not that she or I would inflict such pain by choice, but there it is. And it must burn its purifying way to completion. For something in you dies when you bear the unbearable, and it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and to love as God loves.

     Now is the time to let your grief find expression. No false strength. Now is the time to sit quietly and speak to Rachel, and thank her for being with you these few years, and encourage her to go on with whatever her work is, knowing that you will grow in compassion and wisdom from this experience. In my heart, I know that you and she will meet again and again, and recognize the many ways in which you have known each other. And when you meet you will know, in a flash, what now it is not given to you to know: Why this had to be the way it is.

     Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts – if we can keep them open to God – will find their own intuitive way. Rachel came through you to do her work on earth, which includes her manner of death. Now her soul is free, and the love that you can share with her is invulnerable to the winds of changing time and space.

     In that deep love, include me.

     In love,

     Ram Dass.”