The Devil You Know

There was an article in the paper today about a fifteen-year-old local boy who is in a coma after overdosing on Xanax, Morphine and Ecstasy. His family doesn’t know if he took large quantities of the drugs accidentally or if he intended to end his life.

The family is heartbroken over the thought that he was possibly suicidal and over the fact that he was abusing drugs without their knowledge. (Friends told the parents that this was not the boy's first encounter with illegal drug use.)

My son was a teenager when he died and reading this article made me wonder: is it better to lose a child and know the reason why or to sit at the bedside of a comatose child, not knowing what the outcome could be?

As depressed as I am over my son’s death, I wouldn’t want to face the alternative: to spend the rest of his life sitting by his bedside while he lays in a coma, watching him waste away, fearing that I may have to decide one day to “pull the plug”; or maybe he would wake up from the coma and struggle with severe brain damage for the rest of his life. These hypotheticals seem even worse than the reality that I live with.

The family in the article could be facing these scenarios. I would not want to trade places with those parents and I’m sure they wouldn’t want to trade places with me.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know? I don’t know. Maybe there is hope for this family. Or maybe there is only more tragedy yet to come.

Time will tell.