Marc

Kristi Murphy
Sep 4, 2018 · 10 min read

I always thought I had a pretty normal life growing up. Dad had a good job, mom was a stay at home mom. Mom would wake my brother and I up everyday for school, make us breakfast, walk us or drive us to our schools. Dad didn’t travel, he was usually home by 7pm the latest. Now at the age of 25, this seems like everything should have turned out fine. Good, happy childhoods usually lead to degrees, good jobs and success. Or so I thought. Because that is not what happened with my family. My family ultimately broke and I ended up losing half of my immediate family members to drugs or alcohol.

This is the story of losing my brother to an OxyContin overdose when he was 27.

Growing up my mom used to always use the term “keeping up with the Jones’ ”. When I was younger I didn’t understand this terminology. She said it meant you had to keep up with your neighbors, your peers and friends. I never knew how seriously my mother took this until I started to get into my pre-teens. My mom had always been overbearing about my brother and I’s “look” and “style”. She couldn’t accept that neither my brother or I were preppy people. We enjoyed black, band T-shirt’s and skater shoes. I understand she just wanted the best for us, and skater shoes and band tees were one of the best ways to be picked on in our A-List town, but Hollister and Abercrombie were never for us. My brother was never caught dead in those clothes, whereas I tried them out for a few years to try and make my mother happy. Never did feel quite right.

My brother was 5 years older than me. My mom had problems carrying a child to full term, and she miscarried multiple times before, and in between my brother and I’s births, so my mom has already dealt with so much loss even before my brother and I came into this world. When my brother and I made it to full term and were successfully birthed with no complications, my mother called us her “miracle babies”. Due to our age gap, my brother and I were never close. Maybe when we were younger but from when I can remember, he was never too interested in hanging out with his little sister, which I can honestly understand. By the time I started to come into my own around the age of 12, he was already 17 years old and had been through more than half of his life, and only had 10 more years ahead of him. We didn’t know this at the time, of course, but it’s scary how fast things went south. My brother had a good solid group of friends, he had known most, if not all of them, since elementary school, and from the photos I’ve seen since, it sure looks like they had fun together. But my brother was always a little bit of an outsider, from what I’ve found. He dealt with bullying for his height (he was 5’6 when he died, so maybe 5’3 tops in high school) and other types of bullying for being “weird”, but for the most part he seemed to have a good high school experience. Neither of us got good grades, and both of us were big weed smokers. When I was 13, he left for college. This was the first time my brother and I spoke as friends.

My brother decided to go to Wyoming with his friends to go to an automotive school. He joked about “wanting to get as far as he could” from our town. Him and I started texting soon after he left. This was the first time in my life we had ever had full conversations. I remember being so excited and telling him how much I enjoyed talking with him. I felt like I had a real brother at this point, it was nice. After he graduated, him and his friends moved to Southern California where he got a very good job as a car mechanic. Sadly, this was the same time as the 08–09 crash, and he was let go due to the recession. This was the first downfall that started his downward slope. But first we have to take it back a few years.

When my brother was in his late teens, he broke his arm. He was playing with a friends dog, and tripped. This is where the addiction started, and no one knew. He got OxyContin for the pain, because back in 04–05, giving OxyContin to a 15–17 year old boy was totally a-ok. This was before they knew how addictive these pills can be. This started as a few years of recreational fun, but slowly but surely turned into the monster we know as addiction. He was good about keeping it secret. I don’t know if his friends even knew about the slow growing habit. Now, this takes us back to being laid off from his dream position in 2008.

After being laid off, my brother had to reluctantly move back home. Every 21 year olds nightmare. He started work at a local car repair shop and from what I remember, hated his life. I was in my junior/senior year of high school so I was too busy with friends, relationships and school to notice anything different about my brother, but there were huge red flags everywhere. I don’t know if my parents just didn’t notice, or turned a blind eye to it. Soon, he got a job at a Ford Dealership where he met the love of his life, Sally. She moved in shortly after they met. They lived at my parents house for a few years, and from what we’ve learned since, were using OxyContin daily. Due to the drug use, Marc and Sally were dirty, distant and my parents were fed up with what they thought was just pure laziness. So they asked Marc and Sally to leave. They found a place in Oakland and moved out, and shortly thereafter found heroin.

Both Marc and Sally had been fired from the Ford Dealership, and Marc had gotten work with my dad’s company as a laborer. Shortly after getting the job my dad starts hearing from supervisors that Marc is showing up to work drunk, late or just not at all. My dad was able to pull some strings to keep him employed, but soon the identify theft happened. My brother somehow got a hold of my dad’s company credit card and PayPal’ed himself $5,000 from my dad’s company. Of course this was flagged immediately and my dad fired Marc before the company would find out and have him arrested. I believe my father did press charges of his own, because I know my brother ended up a felon. My parents kept this private from me, so I’m not quite sure what happened. I just remember the tears and fights during this. This was a dark time for my family.

My parents started asking questions after this. They had my brothers landlord let them into their apartment and that’s when they found Black Tar Heroin and burnt pieces and foil and they knew they needed to do something. They set up their own little “intervention” and told my brother it was either rehab or jail. He chose rehab. My parents told Sally’s parents, which caused Sally to leave my brother for their heroin dealer. My brother was heart broken. He left for rehab beaten and broken down, and came back 30 days later.

This is where I hate myself. My brother was living at home for a year after getting out of rehab. This year was the year I had started my instagram, it had started to take off, I was working full time and going to school at night. I can’t tell you what my brother did in this year. I didn’t pay attention, I didn’t care. I was too wrapped up in my young 20’s to care about my newly sober brother. His friends had cut him off when he got bad into drugs, he couldn’t find work due to his felony record, so he just sat in his room and watched movies, TV and played video games. Little did we know, he had relapsed on drinking only a few months in. He was downing a whole bottle of Sailor Jerry’s almost daily. He was maxing out credit cards he couldn’t afford, all while pretending to be sober. I would sometimes stop and talk to him in his room, and I wish I could have seen something, anything. But I didn’t, none of us did.

Maybe about 6 months into Marc being sober, he was rushed to the ICU after going in for a check up because he thought he had bronchitis, but actually was having congestive heart failure. He was in the ICU for a few days before being given a long list of medications and a huge hospital bill due to not having insurance. This caused Marc so much stress over the last few months of his life. He didn’t know how to find work, so he didn’t know how he was going to pay his hospital bills, he didn’t have any friends or his girlfriend, and his own family forgot about his 27th birthday that year…. Marc was in the lowest point of his life and none of us even took the time to realize it.

On the night of my brothers 1 year anniversary of being sober (or so we thought), he went out and bought Oxycontin, which he planned on using the next day. I remember that night so vividly. My intuition was going crazy. I came home from a friends house, and his van wasn’t parked outside. That was a red flag. It was probably 11:30–11:45pm. My brother never went out that late, especially after getting sober. I went inside, wondering where he was, but brushed it off and went to my room. I heard him come home maybe 20 minutes later. He was being so quiet. Like he didn’t want anyone to hear him getting home. I brushed it off yet again and went to sleep.

I woke up the next day on May 6, 2015 and it was any other day. I decided to play “hookey” at work and called out. I went over to a friends house all the way in San Mateo to smoke and dab. I had left the house pretending I was going to work, so when I got a phone call from my house my heart dropped. I thought I got caught and was going to get an earful from my mom about responsibilities. God was I so wrong. I answered the phone to the voice of my neighbor and I automatically knew something wasn’t right. She said “Kristi you need to come home.” This sent my anxiety to a 90/10 and I begged her to tell me what was happening. After fighting it, she finally says “Marc is dead” and I watched my whole world collapse around me in some random persons garage bedroom.

She called at around 3–4pm on a weekday. I had a good 2 hour drive due to Bay Area traffic ahead of me before I got home. I remember calling all of my friends and sobbing all the way home, getting such strange looks from the other commuters stuck in their normal drive home. When I finally got home my dad ran out the door to meet me, and this was the first and last time I’ve ever seen my dad cry. He grabbed me and pulled me in and we just cried on my front lawn. The worst part, my brothers body was still inside.

I walk inside my house, which only mere hours before was my safe haven, my childhood home with only good, happy memories, now has a dark cloud over it that still hasn’t left to this day. I walked in and hugged my mom and she started to sob. She explained to me what happened. She had left for the barn that morning, maybe around 11, and when she came home she felt a strange silence and knew she had to go check on Marc. She opened his door to find him face down, with his dog lying on top of him. She ran to him screaming, trying to flip him over, but he was already so hard and grey. She ran outside screaming for help, sadly, a 12 year old boy was walking past who ran inside to help her, but was traumatized in the process. I still hope to this day that he is okay. My mom didn’t realize what she was doing to the poor kid until it was too late. She rushed the young boy out and called 911. It took the coroners over 3 hours to get my brother out. They wouldn’t let me look at him because they said he was face down for so long that all the blood had rushed to his face and it was so swollen you wouldn’t have recognized him. My neighbor covered my eyes as they took him past on the stretcher. I’ll always thank her for that. Weeks later we got the toxicity report back that confirmed it was an OxyContin overdose.

I drowned myself in my brothers clothes, room, his phone, his computer. Anything of his. I keep replaying our last conversation. I was making macaroni and cheese and my mom told me to ask if Marc wanted any since I usually didn’t finish, and I remember rolling my eyes and giving him such a half ass “do you want any?” I will never forgive myself for that. I will never forgive myself for a lot of things.

My brother died on May 6, 2015 sometime between the hours of 11am-4pm, alone and in emotional pain. I write this on September 3, 2018 and it still hurts like it happened yesterday.

If I could say anything to my brother, it would be that I love him, and that he is an amazingly kind and sweet person who deserved nothing but the best in his life and that I’m sorry he didn’t get that. I wish I had gotten to know you better. I wish I knew what your favorite food was, or your favorite color. I wish you were able to meet my boyfriend, I wish you could meet your future nieces and/or nephews. I wish you could have lived the life you dreamed of. Even though I never told you, I loved you with my whole heart and yearned for a relationship with you, I was just too scared to initiate one which will forever be one of my biggest regrets. I wish I had gone through rehab and sobriety before you so I could have helped you through it, gone to meetings with you or help you find a halfway. I wait for you every night in my dreams and I hope you come to see me soon, I want to give you a hug and remind you how special you are and show you how missed you have become.

If you or anyone you know are dealing with addiction, be easy with them. Take your time on them. Show them they are loved. If there’s one thing I hope, is that someone will learn from this and not make the same mistakes my family made. Say something, speak up, it could save someone’s life.

I love you Marc Murphy

2/13/88–5/6/15

    Kristi Murphy

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