2017 Activity Summary

We’re proud to share what we done in the past year to honor the mission of the Where There’s A Will Fund. The Fund made its first distributions this past year.  Four groups we have  worked with closely were the beneficiaries.  Go to their websites to learn more about their good work. 

Addiction Policy Forum 

                                  

www.addictionpolicy.org

                       

Facing Addiction

                                               

https://www.facingaddiction.org 

          

Friends of Recovery  - New York

https://www.for-ny.org

Partnership for Drug-Free Kids 

                       

https://drugfree.org

We continue to work on our own:

Testimony

Margot and Bill joint testimony before Congressional Committee on Combating the Opioid Epidemic 2/28/17    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DVJrcZvqlQ&t=6s

Writing

Margot’s Letter to the Editor of The New York Times  http://nyti.ms/2xpa1QT

Two essays published in Addiction Unscripted

An essay in The Episcopal New Yorker

An essay in Motherwell - http://bit.ly/2xFS5gn

An essay on Partnership for Drug Free Kids Parent Blog  11/10/17

Partnership for Drug Free Kids Parent Blog 

5/11 – “The Insurance and Treatment System Failed This Family.

                Now They’re On A Mission To Help Others.”

6/13 – “9 Stories of 9 Inspiring Dads”

Speaking

International Overdose Awareness Day/Fed Up Rally

Morningside Park – Hurleyville, NY  8/31/17

Rachel Carson High School, New York City  10/11/17

Sponsored by the ’Mentor Foundation

Radio

Guest spots on WJFF 90.5, Jeffersonville, New York

Theater/Improv/Play Workshops

BIGVision - 3/17 & 10/17

Partnership for Drug-Free Kids - Staff Workshop 11/29/17

Conference

HHS/Medicine X Opioid Design-a-thon Workshop - Presenter and Participant
Washington DC 12/5,6,7/17

http://opioidsymposium.org

Awards

Addiction Policy Forum

Bill recognized as a “2017 Advocate of The Year”

Caron – Greater New York Service Awards

An “Unsung Hero Award”

Caron's generous citation read: “Bill Williams is a father who lost his son to addiction, but his loss has driven him to passionately help others in need of hope and understanding. Since the death of his 24-year-old son, William, Bill works tirelessly to fight the stigma associated with substance use disorder by sharing his story to help others and speak to the desperate need for change. Current laws and societal patterns obstruct the recovery process for many, and Bill has worked with lawmakers, medical professionals, law enforcement, addiction researchers, community organizers and lobbyists to fight for change. He works with the Addiction Policy forum and Friends of Recovery New York to help bring about imperative changes in law. Bill also teaches theater and improv classes for BIGVISION, showing those recovering from addiction that they can find meaning, release and calm through the fun and joy acting and improv provides. His essays have appeared in publications for the New York Times, “Nora’s Blog,” National Institute on Drug Abuse, The Partnership for Drug Free Kids, Phoenix House, Freedom Institute, Medium, and Addiction Unscripted.com. Bill is an inspiration to all, showing how grief and loss can be transformed to benefit the lives of others.”

FORE!

“So, Mr. Trump, I am begging you to take charge and save lives. After all, that is one of the founding principles of the United States of North America. If not, the world will see how we are treated not as second-class citizens but as animals that can be disposed of. Enough is enough.”

Those words could be from the parent of a child with substance use disorder in Manchester, New Hampshire; Louisville, Kentucky; Akron, Ohio; or so many other places in our country where millions need government action.  The pockets of this country where our former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the commission headed by Chris Christie have each outlined, redundantly, paths forward in the fight against the opioid epidemic that takes 144 American lives daily.

Instead they are the words of San Juan’s brave, heroic, mayor and leader, Carmen Yulin Cruz.  Not only has he failed to implement relief in a timely and effective fashion, our president prefers Twitter to chastise another politician, a Puerto Rican, a woman who has spoken truth to his power. 

Mayor Cruz said, “…when it comes to saving lives we are all part of one community of shared values.”  She was, alas, wrong.  Some of our citizens live on islands.  Islands surrounded by lots and lots of water, or lots and lots of stigma. Islands whose shared values have not reached the shore of Trumpland. 

Is Mr. Trump part of our community of shared values?  Is he preparing even overdue action for what lies ahead while he plays golf in Bedminster, New Jersey (a state that lost 1901 lives to opioids last year) today?

What lies ahead for these and other crises?  Fore! 

The Drug Epidemic - Where Are We Headed?

4/15/17

I came across the following interactive graphic in the New York Times’ “The Upshot” today.  Since 1990, the number of Americans who have died every year from drug overdoses has increased by more than 500 percent. In 2015, more Americans died from drug overdoses than from car accidents and gun homicides combined. When the statistics for more recent years become available indications are they will be worse.

I did a “tour” of every county I’ve lived in over the course of my life.  The statistics are horrifying.  The percentage of deaths in the 15-44 age group due to drug overdoses in 2015 in:

New York

       Nassau County 32%

       Manhattan 17%

       Sullivan 41%

       Ulster 23%

Pennsylvania

       Luzerne 30%

New Jersey

       Somerset 25%

Connecticut

       Litchfield 40%

Maine

       Cumberland 33%

Massachusetts

       Suffolk 32%

New Hampshire

       Hillsborough 46%

I shouldn’t be surprised, but nonetheless, I find the numbers in rural counties particularly alarming.

To do your own tour or to get a sense of the drug epidemic in this country go here:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/14/upshot/drug-overdose-epidemic-you-draw-it.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fupshot&action=click&contentCollection=upshot&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

 

  

  

Children of the Opioid Epidemic

At a small dinner party just recently a friend told us about her brother, a psychiatrist and addiction specialist in the Midwest.  Things have gotten so out of hand there that children requiring care because substance use renders their parents incompetent aren’t being placed directly into foster care.  A clogged, sluggish system only reviews placement options once a week.  In the meantime the children are given “shelter” in psychiatric wards.  Your guess is as good as mine as to which environment is safer: at home with addicted parents incapable of properly caring for them or in a ward amidst minds awry from causes other than drugs.  To compound this lose/lose situation, the children in temporary placement occupy beds needed for children who genuinely require treatment in a psychiatric ward. 

Lose/lose/lose.

I’ve been mulling this situation over ever since I first heard about it.  Today I saw an editorial in The New York Times - Children of the Opioid Epidemic.  You can find it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/opinion/young-victims-of-the-opioid-epidemic.html

While going online to locate the Times editorial I came across an earlier Wall Street Journal article, “The Children of the Opioid Crisis,” written by Jeanne Whalen on December 15^th.  That reporting brought me full circle back to the Midwest.  You can find that excellent reporting here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-children-of-the-opioid-crisis-1481816178

The Journal article told, yet again, the story of police apprehending overdosed parents in Ohio parked in their car while their young boy was in the back seat.  My friend Jessica Nickel, the awe-inspiring leader of the Addiction Policy Forum, had written an essay about that boy.  For her the story was too close to home.   http://www.addictionpolicy.org/single-post/2016/10/05/The-Boy-in-the-Back-Seat 

Today there is one small, tragic, change of fact in Jessica’s story.  Back in October when she wrote, the statistic was 129 deaths a day due to drug overdoses. More current figures show that the number has risen to 144 a day! Worse, that number is likely to continue to rise before we see a decline.

  

As the addiction epidemic mounts it is clear that we not only have to act on   prevention, first responders, treatment, recovery, law enforcement and the judicial process.  We have to pay prompt and dedicated attention to the recovery of children affected by this crisis.  A compelling component of our recovery as a society is staring us in the face.  The Times reminds us, “There was a big spike in foster care cases during the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.  The government was far too slow to act then, and it is in danger of being dangerously behind the curve again.”  

WILL TRUMP DELIVER?

At the beginning of this week I wrote Rachel Maddow.  Since the night of the election, I'd been thinking about the relationship between drug addiction and alcoholism and locales where Donald Trump prevailed. I had not considered the suicide rate.  Should have.  Here, in part, is what I wrote to Ms. Maddow:

"If you take a map of those places where Trump scored, or where Trump changed a county from blue to red and then overlaid a map of opioid abuse and drug deaths, I suspect you would find a startling congruence.  I’m suggesting that a significant number of Americans in dire straights have taken to A) narcotizing themselves to relieve the stress they feel and B) voting for Trump as another way to relieve that stress.  Have someone on your staff, or even better you (where you would get the time I cannot fathom – but it’s worth it) read Sam Quinones’s book Dreamland – The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.

It’s no secret that Rob Portman and Tim Ryan both represent Ohio and both have done influential bipartisan work to address the epidemic our country faces.  Hillary Clinton got out in front of understanding the epidemic in New Hampshire and offered the most comprehensive and thoughtful plan to fight addiction.  I’m not sure she caught on to what I’ve come to suspect, addicted America is Trump’s America.

Check it out."

Today, thanks to a friend, I got to read this article by James Hohmann.  As I said to Rachel Maddow, "Check it out!"

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/12/09/daily-202-trump-over-performed-the-most-in-counties-with-the-highest-drug-alcohol-and-suicide-mortality-rates/584a2a59e9b69b7e58e45f2e/?utm_term=.bb6b3c9332a6&wpisrc=nl_daily202&wpmm=1

Time will tell on whether Trump delivers anything of substance to people with these afflictions in these afflicted areas.  It will already be too late for those who have completed suicide.  Will he and his team recognize that our environment is threatened not only from the outside, but from our insides and from what we put inside ourselves?  

Action Is Eloquence

December 2nd is, sadly, the fourth anniversary of William’s death.  At his memorial service Elizabeth, Margot and I made the following pledge:  “We promise to do everything in our power to educate and inform people about drug abuse and its prevention, to provide ever more enlightened treatment for addicts, to help make treatment options for addicts more readily available, and to remove the stain of shame surrounding this disease. “  The eulogy concluded with a quote from Shakespeare, “Action is eloquence.”

We have worked diligently in the past four years to honor our pledge.  We have had the loving support of friends and family.  We have met many others who have suffered loss as we have.  We have met and been supported by new friends who are strong advocates for addiction education, prevention, treatment, recovery, criminal justice reform, research, and fighting the stigma surrounding the disease.  Eloquent all.

Since the founding of the Where There’s A Will Fund we have let the fund grow while we’ve attempted to identify those organizations whose work we believe has the most informed impact in the fight against addiction. This year, for the first time, we have made some modest grants from the fund.  As I wrote to each organization yesterday, “Our means are finite, our gratitude for you and your work boundless.” Because of the generosity of so many of you we have been able to recognize:

The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids

The Addiction Policy Forum

Facing Addiction

Friends of Recovery – New York

I encourage you to go online get a sense of the fine work these people do.

You can go here to get a sense of some of our work - our testimony before the House Bipartisan Task Force to Combat the Heroin Epidemic: Families Impacted by Addiction  5/18/16

 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKYBcsTobTak7yD690q4s_f6SoOx9hbNb

 

Our hope is to continue to be able to support these organizations as generously as possible in the future.  We will continue to work with them, advising, speaking, writing, participating in conferences and workshops, all the while benefitting from their wisdom and guidance.  We will always remain alert for new opportunities to recognize outstanding organizations. 

   

For those of you who feel so inclined you may support the Where There’s A Will Fund by contributing to:

                                                             Community Funds, Inc.

Fbo The Where There’s a Will Fund

The New York Community Trust

909 Third Avenue

New York, NY  10022

Thank you all for your support in all its forms.  Action remains eloquent.

    

Hallelujah!

A month ago I read an article in The New York Times by Michael Paulson, ‘Hamilton’ and Heartache: Living the Unimaginable.  It told the story of Oskar Eustis, director of the Public Theater in New York City, who lost his sixteen-year-old-son Jack two years ago.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/theater/oskar-eustis-public-theater.html   Part of the article read:

“An MP3 arrived by email, hours after Jack’s death.  It came from Lin-Manuel Miranda, a new arrival to the Public fold.  It was a demo recording of “It’s Quiet Uptown,” the song from “Hamilton” describing Alexander Hamilton, and his wife, Eliza, as they grieve the death of their 19-year-old son, Philip:

‘There are moments that the words don’t reach

There is suffering too terrible to name

You hold your child as tight as you can

And push away the unimaginable

The moments when you’re in so deep

It feels easier to just swim down.’

“There is nothing you can say,’ Mr. Miranda recalled thinking. “And yet, I had a song about this. So I wrote to him saying, ‘If this is useful, then lean on it, and, if not, delete this email.’”

“Mr. Eustis and his wife found it useful. “Every line of ‘Quiet Uptown’ feels like it’s exactly correct to my experience,” Mr. Eustis said. “It was the only music we listened to for a long time, and we listened to it every day, and it became a key thing for the two of us.”

Earlier this fall my wife, Margot, and I had the sublime opportunity go to “Hamilton”.  We’d listened to the recording beforehand to familiarize ourselves with the show.  We remained unprepared, however, as “It’s Quiet Uptown” and the performance surrounding it moved us to tears.  Like Alexander Hamilton, like Oskar Eustis, we have experienced “the suffering too terrible to name”, the death of our son, William just after he turned 24.  We’ve had to “push away the unimaginable”, we know the just wanting to “swim down.”  I reacted the way Oskar Eustis and his wife did, listening to the same music every day, listening to it for a long time.

   

In the early afternoon of December 2^nd, 2012, Margot, our daughter Elizabeth Hope, and I were squeezed into a small hospital room around the bedside of our son and brother William.  We’d spent the prior six weeks at his bedside, hoping for a miracle recovery; a brain deprived of oxygen after his heart had stopped beating for too long.  His heartbeat was restored by EMS personnel. Over the course of those six weeks, however, his damaged brain continued to wither.  His heart labored on as other body systems began to suffer from the stress they’d endured.  The end imminent, William was on morphine to guarantee he would suffer no pain.   The irony that a morphine derivative, heroin, had initially caused William’s heart to stop beating long enough to set off the sequence which would end with his imminent death was not lost on us.

We held William, caressed him and kissed him until he left us.  Moments later Elizabeth pulled out her cell phone, laid it near William’s head and played a song.  We’d played lots of music for William during those six weeks, especially anything by his favorite, Stevie Ray Vaughn.  Sometimes we’d sung to him, including “Happy Birthday” on November 18^th, toward the end of the ordeal, as he turned 24. The song was new to me, Antony and the Johnsons' “Thank You For Your Love.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Xdm5yS6PY I heard it and asked Elizabeth who the artist was and if she would play it again.  When we arrived home I found the song on You Tube and began playing it repeatedly.  I explored a bit and came across Antony’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will”. Instantly an old favorite, Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” compelled me. I listened to it over and over and over, lying in bed with my laptop, listening first to a gravelly Leonard Cohen himself singing it, then testing the renditions of all the artists I could find.  Sampling them all to distinguish comforting subtleties.  Listening obsessively, interrupted only by sporadic returns to “Thank You For Your Love.”  Ultimately soothed by repetitions of K.D. Laing’s rich offering, my ritual continued in the two weeks leading up to William’s memorial service.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE  I have no memory of when the rite tapered off.  I do know that I come back to the music when I need to, even finding something about the hateful embrace of heroin in all of Cohen’s lyric, most especially: “… love is not a victory march.  It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.”

Oskar Eustis’s description of his experience had, and has, a visceral similarity. “For me, the beautiful thing about ‘Quiet Uptown’ is, it serves a ritualistic function — it takes us into the grief, and then it takes us out of it,” Mr. Eustis said. “And there’s nothing, there’s no other ritual that I know of, that can do that for me.”

For me the music takes me back to that moment when hope for William flickered, even though I knew he was gone.  Death arrived before hope’s exit.  As Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote, “We push away what we can never understand, we push away the unimaginable.” Somehow the chance to say, “Thank you for your love,” the celebration inherent in the word “Hallelujah” gets me into and out of, or at least a bit further removed from, the grief that is always a part of me.

For four years now a prolonged six-week anniversary of events darkens even more the fall season of gathering darkness.  This year the struggle and the ritual have been heightened by Leonard Cohen’s death.  “Hallelujah” has sprung forth from Kate McKinnon, a children’s choir, Facebook posts in honor of Leonard Cohen.  Is it quiet now where we live uptown on New York’s Upper West Side?  At the least, perhaps calmed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s magnificently comprehending song and an unknown, now discovered bond with Oskar Eustis.

This November 18^th there will be a “Hallelujah” for our lost boy/man, as Elizabeth, Margot, and I continue “working through the unimaginable”, sorely missing our moment to sing “Happy Birthday” to William.