It’s time. I feel like I’ve healed. Not completely, but I feel more like a whole person, a whole person who needs to say it. Not that I was hiding anything before, but I just hadn’t wrapped my head around it. I’ve always been open to talking about Gregg’s life, and death, to whomever asked, but I just don’t offer up the details. He was too special, and also it was too traumatic.

I spent months trying to figure out if this was a story of PTSD or of addiction. I still don’t know, but I don’t think it matters. The trauma, the TBI, the paranoia, the nightmares. The drug-seeking, the lying, the impulsivity, the chaos. There’s really no separating the two. They were the experiences of the same man and the manifestations of the same brain, both driven by the same spirit.

But I don’t even know how to start. Some days I can make sense of it all, and some days it’s all muddled. But no matter which way you straighten out all the details and the symptoms and the signs, it always ends the same.

Gregg died of an overdose. He never had to use drugs off the street. His drugs of choice were ones that were created to help people. Humans like to fix things and it was easy for Gregg to find people, doctors and friends, who wanted to fix his inattention and his sleeping problems and his anxiety and his pain. But the drugs never really fixed anything. And when no one could fix it and he couldn’t let God take it away, he numbed it.

I think a lot of people have gotten the impression that Gregg committed suicide, which is understandable. And I’m not in denial when I say that’s not what happened. I was always really aware of where he was mentally, and that’s not where he was when he died. But at the same time, I think he did sort of lose his will to live. I recently read an article written by a woman who had overdosed numerous times. She said that if you get high enough, you’re either numb to the disappointment and the self-hatred and the chaos that you face everyday, or you don’t wake up and those things aren’t a problem anymore. Win-win. I think that’s where Gregg was.

But of course, that’s bullshit, which the woman in the article also talked about. If your brain tells you those are two best case scenarios, it is lying. Numbing isn’t the only way to deal with negative emotions. There’s always a way back.

And that’s all that I can put into words right now, I guess. I’ve always planned on sharing Gregg’s story in a way that would impact the world, the way he impacted the world while he was here. He was extraordinary, I can’t let his death be meaningless. But overdose is a hard topic. People don’t dress up and hold fancy dinners to raise funds for addiction research or run marathons to fight opiate abuse, yet. Society sees addiction as a shameful disease. It happens in a place people don’t want to visit, or even think about. Even me. I’ve been there with people I love, and I don’t like looking back at it.

People who die from cancer or in a car crash are victims of circumstance. Their death was an injustice. People who die from an overdose made the choices that led to their death. I feel like that’s a fair generalization of society’s views, and I don’t necessarily disagree. I believe that we’ve been given the power to choose to put in the work that will help us to be better. But if a cancer patient was in denial about their disease and never sought treatment, would they be a victim of circumstance or would they responsible for their body destroying itself? If someone trusts a green light and pulls into the intersection without looking both ways, have they died from their own choices or have they been failed by the system that was supposed to keep them safe? There’s no right answer, but have you ever thought about it? Do some people deserve to be saved?

I think that Gregg was saved from a lifetime of pain. And that is merciful. He is also missing out on a lifetime of joy, but not because he didn’t deserve it. He deserved every ounce of joy and happiness, and I know he’s going to be able to cash in on that. Because God is fair. Life is not, but God is. And Gregg is getting the chance to grow and learn just like us.