Thankful Mother Chooses Better Over Bitter
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
Diana Teel’s grief journey began on March 4, 2020, when her son, Raymond, died from an overdose.
Like many, Ray’s substance use began with a prescription from the family doctor and slowly escalated to chemical dependence, multiple recoveries, intermittent hope, and tragedy.
Teel is a nurse in long-term recovery, well acquainted with the realities of substance use. Regardless, when the unspeakable came to pass, she was forced to contend with grief in a daily struggle for her own survival. Teel shares her transformative mindset, and the subsequent outreach made possible by her spiritual resolve.
A Shining Light
“We were blessed with a full funeral,” Teel begins. “Probably one of the last ones before the COVID-19 shutdown. Over 750 people attended Ray’s service. We ended up keeping the funeral home open to visitors and hour-and-a-half later, as he was very well known in the community.”
“Ray had been to treatment a number of times and was always a bright light for others in the facility. He knew a lot about recovery. He loved fashion and style and was a straight-A student. He was a triple letter athlete and made the varsity team by the ninth grade. His senior year, he started taking Percocet with others on the football team due to injuries. They didn’t know what they were getting themselves into until they woke up sick one day. Percocet is expensive, so they switched to drugs from the street.”
“My father died during Ray’s senior year of high school, and he had a hard time handling it. That was when I first started seeing the signs that he might have this disease. But he got a scholarship to Norwich University and pulled it together. When he came back home after that first year, he got back with his old buddies – drinking and taking pills. That made him unable to return, which was one of his first losses.”
“One of Ray’s biggest struggles with staying sober was the shame,” Teel explains. “He had a lot of recovery tools, and he would get sober while helping many people do the same. But as we know, people with the disease are prone to relapse. I would say to him, ‘You are succeeding. If you were sober 355 out of the last 365 days, that is a success.’”
Complications Abound
“In 2019, he was doing well at a recovery facility in Manchester. That year, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and he came home from recovery to support me. Sometime after, he got distracted again.”
“He had Blue Cross insurance, and they would send the checks for his care directly to him. He was trying to work a program and stay sober, but then he got a check in the mail for $33,000. At that point, all bets were off. In January of 2019 we went back into treatment, relapsed again, and we lost him.”
“My daughter had a baby just before he died, and I am so glad he got to meet her. On our last day with him, we were at the hospital, and he came straight from work to meet her. His disease was calling him, and he had not done any heroin for a while, he was shooting cocaine. He ended up getting both substances, and he overdosed in my house. I tried to revive him, and I could not.”
Never Alone
“My grief journey has been quite remarkable,” Teel attests. “I am a faith-based woman, and I really threw my heart out to the Lord. Within 24 hours of losing Ray, I was sitting on my porch, in a place where I sit every night, and I was talking to God, surrendering my soul. I said, ‘I don’t know what I am going to do.’ He said to me, ‘Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you could be thankful that you got to be a mother for 29 years.’”
“For the last four years, what has made a difference for me, is having gratitude in my grief. I’ve had tremendous emotional pain, but no self-pity. In my prayer time, I took inventory of things to be thankful for, and it really started to flow towards gratitude for my granddaughter. I didn’t think I would have joy in my life again, but she brought joy, and it is no coincidence that she was born two days before I lost Ray.”
“In my grief journey, I have met other bereaved mothers, who after only six-or-so months were told by family and peers to ‘move on.’ I have never moved on. My attitude is that I am going forward in life, and I am bringing Ray with me. I talk about him all the time and it gives me great comfort to say his name.”
“This holiday season was really hard for me, so I made a post on Facebook. I said that I was really missing Ray and the best Christmas gift people could give me was to share stories about him. 100 or so people posted all kinds of great stories about Ray.”
Pain to Purpose
“Because of my own recovery, I am a person of action, so I tried to get to as many meetings as I could,” Teel says. “As far as grief support went, I could only find meetings online due to COVID-19. Someone gave me Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler. In it, he says to take the pain and give it purpose, which has turned out to be 100 percent true of my journey. That is what I set out to do.”
“Just before the one-year anniversary of Ray’s death, I met with my pastor. We were preparing to have a big celebration of life. He suggested that I make use of a space in Haverhill, the church I had access to during the pandemic. That was the beginning of the Ray of Light Recovery Cafe.”
“Initially, it was just a grassroots operation with me, some donations, and support from the recovery network, but it has grown. I looked into the Recovery Cafe Network back when Ray was still alive. We always talked about doing something special along these lines. I eventually contacted them, and we started meeting via Zoom. They put me in touch with a recovery cafe in Lowell, which used to be called Lowell House but recently rebranded as Riverbend.”
“I partnered with them, we wrote a BSAS (Bureau of Substance Addiction Services) grant together, and we got fully funded. We are about one month shy of opening, with a tentative date set for February 14. I found a building that was rather run down, but it has an awesome stage, and we were able to buy it. Now the place is looking gorgeous. The tagline for Ray of Light Recovery Cafe is ‘Love is the Movement’ which was a saying on one of Ray’s jackets.”
“This is one of a few things that have been my saving grace. I felt like I had a choice when I lost Ray when I was so crushed. I said to myself, ‘You’re either going to get better, or get bitter, the choice is yours. You’re either going to lean on your faith and make something good come out of this, or you’re going to go under, and this disease is going to get you too.’”
“I made the decision to get better and fight harder than ever, and to honor Ray.”
A Fitting Release
Like his mother, Ray was very active in the church. Over the years during periods of sobriety, he went on 14 missions to help orphanages in Honduras. “That was his true happy place,” Teel says. “That is a testament to the fact that I had relinquished him to his own higher power. I would always try to get Ray into the best 12-step house available, but I never had Honduras on my radar.”
“When Ray returned from his first mission, he told me that he’d received a message from God while on a mountain top near the orphanages. He understood that he could still do something good with his life, despite all the shame from losing opportunities due to substance use.”
Recently, Teel and Ray’s pastor, Rachel, travelled to Honduras with Ray’s ashes and spread them from that same mountain top. “The mountainside was all coffee plants being cultivated by a local farmer,” Teel recalls. “Ray loved a good cup of coffee.”
They met people from the orphanages who knew Ray and they shared stories of his goodwill. “He did a lot of good there,” she says. “The people he helped truly loved him.”