Beth and Tom Tailer lost their daughter Kate (pictured below) to a drug overdose a year ago in December 2007. Instead of hanging a stocking from their hearth for Kate this year, as they did for their three surviving daughters, they hung a wooden angel.
PHOTO BY WENDY HATOUM
Lessons from grief
Family reaches out after losing a daughter to drug overdose
By WENDY HATOUM
The Essex Reporter (January 15, 2009)
Beth and Tom Tailer lost their daughter Kate to drug addiction just over one year ago. The vibrant 21-year- old overdosed accidentally on a prescription painkiller, and died in December 2007. In the face of this loss, the Tailers decided to share what they’ve learned during the last year with their community.
The Tailers are open with their lives and their emotions and are very forthright in talking about Kate’s life, and their process of grieving her loss. Their approach through this period has been to embrace the emotion of the moment and experience it, rather than tuck it away to be dealt with later, or not at all. The circumstances surrounding Kate’s death have forced them to confront two taboos in our society – death and drug addiction.
Kate Tailer had a gift of communication with all things wild, her parents said. She once won a wager with a high-school teacher who doubted her when she said she could catch a bird with her bare hands. As a toddler, she could catch two frogs at the same time and hold them in her hands. Kate was a gifted athlete, mastering soccer, track and pole vaulting.
She helped her father build an addition to their home, delighting in framing a 16- foot-high wall and pulling it up into position.
Despite her strengths, she couldn’t beat her personal demon, addiction. Katelyn Sue Moosh-ka-koosh McGuinness Tailer died Dec. 18, 2007 in Windham, New York. She was partying with “friends” and overdosed from a combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.
She left her parents and three sisters, among other family members, who continue to work through their grief, questioning, “Why did she have to die?” and “Why could she not win over the addictions?”
One of the most difficult parts of dealing with this experience for the Tailers was that some people simply preferred not to know. Their daughter’s death was communicated in some circles, and the couple was given support, specifically at Tom’s school, Mount Abraham High School in Bristol, where he works as a physics teacher.
Similarly at Beth’s workplace, Fletcher Allen Health Care, her peers were emotionally present and supportive. But in other areas of their lives, their loss either wasn’t communicated or news of it was not received well.
“I wish you hadn’t told me,” Beth recalls being told by the parent of one of her daughter’s classmates when she told her of Kate’s death.
In dealing with their loss, the Tailers have found that our society has very few rituals to cope with the death of a child and death in general. So they’ve developed their own as they’ve gone along.
“There aren’t many cultural references for grief,” explained Tom, saying that some cultures have physical manifestations of loss. “You wear black, torn clothes or cut your hair to communicate your loss to society. We don’t have that kind of custom.”
“There are no rules. Everyone experiences their own grief in their own way,” said Beth. She explained that as a Native American, one of the first things she did was to cut her hair. “You cut your hair away because it held memories,” said Beth, explaining that the short hair also communicates to others that you are in the grief process.
Tom thought it important that he make his daughter’s casket. He and Beth along with some of Kate’s friends crafted one of pine with cherry handles and a bronze heart adorning it.
“We went back and forth, them (the funeral home) saying you can’t do this,” Tom recalled, but once they realized the family was serious about their wishes, the funeral director worked with them. “Let the funeral director know what you want,” advised Tom.
The couple has found support from the Burlington chapter of The Compassionate Friends, which offers grief work to those dealing with the loss of a child or sibling. It has helped them deal with the questions of “why?” and “what if?” “There are an infinite number of unanswerable questions that plague me in the night,” said Tom. “Once you realize you’re in that loop, you just have to let it go.”
When they learned of their daughter’s death, anger, in addition to grief, was their initial reaction. “She had the tools, she had the support, so why did she overdose?”
Tom said, referring to Kate’s successful completion of Second Nature, a rehabilitation program in southern Utah. Kate had graduated from high school and had planned to enroll in college at the time of her overdose. “She fought the addiction, but it was stronger than she was,” Beth said.
Kate’s cravings for a high started very early. As a child, her parents would find bowls lined with sugar crystals under her bed. They were the remnants of syrupy concoctions of sugar and water, which she would drink to get a sugar high.
According to her mother, Kate was strong-willed, loved nature, and “was always her own person.”
They believe Kate started to take drugs, specifically Ecstasy, in eighth grade, as that is when they noticed a marked difference in her behavior. She gradually lost interest in sports, her grades suffered, and her friends changed.
“She was gifted, brilliant and intuitive,” Beth said. “But Kate was always outside the box.”
In 10th grade, Kate left Essex High School for a series of stays at rehab facilities in Vermont and New York. None of these was effective for her.
If anything they exposed her to other addicts and addictive behaviors, her parents said. It was the seven-week stay at the Second Nature program in Utah where she finally found the tools and inner strength to be clean. The program was expensive but had a record of success.
Following high school graduation from a Virginia boarding school where she thrived, she returned to New England where she experienced a series of relapses. She knew she needed help and told her parents she needed a new start. She moved to the Catskills and lived there only a few months before she died.
Once her addiction took hold, Kate became a person neither parent recognized. She lied, stole, and despite a parole-required curfew, snuck out of the house – all in the service of the addiction’s cravings.
“Kate fought the addiction, but it was stronger than she was. She was hard to love, so we had to love her harder. I miss Kate, but I do not miss her addiction,” Beth said. “In her last year, almost all we saw was the addict.”
The family struggled to balance helping Kate without enabling her, and employed “tough love” principles. Her parents still second-guess their choice to bail her out of jail in June of 2007. Kate was pulled over by the police as she was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Police found her to have a series of outstanding legal issues.
Her parents had already started to work with her to start her life over again, as Kate had acknowledged she had a problem. She was bailed out and was starting to address her issues in New York. At the time of her overdose, she was working two jobs, communicating more with her family and said, “I love you,” the last time she spoke to her parents.
“You have the illusion that you can go back to that place,” said Tom. “But ultimately we make our choices based on the knowledge we have at the time.”
Both of the Tailers conclude that the war on drugs has not been effective, and the criminal justice system’s approach to dealing with addiction is not working.
“Our family lost the war on drugs,” Tom said. They worry about the drugs that are currently taking hold in Vermont communities, specifically increased use of heroin, crystal meth, and oxycontin.
“Our culture is in denial,” Tom said, noting that they know of parents who lost a child to a drug overdose and never told their surviving children the cause of death.
Both Beth and Tom Tailer have seen the effects of addiction, not just from their personal experience, but from their work as well. Tom can attest to the easy accessibility of drugs to high school students, saying that according to recent studies, in most Vermont high schools the majority of students know an adult pusher and have peers with access.
Beth, a nurse in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Fletcher Allen, has seen the effect of addicted mothers giving birth to babies. These infants then need to be weaned from their own drug dependence. “I see babies born addicted to opiates, or affected from cocaine use,” said Beth, adding the hospital is currently involved in a national study working to change the treatment of infant addiction.
Tom would like to see marijuana legalized, (not just decriminalized as Massachusetts has done), and heavily taxed. “Currently hundreds of millions of dollars are going into organized crime,” he said. “The profits are an incentive to pushers to get kids addicted.”
The Tailers would like to see those tax dollars used to fund treatment. “There are rehabilitation programs that are successful…but they are very expensive and take time,” Tom said. “My understanding is that the programs for addicts in Vermont are not enough. Some drug addictions take months or years of counseling and treatment to overcome.”
The Tailers advocate that the drinking age remains at 21. They cite the “Rule of Fives,” explaining that the younger someone starts experimenting with drugs and alcohol, the more quickly they become addicted.
According to the rule, it takes five days to become addicted to a substance if you are in middle school, five months if you are in high school or college, and five years to become addicted, beyond the age of 25.
Community involvement and participation in group- organized sports are some of the tools that parents can use to keep their children from becoming involved in drugs.
“It’s a cliché, ‘it takes a village,’ but in Vermont we still have villages,” said Tom. “Facilitating community is the easy part, but we need funded intervention – that’s the harder part. We need state-funded programs like Second Nature here in Vermont.”
The Tailers know that Kate’s death has made an impact on her friends, three of whom have been clean and sober since her death. The family hopes that by sharing her story, the impact will go beyond those who knew Kate personally, and will ripple through the community.
“Our children cannot afford our silence around these issues,” Tom said.
This is a follow-up story to an article Joyce Carroll wrote for the Jan. 24, 2008 issue of The Essex Reporter.
