Losing Gannon

I think I have been hiding, too much pain from losing Gannon, my oldest son. I was having dreams all of the time of being lost and not being able to find needed things. Now my dreams are me finding things and always with friends and family around, so I think I am coming back out into the world, and am excited! I just haven’t been ready until recently. I don’t hurt as much about Gannon these days, almost four years after his passing. I know I will be with him again, in some context. I know that the whole thing was a great life experience that kicked us all around for a very long time. I will always miss him terribly. I think often of all of the families that are still going through this heart breaker.

He was so gorgeous and so talented, a dear sweet Rockabilly man, worked when he was just a kid, went and found jobs and lied about his age. A couple employers came to our apartment in downtown Northampton and asked about him. I said, “no we don’t take his money. He buys art books and art materials with it", so they let him work...he was like 13 years old then. He went to court to get out of high school and he tested out 75% above most high school graduates so they let him out. He studied on his own and went to NYC at 18 with his art portfolio and got into The School of Visual Arts there, deferred enrollment for one year to earn some money first. Before ever starting at SVA he was hired with his portfolio only, as an Art Director at Avirex, an international retailer of WWII memorabilia reproductions, mostly high end clothing. He had five artists under him, and was a golden child for four years, living with his fiancé Alethia who was going to Columbia University. They tried Heroin at company yacht parties. Gannon liked it so much, as it made him feel relaxed like he fit in. He had always felt out of place, ever racing too fast forward. He started nipping during the week without her knowing, and within a few weeks he was hooked and had maxed out all of their credit cards buying Heroin. From there on out it was a tragic story, so hard to recount. Have you ever seen the Basketball Diaries, the movie based on the book Jim Carroll wrote about his Heroin addiction? We have lived a version of that hell. Gannon was such a dynamic individual.... people used to stop me on the street all of the time and rave about him. He turned us on to so much, art, music, design, clothing, you name it. We had some of that on our own as I was an artist and so was his step father, but he so obsessed he carried us into the full world of it. We are built on Gannon’s ground.

I remember how I used to be before we found out about his illness. The kids and I made fun of the public warning TV spot when it said “no one dreams of growing up to be a junkie”...like that was so absurd it was laughable. Not so funny anymore. The hardest part for us of course was watching all the hell he went through and how scared he was, and a good deal of the time he was so far away as he had burned so many bridges here I told him he needed to leave so I could raise Ari and Ant. We would occasionally hear from him and send money, but he was always on our minds, especially on holidays. I let him come back out here when Ari and Ant were older if he would go into treatment for a year. I found him a place just south of here, and they taught him how to be a real person again. When he got out of there he did well for a couple of years, but always fell again. (Alethia left him and had married another shortly after he became ill, and that always hurt him. They were beautiful together). He fought it hard and well, recovering and building a new life, then he would fall again. It is a progressive disease, so each time he fell harder. Finally when Ari was at Cornell University and Ant was in his early 20s I had Gannon move in with me after he was released from detox. We did have some really good times then. He tried twice to get his own place but would relapse every time he hit a rocky spot in life. We would show up and he would be almost gone. We'd get him back into Detox. Heroin cripples the mind and removes the natural endorphins so they can’t make it through bad times without amazing support, and we sometimes didn't know when it was starting again. He again came back to live with Ant and me after his last bout. He survived here on Methadone but was so broken from it all, losing everything time after time, he just had lost his belief in himself and was too drugged to see any of his magic anymore. I picked up Ant and his girlfriend from a painting job and we came home from buying Gannon good food and juice that night because he had been too ill to work with them, and he had passed away inside our front door.

The cause of death was hemorrhagic pancreatitis, probably caused by Seroquel, one of the many prescribed drugs he was on, but I think he was just ready to leave. He needed a sweet rest.