LIFE AFTER YOU

In this debut book, a mother recounts the devastating legacy of her son’s drug use and death.

One day in February 2014, the author and her husband busted down the bedroom door of their 19-year-old son Danny’s room to discover him slumped over his desk, dark blue, swollen, and dead of a drug overdose. “I want to scream at every kid in the world—STOP THIS NOW!” Lajterman writes. Part lamentation, part angry shriek, this account warns teenagers, their parents, families, schools, and advocates against the terrible consequences of drug use. The author makes no distinction as to the drug. In her view, all drugs and alcohol end in one place—death and its awful repercussions, which include wave after wave of negative effects on family and friends, a seemingly never-ending poisonous cycle from which there is no relief. This small volume clearly unmasks the brutality, the horror, and the relentless pain caused when a kid dies from an overdose. Not a guide to drug abuse and recovery, not advice for troubled families, this title squarely targets young people who either want to experiment with drugs or have already begun messing with them, announcing only one goal: to tell the unvarnished truth about the consequences of substance abuse. Young folks lured by drugs never think about the mother whose son has died from drugs and whose mourning never ends, or the father who years after his child’s funeral weeps in the shower every day so that other members of the family won’t hear his sobbing. Or the sister who keeps her brother’s room exactly as it was the day he died. Now, the teens who read this heart-rending book will—or at least that’s the author’s hope. Written in direct, no-nonsense prose, this difficult work tears away at the lies readers tell themselves to hide from the ugly truths this tragic account reveals.

Meant to scare kids straight, this sobering journey shows the unremitting personal hell that results when a teen dies from an overdose.