MANSFIELD — When her homeless brother died from a heroin overdose while staying at a Volunteers of America Clinic, Annette Welker felt an unseemly emotion: relief.
“I know it sounds terrible to say it … but at least he wasn’t suffering anymore,” she said.
Todd Laughlin, Welker’s youngest brother, died from a heroin overdose eight years ago at the age of 39. He struggled with a cocaine addiction for five years before he died. Before that, he owned a house in Shelby, two FedEx trucks and his own business.
“He lost it all when the drug use started,” Welker remembered.
Welker remembers taking care of him as a baby, changing his diapers, being a second mother. Then their parents divorced.
“He lived with my dad and I lived with mom. Then after a time he came to live with us. I’ve always wondered like, what drove him to addiction and not me? I don’t know,” she said, pausing. “I guess some people can’t handle certain things. I think maybe he had a mental illness that went untreated and depression, maybe bipolar.”
Her brother’s drug addiction still does not make sense to her or her family. As a nurse practitioner for OhioHealth, Welker deals with addicts on a regular basis. She experience the heartache it causes families and the community.
But no experience outside of her own family’s compares to the heartache she witnessed in her own mother.
“We were at her house and she walked in the door and saw all of us and she knew right away. She knew what it was. And just collapsed. That was just a horrible, horrible feeling. And then we felt bad because they had already taken the body, so she couldn’t see the body. So that was difficult for her,” Welker said.
Her brother’s death drove Welker to become more proactive in advocating a drug-free life and fighting against addiction. She joined Community Action for Capable Youth’s board of directors three years ago and participated in the Spherion Mid Ohio 13er.
But she knows more can and should be done — she just doesn’t know what.
“I wish I had a great answer for that,” she said, adding perhaps more affordable programs for rehabilitation and longer, court-ordered rehabilitation participation.
“Unless you have money to go to a good program, it’s not working. And these people are going into these programs for 30 days and that’s all their insurance will pay for and then they’re right back in the same situations that they were before.”
Running is Welker’s solution. She said it helps her make sense of her brother’s, and other’s, addiction.
“When it get’s really hard, I think about my brother. I think about, gosh, you know, all the things that he’s gone through, I can’t give up now and I can’t stop. You just keep going,” she said.
She is registered for Saturday’s Spherion Mid Ohio 13er. And she knows the above mentioned thoughts will race through her mind as she climbs Griebling Road, nicknamed “The Big G” for it’s steep hill that plateaus midway and continues to climb until reaching Cook Road.
“Oh yeah, that was the hardest (part of the run),” Welker said, laughing.
