Is Rehab the Answer...

I recently read about a parent losing a child whilst in rehab, and it brought back a question that has haunted me for years: Is rehab the answer?

If you are the parent of a child struggling with addiction, chances are you have asked yourself this question too. Do I send them to rehab? Which rehab? Do I force them to go? What if they refuse? Do I keep them home where I can watch them? Do I practice tough love, or do I hold them closer? Do I take away their phone, their car, their money? Do I wait until they are ready? Every decision feels enormous because underneath every question is the only one that really matters: What do I have to do to keep my child alive?

I know that desperation because I lived it with Lilly. When your child is struggling with addiction, you stop thinking like a normal parent. You become a detective, a nurse, a counselor, a security guard and sometimes a prisoner in your own home. You watch their eyes and listen to their voice. You notice how long they have been in the bathroom. You wonder who is texting them. You check whether they are breathing when they sleep. You listen for footsteps in the middle of the night. You tell yourself you won't enable them, and then fear takes over because you wonder if saying no will send them somewhere even more dangerous. You become afraid of doing too much and terrified of not doing enough.

People looking from the outside can tell you exactly what you should do. Send her to rehab. Stop enabling her. She has to want recovery herself. Practice tough love. Don't let her come home. Keep her close. Set boundaries. Walk away until she is ready. But when it is your child, none of those sentences are simple. You aren't worried that making the wrong decision will make your child angry with you. You are terrified that making the wrong decision could mean your child dies.

Lilly died at home, and that fact has lived inside me ever since. For years, I have tortured myself with one particular thought: I should have sent Lilly straight to rehab. I have replayed it hundreds of different ways. What if I had put her in the car? What if I had insisted? What if I had ignored every objection and driven her straight there? What if I had found another facility? What if I had been stronger? What if I had recognized how much danger she was really in? What if I had made just one different decision? Would Lilly still be here?

That is one of the cruelest parts of losing a child to addiction. You don't just grieve your child; you investigate yourself. You become the prosecutor, the witness and the defendant in a trial that never ends. You replay every conversation, every argument, every warning sign and every decision. You put every moment under a microscope, searching for the place where you could have changed the ending. No matter how deeply you loved your child or how desperately you tried to save them, grief finds a way to ask, What did I miss? What should I have done? Could I have saved her?

For me, rehab became part of that guilt. As a desperate mother, I believed rehab was the place that could keep Lilly alive. It represented a controlled environment, professionals who understood addiction, counseling, structure and distance from the people and circumstances surrounding her drug use. Rehab represented hope. I thought if I could just get her there, maybe someone could do what I couldn't. Maybe they could protect her long enough for her to find her way back to herself.

Treatment does save lives. Recovery is real, and there are people alive today because they received professional treatment at the right moment and were able to begin rebuilding their lives. I would never tell another parent not to seek professional help for a child struggling with substance use. But I also understand something now that I desperately wanted not to be true when Lilly was alive: rehab is not a guarantee. There is no building we can place our children inside that allows us to finally exhale and know that nothing bad can happen to them again.

My own story contains a painful contradiction that I still struggle to understand. The person Lilly ultimately got the laced Roxy from was someone she had met in rehab. The very place I associated with saving her life also introduced her to someone who would later become part of the chain of events surrounding her death. How does a mother make peace with that? How do I reconcile years of telling myself, You should have sent her to rehab, with the knowledge that rehab itself became part of Lilly's story in a way I never could have anticipated?

I don't say this because I believe rehab killed Lilly. I don't. And I don't say it to discourage another parent from seeking treatment. I say it because parents dealing with addiction deserve something more honest than simple answers. Sometimes treatment works. Sometimes someone goes to treatment several times before recovery takes hold. Sometimes they leave treatment and relapse. Sometimes parents empty savings accounts, borrow money and try one program after another. Sometimes families follow every recommendation they are given, and sometimes, despite everything they do, they still lose their child.

We desperately want addiction to have an equation: addiction plus rehab equals recovery. We want that equation because it gives us something every parent desperately needs—control. If there is a formula, then we can follow it. If there is a right decision, then we can make it. If there is a place we can send our child that guarantees survival, then we will move heaven and earth to get them there. But addiction doesn't always work that way. Recovery doesn't always work that way. And grief certainly doesn't.

There are parents living this nightmare right now. Somewhere tonight, a mother is standing outside her child's bedroom door listening to make sure she can hear breathing. A father is searching treatment centers on his phone. Parents are arguing about whether their child needs inpatient treatment or whether outpatient care might be enough. A mother is wondering whether kicking her son out will finally force him to seek help or put him in even greater danger. Another parent is wondering whether allowing a daughter to come home is compassion or enabling. Someone is staring at a phone terrified that it will ring, while someone else is terrified because it hasn't. Different families, different children, different circumstances, but underneath all of it is the same desperate question: What decision gives my child the best chance of being alive tomorrow?

I wish I could give those parents the answer. I wish someone could have given it to me. The truth is that addiction puts families in situations where every option can feel dangerous. That doesn't mean we stop seeking treatment. It doesn't mean we give up on rehab. It doesn't mean professional help isn't necessary. It means we stop pretending parents have a crystal ball. We stop looking at a grieving mother after her child dies and asking why she didn't do something differently, because I promise you, she has already asked herself that question a thousand times.

We need to stop assuming that if a parent had been stricter, softer, more educated, more watchful, more forceful or more loving, the ending necessarily would have been different. Most parents aren't choosing between an obviously good decision and an obviously bad one. They are choosing between frightening options while trying to predict which one gives their child the greatest chance of seeing tomorrow. Then, if their child dies, they have to live with the decision they made.

That is what I have had to do. Lilly died on July 11, 2020. There is my life before that date, and there is my life after it. Six years later, my mind can still travel backward in seconds. I can still find that moment and think, I should have driven you straight to rehab. That sentence hurts because it contains the fantasy every grieving parent understands: if I had just made one different decision, maybe my child would still be here.

But then another question comes. What if rehab wouldn't have changed it? What if there had been another relapse? Another person? Another pill? Another night? What if the decision I have punished myself for all these years wasn't actually the decision that determined whether Lilly lived or died? The truth is that I will never know, and that may be one of the hardest things I will ever have to accept. There is no alternate life I can visit where I made the other choice. I don't get to see what would have happened if I had put Lilly in the car and driven her straight to treatment. I only know what happened in this life. My daughter died, and I loved her beyond words. Those two truths exist together.

For parents facing these decisions today, I would still say: get help. Seek professional treatment. Ask questions. Learn everything you can about addiction and the substances your child is using. Understand the danger of fentanyl and counterfeit pills. Keep NARCAN available. Ask treatment programs what happens after discharge, how they handle relapse prevention, what evidence-based treatments they provide and what support exists for the family. Ask what you should do if your child relapses. Ask every question you can think of. Then make the best decision you can with the information you have at that moment.

But I would tell those parents something else too. You are making decisions in circumstances no parent was ever prepared for. There may not be a perfect decision. There may only be the best decision you can make today. And if the unimaginable happens, grief may try to convince you that you should have known the future. I know because mine still does.

Perhaps the hardest thing I have had to accept about losing Lilly is that loving her with everything I had did not give me the power to control the outcome. God knows I loved that girl. I would have traded places with her. I would have given everything I owned. I would have driven anywhere, paid anything, sat beside her every second and fought anyone or anything if someone could have promised me, Do this and Lilly will live. But nobody could make me that promise. Not a doctor. Not a therapist. Not a rehab. Not me.

So when I ask myself today, Is rehab the answer? I don't think the answer is as simple as yes or no. Rehab can be an answer. Treatment can be a lifeline. Professional intervention matters. Recovery happens, and hope matters enormously. But rehab cannot give desperate parents the certainty we are really searching for, because when we ask, Will rehab work?, what we are actually asking is something much more frightening: Will my child live?

I still wish I had driven Lilly straight to rehab. Maybe a part of me always will. But I am trying to understand that wishing I had made a different decision is not the same as knowing that decision would have changed the ending. There is a heartbreaking difference between those two things.

If you are the parent of a child struggling with addiction, I see the impossible decisions you are trying to make. I understand the fear behind them. We aren't choosing whether to love our children. We are desperately trying to figure out how to love them in a way that keeps them alive.

And for those of us whose children didn't survive, that love didn't disappear when they died. Neither did the questions.

I will probably always wonder what I could have done differently. I will probably always have moments when I close my eyes and imagine putting Lilly in the car, driving her straight to rehab and somehow changing the ending. In that version of the story, she survives. Of course she does. Because every version of Lilly's story that I rewrite in my head has the same ending I wanted from the beginning.

Lilly comes home.

Not because rehab was the answer. Not because I finally made the perfect decision. Not because I found the perfect doctor or somehow learned how to defeat addiction.

She comes home because the only answer I ever really wanted was my daughter.

Alive.