Lorain County families, service providers raise awareness for 119 lives lost to overdoses in 2022

LORAIN — Last year alone, 119 people died from accidental overdoses in Lorain County. On Thursday, community members and service providers gathered to honor them. A sea of people wearing purple shirts, scarves and pins filled Lakeview Park's Sunset Terrace on International Overdose Awareness Day, listening to the family members of those lost to addiction or recovering addicts themselves tell their stories. Keynote speaker and nurse practitioner Dawn Bova saw her father struggle with alcoholism long before it became a problem in her own life, she said. She found her own recovery community and life got better, she said. But in the 2010s, with the opioid epidemic in full force in smalltown Bellevue, she watched her son, Brad, struggle with addiction. Brad attempted recovery several times, she said — she watched him detox at home and spend months sober before relapsing. Eventually, he moved to Florida for a fresh start and, eventually, went into a halfway house in 2016. But that halfway house was unregulated, she said. Three weeks after he moved in, he died of an overdose. He was 23 years old. He'd had months of sobriety at the time, she said, and the loss shook her to her core. "I couldn't believe it," she said. She met Brad's sponsor, Brian, who flew out for the funeral and quickly became part of her family. "He was an angel," she said, remembering how he would call her at 1 a.m. when he saw she was online and talk her through her grief. He was a chaplain, she said, and when he relapsed after the end of a bad relationship he went into the same recovery program Brad had. But COVID hit soon after he got out, and the meetings he'd clung to, the community he'd started when he held sessions on his front porch, had evaporated. Like Brad, he wanted a fresh start and, despite Bova's protests, moved from Florida to North Carolina, she said. There, he relapsed less than a month after the move and died. She remembered questioning how much loss one person could take after she buried the man who had become like a son to her. And in 2022 she lost her grandson, William. His babysitter, Kori Seavers, of Fremont, has been charged with his murder. It was at her sister's behest Bova started to paint. She said she found the creative outlet a powerful therapeutic tool. Looking out at the crowd Thursday evening, she encouraged them to find their own creative outlet — from painting to music, cooking to knitting. She also encouraged mindfulness and an awareness that words matter. She said she doesn't remember Brad as an addict. "Brad was Brad," she said, noting that's how he saw himself as well. John Corry, First Alliance Health Care program administrator, implored the service providers in the audience to do more. Corry, who battled his own heroin addiction for decades, lost his first wife to an overdose before he got sober. "We've got to lower the number from 119," he said of the lives lost in 2022. He urged providers to put "boots on the ground" and bring services to those in addiction, rather than expecting them to reach out. Aja Boland, peer support coordinator with Ohio Guidestone, touched on her own struggle with alcoholism, and losing her birth mother to an overdose in 2016. Pilgrim United Church of Christ Pastor Troy Smith has been in recovery for more than two decades, he said. "It can work, you just have to want it," he said. He said he's conducted more than 40 funerals for overdoses and sat with a grieving mother while she waited for the coroner to come to take the body of her son who had overdosed. He said he didn't understand the disease he was facing when he was in addiction, but now that he's on the other side he said helping someone else get sober is what's important. The Mental Health, Addiction and Recovery Services Board of Lorain County, alongside the Nord Center and The LCADA Way, will break ground in late October on the county's new Crisis Receiving Center. Once constructed, the center will be able to provide 16 beds for individuals struggling with addiction wishing to detox and 16 for those struggling with mental health issues. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.