The End of the Line

THE GRAVEYARD. THIS WAS where drugs and alcohol had led me. I was 34 and had never had a job until now, working at the cemetery. I’d just gotten my first assignment to dig a grave. As if I hadn’t been digging my own grave for years. Smoking pot, drinking beer, dropping out of school. Getting hooked on opioids. Getting in trouble with the law, landing in jail. I was the poster boy for addiction.

I’d fallen into the dead-end life I saw growing up, the only kind of life I knew. The steel and manufacturing industries here in West Virginia collapsed in the early 1980s, around the time I was born. There were mass layoffs, factory and mill shutdowns. My hometown of Huntington had been struggling to recover ever since. I grew up on the Southside in public housing, row upon row of squat, dingy apartment buildings where crime ran rampant. As a kid, I saw drug deals going down, fights, shootings.

My mother struggled with addiction. My father divorced her over it when