Susan Stevens’s fight against drugs has reached the White House, but she still wrestles with why her daughter died.
Susan Stevens in her daughter’s room in Lewisville, N.C. Toria died last year of a drug overdose at 22. By Eli Saslow Eli Saslow Reporter on the National desk Email Bio Follow March 31 at 9:04 PM LEWISVILLE, N.C. — She had spent the past 13 months retelling the story of her daughter to anyone who would listen, and now Susan Stevens, 53, sped down the highway, needing to tell it again. Thirty people were gathered at a Cracker Barrel restaurant to hear a local sheriff discuss the opioid epidemic.
“Yes,” the hostess said, leading her past the buffet to a back room of the restaurant. “I can’t believe you still have time and energy for a little thing like this.” “Why did I let them call the police?” she asked, going back over the questions she had spent the past year trying and failing to answer. “Why couldn’t I find a way to help her? I mean, what was I —.”She wiped her eyes with a napkin. “The blame is on the drugs,” she repeated.A few days after Toria died, her mother found her bucket list written in a journal.
She took out her phone. She opened her binder of business cards. She dialed a state lawmaker and waited through the rings. “I’m calling to talk about solutions,” she said, leaving a message. Susan grabbed her keys. She’d been up since 3 a.m., retelling the story even when nobody was awake to hear it, outlining chapters for a book comparing addiction to a hurricane and posting her daughter’s poetry on Facebook. Now she drove to a small office in downtown Winston-Salem. The space belonged to her friend Kenya Thornton, who ran a nonprofit to support victims of sexual abuse.
“Why is your solution always another pill?” Susan wrote to one of Toria’s doctors, blaming him, but by then Toria was wearing long-sleeve shirts to hide needle marks and disappearing for long stretches into the bathroom, where Susan occasionally found her passed out. Susan holds a prescription for Suboxone that Toria filled the day before she died. “She fought it so hard,” Zach said. “I’ve never seen anybody try harder at anything.”“It was never a choice,” he said. “She was so ashamed. She would have chosen anything else.”
“I don’t think there was anything anybody could do,” he said. Customers were coming into the restaurant, and a line was beginning to form at the counter. He stood up, hugged her and put on his gloves. “Go easy on yourself,” he said, but she was already up from the table and heading toward the door.Susan looks at one of her daughter’s paintings, which she keeps with her in the car. Outside the restaurant, she handed out business cards for her nonprofit.
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