WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Pictures provide a timeless window that perfectly preserves specific moments.
Moments and memories are now all she has.
“I don’t know it just showed his personality [and] his blue eyes,” Kristy Whaley said of her son’s baby picture.
Pictures surround Whaley in her Westerville dining room. They are reminders of what was and what could have been.
“But I think it’s important to put a face to it,” she said.
Her son, Kyle, graduated high school with honors. When he was a student at Ohio State University, had a 3.4 GPA and was on the Dean’s list.
“It changes them into someone you can’t imagine,” she said.
In 2014, Whaley says the partying led Kyle to a heroin addiction where he spent $150 a day to support his habit.
“Your brain is an organ and it can be diseased just like your heart, your lungs, your pancreas [or] any other organ in your body,” she said. “It can be diseased.”
What followed, she says, were countless arrests, county jail time and stays in rehab.
“And he looked at me with such fear in his eyes and he said ‘Are you ashamed of me’,” Whaley said of a conversation with Kyle following his first stay at rehab. “I mean, no, how could you possibly be ashamed of someone who has something that…they truly can’t control.”
In September 2017 an overdose claimed the life of Whaley’s 25-year-old son. Today, she sits in her dining room with her blue-eyed baby boy’s picture behind her. Next to it are his ashes.
She now finds peace in meaning.
“Every year for his birthday I go to a bakery and I anonymously pay for someone’s birthday cake and I include a card telling them about [Kyle] and why I’m doing it,” she said.
Whaley says she struggled with clinical depression when she was younger. Kyle, she says, started showing signs of depression and anxiety in middle school. A new statewide initiative to help beat the stigma of mental health and addiction Whaley says she’s appreciative for.
“I just think it’s important for people to realize what they’re going to go through if it does happen to them and that it’s a very real thing,” she said.
Without these efforts, Whaley knows moments and memories will forever live in frames instead of in person.