Mother-child relationship between Drenna Banks and Colton Banks

Drenna Banks and Colton Banks are depicted as a mother and son whose relationship was shaped by the gradual escalation of Colton’s drug use, Drenna’s efforts to protect him, and his fatal overdose at nineteen. His death left her grieving and angry, but also became the point at which she began addressing other families directly: at his funeral, she urged them not to hide addiction and offered help to young people who might need treatment.

Family, Friendship, and the Silence Around Addiction

Drenna and her husband ran a successful insurance agency, but their family’s stability did not shield them from Colton’s drug use. Colton and Christopher Waldrop had been friends and used drugs together; they had crossed paths through friends connected with North Cross, the private school Christopher attended. Drenna’s friendship with Christopher’s mother, Jamie Waldrop, later became a source of understanding between two families facing related crises.

At first, both women had withdrawn from other friends. Drenna and Jamie met at a Families Anonymous meeting at a Lutheran church outside Hidden Valley, where parents gathered for peer support. Their chance meeting made clear how similar their experiences were, despite the isolation each had felt. Jamie recalled that Colton’s death and the connection with Drenna gave her companionship at a time when she needed it. Their friendship offered more than private comfort: it helped bring families’ experiences into the open in a community where shame often kept them unspoken.

Drenna had once interpreted another family’s loss as a failure of parental control. Two years before Colton died, a family friend in Fredericksburg had lost a son to a heroin overdose, and Drenna remembered wondering why the parents could not control their child. She later apologized for that judgment. As she confronted Colton’s own addiction, the distance between an outsider’s assumption and a family’s lived experience became personal. She described the drugs as taking over a young person’s life while families remained embarrassed and silent.

Colton’s Drug Use and Drenna’s Efforts to Intervene

Drenna tried to respond as Colton’s drug use changed. When she learned that he was abusing Adderall at seventeen, she monitored his medication. After finding marijuana hidden in a briefcase under his bed, she grounded him. When his use progressed to pills, she sent him to a twenty-eight-day rehabilitation program at nineteen. These actions show a mother attempting to set limits and find help, even as the problem grew beyond the reach of ordinary parental discipline.

The weekend of Colton’s death was intended to be his last period of use before getting clean. He had an appointment with an addiction specialist scheduled for the following Monday. He had put two Post-it notes on the dashboard of his car to remind himself to attend. The notes make the immediate prospect of treatment part of the circumstances of his death: the appointment was planned, but it had not yet happened.

Colton died at 11:30 on the morning of November 4, 2012, while his parents were at church. The date was All Saints Sunday. A police officer came to the family’s home a few hours later and said Colton had expired; his parents initially misunderstood the word before realizing their younger son was dead. The account places the news in the ordinary course of a family’s day, then makes the finality of the loss unmistakable.

Grief, Anger, and the Unresolved Circumstances

Colton’s overdose involved 30-milligram oxycodone pills and other narcotics. His body was found in the home of a middle-aged opioid addict who had received hundreds of pills from a Roanoke pain clinic three days earlier. A police search warrant confirmed that nearly all the pills were missing. The evidence described a pill-selling arrangement in which Colton had been selling pills at Radford University to repay a drug debt incurred the previous day.

No charges were filed against the middle-aged dealer. The police chief explained that the autopsy had attributed Colton’s death to multiple toxicity, making it impossible to assign responsibility to a single batch of pills. For the Bankses, that legal outcome compounded their grief. Drenna’s anger was intense; her husband urged her to stop and consider their other son. At times, she sat outside the dealer’s home in her car, with a gun beside her, caught between hatred and concern for her son. The account presents this not as a resolution but as one measure of how loss and the absence of a clear legal answer continued to occupy the family.

The Funeral and the Work of Remembering

At the funeral-home visitation, Drenna chose Colton’s clothes herself: a flannel shirt she had recently bought him, pants, a hat, and the boots he wore four-wheeling. His hands held a silver fish medallion bearing the inscription wwjd, a necklace he had borrowed from his older brother. Drenna remembered Colton joking with her about his looks and his success with girls; the memory preserved his playful voice within a story otherwise dominated by addiction and death.

She continued to recall small details of their shared life. On his birthday, she would stop at Burger King for his favorite meal, a cheeseburger, fries, and sweet tea. When she poured ranch dressing on a salad, she remembered how Colton would pour too much because he thought the bottle opening was smaller than it was. These repeated memories keep him present not as an abstraction or warning alone, but as a particular son whose habits and jokes remained part of his mother’s daily remembrance.

Drenna wanted his friends to see the person they had known: an athlete, someone who stood up to bullies, and a friend who protected others. The funeral therefore held two purposes at once. It marked the family’s loss, while making visible the young man who could otherwise have been reduced to the circumstances of his overdose.

From Private Loss to Public Appeal

At Colton’s funeral, Drenna set aside her prepared remarks and spoke to mourners about addiction and the stigma surrounding it. She urged families not to conceal what was happening and told the audience that she believed Colton’s death should lead her to help other young men. She identified at least three boys she believed he would want her to help and promised that they would make it through together. The appeal translated her private relationship with her son into a commitment to other families, without suggesting that grief had been overcome.

Jamie Waldrop, whose son Christopher was in residential treatment and could not attend, sat beside one of Christopher’s high-school friends at the service. She later told Christopher about Drenna’s speech and about her plea that Colton’s death be the last of its kind. Jamie and other local mothers were beginning to speak publicly about their families, recognizing that survival had to take precedence over shame. Drenna’s decision to speak thus joined the mother-son relationship to a wider effort to connect families who had previously suffered in isolation.

That effort mattered in a setting where parents could lack support and where the systems meant to address addiction—health care and criminal justice—left consequential gaps. In 2012, there were not yet Facebook groups linking parents across the state to exchange treatment advice or practical support. Drenna’s relationship with Colton is therefore central not only to the account of his life and death, but also to the book’s portrayal of how a family’s grief could become testimony: first a private burden, then a public warning, and finally an offer of help to others.