Patricia Mehrmann

Patricia Mehrmann is a nurse and the mother of Tess Henry, whose addiction and death form one of the book’s most intimate accounts of the opioid crisis. Mehrmann’s story moves from memories of Tess as a child on the beach to the practical and emotional labor of trying to keep her daughter alive. Her eventual willingness to speak openly also makes her a witness to the stigma surrounding addiction and to the treatment obstacles faced by families.

Family and Tess’s Early Life

Of Mehrmann’s four children, Tess was the quietest. Mother and daughter shared ordinary, affectionate rituals: Tess volunteered to walk the dogs with her, and they went to the beach early at low tide to look for small treasures. In a photograph Mehrmann sent the author, ten-year-old Tess, freckled and grinning, wraps both arms around the family Labrador, Charlie. Mehrmann remembered her daughter as the queen sand-dollar finder. The image preserves a child whose life, in retrospect, seems far removed from the crises that would follow.

Tess’s childhood also included anxiety. Relatives recalled a panic attack on the drive home from the beach to Roanoke, Virginia: she was vomiting and calling to her mother from the back seat because she thought she was dying. At her private Catholic primary school, the details of daily life could unsettle her; she worried that her shoes were not right. These memories do not explain or reduce her later addiction to a single cause. They do show Mehrmann looking back across the distance between the child she knew and the danger that eventually became difficult to recognize.

Tess was a strong student and athlete, a standout in high-school track and basketball who made the honor roll. She studied French at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina–Asheville but did not finish a degree. Before heroin came to dominate her days, she wrote poetry, painted, read, and sang to Koda, her black rescue dog. She loved David Sedaris and once met him at a local coffee shop after a reading. Mehrmann’s recollections retain these specific pleasures alongside the later account of addiction, resisting the flattening of her daughter into a diagnosis.

From Work to Treatment Struggles

By the time the author met Tess in 2015, she was twenty-six and working as a waitress while using heroin. She had moved from snorting the drug to injecting it, a transition she later described as decisive. For a time, she continued waitressing at an upmarket restaurant, hiding injection marks beneath long sleeves and relying on her memory to keep track of orders. Work could make her addiction appear manageable from the outside, even as Tess described a life organized around earning money to use and using in order to work.

That appearance contributed to Mehrmann’s initial disbelief. When a family friend told her that Tess was addicted to opiates, she was angry and incredulous: Tess was still showing up for work and, to her mother, seemed to be doing what was expected of her. The realization did not arrive all at once. By the time Mehrmann described the situation to the author, she had spent six months navigating treatment obstacles. Her experience captures a painful mismatch: the outward routines that reassured a parent could persist even while addiction was tightening its hold.

Tess’s treatment efforts were further complicated by disagreement over medication. She had attended Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings before, but felt stigmatized for taking buprenorphine. Although Narcotics Anonymous officially accepted medication-assisted treatment, members asked to sponsor or mentor Tess declined. Mehrmann’s account of her daughter’s care therefore unfolds across more than the search for a program: it includes the social rejection that could meet a person already trying to recover. The book places this experience within a wider divide between public-health approaches and criminal-justice attitudes toward treatment.

A Mother’s Search and Public Testimony

When Tess checked herself out of a treatment program in Nevada, Mehrmann tried desperately to find her. She tracked her movements through Facebook Messenger and searched prostitution websites that featured her daughter. The episode shows how far a parent’s search could extend when conventional means of keeping in touch did not provide the reassurance she needed. Mehrmann described the force of the drug as something love alone could not overcome; her efforts did not mean she had found a reliable way to control Tess’s addiction.

The book also places Mehrmann’s experience against the isolation that surrounded families at the start of its reporting. When the author began covering heroin in Roanoke’s suburbs in 2012, many families were too ashamed to speak publicly. There were not yet Facebook groups connecting suffering parents across Virginia to exchange treatment advice, coping strategies, or practical support. Mehrmann’s later candor belongs to a changed public conversation, but it does not erase the loneliness families faced while trying to navigate treatment.

Mehrmann became one of the book’s most open sources, sharing her life through hundreds of text messages and scores of emails, phone calls, and visits. The author singled out her willingness to confront addiction’s stigma as extraordinary. That openness gave the narrative a sustained view of the family’s experience—not only its most dramatic moments, but the repeated work of searching, communicating, and trying again. In 2017, Mehrmann was still sleeping with her cellphone, a small, concrete sign of how attention to Tess remained woven into daily life.

Loss and Narrative Significance

Tess’s story ends in death. The book’s dedication records her life as 1989–2017, and the author’s acknowledgment remembers Mehrmann’s courage before closing with the hope that their poet may rest in peace. The ending gives the earlier details—the sand dollars, the dog, the songs in the car—an added weight without making them merely foreshadowing. They remain records of Tess’s particular life, held alongside the account of addiction and loss.

Mehrmann’s significance lies partly in this refusal to let either stigma or tragedy become the whole story. She first struggled to believe the warning about her daughter, then spent months confronting treatment hurdles, and finally made private grief available to public scrutiny. Through her, the book shows how a family can be forced to operate in the gaps between health care and criminal justice, and how a parent’s devotion can endure without being able to guarantee recovery. Her testimony turns that intimate contradiction into evidence of a wider crisis.