Patricia and Alan Henry’s co-parenting and disagreement over their daughter’s care

Patricia and Alan Henry’s co-parenting of Tess Henry unfolded through repeated attempts to keep her safe and find treatment, but without agreement on what kind of help would serve her best. Their story shows how parental care could be both sustained and divided: money, housing, and treatment were offered, while disagreements over Medication-assisted treatment, abstinence, and boundaries intensified as Tess’s circumstances worsened.

Shared Care Under Strain

Tess’s parents confronted the practical consequences of addiction through different household roles and competing judgments about how to respond. In June 2015, after Tess left jail while nearly seven months pregnant, she spent a month living with her mother and trying to make a relationship with the baby’s father work. Patricia and Tess later described that arrangement as disastrous. The family then found a private treatment center two hours away that would accept Tess during the final month of her pregnancy. Private insurance paid most of the $20,000 cost; Alan covered the $6,500 deductible with money remaining in Tess’s college-savings fund.

The treatment decision reflected a difficult balance between immediate access and the limited options available. The Life Center of Galax was one of the few Virginia facilities willing to accept patients receiving Medication-assisted treatment. Tess was taking Buprenorphine in the form of Subutex, which was then recommended for some pregnant patients. After a pregnancy divided between heroin addiction and medication treatment, she worried about the possibility that her baby would experience neonatal abstinence syndrome. The treatment addressed her own addiction while leaving her anxious about the risks facing her child.

Treatment, Money, and Access

By early 2016, Tess described Buprenorphine as making her feel normal, and insurance covered 80 percent of the medication. But access to the prescription depended on costly appointments: her addiction doctor required $700 up front and charged $90 to $100 for each follow-up visit, which could occur as many as four times a month. Patricia objected to cash-only practices and the waiting lists that kept people from getting care. Her criticism was not a rejection of treatment; it reflected the difficulty of sustaining it when medical access carried costs beyond the medication itself.

Tess’s parents also differed over what kind of program she should enter. Alan urged her to enroll in a twelve-month residential program at a faith-based Roanoke rescue mission. The program prohibited cigarettes and Medication-assisted treatment, while Tess was taking Buprenorphine, smoked heavily, and identified as an atheist. Those conditions made his preferred option a poor fit for her stated circumstances. Alan later described a wider family disagreement about the line between helping and enabling: he said he and Tess’s siblings leaned toward tough love, while Patricia was, in his view, more susceptible to Tess’s appeals.

Patricia nevertheless tried to raise alternatives. When she proposed other long-term programs, whether or not they included Medication-assisted treatment, Tess refused and became argumentative. The conflict was not simply over whether Tess needed help; it concerned which forms of care she would accept and what her parents should do when she rejected them. The available evidence records their disagreement, but does not suggest that either parent had a solution that could reliably overcome Tess’s addiction or the barriers to treatment.

Boundaries at Home

Patricia’s efforts to manage the crisis took place alongside the demands of work and caring for Tess’s young son. She held a full-time hospital job with irregular shifts that often lasted more than twelve hours, leaving Tess at home with the child. Patricia installed a security system, but later concluded that its two cameras were not enough to reassure her. When she returned home in March and believed Tess was high, she also found that clothes were missing from a bedroom, apparently pawned for drugs.

The incident sharpened the question of what Patricia could do next. She told the reporter she was consulting an attorney because she could not simply evict Tess after she had lived in the home for some time. A court-appointed guardian ad litem would assess what was best for Tess’s son. Patricia’s concern was therefore not limited to supporting her daughter: she was also trying to protect a child whose care was entangled with the adults’ unresolved conflict and Tess’s unstable condition.

The Hope Initiative offered another route through the treatment system. Its volunteers had assembled a five-page spreadsheet listing thirty-six rehabilitation and aftercare providers across the southeastern United States, with options depending on patients’ finances and available beds. When Tess was again hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, volunteers tried to persuade her to enter a long-term center in Nevada. Patricia and the volunteers faced the short interval in which a patient might agree to treatment, as well as the immediate financial shortfall: Tess still needed $12,000, beyond the remaining college funds. Patricia considered asking her own eighty-five-year-old father to release part of Tess’s expected inheritance early, reasoning that the money would not help Tess if she died before receiving it.

Loss and Unresolved Disagreement

After Tess’s death, the family’s divisions over care persisted. Alan recalled the repeated assistance he and Tess’s siblings had provided with rent, rehabilitation, and food, though he said those efforts had mainly occurred in the earlier years of her addiction. Some family members continued to second-guess one another and debate the meaning of tough love, help, and enabling. The conflict was not erased by the fact that the family had repeatedly tried to support her; rather, her death left those efforts open to painful reassessment.

Alan speculated that Tess might have been in conflict with someone to whom she owed something, perhaps a drug dealer or pimp. Patricia rejected that theory as an unjust assignment of blame in the absence of knowledge about what had happened. Their disagreement showed how even the explanation of Tess’s final circumstances became a point of conflict: Alan offered a possible account, while Patricia resisted turning uncertainty into an accusation against her daughter.

The relationship is thus defined by care that did not resolve into consensus. Alan’s financial contribution to pregnancy treatment, his appeals for residential recovery, Patricia’s efforts to keep Tess housed and find other programs, and her attention to Tess’s son all register forms of parental commitment. Yet the family remained divided over treatment, limits, and responsibility, first during Tess’s life and then in interpreting her death. The book presents that division not as a simple contrast between a supportive parent and an unsupportive one, but as a record of parents trying to act within a treatment system that was costly, constrained, and unable to guarantee a path to safety.