PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Nancy Kaufman had been dreading the call for a long time, but when it finally came, she was completely unprepared.
Her 41-year-old son had struggled with addiction for years. After she moved to Florida, eight years ago, she could go weeks without hearing from him. But that morning, they had spoken. She was planning a trip home to Philadelphia, and she told him to call back with a number where she could reach him when she got there.
"When I got that call and it was a 215 number, I thought it was him," she recalled recently. "And then she said, 'I'm calling from Frankford Hospital.'"
Her son had been found unresponsive. Doctors were unable to revive him.
The next call she got from a 215 number was one she had not anticipated at all. It was Laura Vargas, a social worker with the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, offering support, help and grief counseling.
"I am just so proud of my city, that they provide this service. Now I’m going to get emotional," Kaufman said, her voice breaking, "but the last thing I expected was a city the size of Philadelphia to have a service like this."
The Medical Examiner’s Office has offered bereavement support for nearly 10 years, but Vargas says the focus on overdose deaths is more recent — "once the drug deaths started going up and up they realized there was a lot more need for support."
In 2017, Philadelphia reported a record 1,217 overdose deaths. The number went down for two years, then surged back last year, during the pandemic, to 1,214.
Bereavement support for the victims' loved ones started about two years ago, with $250,000 in funding from the city's Department of Public Health. Through the Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction program, Vargas and one other social worker offer services including one-on-one grief counseling — a process that usually lasts for eight sessions over two months — and peer support groups, which started just before the pandemic and have continued online.
In the last 15 months, she says, the program has served more than 2,000 people.
"It’s a really, really unique position to be in, to hold space for people, usually in the darkest days of their lives, in the throes of grief, and seeing the progress they make," she said.
Susan Ousterman remembers the feeling of being in a fog when Vargas called her after her son died of an overdose in October.
"I didn’t pay it too much mind," Ousterman recalled recently, "but she kept following up. She was wonderful and just so supportive. Then she told me about the bereavement group."
Ousterman says the first session she joined, in January, was a little awkward. People were quiet. By the end, though, she felt that she was no longer alone in her grief.
"Losing a child is just so different," Ousterman said. "You feel like you’re going crazy. You get these different thoughts going through your head, and you have this grief brain, which is just so foggy. And just knowing there were other people out there that were feeling the same things was profoundly important.
"When I got off the Zoom call, I was overloaded with emotions, just crying and crying, but it was such a relief, because I knew I wasn’t nuts — or maybe I was losing my mind, but I wasn’t the only one."
Like Kaufman, Ousterman was surprised the city offered the service. She lives in Bucks County and was distressed that her son died in Philadelphia, thinking it would be inconvenient and bureaucratic.
"It turned out to be such a blessing," she said.
Kaufman and Ousterman both believe that being with others who have lost children to a drug overdose allows them a freedom to share their grief that they might not experience in a more general bereavement support group.
"Child loss is one thing. It’s hard enough to go through," Ousterman said, "and then you have the stigma attached to substance use, so you don’t feel comfortable going to just any child loss group because there are still people that don’t feel your loss is as valid, so this service is so valuable. I wish other communities did it because there’s not a lot out there."
Kaufman said she feels as if the members of the group are old friends now.
"Every two weeks, when the call is coming up, I feel like I’m sort of untethered, like I’m falling into a grief abyss," she said. "And the call brings me back. I get back with the group, I’m able to talk about how I’m feeling. It doesn’t allow me to float off into depression world."
Vargas says the program serves larger public health goals as well.
"Traumatic grief is a risk factor for substance use, so we could possibly be preventing more adverse affects in somebody’s life," she said.
The feedback from families can also help how systems respond to the opioid epidemic, according to Vargas.
"If families want to share their concerns, we tell them, 'What we’re learning from you, we can share, what structural issues you ran into,' so that we’re talking about these things," she said. "I can’t guarantee something will change, but just sounding the alarm."
She gives the example of frustration with an insurance company: "They stop covering rehab, and the person didn’t feel ready to leave rehab." Vargas adds that the city also uses feedback to improve its own response, "by recognizing which policies and services didn’t work here and what might have worked better."