Grandmother’s Facebook post about 17-year-old’s overdose touches hearts

In the midst of an overdose crisis sweeping across the country, a heartfelt letter penned by a grandmother of a 17-year-old Victoria woman who passed away from an overdose just days before Christmas has struck a chord online.

In her Facebook post, Diane Larose Klimek, whose granddaughter Beth Klimek passed away on Dec. 22, wrote:

“She will never come back, I will never see her smile again, she will never hug me again, I will never hear, ‘I love you gramma’ or ‘I hate you gramma’ … Today she started to become a memory, when just a short time ago we were making our own.”

Klimek goes on to say,

“I’m thinking about all the times we spent at rock festivals, haunting thrift stores looking for treasures, talked about everything that was going on and fought about the negative things like the drugs she was taking and how I still thought I could somehow convince her to get help for.”

“That’s where the ‘I hate you gramma’ came into play…That’s when I became some old lady that didn’t get the world today… I’d give anything right now to have her here hating me just so she’d still be here and that would give me another chance to try and get her off all the drugs she was doing.”

I’d give anything to have her here to give me another hug or to hear her huge laugh or even to see her flounce off to her room in a snit… Anything to not hear the silence that is surrounding me since the police came pounding on my door at 4 am to tell me that she was dead of an overdose and how they both had tried to bring her back but it wasn’t possible or having to listen to the coroner talking to me about autopsies and arrangements.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "I'm thinking about all the times we spent at rock festivals, haunting thrift stores looking for treasures, talked about everything that was going on and fought about the negative things like the drugs she was taking and how I still thought I could somehow convince her to get help for."</p><p>"That's where the 'I hate you gramma' came into play…That's when I became some old lady that didn't get the world today… I'd give anything right now to have her here hating me just so she'd still be here and that would give me another chance to try and get her off all the drugs she was doing."</p><p>I'd give anything to have her here to give me another hug or to hear her huge laugh or even to see her flounce off to her room in a snit… Anything to not hear the silence that is surrounding me since the police came pounding on my door at 4 am to tell me that she was dead of an overdose and how they both had tried to bring her back but it wasn't possible or having to listen to the coroner talking to me about autopsies and arrangements."

Klimek also talks about how her granddaughter became a statistic of the ravages of drug usage.

While it’s not clear if it was fentanyl that killed Beth, Klimek says it’s now beyond the point.

“All I know now is it doesn’t matter anymore if it was Fentanyl, Acid, X, Special K, or Xanax because no matter what it was that was added to, whatever she thought she was taking, it was laced with death. That’s all I ever need to know from this day forward.”

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Earlier this month, B.C. Coroners Service said 128 people died from illicit drug use in November, averaging four people a day.

The November stats brought the total number of overdose deaths for the year to 755 people.

This was the highest number of illicit drug deaths in B.C. for a single month in recent memory, with the previous high being 82 in January 2016.

These new numbers are a sharp rise compared to 2015, when 480 people died from illicit drug use.

The majority of people are dying due to fentanyl use. From Jan. 1 through Oct. 31, the coroners service says fentanyl was detected in 374 cases, which is about 60 per cent of all illicit drug deaths. That is almost triple the number of fentanyl-detected deaths for the same period last year.

-With files from Amy Judd