On Thursday evening I returned to that same Naperville church, this time to attend the funeral of Alana Carbonara, a vivacious 18-year-old with a beauty-queen smile and long blond hair whose mother found her dead from an overdose last weekend.
In that two-year time period, much has been done to try and curb this opiate epidemic we've all been reading so much about. Laws were passed, anti-overdose drugs distributed, rallies were organized and countless more forums held.
However, the most powerful deterrent I've heard since covering such an important issue came from the lips of Alana Carbonara's grieving father.
At her memorial service, photo collages and testimonials painted a portrait of a talented and caring young woman who was a violinist, volleyball player and freshman cheerleader at Naperville North High School. Someone who could light up a room with her smile and make everyone she came in contact with feel special.
But after family and friends paid tribute to her all too-short life, Scott Carbonara, a motivational speaker by profession, took the microphone to deliver a powerful message about the death of his only daughter who wanted to save the world "but could not save herself."
In doing so, he took advantage of his captive audience – most of them young people and too many junkies themselves, some even high as they came to pay their last respects.
The majority of her friends, Carbonara said, knew Alana as "the life of the party … the most exciting person in the room."
But "how many of you saw her weeping for how unmanageable her life had become?" he asked. "How many of you knew what she did after the party? She went home alone, terrified and full of shame."
He pointed to the casket. "Look at my Alana now. That is another face of addiction … the cold, lifeless face where many addicts, like Alana, end up way before their time."
CLICK FOR MORE
0 comments:
Post a Comment