Kennedy: Mother's grief fuels anti-drug appeal to kids

Zella Dixon lost two sons.
Zella Dixon lost two sons.
photo Zella Dixon lost two sons.

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Zella Dixon, 85, was looking through some old family papers recently when she came across a seven-page letter written in 1971 by her then-19-year-old son, Richard.

At the time, Richard was a charismatic teenager who had fallen under the spell of drugs, and the letter begged his mother not to let his younger brother, Danny, go down the same road.

"Do anything to keep him from falling into the same pit I am in," Richard wrote to his parents, Sherwin and Zella Dixon.

Dixon says she had forgotten about the 46-year-old letter until she uncovered it earlier this year while tending to her dying husband in their ranch-style Hixson house.

Danny, the Dixons' younger son, died in a car crash in Miami in the late 1970s when his Porsche was hit by a car driven by a drunken driver. He was just 23.

Richard died 17 years later, at age 42, from a brain aneurysm. At the time of his death, he had three drugs in his system, his mother says she learned from his death certificate, which she found along with his letter.

Sherwin, who had cancer, died on Jan. 9. The weight of burying two sons early in life and losing her husband of 65 years earlier this year swept over Dixon like a wave.

"I cried for two days over all the grief in my family," she says. "Grief is like love. It never leaves us.

"God put it on my heart to do what a mother, who has lost two sons because of drugs, can do."

One day this week, Dixon sat at her kitchen table and reflected on today's drug epidemic. She compares today

to the 1960s and 1970s when drug experimentation was rampant among her children's generation, the baby boomers.

She says she had a heart attack in the winter and has begun to feel a deep urgency to off-load her emotions to anyone who will listen.

"I'm still searching for answers," she says. "What's happening to humankind these days is that we are so frustrated with life.

"God has given me more time. My passion is to do what I can to get the word out: To just say 'no' to drugs."

Dixon has read the statistics. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the number of yearly overdose deaths in America (from all drugs) has more than doubled, to more than 50,000, compared to 2002. Meanwhile, the number of deaths from heroin overdoses alone has increased six-fold, to about 14,000 a year, since 2002, according to the government.

Dixon says Richard, despite having a pair of loving, involved parents, fell victim to a permissive, 1960s counter-culture that sowed rebellion - and encouraged drug experimentation - among American youth. It was a turning point in America, she believes, from which the nation has never fully recovered.

Even though her sons, had they lived, would both be in their 60s now, they live in her memory as vigorous young men who were both victimized by the 20th century's drug and alcohol culture. One was an innocent victim, while the other's pain was self-inflicted.

She believes that personal despair and a lack of spirituality are at the root of today's drug deaths.

To illustrate her feelings, she read aloud a passage from a book, "To Bless the Space Between Us," by John O'Donohue.

"May you learn to see yourself

with the same delight,

pride, and expectation

with which God sees you in every moment."

Dixon says she believes bringing up children can be reduced to three words: devotion, discipline and dreams.

Dreaming, she says, includes helping children find themselves, filling an emptiness that they might otherwise try to fill with drugs.

Her own children illustrated this, she says.

"Richard would wake up (exasperated) every morning and say, Good Lord!" she remembers. "Danny would wake up happy and say, 'Good morning, Lord.'"

Contact staff writer Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.

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