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RECENT SERMONS
SAINT ANDREW’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Sermon: Death and Resurrection
March 26, 2006
Rev. Roger Barney
Six years ago yesterday, approximately 600 people gathered in this church to mourn the death and celebrate the life of a special young woman. That young woman had died 10 days earlier of a prescription drug overdose, just two weeks short of her 25th birthday. That young woman was my daughter. And I’m here this morning to tell you about her story and about the resurrection event that took place after her death.
Kimberly had suffered considerable pain as a result of a neuroma in her foot. And while she had surgery, the surgery was not effective. And while she was waiting additional treatment, she was on Vicodin for over a year. By that time, she was hooked. Jeannette, Carla, and I went through rehab with her three times. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
This cross I wear is one that Kimberly made for me when she was in high school. And when she made it, there’s a slight mistake in it—a slight cut on the left-hand side. Somehow, that may have been a premonition—I don’t know—but I wear it every Sunday.
Jeannette and I talked, we walked. With our grief counselor, we talked about the options now. And I thought about the line from Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Now that this has happened, what am I gonna do about it?
There were a number of options. One, we could wallow in our guilt about what we should have done or shouldn’t have done. We could sue the doctors and be angry at them, especially the one who prescribed Vicodin and Valium to Kimberly three days before she died, even though that doctor had never met her and her chart was marked saying that she was addicted to prescription drugs.
There were other choices, of course, but we decided to do something we felt was more positive. So we met with Karen Hyde, the assistant principal at Saratoga High School, and we learned a number of things. One was that Kimberly was not a child at risk. There was nothing about her behavior that would lead people in the school system to believe she was a child at risk. In fact, she was a caregiver to others at risk.
We also learned that there is no education in the schools that deals with prescription drugs. There’s education called state requirements—One Week—that deals with a number of things including alcohol and illegal drugs, but nothing about prescription drugs.
We also learned that football players would get injured and go home and steal their mother or father’s Vicodin or other painkillers, and bring it back to practice and pass it around like it was jellybeans.
So we decided to fund the training of a teacher at Saratoga High School and to have her develop a curriculum and carry a message to those kids. But that was just one school. And one of the messages that kept resounding in my head was a note that Rosemary Tisch—who has a great deal of experience in this area—that said, “Kimberly was murdered by her addiction.”
And we thought about all the other kids in all the other schools. So Jeannette and a friend, Lynne Seay, decided to start VIP—Volunteers Inspiring People—a group that grew the first year to 64 volunteers, none of whom were professional fundraisers, who wanted to raise money to fund Addiction Prevention Services in the middle and high schools in Santa Clara County.
Jeannette and Lynne hooked up with EMQ Children and Family Services and found out that they had a program, albeit for which there was no funding because there is no state funding for this type of education in our schools.
So the first year they held an event called Entertaining Throughout the Seasons, attended by approximately 600+ people, and was able to give to EMQ $195,000 to fund this program in the schools.
Today there are over 20 schools that have this program available. And the beauty of the program is it takes a holistic approach to young people. It starts with the premise that every child is at risk, that every child at any given moment could experiment with drugs, not knowing what they were doing and not knowing if they have an addictive personality.
So every child gets some level of education. Those who are identified as having a problem or those who volunteer and come forward, who are considering drugs, they get special treatment.
This program has grown. It’s in its fourth year. This year the program will have its fifth event on May 5th. And over the four events, the organization, VIP, has raised $725,000. Their goal is to get to $1 million this year, and I’m not here asking for money. I’m here to raise awareness. The awareness is that out of the death of a young child, a young woman, there can be a resurrection—a resurrection that moves people to work and to do things together, to team in the community.
We’ve had help from San Jose magazine. There was an article several years ago called “Just One Child,” where Jeannette and I decided that if there was something we could do in the community to save just one child. And somehow I think back about the four years before Kimberly died, while she was addicted. And when they asked me how it felt, I said, “It was like standing on a corner looking across the street, seeing your child about to step in front of a bus, but being too far away to get there and too far away for them to hear.”
We want to avoid this kind of pain for other families. We’d like for young lives to be saved. We want this event of our daughter’s death and the celebration of the anniversary of her birth on the 29th of this month to be an inspiration to people to go out and help others so that they understand if they have an addictive personality and to get help.
Unfortunately, treatment costs four times as much as prevention, and it’s a lot less effective. So we hope that through this message, you will be inspired; but at least you’ll be more aware.
Amen.
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