Vermonter Kris Francoeur could barely think let alone talk about what happened Oct. 9, 2013. Yet sitting down to a blank screen, she somehow posted a Facebook message.
“It is with breaking hearts that we want to share with our family and friends that yesterday our beloved son Sam passed away,” it read. “We were so blessed to have shared his life for more than 20 years, and can’t count all the joyous and love-filled moments we shared with him. We ask for your understanding and patience right now, as we may not respond to messages, emails, texts or calls — but please understand that we so appreciate the outpouring.”
It all began and ended when the bedside phone rang at 5:34 a.m.
“Kristin, you need to come up here right now,” she recalls her mother saying.
Francoeur had fallen asleep eight hours earlier after hanging up with her son, who was staying with his grandparents a dozen miles away. Her last words to him echoed his last words to her:
“Love you — I’ll call you in the morning.”
But now Francoeur was riding with her husband, their minds racing. They knew about Sam’s struggles with depression and bipolar disorder, his self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, a resulting arrest for driving under the influence that compounded the challenges.
Arriving at Sam’s grandparents, they saw the ambulance and EMTs. Then they saw the ambulance and EMTs weren’t running.
They knew.
“Think back to that incredible moment when you saw your child for the first time, that absolute rush of emotion, of love, in those first few minutes,” the Addison County mother says. “But helplessly seeing your child lie lifeless?”
Holding her son’s cold body, Francoeur felt she had died, too.
Next came question upon question upon question, yet ultimately just one: Why? As she ruminated the following days, weeks and months, she remembered their shared last words.
“Those give me some small measure of peace, once in a while.”
But other times Francoeur seemingly couldn’t breathe, swallow or stop crying. She stared again at the blank screen. Perhaps it would offer an answer.
A challenging but colorful life
Samuel Michael Francoeur was born July 30, 1993, tied up in an umbilical cord that turned him dark blue.
It portended a challenging yet colorful life.
“Sam could talk before he could walk,” his mother remembers. “He didn’t take naps as a baby — the world was too interesting to sleep.”
Friendly and free-spirited as a student at Otter Valley Union High School in Brandon, he portrayed a lobster boy in one of his many theater roles, pulled up in a car with a pet sheep and stereo blasting Jimi Hendrix and insisted to be introduced as “Captain Samuel M. Francoeur” at his 2011 commencement.
The National Honor Society graduate moved on to the University of Vermont, only to leave around the time he was diagnosed with depression the following spring. Starting and stopping a prescription, he soon was self-medicating with alcohol and marijuana. That led to a DUI arrest, seeing his name in the local newspaper, and spending probation in a substance abuse class as he continued to drink and use drugs.
“We were so desperate to save him,” his mother recalls.
Then amid the falling dominoes, Sam learned he had bipolar disorder. Some would dread the news. But he was happy to finally have an explanation for his pinballing thoughts and feelings. Working with a psychiatrist, he looked forward to moving into a new apartment and job Oct. 15, 2013.
The bedside phone rang the week before. Francoeur held her son’s body and wondered: Medical fluke? Suicide? Neither the EMTs, state police investigator nor medical examiner on the scene could say.
“On the list of things no parent should ever have to hear: Your child will be autopsied.”
That’s when the mother accustomed to picking up and preparing laundry reached into her son’s pants pocket and discovered a wrapper from one of his grandfather’s fentanyl pain patches. Francoeur learned only later that three other locals had died from similar accidental overdoses in the six weeks before her son put the patch in his mouth in search of an intense high, unaware it would spark instant death.
‘Even in the midst of our grief’
Francoeur cut a lock of her son’s hair and went home to tell his three siblings. Turning on her computer, she then informed the rest of the world.
“A friend had posted on Facebook that there was nothing harder than leaving your child at college,” she recalls.
Francoeur wished. She shared an invitation to a “celebration of life” at the hometown Leicester Meeting House. In lieu of flowers, the family decorated the hall with garlic bulbs Sam had cultivated at a farm where he had worked the previous six months.
“Sam had touched each of those cloves, they were something he’d cared for,” his mother says. “Growing his garlic would be a way to keep that love alive. It made perfect sense to us, even if not to anyone else.”
Bringing the bulbs home from the meeting house, Francoeur looked outside the day after the service and saw a rainbow in an otherwise blue sky.
“In the midst of great sadness,” she wrote on Facebook, “can come a moment of great beauty.”
She posted similar thoughts two weeks later.
“I (we) can’t adequately express how much we appreciate your support and love, and how lucky we feel, even in the midst of our grief, to have you all in our lives,” she wrote Oct. 27.
She continued near daily in November.
“Yesterday late afternoon I was really struggling, and as I was bringing the chickens in, one wasn’t going in the coop,” she wrote Nov. 2. “I was so mad and frustrated, and admittedly, I was kind-of yelling at the chicken, until I realized it was Fluffy, and she wasn’t going in the coop because she was waiting for me to pet her. When I realized it, I sat down on the ground and held her, so thankful that she in some way realized I needed some company at that moment.”
Francoeur went on over the next months to express thanks for Kleenex, knitting, nature, newfangled technology, the Brandon House of Pizza, Boston Red Sox, “the life and example of Nelson Mandela” and “getting through” Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mothers’ Day and Sam’s 21st birthday, when the family harvested the first crop of garlic it had planted that cold, dark fall.
‘Any act of kindness could help’
This wasn’t always easy.
“Yesterday was a very hard day for us, and one in which I struggled mightily to remember what I was thankful for,” she posted one day. “Finally it hit me like a freight train that the reason I was grieving so hard was because of how much I (we) love Sam — and in the morning light today, I can say that in looking back at yesterday, I am thankful for the depth of that love.”
And so Francoeur has kept logging onto Facebook, continuing a gratitude practice found to ease painful emotions and improve physical and mental health.
“I never intended to write posts for other people,” she says. “As I struggled, I wrote for myself but needed to validate it somehow by posting online.”
Then friends suggested she share her thoughts beyond her private circle in hopes of helping others. And so she has written a book, “Of Grief, Garlic and Gratitude: Returning to Hope and Joy from a Shattered Life,” recently released as an ebook and set for print publication May 21.
“We said we would never hide from the truth,” she writes in the 268-page Morgan James Publishing paperback. “We would stand up straight and say that our beloved Sam had died of an accidental drug overdose. We would not pretend it was something else. We would let other families know it was okay to come out of the shadows.”
Again, this isn’t always easy. Francoeur, a lifelong educator and current principal at Middlebury Union Middle School, has read too many strangers’ online judgments.
“We still, as a country, make negative comments about the mentally ill and addicts, dismissing them as less than human, as losers, as weak,” she has replied on Facebook. “Please, think about the families you know who walk through this valley of hell every single day, live in constant fear of the safety of their children, and stay awake at night racking their brains as to what they did wrong to ‘make’ their children have these issues, and think how any act of kindness could help make their lives a little less hopeless.”
Acts like sharing a personal story.
“I feel it is my responsibility to be one of the many faces of the impact of the opiate addiction,” Francoeur says, “while also pushing myself and those around me to find joy where they can, and to love as fiercely and openly as possible.”
The mother recalls seeing another rainbow on what would have been her son’s 23rd birthday.
“You don’t ever get over losing a child, but in that moment … I felt the beginning of the understanding of how infinite love is, how it doesn’t die when someone’s heart stops, and that if you can find your way through the haze of pain, you can still see signs.”
