Okanagan mom pours her grief into book about the fentanyl crisis

Her son was 30-years-old when a moment of weakness would have deadly consequences.

“That night he got an urge and he stopped somewhere in Vernon on the way home and picked up something, but it wasn’t what he thought it was,” Sylvia Mennear told Global News.

“We found out in the coroner’s report it was fentanyl,

Aaron Mennear died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in April, 2017.

His heartbroken parents said their son’s drug addiction started after a serious snowboarding accident.

“He was terribly addicted,” Aaron’s mom said.

She referred to a large ziplock bag of prescription drugs that her son was prescribed after the accident.

Eventually doctors stopped his prescriptions but Aaron’s addiction persisted.

“He was into bodybuilding, he wanted to help strengthen his body up to stop all the pain and the one guy he met at bodybuilding offered him heroin and said I can stop the pain,” Mennear said.

Aaron used heroin for about a year before getting clean.

But two months later he had that moment of weakness that would ultimately lead to his death.

“Your life changes forever and it’s something you never want to imagine going through,” Aaron’s dad Jim Mennear said.

Jim Mennear told Global News he never imagined this kind of tragedy would affect his family.

“That is the stigma thing that we want people to really understand,” he said. “A lot of these kids, from what we are seeing, are achievers, over-achievers, lots of friends, popular.”

Devastated, Aaron’s mom decided to write a book to not only honour her son, whom she described a golden child and an honour student, but also raise awareness about the drug overdose epidemic.

“There are 4,000 people in Canada in 2017 that died from this, these are not people on the streets, not all of them, these are people like Aaron,” Jim Mennear said.

Called Shattered Dreams and Broken Hearts, the Fentanyl Killer, the family hopes the book helps parents recognize the signs of a potential problem.

“What to look for with their children, to see no matter what type of drug it is, to see what it is that they might be into,” Sylvia Mennear said. “It’s an eye-opener.”

The book is available on Amazon and retails for around $23.