By Laura Karas
“The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. . . .
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”
This except from Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “Out, Out—,” which portrays the sudden death of a young boy after a woodcutting accident and the onlookers’ casual acceptance of his tragic death, is particularly apropos today, more than one hundred years later, in an America that looks very different than that of Frost’s time. Between the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, America now suffers from a surplus of needless, untimely deaths.
Just as the protagonist of Frost’s poem became the casualty of a tragic accident, so too do the many victims of the opioid epidemic become casualties in a losing battle — lives “spoiled” by substance use disorder and cut short by tragic overdose. In this post I explore the status of the opioid epidemic in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing initiatives to address opioid use disorder (OUD).
