In Wake of Son’s Death, St. Martins Spread Hope

By: 
Holli Seehafer, Grant County Review, Milbank, SD

Beth and Mark St. Martin are responding to the death of their son, Ryan, by spreading a message of hope through The Addict’s Hope website and speaking engagements. 

In Wake of Son’s Death, St. Martins Spread Hope
 
"Don't worry Mom. I'm okay."
 
That simple text message was the last communication Beth and Mark St. Martin received from their son, Ryan, on April 4, 2018. Ryan, who would have been 37 years old today, died just three days later, as the result of an accidental drug overdose. His death marked the end of one disheartening journey for the family and the beginning of another, arguably more dismal experience. And now, 692 days later, Beth is ready to begin trying to help others learn how to survive the death of their child. 
“Grief is going to swallow you – there’s no getting around it – but you have to find a reason to go on, because you are going to go on,” Beth said. “Ryan doesn’t want me to crawl in a hole and never come out.” 
Although Beth did get pulled into a deep, dark void, her daily blogging helped pull her back to the surface, to a new normal, and to a place from which she now feels equipped to begin helping others by telling Ryan’s story and spreading a message of hope. 
“What we are seeing now is a lot of recovering addicts coming forward and talking about successful recovery. That’s wonderful; a lot of people need to hear that story, because it gives you hope,” Beth explained. “But people also need to know that not every story ends that way, and you still have to have hope.” 
Ryan was born in Milbank and attended Emanuel Lutheran Preschool. When he was four years old, Beth moved him and three-year-old Jamie and one-year-old Angie with her to St. Paul, MN. An employee of FOK (now United Hardware), Beth had been transferred to the corporate headquarters in the Twin Cities in 1987. Mark became part of their lives in November of 1988, and as Beth recalls, “The night we met, it was like we knew each other all of our lives.” Mark quickly became a father to the children, and he and Beth married in 1991. Billy, the baby of the family was born in 1992.  
If they could roll back time to the fall of 2010, Beth and Mark would tell you that they began to notice that something was “off” in their son’s life. “I just kinda knew something was wrong,” Beth said. “I really didn’t understand the depth of what was wrong, though.” 
Ryan had moved to San Fransisco, CA, in 2006. He was employed as a server for The Cheesecake Factory, and appeared to be moving up in the company. “He didn’t care if the patrons were men or women; he flirted with everybody at the table; he made everybody feel loved, wanted and special,” Beth recalled. 
“He became like the Kobe Bryant of servers,” Mark added. Ryan was so good that he was selected as one of three servers to spend six weeks in Hawaii hiring new employees and training them when The Cheesecake Factory overhauled its store there. 
Beth began to notice odd comments or conversation that just didn’t track as one would normally expect. From 2,000 miles away, a mother’s heart knew that her son needed help. Beth got on the internet and started searching for somebody – anybody – to help Ryan. “I started calling phone numbers until I got a counselor at a treatment center who finally said, ‘If you can tell me where he is, I will pick him up and get him into treatment,’” she recalled. 
With her son in treatment, Beth could breathe. 
The family went into a full-support mode. They prepared and shipped a care package with all sorts of personal care items to Ryan at the treatment center. The package arrived the day after he had walked out of the program. He had stayed for three days. 
The tender-hearted oldest son had always tried to take care of Beth, even when he was only five. “I’d get home from work, and he’d suggest we go to the park. He’d say, ‘I’ll push the little kids on the swings, Mama, so you can rest,’” she related. And as the drugs began to pull at him, Ryan tried to shield his family from their effects. “People who have experience with drug addicts know how good they are at hiding what’s going on,” Beth said. But, when Beth visited Ryan in California, and he slept all week, she knew that he was in serious trouble. 
Beth discovered that Ryan’s drug of choice was methamphetamine (meth) and that the times when his conversations “didn’t track,” it was because he was in a meth-induced psychosis. It wasn’t until she witnessed a psychotic episode first-hand, that Beth realized the greater impact the drugs were having on her son. 
Billy and Beth spent Memorial Day weekend of 2011 driving to Bakersfield, CA, to meet one of Ryan’s friends who was trying to assist the family in getting Ryan home so he could get clean. During a gas-stop, Ryan, while under the influence of meth, approached a police officer to tell him that the friend had stolen his car. “It was just another mess we had to straighten out before we could bring him home,” Beth said. 
On the return trip, the trio stopped at a motel for a few hours of sleep. Fearing for Ryan’s safety, Beth and Billy pushed the beds together and kept him between them. “He couldn’t sleep, though. He kept mumbling that people were going to kill him if he slept,” Beth said. The meth-induced psychosis manifested in extreme paranoia for Ryan, and Beth believes its effects were heightened if he had been shooting meth, rather than smoking it. According to Beth, when Ryan was using, he wouldn’t sleep for days. When they got back on the road the next day, Ryan kept looking at the clouds, and finally, he looked into her eyes and said, “The clouds have faces. If you watch them long enough, they turn around and smile at you.”
Beth couldn’t breathe. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God. My son’s lost his mind,’” she related. “In my lack of knowledge, I was terrified that it was permanent.” 
With Ryan safely ensconced at the family farm near Wilmot, Beth set out to fix things. The family laid down the law for Ryan, and Beth told him, “You are staying on this farm; you are not leaving until you are sober, and then we’ll figure out the next step.” While Ryan appreciated the attempt at help, he wouldn’t stay. He advertised on Craig’s List for a ride back to California. Not wanting him to risk his life hitchhiking, Beth and Mark bought an airline ticket for him and put him on a flight. “We didn’t want to be wondering if he was hanging from a fence somewhere in Utah,” Beth said. 
“I knew he was an addict, but I didn’t know what to do about it,” she confessed. In her quest for information, Beth made the frustrating discovery that there were no books telling parents what to do if their child is addicted. “There couldn’t be because there’s no formula for how to handle it. In addiction, every child is different,” she explained. Her investigation did turn up a website called The Addict’s Mom, and without a huge personal support system, Beth found a glut of first-hand information from other mothers of addicts on that website. 
The family learned that many meth addicts get mean when they are high and may beat the people who are trying to help them. “They’ll steal; they’ll lie; they’ll do anything for their drugs,” Beth related. She and Mark were relieved that Ryan’s sweet nature stayed with him even through the many rounds of drug dependency. “Even at his worst, he was never a mean drug addict,” Beth said. “Ryan didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He didn’t want me to see the mean – the ugly – to know how bad it was.” 
Ryan’s return to California was a bleak time for Beth and Mark. Their son had no job; he was homeless and was living as a panhandler. “He was literally begging on the streets and living on a park bench in Palm Springs,” Beth revealed. If he was high, Ryan would go for days without eating. However, on occasion when faced with desperate hunger, Ryan entered restaurants, ordered and ate full meals and then asked if they would call his mom to pay for the food. “Of course, we would. We wanted to help him,” Beth explained. 
Over the period of Ryan’s addiction while he was living in California, Beth and Mark tried to help him by paying for an extended stay hotel for a month and sometimes wired money to him for groceries. “We did everything we thought we could to protect him,” Beth said. “It’s only as you embark on this journey that you discover what enabling is, and so you have to learn how to say ‘no.’ It’s really hard to do because we, as parents, do everything in our power to fix our child … and you can’t fix this.”
Ryan began having run-ins with the police, but nothing that landed him in jail or treatment programs. The spiral continued for Ryan as his family watched helplessly. Telephone conversations revealed a continuation of the psychotic episodes as Ryan told his mother things like, “All the people driving white cars are crying; I just came in from the desert, and all the rocks are hollow; or Mom, did you see me on CNN? They were in the shower with me.” By September of 2011, Ryan bottomed out and finally called home to ask for help. 
“We knew he had nothing; no ID, so he couldn’t fly,” Beth said. Ryan had worked out a way for Beth to purchase a Greyhound Bus ticket for him over the telephone, but she was cautious. “We knew there was a risk. I was afraid that he wouldn’t show up to get the ticket, or he wouldn’t get on the bus.” 
He did, and after three days of traveling on the bus, Ryan arrived in Sioux Falls, where Beth was waiting to bring him home. “I didn’t even recognize him. He scared the daylights out of me,” she recalled. 
“He looked like walking death,” Mark added. “He was a rail – six-foot-three and maybe 125 pounds. And a full beard.” 
Once again, at home on the rural Wilmot farm, Ryan got cleaned up and fed. Just as Beth was gearing up to go on the offensive against the addiction, Ryan decided to leave. He called an old high school friend in the Cities and moved in with her. He did some painting and yard work in exchange for staying there, and the St. Martins thought things were looking up for Ryan. “She let him just exist; didn’t put any pressure on him,” Mark noted. “No demands.” 
“But after a couple of months, he started to dabble (with drugs) again,” Beth recalled. “The cops picked him up and threw him in jail.” It was supposed to be two months or more until his court date before the judge, and to Beth’s surprise, her son didn’t ask to be bailed out. Beth could breathe. 
Ryan did get out of jail after a couple of weeks, and Beth recalled, “It was like a wakeup call to him. He was like, ‘I’m never going back to jail again.’”
In January of 2012, Ryan was put on probation for five years, during which time he stayed clean, partly because he was subject to random drug testing. He successfully completed a court-ordered drug treatment program and had the paperwork sent to California, where it cleared up some of the charges against him. From 2012 to 2017, Ryan rebuilt his life while living in the Cities. He got a good job, built up his credit and purchased a nearly new car, enrolled in college courses and landed an apartment that was worthy of being featured on a magazine cover. 
“In that five years, he rebuilt his entire life,” Beth sighed. “But I always waited for the other shoe to fall.” 
When everything was going well for Ryan – when he was clean and sober – he was very careful with his money, according to his parents. During this time of sobriety, he had saved enough money that he was able to keep his apartment for six or seven months after the other shoe did fall, so that he wouldn’t become homeless again. As a result, loved ones didn’t know that the spiral was beginning again. 
Ryan, who had been working steadily at a bar in Woodbury, took on the role of manager for a new bar and grill in Oakdale in the fall of 2016. When the numbers weren’t looking as good as the owners had hoped, they let the manager go. 
According to his parents, Ryan didn’t want to go back to serving; he wanted to get into the technology field instead – the area he’d been studying in college. “But with his history, it was almost impossible, so he became depressed,” Beth said. 
It wasn’t long before Beth realized Ryan was using drugs again, a fact that he tried to hide from his parents. “He knew where he was headed,” Beth said. “He didn’t want to go there, but didn’t have enough strength or the self-control to stop.” 
“And he wouldn’t ask for help,” Mark put in. 
Ryan repeatedly denied that he was using, but Beth had learned what to watch for, and she saw it. “He’d be off the grid for days, and I was back to calling the jails and the hospitals looking for him,” she said. 
In an attempt to help Ryan put his technology knowledge to work, Beth and Mark hired him to set up new servers and design websites for their business. Beth was on the telephone with her son for about one and one-half hours on the morning of Wednesday, April 4, 2018. “It was his goal to make my life easier,” Beth recalled. They ended the phone call around 10 a.m., and Beth recalled that she must have expressed some concern for Ryan because a few minutes later, he sent the text message saying, “Don’t worry Mom. I’m okay.” 
And as far as Beth and Mark knew, that was true. 
The store’s internet went down not long after, and with local technicians working to restore the service, the couple left for the Cities on a preplanned trip to pick up a signboard for the store. They stayed overnight with their son, Jamie, and his wife, Pam. The next morning, Thursday, April 5, they texted Ryan to see if he wanted to meet for breakfast but got no response. 
Heading back toward Milbank, Beth and Mark were nearing the western edge of the Cities when Beth’s phone rang. The caller was a social worker with the Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC), who asked if Beth was the mother of Ryan Koch. “We have him here at the MICU, and he is unresponsive,” the caller relayed. 
Beth telephoned her own mother and told her the news, concluding with, “I’m afraid we’ve lost him.” 
“You’re just in shock the whole time,” Mark said. HCMC has a whole ward dedicated for drug overdose patients, with 14 or 16 beds, and Ryan was in the room that was way in the back. 
Beth and Mark sat in the room with their unresponsive son and learned what had happened. Just a few moments after Ryan had ended the telephone conversation with his mother on April 4, the police had raided his apartment. “They arrived with a search warrant, the SWAT team with a battering ram, and an ambulance. They were looking for evidence that would indicate Ryan was dealing,” Beth summarized. “Drug addicts don’t make good dealers, and they should have known that.”
The police didn’t need the SWAT team or the battering ram, because Ryan had left the apartment door unlocked. According to what the St. Martins subsequently learned from the police, when they entered the apartment, Ryan was standing by his desk, reached for a shot glass and downed its contents. Then he picked up a jug of Kool-Aid and downed that. “Whether the meth was liquid or solid, we don’t know. But we do know that Ryan resisted arrest, and they took him down – hard,” Beth related. 
Not knowing what Ryan had ingested, and because of the injuries he sustained in the police take-down, Ryan was transported to the hospital. He was at HCMC when he suffered respiratory failure, followed by heart failure. “It took them way to long to intubate him, and he never woke up again,” Beth said. 
A member of the extended family is a medical examiner, and Beth and Mark asked her to be at the hospital with them. “You are in shock; you don’t know what to believe; you don’t know what not to believe; you don’t know who to trust,” Beth said. “I mean … It’s just all so surreal. You’re just moving through the motions of not understanding anything.” 
As the results of the MRIs and other tests came back, Ryan’s prognosis was dismal. “Almost every slide of his brain was white. White is dead,” Beth recalled. “They told us he’ll never wake up; never call you ‘Mom’ again. He’ll never know who you are again.” His heart was beating, but the machines were breathing for him, and nobody knew if he could live like that for days, weeks or months. “They told us we had to make a decision.” 
It was Friday, April 6, when Beth made her first blog post on The Addict’s Mom Facebook page. She didn’t set out with a goal in mind, but she posted her thoughts and begged for the support of the other mothers – the only people who could share her heartbreak. She wrote, “He is non-responsive. I am so scared. I am so numb … they have said it’s not good. They don’t think he will wake up. Please pray for my son …”
With the decision made to remove life-support, the family delayed the action until the next day, not for their own purposes, but to allow Ryan’s friends to have the chance to come to the hospital and see him. The hospital staff sedated Ryan, so he looked like he was sleeping peacefully, and Beth recalls, “His friends started streaming in. There were people coming and going all through the night.” 
One of Ryan’s childhood friends had arrived on Thursday and stayed with the family as they navigated the crisis. He didn’t leave Ryan’s side from the time he got to the hospital until after Ryan’s death on Saturday. There was a nurse whose own son, a drug addict, had been missing for over a year, and she took care of Ryan, even shaving him before his visitors arrived. One of his friends washed his feet, gave him a pedicure and a manicure, and plucked his eyebrows. “He had no idea how many people loved him so much,” Mark said. “There were 25 of us holding onto him when he took his last breath. The MICU staff said they’d never seen anything like that before.” 
On Saturday, April 7, Beth’s blog post read, “Help me Moms... the MRI shows too much brain damage from ingesting the fentanyl* … the neuro doc says she has never seen such a bad case … today, I have to unplug my baby … I don’t know how to do this, Lord …”
*The autopsy report showed the cause of death as a meth overdose, rather than fentanyl. 
After Ryan’s death, Beth continued to write blog posts every day on The Addict’s Mom Facebook page. By Beth’s admission, the internet-based support group saved her when Ryan died. “These moms allowed me to blog, to journal my pain, and they raised me up every day for the first 500 days. I don’t know what I would have done without them,” she said. 
The blogs started out as tangible versions of Beth’s internal cries for help, sympathy, and understanding – her own. She posted at least one entry each day and some days more than one. Beth found a therapeutic effect in doing the writing but feared that some of her thoughts and observations were too dark for the fellow readers on The Addict’s Mom page. “I actually had two different blogs going for a while, because some of what was going through my head was too much for them to handle. You know … in your deepest, darkest moments …” Beth trailed off. 
The other members of the Addict’s Mom would comment and offer support. “There were people who followed my story from day one, and the support that I got through the comments was amazing,” Beth said. “Some of them had lost a child and knew what I was going through, but most of them were struggling with a child in active addiction, and my story told them that if they got ‘that call,’ they, too, could survive. They knew that, if they got the call, that there is life after that.” 
As time passed, Beth’s posts began to change, and so did the responses from the group’s members. She started to get messages saying things like, “I can tell that you’re healing,” and then surprisingly, people started encouraging Beth to compile her posts into a book, so Ryan’s story could help even more people. 
When Melanie Weiss, a doctor of ophthalmology, was a guest speaker in Milbank in September of 2019, she spoke about her own experience with drug dependency and its impact. After the public event, the St. Martins had the chance to meet with Weiss. From that conversation, emerged the idea for Beth to begin making personal appearances and telling Ryan’s story to groups. 
“People who are going through this need to know the depth (of the anguish), and that you can survive,” Beth said. “You don’t want to survive, but you have to pick a reason to keep going; you have to find the strength to get out of bed.”
Mark interrupted, adding, “To her credit, there was only one day when I had to usher her out of bed. She pushed on. She’s incredibly strong.” 
With a snort, Beth said, “That doesn’t mean the days were productive; it doesn’t mean that I accomplished anything other than getting out of bed.” 
The idea of talking to groups of people about the family’s experience snowballed into more. The two set up a website, The Addict’s Hope, to promoted Beth as an inspirational speaker. It includes information and photos of Ryan, upcoming speaking dates, the first few posts from Beth’s blogs and resources for families of addicts. 
In December of 2019, Beth completed her first speaking engagement. She addressed the staff at a teacher in-service at Florence School, during which she had them alternately laughing and tearing up. 
Beth’s presentation includes telling Ryan’s story in an attempt to end the stigma of addiction. “When you think of a drug addict, you get this mental image, and guess what … It’s not right. My son was a happy, loving, successful man. He grew up in a good household. He had a ton of friends, and he became a drug addict,” she said. Beth will tell the listeners that drug addiction is a brain disease, not a choice. She will tell them that in 2017 in the United States, 192 people died each day from drug overdoses – that’s more than 70,000 people. 
“By telling Ryan’s story, I’m hoping to get people to think about addiction as a brain disease. It usually goes hand-in-hand with mental health issues,” she added. “Everybody loved Ryan. He was the life of the party, and he loved the attention – until he wasn’t.” 
The second goal Beth has in speaking to groups is to help people realize how to talk about grief and how to talk to people who are grieving. “When people come up to you and say, ‘You’re so strong,’ it cuts you off from how you really feel,” Beth said. “You can no longer articulate how you really feel.” 
“Grieving is very lonely because you have to hide the truth; you learn to show people what they want to see,” Beth said. “People don’t want to talk to someone who has lost their child because every parents’ fear is losing a child. So, if you’re talking to someone who has, then you’re kind of experiencing what they are experiencing, and you don’t want that.” 
Grief within the household is another pitfall to be navigated, according to Beth and Mark. “The divorce rate is pretty high after a family loses a child, and part of that is because each of you is so wounded and hurt inside yourself, and can’t reach out and don’t feel understood,” Beth observed. “You feel so lonely, and if your relationship is not good when you go through all of this, it’s not going to get better unless you learn how to grieve together.” 
Beth and Mark were able to grieve together, although in different ways. Beth also shared some of her posts and the comments with Mark. Through the shared activity, Mark began to realize the differences in male and female reactions to the loss. “She was reading to me from The Addict’s Mom, and time and time again, there were moms talking about the fact that their husbands would tell them things like ‘Just get over it; There’s no reason for this; It’s been a year; You need to move on,’” Mark related. “But it doesn’t work like that – I mean, I’m watching my wife go through this for the past … almost two years now, and she’s finally able to breathe – a little bit. But for the first year, there was … I don’t even know how to explain it, but it wasn’t her.” 
According to Mark, men need to understand that the wife they remember may never come back to them. “They say ‘I want my wife back.’ Well, there’s a new normal now, and they don’t understand this,” Mark said. 
The St. Martins agree that men grieve, but they do so differently. “Our society has taught them that they can’t grieve openly. They are raised to be desensitized (to emotional pain), or to compartmentalize it and hide it away,” Mark said. “Men don’t give themselves permission to have feelings or to show feelings.”
“The husbands need to participate, whether it’s your child in active addiction, and it’s ripping your life apart, or it’s you grieving the loss of a child, it’s just as important to the relationship,” Beth advised. 
As Beth takes on more speaking engagements, she hopes that Mark will join her in the telling of their story. “He has something important to say, too, but his schedule doesn’t give him the flexibility I have,” Beth said. “But men need to hear from someone that they have permission to grieve. So, I think for a man to get up and do that in front of a group of people would be powerful. For Mark to say, ‘It’s okay to support your wife; it’s okay to show your grief; it’s okay to cry together,’ would be so meaningful.” 
The couple’s new journey is to tell their truth about their child’s addiction, their loss, and to spread a message of hope. Their method is to personalize and humanize their experience. Mark added that sometimes people philosophically say, “If we can help one person, it’ll be worth it.” The two disagree with that thinking, because the loss of their son will never be “worth it,” but despite that, they intend to help as many people as they can through The Addict’s Hope website and the speaking engagements.  
Through The Addict’s Hope, Beth has scheduled presentations at Sisseton-Wahpeton College at Agency Village on June 1 and 2; Hankinson (ND) School on June 3 and 4, and Centerville School on June 16 and 17. 
The Addict’s Hope is at www.addictshope.com or 1-605-949-9005.
 
Reach the St. Martins 
phone or text: 
1-605-949-9005
 
Getting Help in South Dakota
South Dakota Opioid Resource Hotline:
1-800-920-4343
Avera Addiction Care Center:
605-504-2222
email sioux falls oxford sober living homes: siouxfallsoxfordhouse@gmail.com
 
Other resources:
 
~Holli Seehafer, 
Grant County Review, Milbank SD
 
 

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