My World Fell Apart When My Funny, Caring Son Took His Life at 24

When Richard arrived at his mother’s hotel room in Las Vegas on Mother’s Day weekend in 2016, he was holding a bouquet of roses.

Because Mother’s Day and Richard’s birthday fell at the same time, Ann Marie Farino had flown to Las Vegas to spend the weekend with her son. At 24, Richard appeared to have found stability: he had been sober for three years, was working and had fallen in love.

He was due to marry that September, and Ann Marie had already begun the calligraphy for his wedding invitations. Yet when she opened the door, she immediately sensed that something was not right. “He said, ‘Now you’re here. Now, hopefully, I’ll be okay,’” Ann Marie tells the Daily Mail.

Over the following days, Richard started giving his mother his belongings, including his keys, computer and even a piece of needlepoint she had made for his birthday. When Ann Marie handed him family photographs, he focused on a picture of himself and said, “I look so ugly.” She urged him to see a therapist, but Richard said he would go after she had left.

At the end of the visit, Ann Marie hugged him at the hotel door, pressing her cheek to his as she had done with each of her children since they were young. As she walked away, the doorman called out, telling her to come back soon.

“I said, ‘I won’t be back soon,’” Ann Marie recalls. Even now, she cannot explain why those words came out.

‘He swung from the treetops’

Before the concern and uncertainty, Richard was the child who could always make Ann Marie laugh. Social and charismatic, he had a huge heart and a memorable sense of humour that often became part of their private jokes. Even reading a menu could turn into an extended exchange between mother and son.

Ann Marie says Richard was handsome, although he never appeared to recognise it himself. And when he was happy, she says, he was intensely happy.

By the time he was about 12, his playful mischief had begun to cause problems. Pranks at school led to calls from the principal, and as he grew older, his escapades became increasingly risky.

“He was the kid who didn’t go down the road less travelled,” Ann Marie says. “This kid swung from the treetops.”

Whenever one of those adventures ended badly, Richard would often call his mother for help. Ann Marie always went to him.

At the same time, she was seeing a more troubled side to the boy who could light up a room. Richard sometimes withdrew, and bouts of depression and anxiety appeared to contradict the funny, outgoing son other people knew. Long before drugs entered his life, Ann Marie understood that her son was carrying something she could not resolve for him.

‘Mum, it makes me feel normal’

During Richard’s first year of high school, Ann Marie caught him smoking marijuana beside their home.

Her response was that of a worried parent. She warned him that he could not continue living that way, reminding him that he would eventually need a job, employers might conduct drug tests and the decisions he made as a teenager could affect his adult life.

Richard looked at her and replied with words she would understand in a very different way years later.

‘It makes me feel normal.’

At the time, Ann Marie was focused on stopping his drug use. Richard was also struggling with his mental health. She says he was diagnosed with a depressive disorder and anxiety, while doctors raised the possibility of bipolar disorder, although that was never confirmed.

The drug use became more serious. Marijuana was followed by prescription opioids, which Ann Marie says Richard and some of his school friends obtained through a doctor they were seeing. Eventually, there was heroin.

Looking back, it is Richard’s explanation beside the house that has stayed with her. Ann Marie came to believe her son wasn’t simply chasing a high. He had discovered something that, for a while at least, changed how it felt to be inside his own head.

‘He wasn’t trying to get high,’ she says. ‘He was trying to feel normal.’

Walking on eggshells

By then, Ann Marie says she was ‘always walking on eggshells’. She knew something was going to happen, but never what it would be or when. Richard’s addiction had entered family life with him, and everyone in the house was learning to live around it.

His much younger sister adored him. Richard adored her too, but whenever he was high and she walked into the room, he would leave. She was too young to understand why and eventually reached the conclusion that made sense to a little girl: her big brother didn’t like her.

Years later, after Richard became sober, the siblings took part in a therapy program together and she finally told him what she had believed. Richard was stunned. He hadn’t been leaving because he didn’t want her around, he explained. He had been ashamed for his little sister to see him high. Whatever happened afterwards, she would at least know that her brother had loved her all along.

The family had been trying for years to help Richard. There were treatment programs and rehab, including time at a therapeutic boarding school away from home, with schooling, therapy and family weekends built into the program.

Each attempt brought hope that perhaps this would be the thing that reached him, but nothing seemed to hold for long.

The strain reached Ann Marie’s marriage, too. She and Richard’s father often disagreed about discipline and how best to help their son, and she says those years contributed to their marriage breaking down.

‘The call she knew was coming’

Richard was 21 when Ann Marie realised just how close she was to losing him.

One day, he became so unwell he could barely get the word ‘hospital’ out. Ann Marie thought he had the flu and drove him to the emergency room. Usually, Richard let his mother go through with him. This time he said no.

Richard had been using heroin and had overdosed. After doctors saved him, he told his mother, ‘You know, if I don’t get sober, I’ll eventually die.’

Yet two days later, Ann Marie watched him get dressed to go out with friends. She begged him not to leave. ‘If you leave right now, I know I’m getting a phone call,’ she told him. ‘Either from a hospital or the jail.’

Richard walked out, assuring her that everything would be OK. Soon afterwards, Ann Marie’s phone rang. He had been arrested with heroin.

By then she had watched her son go through treatment, come home and use again. This time, however, Richard was standing in front of a judge who made it clear that what happened next would no longer be his choice.

‘Welcome to the world of felonies,’ Ann Marie remembers the female judge telling him. ‘Your life is not yours anymore. It belongs to me.’

Ann Marie wanted to hug her.

Richard entered the court-ordered program and completed it, eventually having the charge dropped. But Ann Marie believes something else had changed too. After years of other people desperately wanting Richard to get well, this was the first time he seemed to want sobriety for himself.

And this time, it held.

‘I thought maybe that was it’

For the next three years, Richard stayed sober in St Paul, Minnesota.

He found a job at a vitamin store and became fascinated by health and nutrition. He ran, rode his bike and researched the products he sold so thoroughly that customers began seeking him out, knowing Richard would take the time to understand what they needed and genuinely try to help.

Ann Marie began getting her son back in quieter, wonderfully ordinary ways. Richard would arrive for their restaurant dates wearing his blue blazer, open the car door for her and refuse to tell her where they were eating until they arrived. After years in which so much of their relationship had revolved around whether he was using, where he was and whether he was safe, they could simply go out for dinner.

At 21, Richard also told her something he had known since he was 16: he was gay. Ann Marie was happy her son finally felt able to be himself, but devastated that he had spent those years feeling unable to tell his family. After everything he had struggled with, she found herself wondering whether this had been one of the pieces they hadn’t understood.

‘I thought maybe that was it,’ she says.

Then Richard fell in love. He became engaged and moved from St Paul to Las Vegas to be with his fiancé, who was working there. Their wedding was planned for September 2016. Ann Marie began addressing the invitations by hand.

Three months after the move, with Mother’s Day falling just before Richard’s birthday, she booked a flight to Las Vegas to see him.

The wedding invitations

A month after Ann Marie returned home, Richard died.

Mother and son had been texting that day. Nothing about those messages told Ann Marie that by the end of it, her 24-year-old son would be gone. Later, she set out to meet friends for dinner, but on the way she was overcome by a strange physical sensation. Something felt so wrong that she turned around and went home.

Afterwards, when Ann Marie saw the police report and the approximate time Richard had died, she came to believe that strange feeling had happened at around the same time.

‘I felt him leave,’ she says.

Then Richard’s fiancé called.

Ann Marie remembers the doctor coming onto the phone and hearing the words no parent can make sense of when they are first spoken. Richard had died by his own hand. She handed the phone to her husband and walked away.

And then she saw the wedding invitations.

They were still there, the envelopes Ann Marie had carefully addressed in her own calligraphy for the wedding her son was supposed to have in September. Only weeks earlier, she had been writing out names for the people who would come to watch Richard get married.

Ann Marie grabbed a garbage bag and began throwing them away.

‘The grief doesn’t happen right away,’ she says. ‘What happens is pure catastrophic shock.’

For years, she had lived with the fear that one day a hospital or police officer might call about Richard. He had survived heroin, an overdose and years when she never quite knew what the next phone call would bring. Then he had been sober for three years, and Ann Marie had allowed herself to believe they might have made it through.

There was nothing that could have prepared her for losing him now.

Just do something

In the days after Richard died, Ann Marie’s house filled with people. They loved her and wanted desperately to help, but she was still in the state she now describes as catastrophic shock. Even answering a well-meaning question such as ‘What can I do?’ could require more of a newly bereaved person than they have to give.

Her advice now is simple: say ‘I’m sorry’, then do something. Sit beside them. Clean the kitchen. Bring groceries. Be there without expecting them to tell you what they need or requiring them to hold a conversation.

At Richard’s wake, one woman waited three hours in line just to speak to Ann Marie. She had also lost a child to suicide and, when she finally got to her, she didn’t try to make the loss understandable.

‘When everyone is sick and tired of you talking about Richard, call me,’ she said.

Ann Marie never forgot it. This woman knew something others couldn’t yet know: the funeral would end, people would return to their lives, and Ann Marie would still need to say her son’s name.

Team Richard

For a long time, Ann Marie went to Richard’s grave every day. She took a lawn chair and, when the weather allowed, plants to water. Even through the Chicago winter, she kept going. Her son was buried there, and in those early months, sitting close to him was where she wanted to be.

Eventually, she began walking. One day she put on Richard’s winter hat and made him a deal: she would walk the six miles from home to the cemetery. Then she decided she would walk home again too.

That was how she found the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Overnight Walk, an 18-mile walk through San Diego. Less than a year after Richard died, Ann Marie travelled there with family and friends who had come together as ‘Team Richard’ to walk in his memory. They wore shirts featuring Joe Cool, the Snoopy character Richard had tattooed on his arm.

Through the night, Ann Marie walked beside other parents, siblings and friends carrying losses of their own. At the finish, luminarias lined the route, glowing with photographs of the people they had come to remember.

Somewhere among them was Richard.

Ann Marie and Team Richard walked through them together.

In the years since, Ann Marie has also put Richard’s story, and her own, into words. Her memoir, Chronic Chaos: A Son’s Addiction, A Mother’s Love, and Her Quest to Find Joy, traces the years she spent loving her son through addiction and recovery, and the life she has had to build since losing him. It will be published in October.

‘What’s your story?’

Ann Marie knew the tenth anniversary of Richard’s death was coming this year. What she hadn’t expected was the force with which it would arrive.

She calls what happened a ‘grief storm’. Ten years had passed, and there was joy in her life again. She had found ways to carry Richard with her without every day being consumed by losing him. But reaching a decade without her son brought the grief rushing back in a way that blindsided her.

That is something Ann Marie understands now about living after Richard. Time has changed her grief, but it hasn’t erased it. Some seasons are lighter than others. There are days when she can remember her son with laughter and others when missing him still feels terribly close.

But when asked what she wants people to know about Richard, Ann Marie doesn’t begin with addiction, mental illness or the way he died.

Back in St Paul, Richard used to make sandwiches, put them into his backpack and go looking for people experiencing homelessness. He didn’t simply hand them food and walk away. He sat down beside them.

‘I’m Richard. It’s nice to meet you. What’s your story?’

Then he listened.

Richard returned often enough that he came to know many of the people he met. He learned their names and their stories because, despite everything he was carrying himself, he was interested in what somebody else might be carrying too.

‘He had such a lovely heart,’ Ann Marie says.

Ten years after his death, that is the Richard she wants people to know.