Carrie Ann Guthrie
Sept 2, 1989 - Oct 11, 2017
Carrie Ann was a beautiful smart and loving woman. Carrie Ann was my cousin who came to live with my family right after her 14th birthday. In my eyes, we now had the family that I had always wanted. She was a great older sister to my two youngest daughters, Hannah and Lilia. They never knew until they were older that Carrie Ann was not their biological sister.
Carrie Ann struggled for many years with addiction and it stole her from me on October 11, 2017. Carrie Ann had been in and out of rehabs from the time she was 17 years old but she always came home because she knew that I loved her unconditionally. She knew that she would always have a place to go.
When Carrie Ann was 24 years old, she was sober and decided she wanted to go to Job Corps to get her life together; finish high school; and get trained for a job to be self-supporting. As she said, “to make me proud of her”. While she was at Job Corps, she met a boy and became pregnant. About 6 months into her pregnancy she was asked to leave the program and came home to live with us and to eventually raise the baby. In March of 2014, her son, Jayden, was born via C-section. As much as she loved her son, she was struggling with the pain from the C-section and her addiction started to show it’s ugliness again. We tried to help her but after about a year the addiction had too strong of a hold on her again.
I received the call on a Monday afternoon that Carrie Ann was in the hospital from an overdose and I was completely heartbroken. How was I going to face this? How was I going to go home and tell my daughters that Carrie Ann overdosed and she is not coming home this time? She always came home. I look back at that time and wonder how I made it through. I was completely broken. I miss Carrie Ann everyday and I vow to say her name everyday so no one will ever forget her.
Submitted by Karen Sweeting
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