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WILKES-BARRE — Aliyah Benjamin sounds like a high school junior when she recounts how the design for the T-shirt she wore spawned from the jibes of a younger sister.
The Meyers High School junior’s voice grows far more solemn — and older — with talk of a friend’s suicide.
“It hurt because she was so close. I missed her a lot, ” Benjamin said while standing on the edge of Memorial Stadium field awaiting the start of an addiction/suicide awareness and prevention rally. “She was 15.” A pause. “She was really young.”
Benjamin designed the official T-shirt for the rally held Tuesday morning, with students from Wilkes-Barre Area’s three high schools and Solomon Jr. High attending. The back design included a depiction of earth held in two large hands and the words “Be aware,” “Offer hope” and “Save a life.” The “e” in “Be” is shaped like the blue looped ribbon of suicide prevention and awareness.
The rally, held a week before the last day of school, was the finishing touch to a year-long, district-wide push for positive choices and drug and alcohol addiction awareness, Administrative and Student Services Director Rochelle Koury said in brief remarks introducing the main speaker, Joe Kane from Clearbrook Treatment Centers.
Kane recounted his own battle with addiction beginning around age 13 when he tried marijuana, began drinking daily, and moved onto opioids first stolen from a friend’s parent dying of cancer, then to heroin.
“People tell you your life is the sum of your decisions, which is nonsense. Often it is one bad decision,” he said of his first toke on marijuana.
As both a recovering addict and a counselor for others, Kane said “not one of them ever said you know what Joe, one morning I woke up and decided to run my life into the ground.” He told a story of trying to get $20 from his mom, allegedly for gas for his car, and when she offered to drive the car to the station and fill it up, he angrily accused her of distrusting him and of causing his problems.
“I used to say, if you had my problems, you would drink and drug like me. But the truth is if you drink and drug like me you have my problems.
“Some of the stuff I say is going to make sense now, or it’s going to make sense later,” Kane added. “If it makes sense later, it’s going to suck because then it’s too late.
“The worst thing possibly within any life is sitting there after a tragedy and saying ‘what could I have done?””
Following Kane’s speech cheerleaders made short cheer before students got up and walked around the stadium, some holding up posters, while music including John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.” A brown bag lunch followed and a BMX bike demonstration concluded the rally.
School Psychologist Beth Ann Owens said this was the second year for the event, and both years it has made a profit thanks to T-shirt sales. The $3,000 raised this year went to Wyoming Valley Drug and Alcohol Services Inc.
