Grief Never Ends. Here's How to Live Alongside It | Chelsea Laliberte-Barnes

I found Chelsea Laliberte-Barnes the way I find most things that stop me in my tracks: on the internet. It was a short video of her talking to her camera, ten years after a federal law passed in memory of her brother, finally getting to meet the congresswoman who co-sponsored it. Eighteen years after his death, she was a blubbering mess. And she was also a woman who had spent those eighteen years building a movement.

That is the whole show, right there. That is the thing I keep trying to say.

Chelsea lost her brother Alex to an overdose when she was 23 and he was 20, during the early stages of the opioid crisis, before most communities knew what they were dealing with. Out of that grief, she and her family started Live4Lolly, named for his nickname. They had no idea what they were doing. Today it is one of the largest harm reduction and recovery providers in Illinois and the Midwest.

What I loved about this conversation is that Chelsea refuses to hand you a formula. Harm reduction, she explained, is not only about naloxone and clean syringes and testing strips. It is seatbelts and sunscreen. It is asking someone how you can serve them today instead of demanding they meet you in your world first. As she put it, harm reduction is radical love through acceptance. And that framework turns out to describe a lot more than drug use. It describes how to live.

A few things from this episode I keep sitting with:

* Healing is not a place you arrive. Recovery is an active verb. You are always healing, and a hard day at year eighteen does not mean you are doing it wrong.

* Meaning-making does not require a law. It can be leaving the house. Talking to one person. Brushing your teeth.

* We were never properly introduced to grief in this culture, even though it is one of the few things guaranteed to all of us.

* Most of us avoid the gray because black and white feels safer. Chelsea’s whole life is proof that the gray is where the real work, and the real people, are.

We also talked about where the wonder is right now, when the actual earth is on fire and the news gives you a fresh thing to grieve most mornings. For both of us, it is the people showing up. The ones who are done sitting back. My own kids carrying naloxone in their glove boxes the way my generation carried spare change. A generation you cannot fool.

If Chelsea’s fierceness comes through even a fraction as much here as it did live, you are in for something good.

You can find Chelsea at chelsealalibertebarnes.com and on Instagram at @mentalhealth.chels. She is in private practice in Illinois and started a group called Liberal Moms of the Northwest Suburbs, getting women into community doing uncomfortable things together.