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Heather Kopp is an author and editor whose memoir, Sober Mercies chronicled her and her adult son’s journey through alcoholism to long-term sobriety. For years, Noah was her living miracle—a young man back from addiction, building a steady life in recovery. That is, until he traded his bipolar meds for high-grade cannabis and mail-order stimulants.
In time, Noah slipped into mania and finally, full-blown psychosis. Despite his family’s efforts to help him, the unthinkable happened: One day in 2015, Noah fatally shot three people in Colorado Springs before he was killed by police. In the years since, Heather has tried to understand his path to violence and how she was blinded to danger. She recently completed a memoir that tells that story in hopes that other parents can learn from her experience.
Heather continues to write about addiction, complicated motherhood, grief, and what it means to love people whose struggles exceed our ability to save them.
[I recently cleaned up my blog and left only a few of my old posts for now]
The Myth of Monsters
From the get-go, my son Noah was a skeptical kid who took little at face value. When I would tell him, “There’s nothing you could ever do to change how much I love you,” he would take it as a challenge. “What if I robbed a bank? What if I punched Nathan in the face?…
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Remembering Lizzie-Pie
It’s suicide prevention month, and my heart tells me that it’s time to talk about Liz, a young woman I met through recovery back in 2012. I still remember the first time we met for coffee. I was taken by her apple green eyes. The wisdom beyond her years. Her quickness to be vulnerable with…
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Find It in Your Heart
The album, as you’ll discover, was partly inspired by Noah, and the theme of that loss runs heavily through it. Taylor writes, “The songs on the record exist somewhere in the place between the death of my brother, and my need to carve out a bigger life. When my brother died in 2015 I realized…
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Heather Kopp 