She Overdosed In My Bedroom.

At my noon meeting today someone told a story: a friend of theirs was related to a drug-addict and alcoholic who had gotten herself involved with violent men. The person telling the story said the woman had died “a violent death.” The person had looked up her story in the newspaper and found out just how she’d died.

“I can’t stop thinking about it—I don’t know why,” the person said. “Except I think to myself, That could have been me. What she was doing wasn’t very far from where I was when I finally got sober.”

I was sitting on the floor (we had so many people today, there wasn’t room enough for chairs for everyone) thinking about Virginia. A woman who used to live in this house.

When we moved in here in 1993, I was out back double-digging the garden one day when I introduced myself to the old lady who lived next door. “My husband and I have just bought this house. We’re happy to be your neighbors,” I said. She fixed me with a steely stare.

“My daughter died in that house,” she said, her head shaking in an almost palsied way.

“Oh my God,” I said. What else to say? “I’m so sorry . . .”

“You should find out things like this before you buy a place.”

So I checked it out. I went to the office of the recorder of deeds (this was in the days before electronic recordkeeping) and found out that our house had been bought in 1969 by our next-door-neighbors, who in 1972 sold it to their elder daughter, Virginia, and her husband Raymond, I guess so they could have her living nearby. Virginia moved in with Ray and their three-year-old daughter. Then in 1974 Raymond sold the house, which, the deed said, he owned in full after his wife’s death in 1973.

Her death?

So I called the coroner. (These are the things that, as a reporter, you learn are possible to do: you can go to the deeds office, you can call the coroner, you can say you’re investigating a death and get the public information.)

I told the assistant I was investigating a death that had occurred in June 1973. He whistled at the early date and said he’d do some checking. An hour later he called back and said he’d found her name.

“Right,” he said, “cause of death was pentobarbital poisoning, location”—and he named the address of our house—“30-year-old white female, date of death six-three-seventy-three, manner—”

“Wait a minute!” I said, scribbling furiously.

“—manner of death undetermined,” he finished. “But there was an autopsy done, and the cause of death was determined to be pentobarbital and Tylenol poisoning.”

Suicide, I thought. Or an accident. Or, less likely, murder.

“So there’s no way we can know how she died?” I asked.

“What you mean? She died of a drug overdose,” he said.

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The Physician’s Desk Reference says pentobarbital is more commonly called Nembutal. It has a very high bioavailability, meaning not much of the drug passes through the system unmetabolized—your body gets most of the dose. It’s processed by the liver and discharged by the kidneys. Wikipedia says it has been used in Oregon for physician-assisted suicide and “in various U.S. states” for use in executions. It is said to be the drug that killed, for example, Marilyn Monroe. It was one of the drugs used by the waste-case Hollywood characters in Valley of the Dolls. In the U.S. it’s classified as Schedule II, the same as all the drugs I was on in the last four years or so of my addiction. It’s majorly habit-forming; it’s one of those drugs that’s very effective if you want to not-feel.

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Even before I admitted I was an addict, I thought it was pretty ironic that I was living in a house where a previous owner had OD’d. Virginia’s story was one of the many stories that helped me get sober. I didn’t want to die in my bedroom, as she did.

Did she in fact die in our bedroom? Did she die in the bathroom? Did she die in the adjoining room I use as my study? Did she die in the night, in the day, as she was falling asleep, before she could wake up? Was her little girl in my study or across the hall, in my son’s room?

I can’t know any of this, but I do know that it could have been me, and it wasn’t.