Dear Jack: A Love Letter

by Barbara Conroy

Opioid drugs have killed more Americans than the 19-year Vietnam war, the AIDS crisis, car accidents, suicides and homicides combined. Each year, drug 

addiction claims more than 135,000 lives. This epidemic has not only shattered millions of families, it has reached the point that the life expectancy of Americans has been reduced. Barbara Bates Conroy puts a mother and her son’s face to this crisis.

In Dear Jack: A Love Letter, Barbara shares her highly personal and tragic experiences with drug addiction, family discord, loss, and grief. When her son died of a heroin overdose at age 21, the unimaginable for a parent, Barbara invested herself in grief workshops and alternative healing modalities, and found herself on a new spiritual path, one that proved crucial to moving her life forward, and to coping with her past. With the aid of psychics, mediums, intuitives, and her cultivated powers of introspection and recognition, Barbara comes to terms with her own pain and power, as well as Jack’s. Her unconventional memoir is an intimate account of the fear of life and the depth of love.

Dear Jack debuted at #1 on Amazon in the Hard Cover category Grief and Bereavement, and #1 in the ebook category Grief and Loss.

“Dear Jack,” Barbara writes to her son, Jack. She always had, even before he was born, through his troubled teenage years, when he struggled with drug addiction, and even after his death at age 21. It seemed the only thing to do: to keep writing to him, to keep trying to reach him.

A high powered, working mother, Barbara gave her four children and husband a beautiful life. But even with all of the money, resources, and caring in the world, she could not save her son from his dangerous battle with prescription drugs and heroin. Through his troubled years and after his death, Barbara’s world is turned upside down as she moves through one of the greatest heartbreaks any parent could ever face.

Barbara is left devastated, and wondering what happened to her loving, amazing, adorable Jack. Through a series of creative healing workshops and forays into different spiritual healing techniques, from conferences with psychics and mediums to a Shamanism training, Barbara works to understand not only Jack’s loss, but also her own life. This book represents a mother’s journey to continue the conversation with her son, and herself.

Told in alternating sections of prose, journal entries, and letters to her son, Dear Jack: A Love Letter explores questions of motherhood, responsibility, guilt, and spirituality.

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Barbara Conroy is a mother of five. Sadly, two of her children have left this earth. The pain of her loss most times is unbearable. She has been grieving most of her adult life. Barbara compiled her thoughts into a manuscript and decided to publish with the hope that her story of love, grief, addiction and healing will meet someone exactly when and where they need it. She continues to seek resources, success stories, and healing and spiritual tools to share on her website dearjack.love. Determined to do something about the epidemic of opioid addiction, she hopes to discover alternative healings, support individualized treatments, and remove the stigma of addiction. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard.

 

 

 

“On the surface, Dear Jack is a story about a woman trying to process the grief of losing her son to addiction. But as we read each of the letters she wrote to her son Jack from his innocent childhood on into his descent into addiction, and about all that unfolded in between, we find she is taking us on a transformative journey through the dark underside of the pain that often comes with being human and the light that can be found there when we look deeply enough. She takes us with her on her own personal quest or ‘treasure hunt,’ to more deeply understand what pain is, what love is, and what really matters in the end.”

–Shawn Phelps
Intuitive Advisor

“In Dear Jack, Barbara Conroy pours out her heart as only a mother who has lost a child to drug addiction can do. In her letters to her son Jack, she paints a picture of  a wonderful young man on a path of self-destruction.  Barbara’s letters leave the reader felling her love for Jack and the pain she felt in not being able to stop the roller coaster he was on. The book is raw, endearing, truthful and sad. Yet, the reader is filled with a sense of who Jack was beyond the drugs and the love between him and his mother. By the end of the book, I knew Jack, but more importantly, I felt the love between mother and son.”  

–Anna Raimondi
Grief Counselor & Psychic Medium