A Father’s Promise
In an email to Epiphany Center, a disheartened father unable to find his daughter wrote, “Can you please let me know of any options we may have or any steps that should be taken?”
Dave knows all too well the pain and anguish of watching a loved one in the clutches of addiction. He came across Epiphany Center on the web while reading a KQED article on the methamphetamine crisis in San Francisco that featured our services.
Over 6 years ago, Dave moved from Colorado to the Bay Area on a work contract. His 24-year-old daughter, Cindy, followed him here a few years later. Cindy was in recovery and was able to obtain both her Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA) license and her Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN) license. She was doing so well and then she relapsed, and then her life escalated out of control. The last Dave heard of her, she is homeless and injecting both heroin and methamphetamine.
Every day Dave struggles to make sense of what had happened to his only child. He believes that his daughter’s downward spiral began when, at the age of twelve, she found her mother dead after she took her own life.
Cindy has gone missing several times since last January. With the help of the police department and the county jail, Dave had been able to keep track of his daughter, until two months ago. Now he can’t find her. He fears every parent’s worst nightmare, that his child is lost to him forever.
Trying to spare his daughter from jail, an institution, or the tragedy of death, Dave has spent a considerable portion of his retirement savings on treatment programs and therapies for her. Due to the excessive time Dave spent looking for his child and not focusing on his work duties, his employer laid him off. Dave was forced to return to Colorado to look for employment.
Loving and compassionate through it all, he reached out to Epiphany, “I’ll travel back to the Bay Area at a moment’s notice if I had any idea of what to do.”
Dave doesn’t know if his daughter is still here. But Dave is still here, loving her.