It was a summer afternoon in Albany, New York, when I got the phone call. I was in my apartment getting ready to go to work. I picked up and it was my father on the other end of the line. He wouldn’t tell me anything, just that I should get in the car and come home right way, and to let my boss know I wouldn’t be at work that night.

Home was Kingston, about an hour south. When I got there my parents told me that my brother Ryan was dead. He had overdosed. I fell to my knees. I thought my life was over.

Ryan and I grew up in a two-parent home – one most kids would call blessed. We were close, only eighteen months apart (he was older), and we had no other siblings. We loved each other. Our parents loved us too, and gave us all the opportunities in the world – whatever sports we wanted to try, whatever hobbies we wanted to try. I fell in love with gymnastics, and by the time I was six I was training five days a week, three hours a day. It was my life. By middle school I was competing all over New York, and even in other states.

Ryan was into skateboarding and snowboarding. He wasn’t as competitive as I was – for him, sports were about having fun, something you do when you feel like it. Still, he would often come along with me when I had a gymnastics event. My parents would always try to find a local skate park he could hang out at while I was competing. They wanted to show him that his sport was important too.

By the time I was in the sixth grade, I was traveling all over the country competing, and my parents were pretty much focused on me. Ryan was in the eighth grade, drifting, by which I mean that he had started hanging out at friends’ houses, and staying over, smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol in their basements. Meanwhile, my parents are thinking, “This is a good thing for him. He’s making friends; he’s coming out of his shell,” and not seeing the red flags – not knowing what was really going on.

I did. I’d look at him when he’d come home and say, “Ryan, you know what Mom and Dad would say if they found out about this.” He told me not to be a snitch. So I listened. He was my older brother. I looked up to him.

Then I had an injury. I was in high school by now, and after the competition where I hurt myself – it was the nationals – my doctor basically told me that if I wanted to still be walking in my twenties, I needed to hang up my grips. So I quit gymnastics. Immediately, my structured life was gone. And my social life. Because I no longer went to the gym every day –where all my friends were – I became deeply lonely and angry. I started rebelling against everybody – my teachers, my mother and father, everyone. I also looked for new friends and new ways to fit in, and found them doing what Ryan did: smoking pot and drinking. Soon I had spiraled out of control even more than my brother.

After Ryan graduated, he went to SUNY Plattsburgh. My parents were happy that he was in college, but they didn’t show it, because they were still so focused on me. Not because of gymnastics, of course. That was over. But because my rebellious behavior was creating so many issues for them. They called the cops on me – at home. They tried to classify me as a PINS (Person in Need of Supervision) – anything to get me though high school so I could figure out my life and move on. At school it was the same: I got kicked out of the prom. I was told I wasn’t going to walk at graduation. My friends’ parents didn’t want them to hang out with me. In other words, I was that girl in high school. “Everybody knows about Randi.”

Back to my brother: on the surface, things looked fine. He was still a straight-A student. But underneath, he was feeling that nobody cared about him, and he had started taking painkillers and other pills – prescription medications that let him escape reality. Then he started Xanax, and got hooked. Xanax pretty much took control of his life.

I knew about all this at the time, but I didn’t think much about it. In my mind he wasn’t a drug addict. He was just “experimenting.” But of course, I was too, so I wasn’t in a position to say anything anyway – certainly not to my parents.

Eventually I did graduate. I enrolled at Pace University. Believe it or not, I even got a scholarship for diving – something I’d started when I quit gymnastics. Diving was like a second chance for me. But I screwed up that chance. As a diver, you’re subject to random tests for drugs, and I failed – not once, but twice. Overnight, my scholarship was axed. And my college dream.

One day, when Ryan was almost done with college – he only had one more semester to go – he went to my parents and said, “I just can’t take it anymore. I need to get out of here. I’m moving to North Carolina.” And he did. He dropped out of college, moved south, and created this new life. He had a new girlfriend and everything. I could understand him; but just like me, Ryan soon learned that you can’t run from your problems. They always catch up with you.

And they can get worse.

In short, here’s what happened. Because Ryan didn’t have a steady job, he couldn’t afford pills, and so he started experimenting with heroin. Not by injecting – he wasn’t a needle person. He started by sniffing. But then it progressed – as it does – and soon he was shooting up.

Most people, when they think heroin, are seeing a junkie in an alleyway. At least that’s what was in my mind. I never would have thought it could hook somebody like my brother. After all, nobody wants to be an addict; nobody gets up and says, “Today I think I’d like to try heroin.” But there’s power in addiction – and in needing to try anything to make you feel better, to escape that feeling of not being happy or at peace – of not feeling at home in your own life, your own skin.

After getting kicked out of Pace, my mom cried and pleaded with me to do better. She was so worried about my brother and me. I don’t know why, but at this point I started seeing her in a new light: as the woman who raised me and loved me but was full of fear. I started listening to her. I decided to turn my life around – to become a better person and to do better for myself. I surrounded myself with good people. I started talking to my old friends. I managed to turn off the switch as far as my addictions went. I even got into college again.

For Ryan, it wasn’t that easy. Not that he didn’t try. He even moved back home: he ran out of money in North Carolina, and when he got home, he finally owned up to everything. He said, “Mom, I have to tell you something. I’m struggling. I’m a heroin addict and I need help.”

After that, he went through rehab. Several times. But here’s the problem: every time he came out, he thought he could do the same thing: go back to the same people, the same places, the same friends, and still say no to peer pressure. He thought he could have a beer or smoke a joint and still say no to pills or heroin. But it doesn’t work, or it didn’t for him. Every single time it led him right back to the same place.

The last time he came out of rehab, though – he was in for ten months – felt different. He was really doing great, and everyone thought that this was going to be it. He had turned a corner and he was finally going to get his life together. We were all so happy.

Fifteen days later I got that phone call telling me to get to Kingston. I drove down from Albany, and when I got to my grandmother’s house, and my parents took me into the backyard and told me that Ryan had overdosed. “Not again,” I said. “Please take me to him. I want to see him. Maybe I can get through to him this time.” In the past, if he would be using, he could be mean, and I would have stayed away from him. This time, though, I had this feeling that I had to see him, to beg him to stop hurting himself – to give himself another chance.

My parents just stared at me. Then my mother said, “Randi, it’s not like that. He’s not coming back.” It was at that moment that I felt, “My life is over.” And it really did feel like that. I just couldn’t get over it: Ryan, my older brother, my only sibling, who I grew up with, who I was so close to – so close – was gone? I mean, we talked on the phone all the time. And brothers and sisters don’t generally tell each other, “I love you,” “I love you too.” But I’ll tell you what: we did, every single night.

I won’t lie: I drove back to Albany and I thought about all the things I could do to escape this horrible reality. I thought about all the drugs I could take. But I also thought about how, by doing that, I would only hurt my parents – and myself.

Then one day I went to an event held by Breaking the Cycle. People were talking about how to move forward in life, sharing their stories, and one thing that kept coming up was this supposedly big key factor of forgiveness. At first I couldn’t relate. I felt, I’ve lost my brother, and I don’t really know where forgiveness fits in with that. Eventually, though, I saw that it had everything to do with what I was going through. There were so many things I needed to let go of and forgive and move on from.

But here’s the problem: I wasn’t ready to forgive. I was trapped by all those unanswerable questions: Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this? Why did it have to be my brother? Why not somebody else? Well, we all go through different things in life, and we all handle them differently, but one universal truth I’ve learned is that until you really forgive, you are not going to be able to move on. Again, we all have different things to go through, and some of us might have to go through more than others, but it’s the path forward that counts, and forgiveness is a key factor.

And so I learned to forgive. My brother. His so-called friends. The drug dealer. Most importantly, myself. I had to forgive my brother because – I know this sounds really crazy – when he passed away I was angry at him for leaving me in this world by myself. My only sibling! I wanted to kill him. Crazy, but true.

I also had to forgive Ryan’s friends. His so-called friends. Because the night he passed away, apparently there were people there in the room with him, but they got scared when he overdosed, and left. That’s right: they didn’t do a thing, they were so afraid of getting into trouble. I thought all of the ways I could get back at them or hurt them – I was so angry. How could you do that to a friend? (Eventually, I came to see that these people were struggling with the same disease my brother was fighting).

Then there was the person who sold Ryan his last drugs. I had to forgive him, because it wasn’t just heroin. It was laced with fentanyl, and that’s what actually killed him. And I sat there and I thought, I am going to find out who he got those drugs from, because they essentially murdered my brother. So I stayed up at night trying to search through Ryan’s phone, his Facebook friends, all that sort of thing, and plotting revenge. Needless to say it didn’t help me move forward.

Finally – this was the hardest one – I had to forgive myself. For taking all the attention when I was a star gymnast. For covering for him; and then, later, joining him – partying and doing drugs with him. For taking over the spotlight during my high school years, when my parents were so worried about me. Because there were times when he would look at me and say, “I can’t stand you. Mom and Dad only care about you. I wish they’d never had me.” All those things sat in my brain the day Ryan died. All that guilt.

But I’m not done yet: there was shame too, the shame of having a family member who died of a heroin addiction. The shame of having used drugs myself. The embarrassment of being known around town as somebody who was in trouble with the law almost every weekend in high school. Who would ever want to hire me? Who would ever want to hang out with me? Who would ever believe in me?

But the long and the short of it is that I decided to forgive all those people, and myself, and that I was able to move forward. My life didn’t end. It just changed. Today, I, have a master’s degree in education. I have a beautiful family, with two kids. I have a house.

It’s not all easy – I’m not saying that. There are days when I wake up and have to remind myself: Forgive yourself. Don’t look back. There might be a situation at work or at home – with friends, or whatever the case may be. No matter what it is, I have to remind myself to forgive, to let go, and to move on. To put one foot in front of the other and keep going.

Some people think that to forgive is a sign of weakness. They’re wrong. In reality, it’s a sign of strength. It gives you life.