Grieving father sets up bereavement group for loved ones of those lost to addiction

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After his daughter died suddenly in July 2020 following a years-long battle with drugs and depression, Ottawa’s JB Robillard sought help for his paralytic grief.

He joined a bereavement support group, but Robillard felt awkward telling his story to others who had lost loved ones to breast cancer or car accidents.

“There was a bit of a disconnect,” he says. “Other parents described perfect children, whereas our Madeleine, she struggled.”

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When Robillard met another father in the group whose son died of a fentanyl overdose, they established an immediate rapport. “I felt a little uplifted talking to this gentleman,” he says. “He went through what we went through.”

Robillard searched online for a support group geared to people who had lost loved ones to addiction, and discovered Grief Recovery After Substance Passing (GRASP).

The U.S.-based bereavement group was founded in 2003 during the first wave of the opioid epidemic as OxyContin and other prescription opioids flooded the North American market with deadly results. The epidemic is now in its third wave: In 2023, opioid overdoses — most of them connected to the synthetic opioid fentanyl — claimed more than 100,000 lives in the U.S. and another 6,000 in Canada.

One year after his own daughter’s tragic death, Robillard launched an Ottawa chapter of GRASP to help other people struggling to come to terms with the overdose death of a loved one. Dozens of people have since joined the support group, which now meets once a month online.

Almost all of the mourners are parents grieving the loss of children to the epidemic.

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“There’s a certain stigma losing a child to addiction,” Robillard explains, “and there are some sensitivities there. So, when you meet people who have gone through what you’ve gone through, who understand, it makes it easier to talk honestly.”

In many cases, he says, parents’ grief is compounded by the trauma associated with their child’s addiction. Drug users often lose themselves, Robillard says, in a single-minded pursuit of more drugs, which leads to stressed and fractured relationships that can complicate the grieving process.

Many in the group suffer from feelings of guilt, regret, sometimes anger.

“There’s trauma and conflict that is unresolved, that you were intending on resolving, but you never got a chance to,” Robillard says. “Unfortunately, it’s often the same story … There’s no judgment in our group.”

He gets referrals from therapists and family doctors and is sometimes called by parents in the early, raw days of their grieving process. While on holidays recently, he spoke for an hour with a woman in Montreal who had just lost her son. He mostly listens in such cases.

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“It can be heavy,” Robillard says.

He tells grievers that the first three months are the worst. “It’s a rough go early on. It sucks, but you have to feel it. You have to try to sort through it. That’s the only way,” he says.

During group sessions, Robillard stresses the need for self-care — he exercises to manage his own trauma — and grievers share memories of their loved ones, both to understand and to celebrate them.

Julia Robillard calls her husband “incredibly brave” for trying to help others given his own traumatic experience. She found that listening to other people’s stories triggered her own grief and sent her back to the darkest of places.

“I couldn’t participate: I couldn’t share space with others,” says Julia, who remembers little about the two years immediately after her daughter’s death. She found it hard even to speak during those years.

“It was like a grief concussion,” says Robillard who eventually found comfort in grief yoga. “Everyone grieves so differently.”

Madeleine Robillard’s addiction journey began at Stittsville’s Sacred Heart High School, first with alcohol and marijuana, then with cocaine, which she was introduced to at a grad party in Mont-Tremblant.

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Madeleine was an honour roll student at the time and worked in the family’s hearing centre; she wanted to be a lawyer and had earned a scholarship to study political science at Carleton University. But she dropped out of first-year university when her addiction deepened.

The family tried several interventions — counselling, rehab, a youth treatment program — but, like many parents navigating addiction, they struggled to find the right balance between supporting their daughter and enabling her destructive behaviour.

“It really is the hardest thing as a parent to negotiate,” JB Robillard says.

Madeleine went missing in July 2020. The 19-year-old’s pink purse, containing her passport and phone, was found near Hog’s Back Falls, where she had gone with two friends. Three days later, police discovered her body in the Rideau River.

Robillard isn’t sure how his daughter ended up in the water; he suspects she may have had a seizure, possibly as a side-effect of taking Xanax with another drug.

He had spoken to Madeleine the day before she died. In that conversation, Madeleine apologized for a recent argument with her mother and expressed a desire to get clean. Robillard invited her to come home and to go through withdrawal with medical help, but Madeleine insisted she wanted to do it on her own.

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Doctors and counsellors repeatedly told the Robillards that their daughter had to “hit rock bottom,” before she could embrace and succeed at rehab. “She’s only 18 or 19 at this point, so it’s a hell of a thing to say,” he says. “It’s hard to hear that as a father.”

Robillard supports recent calls by the British Columbia premier and some Ontario mayors for compulsory drug treatment programs. He believes it’s the only thing that could have helped his daughter.

“No one wakes up every morning and says, ‘I’m going to get high,’” Robillard says. “It’s not a lifestyle that they want. They’re compromised mentally. … They can’t make that decision to get clean on their own.”

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