One month into 2016 and I continue to wonder: How are you bringing peace to yourself, the people you love, the communities you serve, and to our planet? Are you following the teachings of spiritual, philosophers, and business leaders by adding meditation to your day or are you doing even more to help create a better world? This is not a new question, it comes right from January’s column. The difference is that today I get to do more than ask you to harness the power of meditation. This month I am writing about what one funeral director is doing to stop Heroin from killing one more person.

  Today we revisit Mark MacDonald, of MacDonald Funeral Home in Marshfield, Massachusetts to learn more about what he is doing to stop Heroin’s death toll from rising. If you remember October’s column you know that “Mark is arming every member of MacDonald Funeral Home with the lifesaving drug Narcan,” and he is not stopping there. Mark is on a mission to make sure every business in Marshfield has the ability and the tools to stop a Heroin death in its tracks. What you do not know from that article is why he is doing this or how Mark’s efforts are going.

  According to Mark, “the Opiate epidemic, specifically Heroin, is just that: an epidemic. Heroin does not discriminate. It doesn’t care if you are a man or a woman, what race you are or how old you are. Heroin’s ability to kill knows no boundaries.” If you are like me, when you think about Heroin you immediately think of all the young adults Heroin kills. Then you speak with Mark and you learn that this is only one part of the story.

  The truth: the average age of people killed by Heroin is late 30s. So why do so many of us think Heroin’s strongest attack is against the young? After speaking with Mark I think it is because we hear about the young people Heroin kills and we know the pain the death of a child creates. These lives end before they begin. Yet teens and young adults are not the people Heroin kills most often. The truth is that Heroin kills more people closer to 40 than 20.

  Are statistics what drive Mark to try to save lives when Heroin tries to take them? Sure they may provide part of the fuel, but they are not the driving force propelling Mark into action: instead it is one Iraqi war veteran and her family. Mark became the funeral director for a young woman – a soldier – that came home from war addicted to pain medication, which spiraled into opiate addiction. She died because of Heroin in January 2014.

  Imagine your sister or your daughter lying on the bathroom floor in a fast food restaurant dying and no one can get to her because the door is locked and she has the only key. This Iraqi war veteran was in that bathroom dying because of Heroin. When you think of it this way, do you care about the stigma and stereotypes? I don’t think so. I think, like Mark, you feel the terror this family must have gone through when they learned how Heroin killed their daughter, their sister, and our country’s soldier.

  Now you know why Mark is on a quest to arm every business in Marshfield with the lifesaving drug Narcan. In the coming months you will learn more about what he is doing to mobilize his fellow business owners and citizens so that they may join in the effort to stop a Heroin death in its tracks. Even better, you could share your thoughts and/or what you or one of your fellow funeral homes or cemeteries are doing to make our world a better place so that I may write about that too. I look forward to hearing from you. Please ring me at 617-980-1728 email me at kristan@mooneytunco.com or better yet be part of the conversation at the Let’s Chat Blog at nomispublications.com.