GREENFIELD — Last year, Sarah Ahern stood in the median on Main Street with a sign to raise awareness for International Overdose Day, but this year she’ll be headed with a group to the Boston Common.
For the first time, a Massachusetts State of Awareness event in coordination with the international day, to mourn those lost to overdoses, will be held in Boston. It’s a statewide effort and the latest estimates from the organizing group anticipate 5,000 people to come by the Parkman Bandstand in the common from 6 to 9 p.m.
Ahern, a Greenfield resident and the founder of EndTheStigma, was the person on the ground organizing the effort in western and central Mass. The vigil in Boston will include a keynote speaker, a music headline act and the reading of a proclamation in recognition of the day signed by Gov. Charlie Baker’s office.
“I’m amazed,” Ahern said. “I’m always amazed and I always have gratitude that I get to do these things.”
The state’s Bureau of Substance Addiction Services will be paying for two coach buses to pick up people from around the state. Ahern helped to coordinate for one of these buses to start in Greenfield, where it will pick up 10 people, before it heads east. It will make a stop in Fitchburg, where members of the North Quabbin Recovery Center are expected to catch the bus. The other bus will begin on Cape Cod.
“It was important for me and our people from the Cape that were able to participate,” Ahern said. The bus will pick people who registered up for free, eliminating cost as a factor from partaking in the statewide vigil.
It’s expected that those riding the bus will include people from the RECOVER Project, and people who have lost loved ones to addiction.
Ahern, who is a member of Franklin County’s Opioid Task Force and on Greenfield’s Human Rights Commission, said the idea of the event was to “show unity amongst grassroots organizations.” She wants to show people Massachusetts is a “state without stigma.”
The Opioid Task Force and RECOVER Project will have tables at the vigil event.
Ahern has lost two cousins to overdoses, she said, so like last year when she was raising awareness in Greenfield, International Overdose Vigil day was a tough day for her.
“I always carry them with my heart wherever I go,” Ahern said. “Tomorrow won’t be any different for me, aside form the magnitude” of the event on the common.
Although plans to hold a vigil in Greenfield this year didn’t materialize, events have been taking place this week in the region. Earlier this week a vigil was held in Northampton.
In Holyoke on today, people will also have a chance to recognize International Overdose Day.
Liz Whynott, the director of HIV health and prevention at Tapestry, the nonprofit public health organization, said it can be a tough day for people in the community and in her line work.
“There’s so many overdoses now and it’s so common,” Whynott said. “It’s just been exceptionally difficult for a lot Tapestry staff and a lot of people working in the frontlines.”
Whynott helps to run the syringe access program in Greenfield, which faced several hurdles last year before the city allowed it to open up its doors at the Episcopal Church of Saints James and Andrew on Federal Street.
“We see it as an extension of what we already provide and what we’re trying to accomplish,” Whynott said.
Whynott said despite increased awareness around addiction today, and concerted efforts to address the opioid epidemic, both locally and nationally, things are still not easy to deal with in the community.
“There’s so much shame and stigma around heroin use,” Whynott said. “That’s not just for the people using drugs, but for their friends and family.”
Part of the idea around a vigil is to give a place to remember people who have died from overdoses. Obituaries of people who died by overdose typically avoid explaining that was the reason for their death, she said.
“They were humans, they were a person, and just bringing a space to remember them,” Whynott said. “There’s something very powerful with a vigil with bringing everybody together and just being out in the public and showing it doesn’t have to be a secret.”