 I'm not going to have a class reunion,” she said.
One of the few things looking up in Nanticoke is this statue. The town’s coal industry is just a museum piece, now.
It’s gotten so bad here, Cassandra Carannante just sent her 6-year-old daughter to live with the girl’s paternal grandmother in North Carolina. Carannante is staying behind. She has one of the few thriving businesses in town, a gun shop called Hunting Depot.
Sure, she caters to hunters. But more often, customers flock in looking to buy a firearm for security, an attempt to purchase a little peace of mind.
The line for gun carry permits was out the door of the Luzerne County Courthouse recently, Carannante said. Everyone looking for protection from crime caused largely by the drug trade.
A convenience store right around the corner has been robbed at gunpoint multiple times, including twice on the same day.
The heroin epidemic is out in the open now, plainly visible on small towns streets that once swelled with blue-collar pride.
“You see them all walking, like zombies. It's just insane,” Carannante said, adding that a local pizza shop has a persistent problem with addicts on their highs passing out while sitting in booths.
“I just decided this is nonsense just because of watching the people around me,” added Carannante, who had her own experiments with pot and pills, beginning as early as age 14, but beat it.
She called her decision to send her daughter away the “craziest right” thing she’ll ever do in her life.
Up Nanticoke’s Main Street, Anastasia Vishnefski tends to Tarnowski’s Kielbasa shop with 100 percent Polish pride.
The family business, along with a couple of grocery stores, were founded by Vishnefski’s grandfather.
She and her husband, John, maintain the family tradition, hand-making and smoke-curing the kielbasa according to the same old-world family recipe as when the business began in 1946.
To walk in the shop is to be greeted by fragrant smoke as the meat cures.
The aroma is pleasant, but it can sting the eye. If you want to really bring forth tears, get Vishnefski talking about how the family business has had to pick up and move as one old Luzerne County coal town after another sinks down into heroin’s depths.
Her grandfather began his businesses in nearby Glen Lyon, but that town’s fortunes began to slide even before those of Nanticoke.
So they brought the flagship kielbasa business to Nanticoke.
Now it's sliding, too.
Anastasia Vishnefski, co-owner of Tarnowski's Kielbasa in Nanticoke.
Lately when Anastasia Vishnefski sweeps the parking lot of her relatively new Nanticoke location, she finds the sure signs of community decay: Methadone packets, hypodermic needles and used heroin stamp bags.
And when former Luzerne County residents flock back from all over the country for a taste of Tarnowski’s kielbasa, it's always with mixed emotions. The timeless and unchanged flavor of the smoked meat brings back wonderful memories of idyllic childhoods in northeastern Pennsylvania coal country.
But the harsh, heroin-fueled realities of how far their hometowns have fallen tear at the heart.
Without fail, the faces of these long absent residents who are returning for joyful events like family reunions and weddings show the sadness of seeing the ruins all around them, Vishnefski said.
Her only solace is that her grandfather's no longer around to see what his American dream has become.
Towns that all too often must mourn their overdose dead.
The funerals of opioid addicts can be very unusual affairs, indeed.
It’s the funeral everyone sees coming.
Overdose funerals are different.
Sometimes, the friends of the victim show up high, stumbling around right in the funeral home.
It never ceases to amaze Blake Collins, the fourth generation owner of the family funeral home business.
He said one might think the body of a friend laid out in a casket might be an object lesson on the dangers of opioid addiction for all those left behind. Instead, the occasion is yet another cause for more opioids.
The grief is different, too.
Overdose funerals can have the inevitable feel of the aftermath of a slow-motion train wreck, Collins said.
Everyone sees it coming.
“They are sad,” he said. “All funerals are sad in general. But it is not profound grief,” Collins explained.
Most of the overdose victims Collins has buried have been in their 30s and 40s, though recently the demographic is skewing younger, into the 20s.
Collins’ family funeral home has been in business for 100 years and dates to when young men here were killed by the score in coal mines. Like his forefathers, he will keep burying the problem.
“This is what we are here to do,” Collins said.
E. Blake Collins III, a fourth-generation undertaker in Wilkes-Barre.
Overdose funerals tend to be simpler, low-cost affairs.
These days, families of victims often turn to Internet donation sites like GoFundMe.com. However, most funeral homes don’t like to wait for their money.
And it’s not just Luzerne County or even northeastern Pennsylvania.
Brian Leffler and his wife own funeral homes in Wilkes-Barre, Pottsville, Coudersport, Wellsboro, Troy, Williamsport, Jersey Shore and Avoca. Overdose deaths are hitting all these locations.
The victims’ age range is more concentrated in the 30 to 45 and 50 range. But Leffler has seen overdose victims ranging in age from 20 to 65.
The common theme is the heavy toll addiction takes on families and loved ones left behind.
At least now the struggle is over. The worry is ended, if only because a parent’s worst fears have finally been realized.
“A mother will say, ‘Now I know where she is. There were many nights I laid in my bed and I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t know where she was, if she was alive or dead. But now I can take her home, and I know where she is at,'” Leffler recounted one sobbing mother as saying.
In death, at least there’s peace.
County Coroner William Lisman has experienced similar and seemingly strange reactions from family members of overdose victims.
“It is very rare that you shock a parent when you tell them their son or daughter died of an overdose,” he said.
But he doesn’t draw any peace from these deaths.
In fact, as parent of four who are thriving, albeit far away from Luzerne County, every overdose death and the seeming acceptance of these personal tragedies bother him deeply.
There are too many people dying for Lisman accept any of it.
In Luzerne, the overdose dead are mostly Caucasian, as is the county population. Males and females die in almost equal numbers. There have been victims in their 50s and 60s, while the youngest was 19. But the majority are in their 20s, 30s and 40s -- the prime of life.
“Not too long ago it was a major event to have a drug death,” Lisman wistfully said.
There was a full investigation. Everyone from police detectives to the district attorney to the coroner would turn out.
Now, there are so many overdoses in Luzerne County, Lisman has stopped performing full autopsies, at a cost $2,100, on every victim. The pricey procedure is now reserved for only those overdose cases in which a dealer or other drug source might be charged for delivery resulting in death.
The rest of the victims get full toxicology screens, so the exact drugs and their amounts can be documented -- and Lisman can remain on top of the ever-shifting fentanyl analogs. Still, the county autopsy budget has more than doubled to $260,000, swallowing up over half of Lisman’s $500,000 annual budget.
Above all, Lisman cannot fathom the thought process of opioid addicts.
The coroner has held the brains of overdose dead in his hands during autopsies. But he will never know what they were thinking.
Many questions can be answered by forensic exams. Not this one.
And at the end of another long day, Lisman must force himself to stop thinking about such things. This is the only way he knows to stay sane in a community where people are dying all around him.
“You leave it in the office when you go home,” he said.
What’s in this kit is sometimes all that stands between life and death in Wilkes-Barre.
For now, there is Narcan.
The brand-name for naloxone stands as a super-effective lifeline for overdosing addicts. These days, Narcan is nearly everywhere in Luzerne County. Police carry it. EMS responders have it. And for more than a year, so does the entire staff of the Wilkes-Barre Fire Department.
If you overdose in this city, it’s not uncommon to see a fire engine with flashing light ablaze rolling up to save you.
Not according to Wilkes-Barre Fire Chief Jay Delaney. Every one of his 70 full-time firefighters