Faces of Newburgh

Addiction through a child’s eyes

By KATELYN CORDERO
Posted 2/13/19

It’s a Saturday morning at 4:30 a.m. a young girl is standing at the stop on Broadway nervously waiting for the shortline bus. She climbs on, the coins in her pocket jangle around. She checks …

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Faces of Newburgh

Addiction through a child’s eyes

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It’s a Saturday morning at 4:30 a.m. a young girl is standing at the stop on Broadway nervously waiting for the shortline bus. She climbs on, the coins in her pocket jangle around. She checks to make sure nobody recognizes her.

An hour later the bus comes to a stop at Otisville Correctional Facility. No matter how many times she visits, the opening gates send chills through her bones. Maritza Wilson filled out her paperwork and waited to see her father as she would do every Saturday.

For Wilson life wasn’t always like this, before moving to Newburgh she lived in Puerto Rico, in the country. Before her father was drafted for the Vietnam war her family was whole. They lived a simple life on a farm in Puerto Rico. Her family lived off the land, and they were content.

“It was a different life over there,” said Wilson. “Coming here it’s so different, we lived off the land, over there it was the simplicity. You felt the love, it was just so genuine, you respected everyone.”

When Wilson moved to Newburgh from Puerto Rico, her father was in Vietnam. He left for the war strong and resilient, she never saw him touch a drug. He came home a different man, battling the horrors he saw on the frontline.

“He was in the war and when he came back he got addicted to drugs,” said Wilson. “So it was hard because while other kids are playing and going roller skating, I used to be embarrassed because I would be getting on the shortline and catch the bus to go see him at the Otisville Correctional Facility. To this day the sound of the closing gates goes right through me.”

Wilson spent a good portion of her life visiting her father in and out of jail, the consequences of dealing and using drugs. Through that time she never gave up on him. She visited him everytime he was in jail, to remind him that he still had someone there for support.

“They don’t realize that when they have a drug addiction we live through that, it affects the whole household,” said Wilson. “You serve that same prison sentence with them because you’re going there all the time, and there’s an absent parent that’s not there.”

Wilson struggled growing up resenting her father, but wanting to help him at the same time. She was unable to understand the addiction that kept him from being there for her until she sat with him in the hospital after his leg was amputated.

“I remember I was sitting in the recovery room with him and he was strapped in,” said Wilson. “At that moment after all those years I never understood exactly what he was saying to me [about addiction] that day I did.”

Maritza sat in the recovery room with her father and watched as he sat up in bed reliving the war, held back with constraints he screamed and cried as if he was thrown back into Vietnam on the frontlines. Wilson listened as he described the things he saw and the things he felt.

“For me in that moment, that day, I finally understood what he meant when he said it was a battle inside his head,” said Wilson. “I cried because I felt bad, because I used to be mad at him and I resented him for not being here for us. I could never understand how a drug could do that. He would tell me that it called his name.”

After Wilson’s son was born she took him to visit her father, an experience that opened his eyes to the pain and grief he put on his family. That was the last time he would serve time in prison.

Shortly after he was diagnosed with liver cancer, the product of years of heroin use. He was placed in a Veteran’s Hospital in Philadelphia where Wilson would go every weekend with her family to visit her father. As his health continued to deteriorate he asked to go back to Puerto Rico.

Wilson arranged for him to be picked up from the airport in Puerto Rico and dropped off at the hospital.

“That day I get a phone call from the hospital, that he never arrived,” said Wilson. “I was freaking out trying to get in touch with him, until a little while later I get a call from him. He says ‘Mara, you will never believe where I am!’”

Her father took a detour on his way to the hospital, to feel the sand on his toes one last time.

“I remember he sat on the phone with me and described to me way the sun set over the water,” said Wilson.

In 2010 Wilson got a call, her father was unresponsive. She and her daughter flew to Puerto Rico to take care of him. When she got to the hospital a man was waiting for her there. He asked for $320, to pay off her father’s debt. The man was a drug dealer, he had been injecting her father’s ankles with heroine.

She refused to pay the money and sent the man away, but felt hurt and broken by her father’s actions.

“It hurt me because I was like you’re still doing the same thing, you’re still killing yourself but you’re killing me too,” said Wilson. “To the end I will never fully get it, it was like that overtook his way of life. I feel short changed. I feel if he would’ve been stronger and been able to not do that, then he would still be here.”

Regardless of everything she went through, Wilson stood by his side until the very end. As her father hung onto to his last breath he asked for her permission to leave.

“I looked at him and I said yes,” said Wilson. “I felt a sense of peace go through me, that was it, he was not suffering anymore. After all those years lost along the way, I felt like I had a second chance at life.”

As a clerk for the City of Newburgh Recreation Department, Wilson finds herself talking to kids going through the same struggles she did. She gives them the support they need, and reminds them they’re not alone.

She began working for the Recreational Department at 14 and made her way into the clerk position, now training all staff and running the office. Wilson is known for her passion to give back to the community. A person in need will never be turned away at her desk in the Newburgh Activity Center on Washington Street.

“I view life in a different light now,” said Wilson. “I live everyday to the fullest and I feel like I’m free everyday. God blesses me with the opportunity to help people, and if God gives you to opportunity to do it, you just do it.”

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