People are obsessed with the concept of a zombie apocalypse: hordes of the undead, including former loved ones, walking the streets with hungry snarls and blank stares as if in constant pain and unrest, looking to eat you body and soul until you feel the same way they do — tortured and alone. I’ve seen what that apocalypse looks like firsthand — in the form of loved ones dealing with heroin addiction.

For as long as I can remember, I have known what heroin is. My dad was a drug and alcohol counselor, and when I was a kid, we would regularly run into his clients, in supermarkets and state fairs and on the street. They would thank him, and it wasn't uncommon for me to be told, “Your dad saved my life.” I grew up with the knowledge that heroin was just about the worst thing that existed.

Then Cody came into my life. I first met him the summer before college when I was dating someone else. Cody was sitting on top of my car, in baggy jeans, hair hanging in his face, playing a guitar — like I had given someone a checklist of my ideal boy, and they’d created him and placed him on top of my green Geo Prism. All that was missing was the big red shiny ribbon. It was like a scene from a John Green novel. He was friends with the younger emo kid I had been summer-flinging with, and I spent the evening hanging out with a bunch of musician dudes and their girlfriends, staring at Cody. He drove me home later that night, and we talked for hours in my driveway. I left for college a week later, found myself single a few weeks after that, and fell completely head over heels batshit crazy in love with Cody a few months later (thanks, Myspace!).

His demons were morose and real, but he funneled them into music and beer and weed — normal teenage stuff. We jumped off waterfalls and explored abandoned houses and sang throaty renditions of Third Eye Blind songs to each other, living in that “right this moment” way you only really can when you're 18. But one year together turned into three turned into four, and he still lived with his toxic, super-Christian, unsupportive family, and rarely had a job that lasted over a month. He was never not drinking. Soon, I decided to move to New York, and I didn't want him to come with me. He helped me move, and I broke both our hearts for us.

The first time I found a tiny empty bag inside his dresser, we weren't technically together anymore. I was home visiting for a week and needed to see him as an escape from family drama. Both of my younger sisters were struggling with addiction, which was manifesting itself in needles and bottles and pills and lies and pawn shops and stolen money and cold, blank stares of narcissism and indifference. I needed a distraction, so I called him, unknowingly leaving two addicts for another one.

We snuck whiskey into a movie and made out in his kitchen while his family slept, pretending nothing had changed. He looked gaunt, but he always looked gaunt. He was bruised, but he was always bruised. He told me the bag was coke but he wasn't doing it anymore. I chose to believe him and went back to my life in New York.

I wouldn't see him again until the fall that my dad became very, very sick. I had moved on for the most part (except that piece of you that never falls out of love with your first), and was with a man I loved. He would drive me five hours to sit by my dad's hospital bedside while my dad grimaced in confusion from morphine and let me read Harry Potter to him. One weekend when I was visiting alone, I called Cody — the hospital was only a few miles from his house, and he had always loved my dad. I thought he should know; I couldn't imagine him not knowing. He showed up within a few hours, looking gray. It was jarring to see how much older he seemed. Tired. When he left, my sister — freshly sober — pulled me aside and said, “Lyz, that's heroin.” I had no idea.

When he called me a few days later on my birthday, I told him that my dad had died. I sobbed to him sitting in my mom's minivan in the parking lot of a Buffalo Exchange, and he just listened. Then he gently asked if he could come to the wake, if it would be appropriate, and I asked him to please come. He never showed.