I still mother them….

We are 18 days away from Overdose Awareness Day Delaware, and this is always the point where I start looking around and thinking, how in the hell did this get this big?

We have 100 exhibitors registered.

One hundred.

When Face the Facts started, I certainly wasn’t sitting around imagining a day at Delcastle with 100 organizations, speakers, music, families, police officers, treatment providers, people in recovery, people who love someone struggling, and people carrying pictures of somebody they would give anything to have standing beside them.

I was a mom who lost her son.

That is where all of this started for me.

And now, eight years into Overdose Awareness Day Delaware, I get to watch this community show up in ways I never could have imagined back then.

This year Matthew Anderson is hosting. Sheed Pernell is performing a skit, and if you saw him at the SOR Conference, you already know why I wanted people at our event to experience that. John Waters will share spoken word. Mars Marsini will bring the live music. Domenica Personti and Brandon Novak will share their stories, and Colonel James Leonard from the New Castle County Police Department will speak.

But some of my favorite parts of this day will never happen on that stage.

They happen when somebody walks up to a table and finds the resource they didn’t know existed.

When someone gets trained to use Narcan for the first time.

When a person in recovery realizes an entire park full of people is celebrating the fact that they are still here.

When two moms who have never met recognize something in each other’s faces and start talking.

When the kids are being kids over at the Kids Corner with Phoenix Family Resource Center.

When everyone stops for the dove release.

And when I walk through all of those Impact Signs.

Those signs get me every single year.

Behind every one of them is an entire life. Somebody’s baby. Somebody’s brother or sister. Somebody’s parent. Somebody’s best friend. A person who laughed and aggravated people and had favorite foods and inside jokes and people who still instinctively want to pick up the phone and call them.

That is why I am being so obnoxious about the deadline this year. You have six days left to order an Impact Sign. August 31 is the absolute cutoff. I cannot pull a Penny and figure it out afterward. There really are no exceptions this time.

We have four volunteer spots left. We still have room for sponsors. There are still opportunities for exhibitors. We’ll have Ristorante Attilio’s Roaming Restaurant, Fusco’s Water Ice, free Narcan training and all of the things that make the day feel like a community gathering instead of some sad event where everyone stands around talking about everything we’ve lost.

Because that isn’t what this day is.

Of course we remember.

God knows I remember.

But we also celebrate the people who are here. We educate. We connect. We hug people. We laugh. We eat. We listen. We learn. We say their names. And we make damn sure that somebody who walks into that park feeling alone has a pretty hard time leaving there believing they are.

September 12 will be here before I know it.

Right now there are lists everywhere, things I am afraid I’m forgetting, people texting me, last-minute details, signs, shirts, sponsors, volunteers and probably 47 things I haven’t thought of yet.

But in 18 days, I will stand at Delcastle and look around at what this village has built.

And I will think about Vincent.

Because no matter how big this gets, I will always know exactly where it started.