They barely knew each other, but together they walked the fine line between life and death

Five days before her son died of an overdose, Holly Lachance warned him about purple heroin.

The Iroquois Falls woman had seen a news report about the deadly opioid making the rounds on the streets of Sudbury.

She sent him a text on Monday. On Wednesday, Devon texted back to say that he was "pretty aware doing purple heroin is a bad idea."

On Friday Feb. 8, the day his parents had come down to Sudbury to help him move back home, the 23-year-old died of an overdose.

"He might have been so depressed, it might have been 'Either I'm going home or not I'm going home,'" Holly Lachance now says, months later. 

"It's not an ending you want."

Just before Devon inhaled the toxic fumes from a smoldering purple lump on a sheet of tin foil, he smiled at a woman he barely knew, who had breathed it in first.

"It's like a big hug," says 24-year-old Jocelyn Elliott. "Your whole body gets warm."

She had survived her brother's murder, a sexual assault, but she didn't start using opioids until about two years before she met Devon when her two young sons were taken away by the Children's Aid.

Jocelyn had only known him a month, believed him when he said he had taken purple heroin before and screamed when she woke up to find him unconscious. 

"That's the first time that I've ever like got on my knees and prayed. I'm not like Christian or anything, but while they put the defibrillator stickers on him, I prayed...that he would come back," she remembers.

Jocelyn made a silent promise to Devon that day as well. That she would give up drugs for good.

And she did for about a month. 

"With everything else that's happened and my addiction and then making that promise to Devon that I wouldn't use again. And then breaking that promise. Like it was just too many too many people I had disappointed," Jocelyn says. 

"So I just didn't want to come back from that relapse. I was just ready to let go, whenever the time came."

Jocelyn's mother saved her. She followed ambulances around Sudbury for days, hoping to find her daughter inside.

She's now on a path to recovery and is hoping to get back into her sons lives, before they forget her. 

"The 'remember whens' and the 'what ifs' are just going to trigger that person and go and use, because they're already their worst critic," she says.

"I know I beat myself up for letting down my family and my kids for so long that I it was really hard for me to finally forgive myself."

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