From time to time, members of The Enquirer staff will write personal essays to give you a sense of the journalists who bring you the news.

On Sept. 24, my Aunt Jenny overdosed on heroin.

I was throwing a party at my parents' house while they were out of town when I found out. When my cousin told me it was heroin, the question that inevitably followed: “Is she alive?”

She was.

While the family may never know the true story and I’m still confused on the details, what we know is this: Jenny overdosed while doing heroin with another woman. No one knows how long she was unresponsive before the drug dealer showed up with Narcan. At some point, the paramedics arrived and administered Narcan again. She suffered cardiac arrest twice. On that first night in the hospital, she was unresponsive.

The following day, I didn't recognize her. I hadn’t seen Jenny since June 2013 and that was at my grandpa’s funeral. I remember hugging her, but I don’t know if I said anything other than the typical funeral pleasantries.

She had stolen pain pills from my dying grandfather, her dying father, the week before he died. I was there the night he died, sitting watch with my cousin, my other aunt and my grandpa's wife.

As I went around gathering up the medication after he passed, methodically dumping pills from their bottles into a bag of kitty litter, I found a note.

“They’re all yours now, thief,” written in my father’s handwriting.

I left that note there, by the edge of Grandpa’s bed. I wonder if she ever saw it.

Before then, we already knew she had a problem with pain pills and it put a strain on our very close-knit family. She cited foot and back problems as her reason for the prescriptions that she was taking until the end of her life.

That was three days after her overdose, on Sept. 27, when the family took her off life support.

This is what an epidemic looks like.

The reality of the heroin epidemic? I went back to the party I was hosting after getting that phone call and didn't tell anyone. I called my parents while they were in Italy to tell my dad his baby sister was brain dead.

It's a sick sinking feeling in your stomach. It's fear. It's the five stages of grief hitting you all at once.

It's my dad, who had called her a thief, tearing up when he read the eulogy at her funeral, maybe glad the struggle was over but heartbroken that this is how it ended.

I'm a reporter. I write about overdoses, drug charges, drug busts and everything in between. So do my colleagues.

On that Monday after Jenny had been admitted after the overdose, I worked from her hospital room. I wrote an article on the Department of Justice giving Southern Ohio $2.9 million to address the opioid epidemic.

I filed the story to my editor and added a note to him about it being horribly ironic. Later, I went to the Justice Center to look at arrest slips, I didn't blink when I saw the word heroin.

On one hand, I understand the epidemic and, like plenty of people, I don’t bat an eye because it’s such a pervasive problem in our area.

To more than one colleague, I said, “well, it wasn't unexpected.”

On the other hand, it’s been nearly three weeks and I’m crying while I write this because I always hoped that Jenny would admit that she had a problem, get help and go back to being everyone’s favorite aunt.

My aunt had two daughters. One is two years older than me, the other is two years younger than me. We grew up very close. My younger brother and I practically lived at Jenny’s house, or at least that’s how it always felt.

Jenny was everyone’s cool aunt. She let us go to the pool unsupervised, stay up late watching movies and eat junk.

We knew Jenny cared about all of us deeply. When she knew we would be staying the weekend, sometimes she would call my brother and ask him what he wanted for dinner and she would make it. She would recommend books to me. She never picked on me for my Avril Lavigne phase.

When the first Harry Potter movie came out I was 8. My mom, for whatever religious reason we still make fun of her for, wouldn’t let me see it even though I had already read the book. I remember being in Blockbuster Video and staring at the display for the movie.

When Jenny asked if that’s the movie I wanted to see, I dejectedly told her mom didn’t want me to. She walked right up to the display, grabbed the Harry Potter VHS tape and dropped it into the basket and told me to go supervise my brother and younger cousin.

When I told my parents I'd seen the movie, they weren’t happy, but that’s how Jenny was and that's how I choose to remember her.

She was the one who wanted me to see everything, feel everything, decide for myself. She gave me the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. And, yes, while she definitely disciplined me from time to time (like when I ate a whole serving plate of cocktail shrimp when no one was looking), she was the one who listened, understood. She was there for me.

I know that regret is part of the grieving process.

Right now I regret not trying harder. I regret knowing that her death was preventable, but I didn't prevent it.

I had trusted her my whole life. She had helped me in so many ways.

It's hard to realize she didn't trust me to be with her, help her, when I would have gladly returned the favor.

Sarah Brookbank is an Enquirer breaking news reporter. You may reach her at sbrookbank@enquirer.com.