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Judith Ann Hillard led a bright, successful, almost privileged life until the age of 33. She describes her life before drugs as practically Mary Poppins perfect. If she dated a guy, he wanted to marry her. If she met his parents, they all wanted him to marry her. If she took a class, she aced it. If she applied for a graduate program or a job, she got in. She was popular, elected to many leadership positions throughout high school and college, athletic, fun, and attractive. She became a marketing executive right out of college working in an advertising agency for a major fast-food company and a luxury hotel chain as their point-person or account executive. She golfed with the hotshots. Doing so one day, she was offered a line of cocaine at the turn, and turn she did. In one afternoon she went from homecoming queen, everybody's best friend to addict to junkie. She went from a gorgeous apartment with a skyline view of Philadelphia and a primo job at the Episcopal Academy on the Main Line to Gray's Ferry Road in South Philly (aka, the Ghetto). She went from Ms. Hillard or even Dr. Hillard to "that white girl" who was slipping away before her new neighbors' watchful and nosy eyes. Those nosy eyes probably saved her life as one of them alerted her friend who had brokered the house deal from another friend who bought the lovely brownstone, only to be too afraid to live there, renting the house to Judith for a mere $300 a month. Her friend did not know at the time that she was simply providing Hillard with more drug money, to the tune of another thousand per week. After just 4 months of snorting the drug, her sinuses were on fire in the mornings and the only thing she could find to numb the pain was more cocaine, perpetuating the problem beyond her ability to control it. Her nose would bleed profusely during lectures on Whitman and she didn't notice until a student looked up and screamed at her, "Ms. Hillard, you're bleeding!" She often ran down the hall away from the school nurse after procuring bandaids for the inside of an arm leaking through her otherwise crisp and starched Polo oxford. Her dealer took her to another of his clients, this one an MD doctor who told Judith she needed to take cocaine the way the big boys did (Sigmund Freud, Ulysses S. Grant), shooting it straight into the veins as this was the true way to enjoy the potential of the drug and flush out impurities. Little did she know that flying once to the moon on Patrick's concoction would not be an isolated trip, but one she would yearn to repeat every minute of every hour of every day. Within three months she had lost her perfect teaching job and nearly her life several times. By the time her friends and parents (at the tip-off of her nosy neighbors) got her on an airplane bound for Phoenix (home) she weighed 84 pounds, had not had a menstrual cycle in almost a year, and literally did not care if she lived or died. In fact, she had virtually accepted the reality of her death and often only wished for it to hurry and not keep everyone waiting in agony. In His enduring mercy and unfathomable patience, God above looked down upon Judith and found her redeemable when she could find no redemptive qualities left in her own life. He forgave her when she had no tools left for forgiving herself. She was given grace in an unbelievably brilliant if myopic way when she cried out one night, after 13 weeks in the hospital, 31 operations, nearly losing both arms, fighting cellulitis that threatened daily to become endocarditis, fevers crashing upon her above 105 degrees, weeks on the burn unit enduring excruciating pain as they pulled dry packing off of those wounded limbs, so tortured you could look into the black holes they had become and see the bones; she cried out to God and said, "If you can still hear me, just give me a reason to live. I don't even care what it is." Judith was indeed granted a miracle that pales George Bailey's fictional one. She was given love when she had thrown herself away at age 34. Of course, it was not entirely the young man's fault as he was blind in one eye and had no peripheral vision (really). A few months later, she was pregnant. In that instant, she felt the wonder of a prayer answered. She may well have harmed herself again, but never that unborn child. She named her daughter Olivia Grace, God's gift we don't deserve but receive anyway. Olivia Grace has continued to rocket Judith from the heavens back to the earth in their journey together through the first and into the second decade of their life as clean and honorable, helpful, giving people. We have no right to be here, Judith tells Olivia.... so we must give to those who have less, who don't remember how to live. We must show them. Judith and Olivia write together, read together, walk together, travel together, and are beginning to share a stage together as Judith tells her remarkable story of healing and miracles to groups of teens and parents and civic groups and churches and schools. They are popular, entertaining speakers in this most dark of topics, this most frightening of pathways too, too many young people choose to walk.

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