A year after our original reporting published, Rich Lord and I traveled back to see how “OD Road” is changing, slowly, into Recovery Road. Here in Pittsburgh’s once most fatal ground for the epidemic, overdoses are dropping, and 1,050 “saves” have been made — almost all by other opioid users — using naloxone distributed by Prevention Point Pittsburgh since 2017.

I had to check that my mouth wasn’t hanging open while visiting Donna Williams. She had opened up from her “raw, get out of my neighborhood” approach to people in addiction to wanting to offer clean needles and health services on her block instead. She baked cookies for the men in the recovery house up the street, she is partnering with a man who formerly sold and used drugs to transform the minds of her neighbors.

Despite the cautious optimism, ripples of trauma are still carrying through families for generations. Here’s what people shared with us.

When we sat with Gary Fisher months before his own fatal OD, he foreshadowed the abandonment he would pass on from his own childhood to his daughter’s.

“Abandonment’s a big thing, it was a big thing for me. I was abandoned by one person that I didn’t think should ever abandon me. And I fear that for my daughter, that she’s going to wonder why dad left, why he’s not around, why he died. And she’s going to have questions and she’s never going to get answers. And that feeling that I live with on a daily basis, I don’t want anybody to go through. And I don’t want her to feel like I gave her up.”

We went back to Gary’s daughter’s house in McKeesport, Pa. as she struggles with the anxiety of the bullying and night terrors she is experiencing in the wake of her father’s death. Her story is part of the final chapter of Needle in the Family Tree, a yearlong look at how the opioid and overdose epidemic is impacting families in Western Pennsylvania. Head to the Post-Gazette here for more.