About Us
We are a family affected by addiction within our family and community. My husband, Mike, is my beloved of 35 years and we have two daughters, Amy and Anna. My name is Debi and I am the daughter, sister, wife and mother of addiction. Thankfully, most of my family survived their addictions and went on to lead successful lives, except the one who didn’t. His name was Robert, and he was the son and brother my family chose to bring into our lives when he was seventeen years old. We had five wonderful, difficult, heart wrenching, exciting, and memorable years with him and as my daughter said at his funeral, “Robert taught us what it looked like to love unconditionally and that was the gift he gave us.”
This website is done in loving memory of our chosen son and brother, Robert Christopher Lehto.
He was a boy with a huge heart full of love, angst, and tenderness. His life was not an easy life, he had many significant life traumas that would be a lot for anyone to deal with in a lifetime, let alone 22 short years. He was a gifted writer, a wonderful son and he had a brilliant mind, with an IQ over 160 and a photographic memory to go with it. He was wise and intellectual way beyond his years. He was a “one in a million boy”.
And he was an addict. After the untimely death of his birth mother, his recreational drug use soon became a habit and what started as an addiction to pain pills quickly progressed to an addiction to any and all substances that would ease his pain for the moment and bring him to an altered state. It is in this state, a fatal error was made; his intellect mattered not, and his physical life on this earth ended; but the legacy of who he was and those whose lives he affected live on in each and every one of us. May this forum grow into a venue to say what needs said within your hearts on a disease that affects us all. And it begins with: