One family’s loss could become a beacon of hope for others.

Tessa’s House, a 16-bed women’s residential recovery center, opened in the Knox County town of Washington over the weekend, the latest push to expand drug treatment to underserved rural communities.

Funded in part with money from Maine’s portion of national settlements with some pharmaceutical companies accused of deceptive practices that helped fuel the opioid epidemic, Tessa’s House is the county’s sole recovery center specifically for women, its founders say, and the only such facility located between Portland and Bangor.

It is named for Tessa Lee McCue, a former figure skater from Hampden who died from a fentanyl drug overdose in 2022.

McCue was prescribed ADHD medication at age 16, her mother Debra McCue said, which began a nearly 15-year battle with addiction.

“We lost her in pieces,” Debra McCue said. “The medication backfired on her and because it’s in the amphetamine family, she became addicted to it. She struggled so hard to beat that. She was competitive by nature. She fought the fight. She didn’t want to be an addict. She didn’t want to be sick.”

McCue’s family decided shortly after her death to open an addiction treatment facility, her mother said, to help others struggling with substance use disorder.

Tessa’s experience — being prescribed the medication that led her down an ultimately fatal path — has been common during the opioid epidemic that has claimed thousands of lives over the last decade.

A number of pharmaceutical companies accused of exacerbating the crisis by encouraging doctors to prescribe addictive medication have been ordered to pay some $50 billion in settlements across the country. Maine is set to receive at least $235 million incrementally through 2038.

Much of that money is being put toward addiction treatment facilities and programs, particularly in rural communities in central and northern Maine, said Gordon Smith, the state’s director of opioid response.

“What the settlement funds have allowed the state to do is to fill some of those gaps that have always been there, right from the pandemic and even back further,” he said. “Let’s be honest, we’ll never have enough resources to do everything we’d like to do, but we’ve got so many things here now that we didn’t have when we started this work in 2019.”

New recovery centers are being built in Portland, York County, Piscataquis County and elsewhere with funds from the opioid settlements. Increasing the number of treatment beds, state officials say, is one of the most effective ways to address the opioid epidemic.

Coupled with expanded availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, Maine overdose deaths have dropped steadily from historic highs in 2022. The number of fentanyl-linked deaths dropped by 37% between 2023 to 2024.

Tessa’s House could not have happened without the $1.1 million in funds from the opioid settlement. But it was a series of coincidences that Debra McCue attributes to a power higher than herself that allowed them to get the project off the ground.

She and her husband, Carl, initially wanted to open the facility closer to Hampden, Tessa’s hometown. Just hours before they were set to close on a property there, another buyer scooped it up. McCue, who works as a real estate lawyer, received a call later that day from a man looking to notarize a discharge of a mortgage.

The man’s wife had recently died. The two of them had taken ownership of a facility in Washington once used as an assisted-living home. He was shutting the facility down after his wife’s death and was emotional when he came into McCue’s office, she says.

CRYING TOGETHER

In the course of the conversation, the man said his wife’s death hit harder because the two had lost their daughter to an overdose shortly before. McCue then shared her story of losing Tessa. The two began crying together in her office.

“He said, ‘Do you think that my wife and your daughter might have just met in heaven?'” she recalled.

The two decided it was fate to reopen the facility as an addiction treatment center.

Tessa’s House is the only such facility in coastal or central Maine specifically serving the state’s rural communities that have been hit especially hard by the opioid epidemic.

“We really have nothing quite like this in central Maine,” said Smith. “Nothing is more important than preventing people from starting down this road in the first place. But that’s about improving the social conditions of health that cause people to use drugs to start with. Then it’s very important, that next piece of treatment and harm reduction to give them a chance at recovery.”

In addition to serving rural communities, Tessa’s House will serve exclusively women, who are often stigmatized for struggling with addiction and may not feel welcome in established recovery spaces, Executive Director Merrilee Larsen said.

“It’s a journey they have to go on, to heal. They should be welcomed with all the support that they need,” Larsen said. “I think the stigma for women in recovery is especially great. I think secrecy, silence and judgment exist for women who have substance use or dependence challenges.”

“We can decrease that level of shame and stigma by helping these people and helping others recognize that they are mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, partners and just people in your community,” she added.

Tessa’s House officially opened its doors over the weekend. But McCue, Gordon and Larsen all agree their work is only just beginning.