I’m sitting in my restaurant not long after my son Tony Luke III dies, and an elderly gentleman comes in and he says to me: “Hey, Tony, I heard your son passed away. I just want to tell you how incredibly sorry I am.”

“Well thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Do you mind if I asked you how he died? Did he have cancer, was he ... “

“No,” I said, “he died of a heroin overdose.”

“Damn it, these kids, the choices they make.”

I didn’t get upset with him. I just thought: “Wow. This is the view. This is why no one talks about it.”

Every day I saw my son, he had the look of being ashamed, as if he were losing, as if he were weak. Because that’s what he hears. You’re weak. A strong person could get out of this.

Tony had fallen into partying when he was young. Marijuana, pills. That was their version of alcohol.

But he was always athletic and he was a wrestler in school. When he got into a car accident and hurt his back, the doctors put him on Percocets. But one wasn’t enough to take the pain away, so he’s taking two, three, four. But he was still hurting and got his prescription refilled and before we knew it, he was addicted. He couldn’t function without them.

After a while, the doctors figure you’re better and they cut you off. So then you start buying them on the streets. But pills are super expensive — 25, 30 bucks a pop. You can keep that going for a while if you have a job and money, but as he got older, Tony lost his job and he had lost his health care. So what do you do when there’s no money and nowhere to turn? You go to heroin. It’s ridiculously cheap. Anyone can afford it.

No one wants to be an addict. No one wants to feel like crap every single day of their life when they get up. They don’t want it. Tony had been to rehab twice, and each time he came out, he was better. He was really working his butt off to be better.

But this is a disease that takes over your whole body. My son Michael calls it the Monster. It’s a great term because it’s so big and it’s so scary that you can’t fight it. You fight it but — it would be like me literally fighting a great athlete, who was 6-foot-11 and 400 pounds of solid muscle. If I fight him every day, I just get tired. I can’t beat him.

Tony was a good kid, truly he was. But the Monster took over. The Monster has to feed and nothing matters then. You lie, you manipulate, you say whatever you need to do to take the pain away.

And that’s the road he fought for eight years, nine years. He tried and tried and he tried. And then, on March 27, he had a moment of weakness and made a decision, and the Monster beat him for good.

The day before, Sunday, he was sweeping and mopping the floor of my store and he said: “Dad, I can’t stand it anymore. My back. Do you mind if I go home?” And I’m like: “No, we’re done. I’ll finish the rest.”

He said: “Dad, I’ve been humbled. I just, I want to take care of my children,“

Then he kissed me, and as he left, I said, “Tony, I’ll see you on Wednesday,” because we were closed Monday and Tuesday. And he died Monday.

After the guy said that to me in the store I thought, “Man, if I feel this way, how many families are feeling this way?”

At the same time, everywhere I look in the news I’m hearing about opioids, and I hear 3,000 dead, and 4,000 dead, and I’m thinking to myself: “This isn’t about numbers. My son is not a statistic.”

And then I finally think, well what about an initiative? What if we find a way to encourage people to talk about the people they love? To promote conversations between survivors and the public? To remove the stigma?

I thought, if people see me taking the heat, they’ll realize there’s nothing to be ashamed of. That it’s OK to talk about addiction and their loved ones.

I worked with a group of people that helped me come up with Brown and White as just a hashtag (#brownandwhite). I didn’t want Tony Luke on there. This is not about me. It’s about my son to me, but not to you. I don’t want you to think this is my cause.

It’s our cause.

Next I get a call from a local TV station, and they said, “Would you come in to talk about your son?”

And then boom, it exploded.

So, keep it going. Go to Twitter and put pictures of your loved ones there. Put a name to your story. Let them know that this isn’t a statistical problem to be solved, these are people to be helped.

Tony Luke Jr. is a Philadelphia-area entrepreneur and media personality. He wrote this for The Philadelphia Inquirer.