This photo shows Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood and his fiancée Xana La Fuente. Andrew Wood was a major figure on the Seattle scene that later became known as grunge. They had been together for 4 years and had a tumultuous relationship, which was documented on several songs most notably “Crown of Thorns”.
Mother Love Bone were about to release their first album, “Apple”, and Andrew Wood had been clean for almost 6 months, when Xana came back to their apartment to find him overdosing.
“He was dead when I found him, and I didn’t really realize it,” she remembers. “I flipped him over and was shaking him. I looked at his arm and dialed 911. They told me to get him on his back and give him CPR. When they arrived, they pronounced him dead, made me sign this paper, and then told me to go to the hospital. When I got to the hospital, Andy was alive. He was alive for three days.
“He had an aneurysm in his brain that would have caused him to have a stroke eventually; so he did the drugs and probably had a stroke a few hours later, which knocked him out. They got his heart going again at the hospital, but his brain had swelled up from not breathing. They told me he could get worse, which he did. We had a meeting with the doctors on that Monday, and they said Andy’s brain was dying, and it wasn’t going to get any better. We had three hours to say goodbye to him.”
This was not the only time heroin would take people close to her. Xana was also good friends with Demri Parrot, who became engaged to Layne Staley of Alice in Chains. Demri also died a drug related death in 1996, which was thought by many to be the final straw for Layne Staley whose own downward spiral ended in 2002.
Interview excerpt and picture from RememberLayne.com
