Scott Vermillion’s family members still struggle to articulate the jumble of emotions they felt last November when they received the phone call from the doctors.
Vermillion, a former M.L.S. player, had died almost a year earlier, on Christmas Day in 2020, at age 44. The direct cause was acute alcohol and prescription drug poisoning, his family said, a dour coda to a troubled life: A high school and college all-American who played four seasons in M.L.S., Vermillion had spent the last decade of his life withdrawing from his family as he struggled with substance abuse and progressively erratic behavior.