Blessings In Disguise

The other night I sat looking at a picture of Ethan and thinking to myself how badly I wish this was all a bad dream. I wished I would wake up and it not be just some time briefly before Dec. 15 when I could have done some of the things I wish I'd done before he died, but long before, when I might have been able to see the damage coming and saved him from the path he took.

At the same time, I thought that I would want to take back with me this different person that I have become. Although I may often be unhappy with what I see in the mirror, feeling I look as tired and worn down as I sometimes feel, I am grateful for the changes in my heart and soul.

I can't say I'm thankful for what God has done to get me here, but I am thankful for who I've become.

Sunday morning, the topic of the bus crash in California came up at church. I could tell that, once it was mentioned, it made my Sunday school classmates uncomfortable. There they were trying to talk about good coming from tragedy and how could any good come from losing a child and they suddenly realized where the topic had gone.

Me, well I waded in as the discussion faltered. Losing my Sunday morning makeup as I talked, I told them how it could be exactly that.

No, when it happens it doesn't feel like a blessing. It feels like the world has ended, like you can't breathe, like you are the person who has died even though you're still functioning at some level. Four months later it still feels like that some days. The blessing is never the loss itself, at least to those of us left behind.

The blessing, the good that can come from it, is in allowing what has happened to change us, not with bitterness, but, through God's love, with compassion. The blessing is in realizing deep down how precious and temporary life is and how much of it is wasted on meaningless and self-centered pursuits. It's in discovering the deep well of compassion from other people. It's accepting that you aren't required to get through tragedy alone because there are people who care if you're vulnerable enough to let them. It's finding that same well of compassion inside and reaching out to a world you didn't really care that much about until your world was shattered.

The good isn't the loss or the tragedy, but what comes out of the people who survive -- what the people who are left to grieve and mourn do with themselves and their changed perspective that can be a blessing. I've noticed one of my fellow grieving mothers, a blogger I know only as Victoria is also becoming aware and appreciative of the changes in her life and sees them as ongoing blessings from the love she bears her son.

It's a strange place to be, knowing that this isn't the life I wanted, not the path I would ever have sought, one I would erase in a heartbeat, one that, because of tragedy, is both lacking an important element and still more rich than the path I would have taken.

I'm so thankful for the lives I've touched and the people that I've allowed to touch mine as well. We aren't just classmates at Sunday school, or Zumba, or even sometimes just people who like one another's comments on Facebook. We're people who care and share and hug and send cards and call and pray. If I had not lost Ethan, I would never have had this wonderful connection to the world around me -- a connection that was there all the time but one I never noticed or valued.

It wasn't my choice to make, this rich tapestry of lives intertwined or the singular thread that I lost. Had it been, I'm sure I would have clung to the thread of his life, but I wonder in doing so what other treads spreading out from mine might have been dropped instead. With a knitter's mind I see the loop of his life not dropped, but doubled with my own, while other stitches have been added which might have, instead, been dropped. It's hard to explain, other than to acknowledge how much I value these new connections, even if I would never have sought or found them had it not been for tragedy.

God made the choice of how I would move forward, tethered not by the one string, but by dozens.

It was the changed me with a thought of Ethan that stopped and blew the horn at a man with a dog on the side of the road yesterday, handing him money through the window. Had I not had two small people in the car with me, I think I would have liked to stop and talk with him a while. I wondered if he still has a mother who would like to know where he was, and I said a prayer for him and his dog, which was wearing a sweater against the chill.

Perhaps the only blessing from this loss was the money I pressed into the street person's hand and the "God bless you," I received in return. Perhaps it is the prayers and love that have knit a warm blanket of support around me. Perhaps it is the less calloused person I've found when I wake up each morning. Perhaps it is knowing that God's hand is in it all and that it was never up to me, dreams and regrets aside, at all.

My Son's Best Friend Brings a Gift of Memories

Until last Friday, I hadn't seen Nathan since the day he joined my daughter and I to get memorial tattoos.

If Ethan could have had a brother, he would have been Nathan. The same was true with Nathan, and Ethan's loss has impacted him in ways young men in their early 20s don't expect to be hit.

From the time we moved to North Carolina when both boys were 7 and I worked with Nathan's mom, it seemed the two boys often grew up in both homes. Even their names made them sound like twins separated at birth. Our homes are full of pictures of both boys; Nathan's mom and I both feel maternal toward both young men, we both worried and tried to get help for Ethan and we both mourn that he's beyond our reach now.

Nathan and Ethan started skateboarding together and he was staying with them when the boys decided to use a nearby hill to luge on their boards and Ethan wound up with multiple fractures in his lower leg. They were here playing video games and raiding the refrigerator or playing with Ethan's decorative sword collection. They harassed each other's older sisters.

When they were a little older, they used drugs together. I've never had the nerve to ask whose idea it was. It doesn't really matter and some part of me almost believes it might have been Ethan, raising the bar a little and thinking it was safe.

By Ethan's senior year, he had lived away from home for about eight months and was probably already an addict, although I didn't know it. Our relationship was strained when he came home to finish high school. He refused to ride the bus and I refused to provide parental transportation. Instead he rode with Nathan, and most days I think they made it to school -- at least they went often enough to graduate. Nathan worked and had a license and a pickup and a girlfriend he later married, things I tried to encourage Ethan to do. He had the girlfriend, most of the time, but they never actually dated and in fact weren't supposed to see each other.

I knew about things happening in both our homes. I knew about sex and pot and sneaking around, but I didn't know their darkest secret.

I didn't know about the dextromethorphan that they both used, that their girlfriends used, that they both became addicted to and which eventually destroyed Ethan's life and very nearly Nathan's as well.

In many ways, Nathan and Ethan, although they worked so well together, are polar opposites. Ethan was big and blond and a talker; Nathan is slight and dark-haired and quiet. At the same time, being around Nathan is a dose of "what might have been" for me. He found a reason to get straight, something Ethan never managed to do, and he's married with two children. Being around me is probably a reminder of Ethan for him as well, as Ethan was pretty much the masculine version of me -- amplified, a bigger bone structure, a deeper voice -- and I know that both boys surely spent a lot of time dissing their moms as we struggled with their teen years and addictions.

Yet I think each time we manage to struggle through those emotional hurdles, to navigate our different schedules, and share the same space for a little while it is healing for us both. We manage to let go of little bits of guilt and find better memories of the young man we loved.

Immediately after Ethan's death, when my mom and I addressed his meager possessions (a person with no job and an often temporary home doesn't accumulate a lot), Nathan wanted something of Ethan's to hang on to and remember him by. Last Friday he got a video game and one of the old swords he remembered from he and Ethan's golden days. I also gave him Ethan's favorite video game Final Fantasy.

He said driving to my house brought back all those days when he hauled Ethan back and forth to school. That Ethan was always different, but it was a good different. Ethan, however, just wanted to be like his friends, I said.

"You were a good friend to Ethan," I said, knowing that he had tried to get Ethan to quit when he did. Knowing that Ethan had stayed at his home and lied to him like he did everyone else who loved him and wanted to help.

"Not always," he said.

I knew he meant that they used together. "You didn't know," I said. "Neither of you did. You thought it was an easy way to get high and stay away from the 'bad' drugs. You were both so young that you didn't know what could happen."

"We never thought it would end up like this," he said.

We hugged before he left, promising to stay in touch, which we have managed in cyberspace for the last two months.

I hope I gave him something that will bring back happier memories. Memories of a boy who still laughed and smiled, had a great imagination and was super smart.

He gave me hope that we didn't lose them both and that someone else still treasures the memory of the young man we lost.