From One Grieving Parent to Another

Yesterday the horror that most people felt at what happened in Oregon was a passing thing.

It was disgust and anger that yet again something in our system had gone wrong. Grief that innocent lives had been lost.

It was a rallying cry for gun supporters ("If everyone had concealed carry this wouldn't have happened.") and advocates of more gun control ("He shouldn't have been able to get a gun or get it into a classroom.") and for those who realize our nation's mental health system is badly broken ("Someone should have seen the warning signs and he shouldn't have wanted to get a gun into a classroom."). The world looked at it in horror. There were prayers and candles and for most of the world, this morning life went on.

But for the parents of the young people who died yesterday, life will never be the same.

Although I'm ususally sensitive to these things in my community -- car crashes, cancers and other diseases that claim young lives -- it didn't really hit me until a fellow griever on Facebook posted a picture of a candle.

Then, as they say, the chickens came home to roost. Suddenly I was feeling, just as I have dozens of times since my son died, the waves of sorrow I know they were all feeling. I sat in my living room thousands of miles away from the scene of loss and cried. How would I answer his question?

What would I want to know? Instead of the platitudes from people who've never lost a child, or had a sudden out of sequence loss, what would I want to be told?

And this is what I've come up with for the parents of those lost yesterday (or any other day).

I know how you feel. No matter what anyone says, only a parent who has lost a child can ever comprehend the place you are at right now. The best people for you to talk to are other grieving parents. Not those who have just lost a child like you because you're all hurting too much to help one another, but those people you may have known for years and always been thankful you didn't have this in common with. They will be your best friends in the coming months because they know. They understand and they will listen to you repeat the same litany of pain over and over because they know.

Nothing prepares you for this. You've survived other losses and you can survive this one, but nothing has given you even partial immunity to this pain. Just accept that. Don't wonder why you feel the way you do. Why losing other loved ones didn't give you some perspective on this. Even if your child had been suffering a fatal illness, you couldn't have been prepared for the reality of loss. To lose them suddenly is like having gravity disappear. There is no frame of reference and no way to prepare yourself.

You cannot change what happened. No matter what tragedy took your child's life, you cannot change the past. You can repeatedly grapple with the what ifs, but don't let them consume you. There will be times when that's all you can think about, so don't get too aggravated at yourself. Life is full of what ifs and these are big ones.

This is your grief, no one else's. No one can put a limit on how you grieve or how long except you. (I metaphorically put my grief away sometimes when I cannot let it overwhelm me, like pushing it down into a box and sitting on the lid. Eventually I have to let it out, but there are days and times when I cannot deal with it and so I don't. Other times I cannot get it to leave me alone and I cry as though my son had just been found dead.) You will NEVER get over this and you shouldn't. You will have good days when you catch yourself and feel guilty because you aren't sad and maybe haven't been for a little while. Don't. Your grief will come back. At the same time, your child would want you to laugh and be happy again. If anyone tells you differently, don't listen. They obviously don't know what they are talking about.

Every relationship in your life will be tested by this. Your relationship with your spouse, your God, your friends and the rest of your family. No, this is not what you want to think about now, but it's the reality. Your dead child is always with you and some people cannot deal with that. It's hard to resume intimacy. You cry and people don't want to deal with tears. Whoever stays with you through this is really there for you. Treasure them and hold on to them. Also be aware that you'll make new relationships out of this. Those fellow grieving parents may become people who not only prop you up now, but understand and still care in six months or a year.

It's OK to question God. He's big enough to take it and He feels our pain. He had a son who died. It was not His choice that our children died, but the world and the choices of people in it. Yes, there were times I railed against Him because I had prayed for a different outcome, but I didn't get it. I told my son "no" many times and it didn't mean I didn't love him or desire to give him everything he wanted. I had to accept that from my God as well. If your faith survives this, it will be stronger and it will help you through. I've accepted that this life is just a little piece of who we are and what we're meant for and I know Ethan has gone on to the next phase.

Take care of yourself. Your child cared about you and would want you to do that, beyond anything else. You're fragile and need to be treated that way for a while. I felt like I needed a t-shirt that proclaimed it to the world because some times I walked through the grocery store crying. That's just how life is going to be for a while.

Survival is your choice. You have to choose to keep living, not just breathing, but living. You don't have to make that choice for a while but eventually you will. Right now you can sit in the dark, or stay in bed. You can do without food and take medication to sleep. Whatever you need to get through right now is ok as long as you realize that this probably shouldn't be the way you spend the rest of your life. There are other people who love you and need you in their lives -- even if you don't even know them yet. Eventually you have to decide how you are going to live for them. Try to find a healthy habit and keep living, find your voice and your life again and be the person your child would have wanted you to be.

In the months to come, there may be days or weeks when you hurt as bad as you do right now. No, you don't want to hear that either, but it's true. There will always be a hole in your heart that no doctor can see or heal, but you learn to live with it to some degree. What helped me was my blog, which became a sort of shared journal and I would encourage you to keep a journal. Pour out your pain when no one else wants to hear it. As time passes you can use your journal to measure your healing -- or determine that you're stalled out and need help if it comes to that. Eventually start to look for something good every day, even if it's something little. I found that helped me tremendously to realize that everything was not the dark cloud that it felt like sometimes.

Although it's your grief, don't try to get through it alone. Whatever took your child (mine was drug addiction), deep down you share a connection with anyone else who has lost a child because your heartache is different from anyone else's. You lost not only your present, but your future and the dreams you had for your child. At the same time, you share a connection with anyone who has suffered loss, when you feel strong enough to recognize it. Spend time with people who will really listen and hear you, shore each other up for going on with life, and allow yourself to hug and love and smile again.

Life will never be the same, but it's up to you how to live it.

We should have celebrated instead of mourned

We should have been celebrating somewhere today.

The sense of what should have been and what is missing has hovered over my afternoon like a dark storm cloud, finally descending on me as I took a brief walk with my dogs.

As a family, we should have been gathered somewhere eating pizza and laughing at Ethan mimicking my dad, who wouldn't hear it and would have no clue what we were laughing about, or wielding our cumulative sharp wit at one another and innocent bystanders. We should have split a couple dozen chocolate-covered, cream-filled Krispy Kreme doughnuts or a big chocolate cake, and sung happy birthday.

On Tuesday, my mom will observe her birthday. There will be no celebration to speak of, because it would also have been Ethan's birthday.

My son, had he lived, would have been 25.

Ten years ago, I would have imagined a day filled with promise. A bright young man with a college degree and a wife, or at least a fiancee on his way to living his dream.

Five years ago there was still hope that the addiction had released him. He had an apartment and was being treated for the seizures caused by his drug abuse. I didn't know he was still using, and that jail time and a horrible automobile accident weren't all that far in his future.

Just two years ago, he was living sober and there was hope that somehow he'd manage to stay that way. Then he lost his support network, alienated the people who would have helped him stay clean, and withdrew into a spiral that left him alone, finally dead of an overdose.

So there was no celebration today, and won't be on Tuesday. My mom who once delighted in sharing a birthday now has an especially painful memory instead.

For the last week it seems the harder I have tried to run from the reality of what will be, the harder it has stalked me. I'm like a mouse being toyed with by a cat. I'm not really getting away, no matter how busy I make myself.

Today, I decided not to run. To sit down by the computer and once again give in to the tides of grief that I've been avoiding fairly well; to return to therapy, as it were, because I know that facing the pain, wrestling with it through words, helps me in the end.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger

There's a well known saying I've found to be true.

What doesn't kill us does make us stronger.

Most of us go through life with a mental list of the things we don't believe we could survive. The list is generally the things we fear most -- not the phobias that make us laugh nervously in a crowd, but the things we don't talk about, the things we see happen to other people and say a silent prayer of thanksgiving because they aren't happening to us.

That list might include cancer, debilitating injury or disease, living with addiction, and loss in myriad forms.

For a parent, that list would be topped by the death of your child.

It's the darkest place you can imagine going, the thing you shy away from facing. When it happens to a friend, you struggle with what to do and say and may even try to avoid it because your own fears drive you to deny that reality. Even when it happens to a stranger, you feel some internal tug.

That's the world where I used to live. It's a place where my absolute worst fear, despite my son's addiction and all of the darkness and pain that came along with it, was still something I could not imagine facing.

I'd faced addiction in people I loved before. I'd faced lumps and biopsies. I'd escaped domestic violence. I'd buried my dearest pet (and hardly eaten for a week). I didn't realize each of these survivals was preparing me, making me stronger.

Then Ethan died.

My worst nightmare came true. My reality shifted from what I had known to living what had been unimaginable. There was no path to follow, no plan for how to survive. It was the thing that I didn't believe there was a way to survive, not in a way that saw life go on with any degree of normalcy.

Yet, the next morning I got up again. One day at a time I accepted a new reality. Somehow despite all the pain and the sense of being lost in a dark place inside much of the time, days passed, then weeks, months, and finally a year.

The thing I ran from became my reality and changed who I am.

It's a oxymoron that losing Ethan made me stronger, but at the same time chipped away that tough veneer I showed the world, that professional objectivity I'd spent 25 years as a journalist perfecting. Now, instead of running from someone else's pain, I'm more likely to cry for and with them. I want to help them bear it because having gotten this far, I know I'm stronger and that one day, in their own time, they will be stronger, too.

I want people who have lost a child, regardless of the age or circumstance, to realize none of us are alone in what we are feeling. Whether it's a tragedy that rallies the community for a few weeks, or one that no one knows how to talk about, what we're left feeling is the same broken sense of being. We're still mothers and father and aunts and uncles and grandparents, it's just that our children aren't where we can touch them any more. They live every day in our hearts and through faith we will see them again someday.

Now when I hear of a child dying, my prayer is for those left behind and it's usually said with tears in my eyes because I know what they are going through. Knowing that the things I needed to hear were the words only other parents who had lost children could say, I try to reach out whenever I can. I try to pass on the love I felt when my friends who had lost children came to my house after Ethan's death, when strangers hugged me with tears in their eyes.

I still like to pretend I've had my share of pain and that life has been as dark for me as it will ever be, but I also realize there is no quota to be met. Bad things could still happen and all the fears that I still carry for my loved ones and myself could become real all too easily. There are still things I don't think I can survive, but sometimes there's a part of me that says it's more of a matter of not wanting to live through than it is inability to survive. And perhaps that's what it was all along.

The Most Wonderful, and Difficult, Time of the Year

I've always loved Christmas.

Even when I was a kid, I don't think it was just the toys. It was the family gatherings, especially the big Christmas Eve get together at my great aunt's house where cousins normally spread far afield were all under one roof for an evening. It was magical.

Between the memories of Christmas past and the high expectations set on the holiday by our Norman Rockwell dreams, Christmas is especially hard when your holiday doesn't "measure up." That's especially true when you lose a loved one.

Somehow it feels like the heart goes out of the season.

When my grandma died less than two weeks before the holiday several years ago, it was hard to go through the motions. When my grandpa joined her 11 months later, we didn't even really try and many of those family connections faded just as those on the other side faded when my paternal grandparents died.

Becoming a grandma in my own right brought a lot of that sense of family back. Everyone gathered at my house, my immediate family -- parents, children, son-in-law and a growing number of babies -- plus relatives who had no other plans, to eat together and make memories on Christmas Eve.

Losing my son last year just two days after the anniversary of my beloved Ma Mary's death pretty much knocked the wind out of Christmas again.

The brightly colored lights on the eaves taunted me. The Christmas tree with its promise of wonder held no magic. The gifts I still had planned to buy were never purchased. Had it not been for a big-hearted friend who arrived one day with a box of wrapping paper, I'm not sure the ones I had would have been wrapped.

After Christmas was no better. There were all those memories to pack away. The ornaments with an E and a date on the bottom that I'd bought for Ethan through the years were almost more than I could bear. If it hadn't been for an obliging ice storm, I'm not sure I would have ever got the lights off the house, although they were quickly unplugged. The spruce tree at the corner of the porch, well, let's say it didn't take much to light it up this year since the lights were left hidden in the boughs.

The months rolled around and now the season is here again and I've found that like everything else in my life, Christmas is permanently changed and redefined.

I had trouble getting in the gifting mood, until someone reminded me we were celebrating Christ's birth and that is an occasion worth celebrating no matter where we might find ourselves otherwise. I remembered we give gifts to those we love to honor the ultimate gift of love. But it still took walking in a Christmas parade with all the lights and sounds and shouted greetings before I felt an inkling of what I always took for granted before.

All that said, Christmas is still a little bit dimmer this year. The big lights that hung on the house a year ago are still in their storage tub. Even after I carried them and the ladder to the house I found I wasn't up to the task of hanging them or the more distant idea of taking them down. The tree is decorated with lights and shatter proof balls, and the ornaments so loaded with memories are spending the holiday in the back of the closet. I gave myself permission to do less this year.

Although I've done my shopping (virtually all on-line), there are still no gifts under the tree. I've yet to tackle the challenge of wrapping them all. The menu has been chosen for dinner, but none of the groceries have been bought. Every Christmas card makes me feel guilty, because that's one of the tasks I gave myself permission to omit. I've been unable to tell anyone anything I want, because to be honest what I want most isn't a gift that anyone can give.

Still in a week or so, Christmas will arrive. Little girls eyes will sparkle with magic and excitement. God willing, family tensions will be set aside and we'll celebrate and try not to notice an unshed tear shimmering in someone else's eye because to do so would mean acknowledging the ones in our own.

There will be less laughter and more leftovers and a sense of Ethan's absence that's as glaring as a piece lost from the center of a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle will still make a picture, but it won't be the same. This year it feels like a big bright piece of a 20-piece puzzle. Next year the puzzle may feel like 50 pieces instead, and the absence will be less noticeable. Maybe in time it will be such a huge puzzle of memories that all those tiny missing pieces will make their own part of the puzzle -- a shadow of what could have been.

We Never Really Grieve Alone

I struggled all day Tuesday, although it probably didn't seem like it.

The very first person I talked to told me two local girls had been killed in a car wreck on a stretch of four-lane I drove through twice yesterday, and that two brothers who were also in the car were in the local trauma center. She was bringing her dog to stay with me for the Thanksgiving holiday. We'd never met and she had no way of knowing how the news of a child's death hits me. As soon as she left I stood in my kennel yard and cried and prayed, for the families, the injured, those destined to go on with holes in their heart and enough regrets and what ifs to cripple them if they aren't careful.

All day that awareness hung over me, stopping me in whatever I was doing and sending me back to tears and prayers.

After a brief visit to my newsfeed on Facebook, I had to stay away. A friend of mine had posted that one of the girls was her niece. There were pictures and tributes and other parents that had lost children were posting; other Facebook friends were related. All day I argued with myself about going back to the computer.

I thought about how wrong life is when children die and how those deaths, so undeserved, may make us question God. I thought about how God gave us a perfect world, but we weren't content with that and how all the tragedy on every scale, the wars and genocides, abuse and neglect, car crashes and illnesses are part of the choice humanity made. God isn't any happier with it than we are, but to end it, well that time isn't quite right apparently. When I hurt for people I don't even know, I have to believe He hurts as well for people that He was willing to send his son to die for.

I wanted to wrap my words around it and unravel it all in my mind, but I didn't want to blog about someone else's tragedy. It wasn't about me, it was about them.

Then I went out to gather my eggs, tuck my hens in and get the kennel towels off the line because the local forecast says wet weather and possibly snow tomorrow.

I almost never see a sunrise or sunset because of the hills and trees around my home, but the sky was lit up in a way that could not be ignored. I set my laundry basket down and walked to the end of the drive. The clouds drifting in from the south were all painted pink on their undersides and the horizon was molten gold where the sun was sinking.

As we're wont to do in this camera/phone era, I snapped a picture of the first sunset I'd seen in ages, then went to put my phone back. Already the pink was fading, and I noticed a small white spot in the clouds. It didn't seem to match, just a little circle of light in the darkening sky, no way the sun was reaching around a cloud to be there.

Then it hit me and I felt like the spot was Ethan, my far from an angel son gone on to heaven all the same. There was a feeling of peace, even as I stood and cried one more time.

I shared it from my phone and tried to explain what it meant. Then I came inside to get ready for Zumba, but suddenly the stomach ache I've had for two days was back and I decided I wasn't driving 30 minutes to class only to not feel like dancing. Instead I came to my computer, thinking I could post the picture to my blog and that would be enough, but as soon as I set my fingers to the keyboard, it all came pouring out.

When you lose a child, you feel so alone. Mothers and fathers love their children so differently that it's easy to feel that not even your spouse understands. You're on this island of pain where you cannot imagine how you are supposed to ever laugh again, or enjoy a meal, or lay down at night and go to sleep without crying. You can't hardly even keep breathing because it feels like there's a vice around your chest and you're not even sure you want your heart to keep beating.

Beyond the circumstances, once the rest of the world has processed that your child is gone and sent its condolences and tried to help, what you're left with is the same emotions that virtually every grieving parent feels. When I lost Ethan, I had friends who had lost children in far different ways who still knew what I was going through and who were here for me. Whether it's war, car accidents, illnesses, or drug abuse, what we parents are left with is the same sometimes crippling burden of grief. It's the endless questions that can never be answered about what could have been different, the unfulfilled expectations, the inability to see an altered version of ourselves in our child, the rest of our lives without what should have been an integral part of it.

I think once you've lost a child, then you feel it every time you hear of a child dying -- whether that child is a baby, a teenager, or even grown. Any time you hear of a parent losing their son or daughter, you grieve with them because you know down deep in your heart and in the very core of your being what they're going through. Depending on the timing or the circumstance, you may almost feel it all again, even though you never saw the child except when they were already a memory.

Knowing that, I have to believe that God feels our pain.

It's easy to forget in the grand scheme of worship that Jesus is God's son. He came to earth and died and in order to die had to be separated from God for a brief span. On the third day Jesus arose, just as God knew he would, but for those days He felt what we feel. He understands our pain and every time He grieves with us.

I wish I could say I came up with that entirely on my own, but at least part of that comes from my friend Annah Elizabeth's book Digging for the Light. Annah Elizabeth and I were pregnant with our sons at the same time. In the spring of 1990, Ethan was born about a month before her son, who died shortly after birth. We've never met, but through the wonder of the internet we've become supporters of one another on our journey of grief. During her grief and depression following her son's death, she met with a woman who she called a wise woman. This woman told her "God is always with us. Divine intervention is rare. He was in the room with you.... He was crying out in pain with you...."

Those words were healing to Annah Elizabeth and they were healing to me as well. Sometimes, albeit rarely, there are miracles. Most of us have known of one or two and if we've lost a child we've been jealous that miracle wasn't for us. But it makes a difference to know that God is no more happy with the situation than we are. I take it a bit further in thinking that not only does He weep with us, but He feels as keenly as I feel the pain of mothers I've never met over the loss of children I do not know.

So I stand and cry and look at the sky, and in the clouds there is a spot of light, and I realize I cannot keep it all in or limit it to a few lines on Facebook. Perhaps the light was not only to comfort me, but to remind me of my gift and that unraveling the pain with words is what I do and isn't always just for me.

Election Day Brought Another Pain in Focus

The last place I expected to find myself in tears yesterday was the voting precinct where I was putting in 15 hours as a voting official.

But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the places where something is still suddenly too much.

It built up through the day, and, thinking back, even before.

A week or so ago I received a political mailer for Ethan noting he hadn't voted in an election recently and shouldn't miss his opportunity. I remembered that two years ago he was in Winston-Salem in a boarding house where he could be transported back to his doctor's office for care after breaking his back in a car wreck. He wanted an absentee ballot to vote for the presidential race, but he gave me the wrong address so he didn't get to vote. By last year he was surrendering to his addiction and couldn't have cared less, even if it had been an important voting year.

All day yesterday as we assisted voters, there was a steady stream of little things.

One of the other judges mentioned taking his son and his mother to vote during early voting. It was his son's first time to cast a ballot and his mother said after voting, "Your grandpa would have been so proud." That hardly seemed to register at the time and I focused more on the loss of his father than the presence of his son.

But there were young men coming to vote whose style of dress, manner of movement, or even just general size kept triggering reminders of Ethan. There, my mind would say, that could have been him... or that.

Then a family with two grown sons, one voting the first time and one in his 20s, came in to vote together. The easy affection and teasing among them brought my own pain closer to the surface. I never voted with Ethan. He was never interested but the one time. I should have gone to Winston and brought him home to vote. It probably wouldn't have changed his life, but it would have given me that memory to treasure.

Finally another judge's son came into vote alone and she slipped around and gave him a kiss and a hug. One of those mom and son moments. He voted and left, tuning out her teasing remarks about fixing her some dinner. "He never listens," she smiled.

"How old is he?" I asked, poking at my own pain without even thinking.

"Twenty-four," she replied.

"Ethan never made it to 24," I said as tears slipped from my eyes. I realized they probably graduated together. Her son probably knew the troubled teen that was Ethan. Although I felt guilty about making her uncomfortable, I couldn't help myself. In a few moments I was able to excuse myself to repair the damage. I've known her for years and she knew about Ethan, but the other judges probably wondered what had gone on.

Afterwards I realized I shouldn't have been surprised. All too often something that never meant much to me before will knock the wind out of me. An autopsy on NCIS, a police drama featuring a death notification, actors portraying a mother and son, or the not-quite-right emotions of the character whose son has been murdered do it on TV, and books are almost as bad. Then there's real life -- a friend with her sons, someone Ethan knew with a real life, people I don't even know doing things they never think twice about and suddenly out of the blue that's the one thing I won't be doing with Ethan and I have to turn away.

I sit here this morning knowing that for the rest of my life there will be these moments filled with too much pain, too much regret, too much "I wish" and "If" and "Dammit life isn't fair." Knowing that, I dry my face, take a few deep breaths, and look for the focus to keep moving forward and walking the path I've been given to walk and treasure what I have been given.

Sometimes it feels my life and friendships are filled by souls battered like my own and, while it's painful sometimes to run into those who are innocent of this kind of grief, at the same time I want to shout at them in the most mundane of activities: "Treasure this moment! Not everyone gets it."

Even on Election Day.

Looking For a Bright Spot, Even a Penny

It's been almost 10 months since I learned that my son, Ethan, was dead.

Almost 10 months since my reality, my expectations for the future, my whole world was shifted on its axis.

Ethan had been troubled with drug addiction and the accompanying legal, emotional, mental, developmental and financial chaos since he considered himself an adult at 16. He'd pulled himself away from most of his family like a baby tooth working its way loose from the mouth. I always thought he'd eventually see that he couldn't keep on going like he was, that he'd reach bottom and come back to us.

He didn't.

Reaching bottom turned out to be fatal for him, as it too often does. The medical examiner ruled his death an accidental overdose, just a step too far along his search for escape and the ultimate high.

My reality was that there would be no more Christmases, no more birthdays, no Mother's Day cards, no special girlfriend leading to a wedding and more grandbabies, no more phone calls just to talk or even to ask for something. Nothing. Period. The end of the life I had a part in creating. There were days when it felt like just too much effort to cope, but I was needed by my husband, my daughter and granddaughters, my son-in-law, a lot of people and their dogs, so I kept going. I blogged and found a community of mutual support. I made new friends who had also had devastating losses.

For the last month, however, I've been pushing away the tides of emotions and letting my busy days keep me from following where they were taking me. Now it's October now, it's raining and sometime in the next day or so we're supposed to see our first dip into the 30s. I hate cold weather and I fear that the coming dark and cold will pull me into a void of depression. I'm scrambling for ways to avoid sinking under a dark cloud that won't go away.

Losing my church, albeit my decision, didn't help. Instead of somewhere I could turn for comfort, it turned into another of life's painful experiences that at best has me second guessing what should have been, much like my son's life.

Part of avoiding my emotions has been the all-too-easy option of not writing a blog. But my blog has been my therapy since Dec. 15 and it's helped me work through what life has thrown at me, so I'm back. I'm trying to arm myself in every way I can to fight the compounded effects of cold weather and grief. I'm trying to deal with things in small bits, so they don't become overwhelming like a the accumulated belongings of a hoarder -- a good analogy because instead of holding onto my sadness by hiding it, I'm going to start tackling it again.

I'm fighting back by joining the gym, going to Zumba classes (including one with the instructor and many other dancers from my old studio), and by buying a few things that I hope will be distractions as the weather shifts, like a big bounce house for the girls and a hot tub for the back yard.

I've quit letting myself indulge in eating binges of comfort foods that bought me short-term gratification, but were beginning to make my favorite clothes uncomfortable. I'm halfway back to where I want to be and already find a little more breathing room in my shorts and jeans. I got my hair cut, just a little, so that it had a bit more style than just long, curly mess. I'm getting a massage and an expensive cosmetic treatment that I've wanted a long time this month. In short, I'm looking for ways to be kind to myself that don't involve eating, although I've also fallen in love with a salad blend from Costco that I eat to excess -- far better than a Krispy Kreme doughnut at least.

I'm also reconnecting with the people that I found were so wonderful to be around, gathering them back like snuggling into a warm blanket on a cold night. Last week we did a quick, impromptu dinner with another couple and this week it's dinner at our house with a few more friends. Instead of working to exhaustion every Saturday and collapsing by the television, we're going to start engaging with others again -- people who have been here for me and my husband through thick and thin.

I don't know that it will be enough. I don't know how I'll work through the coming months, when already I feel like I'm teetering on the edge, and things as simple as a Facebook post about wonderful sons or a TV show where a dying mother tells her son goodbye will send silent tears sliding down my face. I don't know why I feel Ethan's blue eyes looking at me, intently as they so often did, and why if I have to sense that I cannot also feel some reassurance. Instead I feel like he's watching me, worried and uncertain if I'll be OK, because that's how it feels -- how I feel.

Then I find change outside my car door in the parking lot, a quarter and a penny, and I remember the poem about pennies from heaven. I smile and pick it up and toss it in my console, drawing comfort wherever I can. I close my eyes and send a mental hug to my baby and imagine his arms around me and his strong grip as he lifted me from my feet. I drive home with tears streaming down my cheeks again, but still hopeful that I won't let him down by failing in some way to do what has to be done.

We Were Never Meant to Live Here Forever

"Aren't you afraid to die?"

Not too long ago I was out to dinner with two friends who have become close as a result of our grief journeys and they looked at my little Miata and posed that question.

I answered, "No," without a second thought. "If I were killed driving this thing, right up until the last few seconds, I'd be about as happy as I've ever been, so I don't worry about it."

Since losing Ethan, I look at death differently. It's not that I'm suicidal or don't enjoy living, but I look at death as a step, not an end. It's a change from this plane of existence to another where what we are is different, but who we are is much the same, although unhampered by the pangs of life, the bonds of our physical being, the ache of physical hardship and addiction.

I know as a Christian, I should have looked at death this way for a long time. In fact, it's a wonder Christians strong in their belief aren't ready to check out immediately and skip the whole bit of trying to live like Jesus. Life is hard. Living like Jesus, with an unwavering moral compass and a love for everyone we encounter, is even harder.

Yet we cling to life, even when we're hurting, and fear moving on to something unfamiliar. We're right to do so. It's a gift to be enjoyed as long as it's ours. We should get up each morning with a prayer of thanksgiving for the day, asking that we live it as we should -- although I'd be the first to admit that I generally don't do either of those things. Instead I wake wishing I'd slept a bit longer, that the alarm clock wasn't blaring at 5:15 a.m., or my carpal tunnel setting my hands on fire at whatever time shy of 7. Anything after 7, well then I wake up thankful for close to 8 hours of sleep!

I take the gift of life for granted, even though I know that physically it's not an endless gift. I've said goodbye to family, friends and pets whose time has run out. I've mourned their passing, even when I've been assured that they've gone to a better place. I've never been willing to think about joining them.

Then on Dec. 15 I got the call that my son was dead. Although his addiction had pulled him out of my life so thoroughly that even now I cannot miss him except in an abstract sense because he'd been gone in so many ways for so long, still there's a hole in my heart just from knowing that I won't see him again. I've been angry and sad for eight months now, and I still am.

But at the same time, I've learned something.

Ethan was afraid of life, although he'd never admit it. Every addict is. Even before addiction takes over, they need a buffer to face life, some way to separate themselves from dealing with something -- anything from physical pain to feeling like they don't fit in. They try drugs or alcohol or food or porn or a whole list of what we consider vices to cope, and then whatever fuels their addiction consumes their life.

Ethan couldn't live straight, taking the good, the bad and the ugly that life dishes out every day. But he could die. He could get high and feel a bit out of breath and stretch out and just slip away without a lot of drama or attention. When it came right down to it, it was as easy as letting go of all the things, good and bad, that had held him or driven him for 23 years.

If he could do it, then I darn sure can.

Many times "This Life" from The Afters has brought me to tears, while at the same time brought me peace. "We can't own it, we just get to hold it for a while. This life. We can't keep it or save it for another time. This life... We were never meant to stay. We don't have to be afraid of what is waiting on the other side...."

This week a woman at our church died after a long fight waiting for a liver transplant. The church had gathered to pray for her. She left behind a family not unlike my own -- a husband, grown children, and a church family who cared for her. She wasn't elderly. We didn't feel it was her time. Yet it was.

While she leaves mourners, people aching in her absence with their arms empty and their hearts broken, she's never felt better. The pain, the mental anguish, the struggle is over. Just as it was for Ethan.

Death isn't the enemy that we make it out to be.

Of course, I say that from a distance. I'm not fighting for my life. But I believe that the lesson I've learned from losing Ethan means that while I will fight to live, should the need arise, I won't fear death. While I won't rush into its darkness, or even its light if that's how the transition appears, I'll go without fear to the presence of my maker and those gone before.

I still mourn for the loss of my son, the seemingly untimely loss of others. But my perspective on this loss has changed. It's not they who have lost a life, it is us who have lost a presence.

The only way a life is lost is if we do not choose to go on living the life we're given to its fullest -- however long it lasts.

Just Let Me Get The Date Behind Me

This has been one of the toughest weeks in ages and I'm dreading next week, but at the same time hoping that birthday preparations keep me too busy for the wandering mind that has plagued me this week.

My daughter's work schedule means this is my week with the 3Es -- getting up far too early and still unable to go to bed before 11. Those 18-hour days pile up and much of the time I'm alone, or at least the only person awake within the four walls where I'm surrounded by people I love.

Mornings the girls arrive shortly after 5, take over my bed and the crib in the playroom, and go back to sleep sometimes for as much as two more hours. I spend a portion of that time working out and caring for dogs in the kennel, and I'm fairly good at keeping my mind occupied the rest of the time.

By the time I'm left alone again for an hour or so at 3 p.m. between the time they leave and the time my husband gets home, my defenses have slipped a bit. I can only work out so much. It's too hot for the dogs to want to be out, or for me to start some outdoors project after being sidelined all day with little people. I'm at loose ends and find myself debating the social acceptability of alcohol after noon versus the calories I would need to burn to justify it.

Once my husband gets home I've got company another three or four hours before he goes to bed to be ready to get up for his early shift. By 7 or 8 I'm alone again with the evening stretching ahead of me. Some evenings I take a Zumba class, but if I work out too much or too late, I cannot sleep, so I'm left to grapple with the long hours and whatever form of entertainment I can use to distract myself.

This week there's no question that I'll cry during those alone times. It's just a matter of how often, how desperately, and when.

I hate this. I know it's just a date hanging over me. August 17. Yet it's a battering ram of emotions, a realization that it will be year and that each year I will tack another year onto how long it has been since I saw my baby and talked to him, since I was crushed in one of his terrific hugs, since I saw his smile or his blue eyes or the lost expression that so often crept across his face.

For the rest of my life, when I should have been watching him get his life together and find a young woman and have those blue-eyed, blond-haired children he wanted, I'll be marking off another year since I've touched him.

I hate that it had to be on E1's birthday. That I have such a firm date in my mind for when I saw him last. That it has to taint what should be her day.

At the same time, if I have to remember the last time we were together so plainly, I'm glad it's a good memory of one of his favorite family times. I'm glad I can think of him as he was that night and smile at the memory of one more hotdog, or a corner piece of cake, at him slipping up to me as I played hostess to ask a question, grab a hug, be my little boy even as he towered over me.

I'm also glad that it's a day when I won't be tempted to sit around and wrestle with my memories all day. The day itself will belong to the birthday girl, it's just the time before that is haunted with a much loved ghost.

This week, odds are that something on television, on the radio, in an MP3 I thought was safe and downloaded, or even in a mystery novel will bring tears to my eyes. I cry over the fictional characters, the broken hearts, the happy endings that aren't my own, when what I'm really crying over is the life cut short last December by an overdose.

I think of Ethan alone slipping away from us. My mom has wondered if he needed us and why he didn't call. I think he found peace, a high -- what he thought was another NDE (near death experience) the users call it and they seek it as the ultimate high, even though they are sometimes smart enough to be frightened at the same time. I don't think he was frightened. I doubt he ever realized it was not a NDE, but the real thing, until he shook himself free of his pain wracked body and mind.

I wonder if that was what he had been chasing all the time, and I'm sorry that I'm angry and sad that he's free. But that's where I am this week and where I may stay until I mark the date from my calendar. The waves of grief are lapping at my ankles again and I hope it just means I've wandered too near the shore, not that the tide is coming in.

I'm running at a frantic pace, desperately seeking distraction, and a little ragged around the edges. I hope in 11 days I'll be breathing easier again and that the waves don't pull the ground from under my feet in the meantime.

Another Bittersweet Birthday Approaching

The biggest of the three Es will turn 5 in a few weeks.

It's no surprise it will be a "Frozen" party theme, and I'll get to paint a t-shirt to commemorate the occasion -- something I've done each birthday for several years.

But while I'll be getting the house and yard ready for the party to be here, just as it was last year and would have been the year before had E2 not fallen ill, I'm battling more than the need to get things ready.

The last memory I have of seeing my son, Ethan, was at E's fourth birthday party. In just a few short weeks it will have been a year since he swept me up in one of his big hugs, probably swinging me off my feet just to show me he could. A year since I watched him drifting around the edge of the party, talking to my cousin's attractive stepdaughter and dreaming of being that boy again (OMG that would embarrass him so). A year since he sat in a chair in my yard enjoying hot dogs and cake and ice cream. A year since he left with my parents, my dad stopping to make some smart remark about him that even then made me want to reach into the car and slap my father.

Although it was December before he was gone, he was just a voice on the phone, the one who left an empty place when he didn't show up for family gatherings, an already hard to reckon with distant presence whose life was disintegrating around him.

Four more months he was here, and I never saw him, never hugged him, smelled him, kissed him. How could that be? How could our last time together have been so vague a memory? Rushing around being hostess, just seeing him and glad he was here, stopping to exchange a word here and there?

And so this birthday looms. An anniversary I'm trying not to give too much power, but something I'm struggling with at odd moments all the same.

I'm glad E1 wants the party here. Even though it will be largely the same gathering, minus one, it will keep me busy. I won't have time to look for the ghost that isn't there. I won't have a chance to huddle somewhere trying to put my broken heart back together.

I know birthday parties will always be hard -- although I can hope they will be easier as time goes by. I'll always look for him in the background, always feel the hole left in my family by his death.

A Dead Fawn on the Lawn

I woke up this morning with a mental picture of the moment the doctor handed me my newborn son.

The wonder that after a dark-haired little girl who looked so much like her father, I had produced an unexpected son who looked instead like me with light hair and blue eyes. I was thunderstruck in that I had no idea how to be a little boy's mother, and realized even then that his father would be no help.

Then I was fully awake with the realization yet again that my beautiful boy is gone. Before I even threw back the covers, I had to pray and admit once again that I don't understand why this is how our lives had to be.

I turned on the coffee pot, fed the cat, and once coffee was made went to the front porch to enjoy it and wake up in the quiet, cool air, and hopefully regain my equilibrium for the day.

That wasn't to be.

In the center of the front yard was a dead fawn, a gaping wound of red meat, delicate legs splayed, the spots in its back letting me know without going any closer what I had to deal with.

Thanks, dogs.

Even before I went out to clean up the carcass, I knew it was roadkill. My dogs are too well fed and lazy to actually hunt and kill any real prey, and fawns are generally safe despite the tremendous number of deer in my neighborhood. When I got near with a garbage bag in hand, I wasn't disappointed to find the tiny back legs shattered with bones protruding through the skin. I wrestled the surprisingly heavy little body into the bag, discovering that the dogs had hid the worst of the wounds in their placement, and removed it from my yard.

But my memories and the fawn were linked. My emptiness and lack of understanding had found a soul mate in a doe sleeping alone somewhere. My morning was ruined.

I carried the bad feeling with me to church where I clutched a tissue and tried to avoid looking like a raccoon, although I didn't realize for a while that the two had been linked and that I was crying for Ethan and for a baby deer that I would have been willing to eat had it grown.

I was sad for another mother I met a few days ago who was in the same place I was in December, struggling to adjust to the reality that her troubled son had been found dead. I never knew her son, never met her before, but I know I was the only person in the room that understood exactly what she felt.

We're bound together in heartache and a loneliness in our hearts that we will never get over or come to terms with. Our loss is so senseless, so beyond our comprehension, so life shattering that even while we go on we know we'll never be back to who we were before.

Right now, the lonely doe is part of our misery, but I envy her.

Her life is short, even if she survives traffic and hunter's guns.

Her memory is even shorter. She won't look at other fawns and think of her own. She won't stand alone in a meadow and miss the flicking tail of her fawn as it nurses in the evening air.

Next year she'll have another baby, and it will replace the one that was torn from her side as though the dead deer on my lawn had never existed.

For her the circle of life will go on.

For me, it's the circle of grief bottoming out one more time in a process that I expect to repeat itself for the rest of my life.

Remembering the Bright Spots for Dark Times

Sitting in the shade, surrounded by plastic water bottles, watching three curly-haired little girls play on the swings and slide while I neglect, for a while the things that need doing, happy doesn't seem that hard to do.

Driving home alone last night, it was the exact opposite -- elusive and hard to recall.

So often the alone times when I'm not busy, when my mind is free to wander the endless maze of "what if" and "if only," I find myself in dark places. Those are the times that I conjure my son's memory and stab myself in the heart with the reminder that he died, that his memory is all I have for the rest of my life.

Those are the times when I have to work to remember that happy happens, and that it will happen again. That it's when I need to remember this exercise and the things I'm saving in my mind for a sad time.

1. Fledgling wrens. For weeks my front porch has been a hub of activity for the wren family nesting in the eaves. Sunday mom and dad were strangely absent and the babies full of vocal complaints. The time had come for their parents to lure them from the nest. While we were away at church, they left and apparently with total success as I heard no left behind chirps nor did I find any caught by the dog on their maiden voyage. A few weeks and there will probably be another gang growing and noise again under the eaves, as there have been wrens on my porch for years now.

2. Little green tomatoes. Most of my garden could benefit from a good rain, but tomatoes do love hot weather and they are thriving. Several are sporting little green signs of progress, although I've yet to begin dreaming of that first, warm from the garden tomato.

3. Babies playing in the driveway before the sun gets too hot in one of those rare games when they all seem to be on or near the same page.

4. The slowly growing sprigs of the fig tree I planted the Saturday after Ethan's funeral. It froze back to the ground in the horrible winter we had, but it's alive and while I don't expect fruit this year I'll be looking for it in years to come.

5. Driving my convertible with the top down in the rain. Yes, I did it. I didn't have far to go and I wasn't convinced those random drops hitting the windshield as I started home were really going to add up to anything. Well, by the time I decided I was wrong, I would have gotten wetter stopping than driving, so I came on to the house. Although I drove through one serious downpour, it wasn't raining much at home, and it was seriously hot so I didn't mind the damp.

6. Pedro's social debut. I took him to a dog washing being held to raise money for the group that rescued him and he loved on people and was cordial to strange dogs. Several people stopped to comment on what a good dog he was. I know it's only a matter of time until the right person comes along.

7. Spending time with a friend letting her dog learn what it means to be a dog, or a puppy in her case. We had a very nice visit and Mabel eventually found out that she really didn't need to hide under a chair because the other dogs were FUN!

Sometimes, yes, it's a bad day or night, or even a bad week. But I know that there are always moments of joy if I'll take the time to give them the credit they are due. I know since making the effort, it seems the tide of my grief has turned just a little and seems less likely to swallow me, because I know I have happy to hang onto.

Caught in the Circle of Grief -- Still, not Again

It's 9 a.m. on Thursday and I'm finally getting a cup of coffee.

I've been up off and on since the alarm went off at 5 a.m. for the girls to come (they came about 5:30, I really need to reset the alarm), they've had breakfast, been dressed, had their teeth brushed and hair arranged, and E1 and E3 had their morning brushing (therapy, more later) then we took E1 to her last day of Pre-K in public school (also a developing story line). The two little Es wanted more to eat when we got home. I've also let the kennel dogs out, cleaned cages for a couple who don't quite get waiting, fed the cat and carried out step two of sourdough bread making.

I think I deserve more than a cup of coffee.

Describing my morning and thinking how I'm floundering, how when the baby wanted a hug (and we give long, deep ones as a compression), I cried over her shoulder, I realize I'm not allowing myself time to process. Heck, life isn't allowing me time to process. My retreat from this blog, which I felt I didn't have time for (often true), has been like stopping therapy when I hadn't really accomplished my goals.

I'm not eating right, having trouble going to sleep, once again grappling with the idea that my 23-year-old son died all alone in his apartment, isolated in his addiction, and that we didn't even know it for days.

My mom bought me his death certificate last Saturday. It's still in the glove compartment of my car. She told me that in addition to the drug overdose which caused his death, he also had pneumonia. I haven't seen it. I cannot bring myself to look at it and to put a period on the sentence of his life that began with the birth certificate I have tucked away. Perhaps I'll hide it in the back of his baby book with his footprints and notes about his first teeth and first steps, with the lock of his baby hair and pictures of his cherub face -- here's how the story ended.

A friend of mine has his autopsy results. He works in emergency medicine and I thought would be better able to translate the terminology than I could. Plus, I wouldn't need to unsee and unknow anything. Ethan was mixing his meds, he said, and had a prescription painkiller in his system along with the chemicals from the dextromethorphan. Both were respiratory inhibitors. Both were toxic overdoses. We haven't had time to sit down together and answer any other questions. The day we had a meeting scheduled, there were multiple suicides back to back that he had to attend and I had to imagine the fallout.

I haven't processed either of those things. How does a 23-year-old with a heated home and the ability to feed himself wind up with pneumonia? Why did he think the meds he got from a friend to deal with the pain of the pneumonia were safer than going to a doctor? Why the bloody hell did he have to die all alone in his bathroom floor when so many people cared about him and he just wouldn't let anyone do anything that really meant something? How did the bright, beautiful boy I raised wind up so lost and hopeless?

Then we can move to the current generation of children. As a result of E1's late birthday and the effect her SPD has had on her small motor skills and emotional development, the decision has been made to redshirt her this year. Despite Mom changing her work schedule to better deal with school and her excitement about it, she won't be starting kindergarten as a 4-year-old in August. Instead she's likely to be attending a nearby church pre-K program the days she comes to my house so she won't be forced to sit home with the babies every day.

And a conversation with E1's therapist about her astounding progress (to us) and the fact that the one who had a tough time with beach trip was E3 resulted in the therapist suggesting SPD in the baby and all of us re-evaluating her change from a wonderful baby to a whiny, difficult toddler. She went for testing yesterday and it was confirmed. She starts therapy next week just as E1 is geared down to a semi-weekly schedule. The good news is the sooner it is detected the quicker she should respond to treatment and long term, because the adults in their lives learn management and they learn to recognize what's happening, they will be fine.

Because the disorder is genetic and because of the more than passing resemblance between E1 and Ethan in many photographs, I once again return to that disorder as something that slowly overwhelmed my son. Of course, there is no way of knowing, nothing that would show up on an autopsy or any of the many IQ and standardized tests he took while alive. It's just a feeling in my heart that had we known, had it even been a recognized and treated disorder 20 years ago, my son would have had the life he and I dreamed of and he deserved.

Then there is the fact that the schedule I'd grown used to, the one that worked for me and helped me keep my balance (perhaps I know where the SPD gene resided in my generation), has been disrupted not once, but twice. First my daughter takes the schedule shift, and the girls are no longer a part of my evenings every weekday, instead arriving bright and early every other week and by Thursdays leaving me stumbling through the day and with time to get things done on the alternate weeks (I'm not saying I don't like it overall, but it is adjustment). Then, just as I'm taking advantage of the free evenings to enjoy more time with my PiYo and Zumba companions, the studio closes for a month and I lose that entire fragile network of support where I'd been able to count on smiles and hugs and feeling for an hour or two that there were people around me who knew I was sometimes fragile and cared.

On top of that it's been so long since I've heard Ethan's voice, since I've felt his arms around me and his big bear hug, since I've heard him laugh or mimic my dad or put on one of the phony voices he'd use for fun. I may sleep in an old pair of his shorts, and keep his sweatshirt in a freezer bag to save the smell, and find myself unable to do anything with his old toothbrush, but I cannot reach him in any way. I cannot touch him and feel him. I cannot save him or myself from what happened or the path I'm now stumbling down alone.

Instead of just going on like none of those things bother me until I'm simply overwhelmed and crying on a baby's shoulder, I've got to start dealing with my grief again. If I don't give myself this time, somehow find a way to carve it out of days that feel impossible, then it's going to come back and bite me even though I thought I had it tamed.

As I've already realized, grief is a journey where the path loops back on itself time and time again. I can only hope the circles get bigger, instead of smaller like a whirlpool that sucks me down, because I know there won't be an end to the journey.

Some Weeks, the Joy is Hard to Recognize

I would say this has been a hard week, looking back, even though I might not be able to put a finger on why.

I think it is the sense of grief that has hung around several of my friends, new and old, who within a few days timespan of one another marked the anniversary of their child's death. My Facebook news feed contained a trickle of pain that some days felt more like Niagara Falls. All those pictures of our children we'll never hold again in this world. Gone 11 years, gone one year, gone a month; dead in vehicle accidents, drug overdoses and drownings; snatched from our lives in a heartbeat that wasn't followed by another while we were going about the business of living.

Most of the young people I never knew; two of the mothers I've never met face-to-face, but their pain resonates in my heart each day and I knew the grief that only we can understand and share. It's been six months since I heard my son's voice. Sunday will mark a six-month anniversary for me and although I hadn't thought to give it weight, the weight of other's pain has added to my own. And for the first time the actual date, the 15th, will also be the same as it was in December.

So it has been challenging to think about trying to find random joy this week, which meant I needed to do it even more than on a week when the list could be endless.

Babies, dogs and reptiles still delivered the odd smile, even if sometimes I had to brush away an unshed tear to do so.

1. Catching a five-foot blacksnake in my hen house. Literally. I wish I'd caught his companion and I'm glad that four of the five snakes I've encountered this week (yes, it really has been that kind of week) were black snakes. There's nothing to freak your friends out on Facebook like posting a picture of a snake, in your hand, and wrapped around your wrist. Not only that, but I think I could be solving the egg mystery one snake at a time. I have caught two blacksnakes in the coop this week (the other was much smaller) and my husband killed a copperhead in the kennel one night. I've seen two more black snakes. Apparently the wive's tale about them keeping copperheads away isn't true. My yard isn't that big.

2. Another tiny turtle. This one was even tinier and so shy it would not stick its head out to entertain the baby, but E2 was delighted by it all the same. Since it was so near my home, she had the honor of taking to the garden to release it.

3. Gold Medal Day. For little gymnasts, it is the equivalent of a piano recital. They get to put on their moves in front of friends and family and after toting E1 and E2 to classes, and E3 along for the ride since the oldest was 2 years old, I'm an old pro at the festivities. So was E1. My middle baby, who is never daunted by anything and who has been doing class without help for a couple of weeks, was overwhelmed by the number of people and needed me to come with her. While I was looking forward to being part of the audience for a change, I was glad to be the one she called.

4. A baby sleeping in my arms through Sunday school class. Yes, she was hot, and heavy after a while, but it was such a sweet burden to hold E3 when she dozed off without her pacifier or blanket. Plus, she awoke in a much better mood.

5. Pedro. I know, you're probably tired of hearing about Pedro, but in the wake of what seemed like a nervous breakdown last week, he's suddenly OK. With everything. Including the big male dogs that would previously have given him a cause to be defensive. I'm still testing the water, but he was actually playing wild games with another male that he wasn't four times as big as. Now all I have to do is find him a good home, but he's sure ready to go and after so many months of work I'm so happy to see the dog that has emerged from the tormented canine that arrived last October.

6. The pool. Growing up I would never have dreamed I'd have a pool, mainly because no one had pools except country clubs and the indoor one at the Y. I don't swim well, probably for the above reasons, but I love my pool. It is a temporary, above ground one, but it's got salt water, and I can fall into it after mowing or anything else and be so refreshed and immediately cooled. Not only that, but it's a wonderful place to contain and entertain the girls on a hot day and it's finally big enough, after two summers in one of the easy set models, for floats and multiple adults and children.

7. A quart of red paint for my front door, well crimson paint actually. I've always wanted to paint the front door red. It's supposed to be good feng shui to have a red front door and I'm about to have one, except I forgot to buy a paint brush. Still, I have the paint and the plan, and it's good to have plans.

So it took some dredging, but I came up with seven. I figure one for each day of the week and I can pull them forth and polish them off if this coming week is as hard as last week.

I keep reminding myself that happiness isn't a destination, it's what happens along the way and I've got to work to have it each day because I'm never going to get there. It has to be within me as I go.

Do the same, whatever hard battles you're fighting. Recognize the joy because you can bet you won't miss the pain when it comes. Try to see happy when it happens.

It's Still Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day.

Don't cringe. Don't tiptoe around it. It's still Mother's Day for me and all the other mothers who have lost our children, whether they were stillborn, died as infants, died as children or young people and whether or not they were our only children.

Happy Mother's Day.

Last year I expressed this sentiment to a friend who had lost her only child and my husband thought it had been a slip of the tongue for me. Perhaps, instead, it was a presentiment for me, knowing what should be said. While we didn't dwell on it at the time, I think she was glad to have her motherhood acknowledged. Last Sunday she brought me a gift of a necklace with the Bible verse that brought her peace on it. She wanted me to know she knew today would be difficult.

Happy Mother's Day.

Those singular days in the year set aside to express things we should express year round have never really impressed me. Perhaps I'm a cynic, but Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day and even Grandparent's Day have never had a lot of meaning. If you can't manage to be a good sweetheart, child or grandchild, expressing love and appreciation at least occasionally, the other 364 days of the year, then there's not much point. That means I sometimes pull off a card or a meal, mainly because it's expected, but it's not a big day personally and I've never had high expectations.

In fact, I've always felt like the hoopla of the days does more to point out the things we lack than the things we have. Valentine's Day always felt like so much more of a big deal when I didn't have a significant other than when I did. Celebrating how wonderful Mom, Dad, or grandparents are highlights their absence or makes people who have a less than wonderful branch in their family tree more aware of what they are missing.

For those who have had wonderful mothers to remember and miss, today may be bittersweet. There will be warm, happy memories tinged by loss and perhaps smiles through tears as they celebrate the day for other mothers in their lives, or perhaps gather with siblings to remember Mom. The day will be different and perhaps even difficult, but it will still be Mother's Day.

There's no question that children who have lost their mother's still celebrate the day, perhaps with a white flower on their Sunday best, but it's a different matter when it comes to mothers who have lost their children. I think the world looks at us as though we'd like to forget the day, and, even if it's painful, I don't think that's the case.

Today will be hard for a lot of grieving mothers I've met over the last five months. As we gather with family, there will be a child missing. As we open cards, there won't be one from a son or daughter. When the phone rings, it won't be that absent child calling to say they are sorry they aren't part of the celebration, or that they mailed their card too late. There will be a hole in the day, just as there has been a hole in our lives for some time now. The family gatherings, cards and calls will make it more apparent, but it is still Mother's Day.

I don't expect to feel those pangs. Last year my family got together for Mother's Day. The three Es were being dedicated at church and my parents went by to pick up Ethan so he could be part of the gathering. He was just beginning his slide back into drug use in the cycle of addiction he never escaped. While he'd been clean and happy a few weeks earlier for his birthday, that wasn't the case by Mother's Day. In typical, narcissistic, addict fashion, he told them when they arrived at his apartment that he wasn't going and had made other plans. He didn't call to wish me a good day. It was not the first or last of our family gatherings that he had simply skipped at the last moment. There's a big part of me already used to his absence, even though I crave his presence.

I've already had Mother's Day without my son. Addiction took him long before it claimed his life.

So I also acknowledge the other mothers I know who will spend today like I spent Mother's Day a year ago, missing one who could have been there, and who may not even bother to call or send a card, because those things don't have anything to do with getting high and enjoying that place in their heads where they live. I know how you'll spend today and even if they go through the motions, you'll spend today missing the child you would have had without addiction and clinging to the moment, to the hope of change just as I once did.

Whatever the pain we may feel, whatever its cause, today is still Mother's Day for us all.

Whether we are mothers, or simply have or had mothers, Mother's Day has meaning.

Whether we are surrounded by the wonderful noise and chaos of little children, the changed dynamics of a grownup family, or an empty house where the memory of our child lives in a bedroom down the hall or a photo on the wall or perhaps just in a flutter we felt in our womb that was never realized as a child in our arms, today is our day.

It may hurt, but I think we still want to hear Happy Mother's Day, because ignoring it is, in a sense, ignoring our pain and our joy and all that we went through. It is ignoring the existence of the child we loved, whether we never really knew them or knew them for years. I don't think any of us want to pretend our child never happened, even if we cry because they aren't with us today.

So don't tiptoe around the grieving mothers in your life. It's Mother's Day and we're still mothers. Help us celebrate our memories instead of our losses.

Happy Mother's Day.

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.

All That I Would Say

I wish you had come with an expiration date.

You know, like milk. A "Best if Used By" warning.

We all come with one, but we expect it's some 75 or 80 years away from when we're born, and the people around us who care about us have those same expectations.

When you were born shortly after midnight, 24 years ago today, I had no inkling that you would not be seeing the same 80 plus years that my grandparents had seen. There was no loaded genetic dice, nothing to warn me that you wouldn't see the time allotted to most of us these days.

I guess, in a way, it's fitting that our half-formed plans to get together yesterday to recognize your birthday were thwarted by the needs of the living -- a change in work schedule -- because the dead, after all, have no more birthdays. You're forever 23, like a dragonfly in amber from the Jurassic period. Frozen, never aging or changing, even as the rest of us go on stumbling through life.

But I find myself wishing, perhaps more often than anything else other than that you had not died, that I had known you were only around for a limited time engagement that would be up before my own.

There are so many things that I wish I'd done, so many opportunities wasted, so much unsaid.

I remember your birth so clearly, the long day of labor, the pain before the epidural, the fetal monitor indicating you were in distress and the rush to a cesarean delivery. There, hidden by a sheet from my view, I felt them pull you from my body and heard them count off the number of times the umbilical cord was around your neck. I was scared that you weren't alive, but soon they were showing you to me -- not the twin of your dark-haired sister that I expected but a big boy with fair features.

Still, I struggle to remember a lot of the years in between then and the phone call in December. They say our minds cling to the bad in the first stages of grief as a way of lessening the pain of loss, and perhaps that's it. There are days when it is easier to recall your rage than your laugh, your bitter words than your love, your clinched fists than your hugs. I wait for those better memories to return, for the balance to tip back, but perhaps I'm not ready to stand beneath those memories yet.

I do remember the preschooler who got up one night to go to the bathroom and instead peed in a trash can. Oh, that one haunted you a long time. Yes, it was about the same size, and I was in the bathroom and more than a little surprised to come out and find what you'd done in your half-waking state.

I remember you as the little boy who got a pony for Christmas, and swapped her to his sister for a video game. The middle schooler who discovered dirt bikes at a friend's house, but would never ride the one we went to Westfield to buy for you. Rushing to the hospital when you broke your leg on your skateboard and how desperately you needed a bath that you couldn't take for such a long time. The boy who alternately closed the door to shut me out, and called me at work needing me immediately. You were always at extremes -- overly cautious or a daredevil -- you never seemed to learn to live life within the lines.

We were so close, so alike, and yet there was that one glaring difference that I could not see through the male image of myself. While I was the brainy outsider comfortable with the role, happier with my books and dogs, you wanted so desperately just to be part of the crowd. I often thought your change from who you were meant to be to who you wanted to be was behind your discomfort with yourself.

I wish I'd understood your addiction better and been able to reach you, to show you somehow that life was worth living and that you were wonderful, special and beautiful beyond compare, without any mind or mood altering substance to change you. I wish I'd been able to drag you out of the cocoon in which you wrapped yourself to show you that life, stripped down and bare of anything between you and the world that God gave us, was worth living. I wish I'd called and beat down your door and somehow forced you to be with us more.

I wish I'd seen the work you did at church. I know it was great, but I thought you were on the right track and would be there longer. I wish I'd made you play your guitar for me. Made you share those things you kept to yourself. Talked to you and touched you and held you more. Made you live.

I'm reading a book written by a woman whose first child, a beautiful boy, was born dead, and it's fitting that I was reading that chapter this weekend. I'm so thankful that despite the pain of loving you and losing you, I had you for over 23 years. I'm thankful that while you were in the hospital after your wreck, all beat up and forced to listen, I told you that I would always love you no matter if you were an ass or not. I wish that had been enough to hold you.

I wish I knew you didn't want me in your final moments. That you weren't like E2 when she fell at gymnastics the other night and just wanted her mommy to hold her, even though the pain wasn't that bad. I wish I could have touched your wonderful hands and ran my fingers through your hair and held you and kissed you goodbye. Instead, I keep your old sweatshirt in a freezer bag so it will hold your scent, and I wear a few of your old t-shirts, loaded with memories and holes.

Last year, the family was together to celebrate and somehow I never got a good picture of you. I never thought when my mom asked for pictures of her family, to ask someone to shoot one of us -- me and you and your sister -- maybe because we've always been a broken family. I'm sorry your dad was such an asshole and never came around and honestly, staying married to him would not have made him a better dad because he didn't have it in him and that's one of the reasons we didn't last.

I think of a story a friend told me about a woman whose daughter told her that she had a sister, while the toddler was an only child. The little girl said her sister was with Jesus, but she'd be meeting her soon. The little girl drowned before her mother learned she was pregnant, with a little girl. I think you've gone back to the home you left 24 years ago today. You've returned to a bright, timeless existence and I'll join you again in what, to you, will be the blink of an eye.

It's hard down here without you, marking this birthday alone. Still, I'm happy for you, that I know you've found the peace that eluded you for so long. I feel you sometimes in a sunset or a song, and I know that just as you were before you were born, you're only a heartbeat away.