Can I Really Forgive Him for Dying?

Pushing myself through the rituals of Friday morning, thinking about Ethan, I had an unsettling thought.

Forgiveness.

Last year my goal for the New Year was to find a way to forgive someone in my life that I was struggling to love or forgive because the pain that person inflicted was ongoing. Through a lot of prayer, I was able to do that by focusing on the positive things in my life that were there because of them -- even if those things happened years ago.

When I saw someone's post on Facebook earlier this week about forgiving someone to achieve peace, I thought, yes, I nailed that one.

Then, yesterday morning out of the blue I realized I still have a lot of forgiving to do and at the top of that list right now is Ethan.

Although I learned a lot of lessons about love from him over the last seven years, I had not yet embraced the lessons of forgiveness.

Several years ago when I found him sleeping in his car in my driveway one morning, God drove home to me a lesson about love. Ethan was screwed up and not living the life I envisioned he would live; he wasn't living life to its full potential; he was wasting the gifts of talent, intelligence, love and support. Yet I still loved him with every fiber of my being. In that moment, I realized how the love we read about in the Bible -- the love that God feels for us when we mess up, sin, don't choose the path that He lays out for us to a full and happy life -- is real. There is such a thing as unconditional love, even when we aren't close to one another or denying its existence.

I loved Ethan unconditionally and did my best to make sure he knew it.

And time and time again I forgave him for the things his addiction made him do. I forgave him the physical and emotional havoc he left behind sometimes, because I loved him. Even while I did my best to limit his ability to cause physical pain, I didn't expect an apology after he called on a rant or neglected something that was important to me. I accepted that was the way he was and I was just glad he called again. I accepted and forgave every emotional blow in the hope there would come a time when things would be better and we could put it all behind us.

Until the other morning, it felt like I had done enough forgiving.

Then I realized I have to forgive him for dying. Even though he's beyond all need of anything I can ever give him, I have to forgive him for me. I have to forgive him every stupid mistake and bad choice that put him on the road to dying alone in his apartment. I have to forgive him for shutting us all away so often that no one missed him for days. I have to forgive him for squandering the life I fought so hard to give him.

Just as, at some point, I have to forgive myself for any way I may have failed him (a bridge I'm not ready to cross, and yes I know I did my best), I have to forgive him for things that ultimately slipped out of his control.

I have to forgive him for becoming an addict, because I know that once he found the drug that spoke to him, it was as powerful and insidious as Satan in the Garden of Eden. It whispered to him in lies and promises about special knowledge and gifts, special visions and experiencing the world in a way he could not without it. It made him feel things the real world didn't deliver. I cannot understand addiction and that desire to escape and I'm glad, but I have to forgive him for being overwhelmed by it.

I have to forgive him for not fulfilling the potential I saw when the doctors pulled him from my abdomen and placed him in my arms, a big, healthy, beautiful baby boy. I have to forgive him for disappointing my dreams, for not being able to find himself again and for not sticking around to take care of me when I get old.

Where time and again I've felt some version of survivor's guilt because of the families grieving a lost child who had done nothing wrong, who was caught up in some horrible tragedy of time or place or birth, I have to forgive him for no longer dodging the fate that had for so long been waiting. I have to forgive him for involuntarily choosing not to be part of our lives when he could have been, because now he cannot choose.

Ethan often said he wished he could die, and I have to forgive him for those thoughts and for finally having that wish granted.

I have to accept that he was doing his best to make his way through a world that was more painful to him than it is to me, a world that somehow didn't make his heart sing the way it sometimes does mine. I have to accept that while having people who love and need me is sometimes enough to get me through a day, it wasn't enough for him. I have to accept that he didn't always feel he had a purpose and that being without a purpose leaves you vulnerable to things you cannot control.

So today, in writing this and acknowledging the things I hadn't forgiven, I'm taking what I hope are the first steps toward letting those hard feelings go. Not because he needs me to do so, but because in order to live and breathe freely again, in order to have peace in my heart, this is what I need to do.

Already I feel lighter and I think the journey toward forgiveness is underway.

All Grieving Parents Belong to a Terrible Club

Two weeks ago I joined an exclusive club, although I've found it wasn't as exclusive as I would have liked to imagine.

The thing is, nobody wants to get in. No one wants membership, especially the people that have it.

It's made up of people who have lost a child and until you become part of the group, you may never realize how large it is or how much pain there is in the world around you.

In the last two weeks, I've learned about a lot of it because, thanks in no small part to this blog and Facebook, I've reached out and other moms and dads, many of whom I still have not met, have reached back. Old and new friends have shared stories of pain and heartache surrounding a child's addiction and death; others have had a sudden loss; but the painful end result is the same.

We're all stumbling through a life we never expected to live. Our children were supposed to be there for us when we got old. They were supposed to grieve for us in the natural order of things after helping us through our old age and giving us the blessing of grandchildren in which we might live on. And it doesn't matter how many children we have, the loss of a child is like losing a part of our bodies, we feel crippled and maimed and we wonder sometimes why people don't see a visible sign of the pain that we carry.

Although people have said to me that it's not supposed to be this way, and in more modern times we've come to believe that, it is only our perception that this is wrong. As exclusive as this club is, as rare as we like to believe membership may be, it has been around forever.

The first death in the Bible was a son, favored by God and mourned by his mother who bore him in pain and watched him grow. We are not so special. God plotted this course for us from the first named mother sent forth into mortal life. Mary, favored among women, followed the same path when she watched her son, Jesus, die on the cross. She couldn't save him, nor could she know he would rise again in three days. None of that mattered at the time to her because her son, the baby she held in her arms as a crying newborn and watched grow with all the love in her heart, died. Perhaps her grief was short-lived, relieved in three days by an open tomb, but for that time she felt the same pain we feel.

The old family cemetery where my son's body was laid to rest is filled with rows of markers on the graves of children who passed away during some dread disease outbreak a hundred years ago. Not so terribly long ago mothers sometimes bore and buried a half dozen children in the hopes that one would survive to carry on.

While we are not Eve and certainly aren't Mary, and while thankfully I've only suffered this loss once, losing a child, gives us something in common beyond our humanity. I think for mothers, who after all know their child before they ever hold them in their arms, it's a level of pain that no one else can understand. And although I cannot speak to a father's grief, to their hopes and dreams unrealized and their pain, I've cried on the phone with one who still mourns his daughter 10 years after her passing.

Many times during the past two weeks, it has been other members of this group who have helped hold me up when I didn't think I could go on. Their words have held no promise of an end to pain, but they have been honest, caring and supportive. We've cried together about a pain that you learn to live with, a loss that isn't forgotten, a grief that you get through, not over. They've warned me that sometimes I'll be swept right back to where I've been for two weeks -- on a birthday, by a song, maybe just by the slant of the light that will trigger a memory I've forgotten now. We talk about death in a way that most people cannot understand. We're honest with each other in ways we cannot be with anyone else and in ways no one else can be with us.

Going forward, I know there are people I can call on to talk me down from the mental ledges where the "should have beens" and "what ifs" take me. They'll do it in a Facebook message, a text or a call on the phone. I hope there will be times when I can do the same for them.

When my writing voice falters and I wonder why I do this in the mornings, I'll get a message, or reread an old post and realize that despite how this hurts, it's part of healing. It's not just for me, but for someone else who has found themselves a reluctant member of this club. It's my message of hope and survival, my call to someone who needs a friend or stranger to reach out.

We don't want new members -- really. If I had an enemy, I would not wish this on them. But if you find yourself walking this path, hearing those words and opening that box of pain that you never wanted to receive, we're here. All of us.

And while I wish that no one had ever felt this pain, that it really wasn't the natural course of events it too often is, I'm thankful that I don't have to walk this walk alone.

I Cry Every Day

I cry every day.

People ask me how I'm doing, careful about the question as if I were fatally ill, not someone still struggling with death. They know an honest answer won't be good, but they ask because they care although they may mentally cringe at what I may say, or at even asking the question. It's not just me who doesn't know how I'm supposed to act, it's all the world around me that doesn't know how to treat me.

I know at some level that it would be easier in so many ways to just quit. To wear the same clothes day after day, to sleep on the sofa with the TV muttering its distractions, to totally forgo life and just allow the grief to consume me. But while the grief occasionally swallows me whole for long minutes of time, I can't do that. Even though the addiction often wouldn't let Ethan think of anything except himself and getting high, I know the boy/man that I loved and who loved me would not want me to do that.

So I try to go on, not as though nothing had changed, but as though I were OK, because most of the time I am.

But I cry every day. Not just once, but repeatedly in moments when I find myself with nothing else that needs to be done, or when I sit quietly for too long and my mind begins to pull up fragments of memories, like a squirrel digging for acorns in the leaves.

There's a big hole in my heart, but you cannot see it and a doctor would probably never miss it unless he asked the right question. Then my heart would stutter along as it seems to do periodically throughout the day, a pulse that has nothing to do with the pace of my body, but with the faltering of the breath in my chest, the sudden streaming of tears down my face.

My clothes still seem to fit, although I think I've eaten three good meals in the last week and a half. I eat when I need to fix a food for someone else, or when someone else prepares food, because although I'm hungry, there is nothing that I want. Food is a wonderful idea, but one I only manage to embrace about once a day. My diet is mostly coffee. I need lots of coffee to wake me up in the morning, when daylight is a long way off but my eyes are open and so I must begin my day. Then more coffee after lunch to keep me awake with the girls, to be sure that I don't nap and sacrifice sleeping at night to the exhaustion that sometimes threatens me at 2 p.m. I usually manage to eat a little dinner, when my husband is home and the girls are ready to eat as well -- their appetites unimpacted by the grief that fills me. After the girls leave, I begin chasing sleep with the same zeal that I use all day to avoid it. Alcohol helps. A glass or two of wine and my eyelids are heavy and I can turn off the television and escape my reality for a few hours.

I try to convince myself that I need to exercise, to drink the quarts of water that I used to consume every day, and that to get moving and embrace old routines will make me feel better. But those things just don't seem important right now. I'm not going to feel good, so why bother? The disrupted schedule of the back to back holidays means I have to be self motivated, and right now I'm just not.

But aside from the liquid diet and my general apathy toward a lot of things, I think I'm doing OK. I'm feeding dogs and chickens and the cat and rabbit and gathering eggs. When the girls are here and going strong, I'm pulled from the brink of whatever pit of gloom may be threatening me and carried by their energy. When the sun is warm and the wind doesn't blow too hard, I want to be outdoors and moving with the dogs(it just isn't the season for much of that).

Most of the time I can keep my grief simmering in a pot on the back burner, but there are moments when I'm alone that the pot boils over and for just a little while it's really messy. I'll be coasting along doing OK and some random thought of Ethan will pop into my head, quickly followed by the bone-shriveling reality that he's gone -- not just mad and not speaking, not just out of minutes on his cell phone, not just high and not in the mood to talk -- gone from my life for whatever remains of it.

When I sorted his video games one last time before donating them to the local homeless shelter, I touched his treasures and my heart broke. Then I felt something in the side pocket of the gym bag where they were stored and pulled out a toothbrush and half a tube of toothpaste and that pushed me over the edge. The little losses and reminders, the bits of him that will always be part of me are sometimes just too much.

In those moments, I understand the despair that sends mothers to emergency rooms or drives them to lock themselves away from the world. In those seconds, I grasp how people lose the will to go on and are beaten down by grief. In those minutes, I'm often huddled with dogs who are not always my own and who lick the tears from my face and press against me with warm bodies, sensing some pain they do not understand but seek to ease. In those times, once I'm able to breathe again and trying to pull my head above water, I turn to prayer or the words of the songs that echo in my head to comfort me.

My prayer is often an angry one filled with questions and pain. On Christmas morning, however, I managed to thank God not only for the gift of his Son but for the 23-year gift of my own. Because despite all the pain and the fact that I do not like how the story of Ethan's earthly life ended, he was a gift that I might not have been given and I have to remind myself of that sometimes. I'm struggling to find acceptance and it comes in brief moments of clarity that I cling to when the tears come back again.

Perhaps, with the passage of more time, this wound will be less tender and the tears won't come quite so often. I won't start my day with this self-imposed therapy session where I often rip the scab from whatever healing I've managed and poke at the weeping pain beneath. Or perhaps, the scab will gradually be replaced with tender flesh and a scar that I'll touch gently forever. But right now I know I'm going to cry and working my way through it in words seems to help me wade out of the pit when I fall in. It gives me something to cling to, to remember. It's a free therapy session where the prompt isn't a psychologist's questions, but a blank screen.

If you ask, "How are you?" The answer is that I think I'm doing as well as I could be. The fact that I hold it together doesn't mean it's not even more awful than I imagined, it just means I don't see any other option.

And although you will probably never see me do it, I cry every day.

Wading the Ocean of Grief

"When the waves are taking you under
Hold on just a little bit longer
He knows that this is gonna make you stronger, stronger
The pain ain't gonna last forever
In time it's gonna get better
Believe me
This is gonna make you stronger"

I realized last week, two days out into this journey, that this kind of grief is like an ocean.

Sunday I was on the shore and the ocean was just something to look at and consider.

Monday I was struggling to stay on my feet through what often felt like the force of hurricane waves. By Tuesday I recognized the grief came in waves that would almost consume me, then subside for a time. They were irregular and storm driven, not the paced, rhythmic waves of a normal tide.

However hard the waves of grief come on me, that is how they feel. It's like I'm walking along the beach, maybe even enjoying a break in the clouds and a ray of sunshine, when a wave comes out of nowhere and suddenly I think I'm going to drown. I feel my ability to go on sliding out from under me like the grains of sand pulled out to sea by an outgoing wave. And once the waves hit, I know that I'll be pounded for a while before I'm able to struggle free of the water again.

So far none of the waves have pulled me so far out to sea that I cannot find my way back to my feet and back to the sunshine, but I'm still walking in the water's edge. I cannot get away from the grip of the sea.

I don't remember this sort of all consuming pain when my grandmother died. I loved her, but she'd had a long good life and I know she was ready to go. She'd had time to make peace with those around her and we had a chance to make peace with her. If there were things we wanted to say, because she had been ill, we had a chance to say them. Although her actual death was a surprise because her health had seemed to be improving, it was something we could accept.

Losing Ethan is a whole different level of grief. Losing a child, through a long illness when you have to accept that barring a miracle it will be over, through a sudden tragedy that takes the healthy child you hugged a few minutes earlier, through the series of small deaths brought on by addiction when it seems that you've said goodbye to bits and pieces of your child for years, is something we just aren't prepared for. There's no reasonable expectation that we have in our minds that yes, we'll be outliving our child. Ever. In any version of reality.

Then it becomes our reality.

A path we had tried not to even look down becomes the path we have to walk every day for the rest of our lives. Right now it's a dark and scary place where I look for glimpses of light just to keep moving.

It is prayers that keep pulling me along, because although people keep telling me I'm strong no one is strong enough to do this on their own. It is three little girls who drown me in a different kind of wave -- one of noise and motion and fights and cuddles -- and keep that dark sea of grief at bay. It is the kindness of friends and strangers who care about me, or who have felt a variation of my pain and want me to know they understand and that while I won't forget, in time it will get better.

When I began writing two months ago, this is not the story I expected to tell, but this is a story that seems to resonate. While we put on our "normal" faces and go about our lives, too many of us carry grief, or fear of this grief, down deep in our souls. Facing it makes my pulse race and my eyes stream, but I cannot push it away. If doing this lets someone else know that they aren't alone, then perhaps there is a purpose to it. Perhaps walking this dark path at the side of a stormy ocean we cannot see is easier together than alone, even if we cannot reach one another's hands. Perhaps knowing there is someone else on the path will make the walk a little easier.

It feels at times wrong to share my pain and let strangers inside the wall I feel I must build to hold myself together. And then a message from someone I've never met tells me they've been down this path and that they want to help me, or that they've stood on the beach where I was a week ago and they are as afraid of the waves as I am, and I know this is what I'm meant to do now.

That everything we've been through won't be for nothing if I can help someone else, if we can somehow save someone else from the journey Ethan took.

Somehow, like everything else in life, it will make me stronger and prepare me for something I need to do. I just wish to my soul that there had been another way to do it.

'Don't Cry For Me Down Here'

Yeah, when I get where I'm going
There'll be only happy tears
I will shed the sins and struggles
I have carried all these years

And I'll leave my heart wide open
I will love and have no fear
Yeah, when I get where I'm going
Don't cry for me down here

Melvern Rivers Ii Rutherford

Getting ready to go bury my child yesterday, this song as sang by Brad Paisley began playing in my head. Not word for word, but the chorus. Funny how my country roots have been showing this week.

I fumbled for the right things to wear -- somehow I'd never purchased a wardrobe for burying my son -- finally settling on black pants and a dark shirt, the black leather coat I bought the winter I was expecting Ethan and couldn't button when I was pregnant.

We were running late driving the 30-minute route from our house to Galax. Of course, I was riding shotgun, and the roads were more familiar to me so I might have made better time, but I was reasonably sure they wouldn't start the procession without me. His sister and her family were caught in traffic on the interstate, so I was glad we went the old roads. An accident clogged northbound traffic all day, but she was at the cemetery about the same time we were.

Traveling through Galax, I put my head down to pray for the strength to make it through yet another tough day. I had no more uttered the prayer than my mind was filled with a vision. It was Ethan, stretched out in the floor, but there was a figure of light above him and it reached down toward him and pulled him free of his earthly shackles. He rose up with a light of his own, and his face was split by the biggest smile I've seen in many years. I knew that he'd shaken off the addiction, the pain, the suffering that only he could understand and that he was free. God had sent me what I needed to know and the strength to get through the day. I could miss him, but I couldn't want him back in those bonds.

His best friend and that young man's mom, who had like Ethan and I battled the same addiction, were the first people I went to at the funeral home. They were Ethan's second family, just as in many ways my house was his second home, for years. He has a family, escaped the addiction, had to make the difficult decision to not spend time with my son, and I just wanted him to know that he did what he had to do to survive. I wanted him to know that some of the love I can no longer give Ethan will be his as he goes forward.

I cried with his mother, who had known both the little boy and the angry young man and, like me, loved them both. I am sure there was a part of her that shuddered at how close she came to being where I was at, a part that mourned and was also thankful that she wasn't bearing the full brunt of it. Had the roles been reversed, I would have felt that way as well.

The drive to the cemetery was peaceful and the weather was warmer than expected. The leather coat went in the back seat by the time we reached the rural cemetery where Ethan was going to join generations of his ancestors, my grandparents, and a whole sea of people I didn't ever know. My parents plan to be buried there. The view is rolling hills, trees and fields of cattle. The sun was shining bright as we gathered around the grave.

I expected a small, sad gathering of family members who could get away from work, maybe a few folks from the Hope House where he lived a while (they agreed to be pall bearers) and some people from his church. I was totally overwhelmed by the number of people who were there. It was rush of activity to get us seated and everything ready for the service.

My chair almost toppled down hill when I sat. My first thought was how funny it would be to just fall over and topple the whole family like dominoes down the hill -- how Ethan would love it.

The pastor from the church where Ethan had found the only job he liked, but where he still couldn't manage to stay on track, knew the young man that he spoke about. He said that he knew we were all asking if we could have done things differently, and the answer was yes, because we are all fallible. That nothing could separate Ethan from his God, including the demons who drove him. We shared a few stories and a prayer and the Vince Gill song "Go Rest High On That Mountain" was played. We gathered in a gusting wind and released 23 bright colored balloons into the heavens.

After that, I had a chance to see who had come. I was even more blown away than I had been at the sheer number. There were people from Virginia who knew and cared about him, many of whom I never got to meet. People from North Carolina who knew and cared about us. People who came just for me and brought love and support and an outpouring of grace that I never expected from the time we've spent together. Family that I hadn't seen in years and years. The love poured out on me at the side of my son's grave wrapped round me like a warm blanket and helped carry me through the afternoon.

While the gravediggers finished their work, several of us gathered in the old wooden church and sipped coffee. E1 and E2, who had hardly got the chance to know their uncle, ran the aisles and played, freed from the need to keep their good clothes nice for the ceremony they did not understand. E3 cruised the pews and complained about the disruption in her eating schedule.

Before we left, my husband and I walked back to the grave topped with holiday flowers. We knelt and prayed individually, then stood and prayed together. I thanked God for giving me Ethan and for the blessing that was his life and the lessons I learned from him. I wished I could have kept him longer. I questioned why his life had to follow the course it did. I asked if there was any way to let him know how much he was loved and missed.

Of course, there was food and conversation at my mom's house following the ceremony, more noise from boisterous little girls, a drive home in the cooling afternoon to resume the routines of life, late night texts from a sister who is now an only child and beginning to feel that loss more keenly.

This was the day I buried my son, still with no answers as to how he died, but I think, thanks to a gift from God, some understanding of why. The time was not right for me, or for his sister, or for the many people who cared about him, prayed for him, and held onto a hope that one day he'd be all they knew he could be. The time was right for Ethan, walking with God, to be free of the pain of this life and get on with what comes next.

From a day that I expected only sadness, I found the closure I did not think I'd find. I found a peace that may make it easier to deal with the sadness. I found the strength everyone had said I had, but I found it did not come from within, but from without from those same friends who gathered around me and from the God who made the decision I still wish He had not made.