I Didn't Tell a Friend -- Maybe Because She Wasn't

The other day in Walmart, I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in years.

That could be the beginning of a lot of stories. It is the beginning of a lot of traffic jams and sometimes aggravation for Walmart shoppers, but at the same time virtually everyone's path crosses at Walmart at some point. I once ran into the guy I had a crush on in the 11th grade at Walmart, which wouldn't be such a huge shock if he didn't actually live in Tennessee.

The friend I ran into on what was virtually my first time away from home since Ethan's death more than two weeks ago was carrying a toddler on her hip and asked if I'd seen her husband, which I hadn't. I was pushing a cart loaded with the youngest granddaughter while the older two were burning off some pent up energy by running up and down an aisle. Years ago, one of her sons and Ethan had spent time together at church and our homes. She drove the school bus that carried him to elementary school. We were members of the same church, although I haven't seen her there recently.

Do you want to know what we talked about? Would you care to guess?

We talked about babies. Turns out the baby on her hip wasn't her newest grandchild, but a little boy she's adopting. She wanted an update on my granddaughters. I held her little boy so she could go to the restroom (her reason for looking so desperately for her husband).

Neither of us mentioned Ethan.

I don't know why.

There is a very real chance that she didn't know, although it seemed that the news spread fast. We're not even Facebook friends any more, and I don't know that she keeps in touch with her former church family or reads the newspaper to see his obituary. I'll have to admit, if something had happened to one of her children, I don't guess I would have known.

But she knew my little boy from the time he was seven and the bus didn't come on the first day of school, because the boy who lived here before us was also named Ethan, and she knew he'd moved. She saw him every school day and at church on Sunday. He sometimes went home with her to play Nintendo with her sons. We sang together in the choir. When our children were older, we sat together and caught up on where they were and what they were doing.

Yet she never asked about him, and that omission tells me she knew, but just avoided the conversation. She never even asked how how I was, firmly keeping the door closed on that conversation. She may have been sorry that she bumped into me, and had it not been for the toddler and her need, she might have took a turn down an aisle before I spotted her.

I get that. Really I do. People think they'll upset you by asking. Talking about it will make me cry, whether to a friend or a total stranger, like the nice lady from Northern Hospital calling about the payment I forgot to send the week Ethan died. But not talking about it doesn't make the pain go away.

While I'm willing to give her a pass because I understand if she was reluctant, I'm still struggling to understand why I didn't tell her.

It's not that I'm unwilling to talk about it, or even that I don't want to examine my pain. I've discovered that I'm perfectly good at baring my soul when it comes to this. I've discovered that it helps me deal with and work through it. I've discovered that it's a whole lot better than pushing it down inside where it would simmer and leave me unable to help not only myself, but anyone else.

Her reluctance, or more accurately avoidance, I understand at some level. You don't want to poke at another person's pain.

Accepting my own complicity in pretending that my life is OK, however, is something new for me to deal with. Realizing that I'm not going to bring it up, even when it should be perfectly acceptable to do so, is something I'm still processing.

Yet, I know it's a common reaction. Out of my friends and acquaintances who I've known for years have lost children, there has only been one who would honestly share their pain and I know that honesty sometimes has people turning away. Honesty has a price that we may be hesitant to pay.

I think we also come to realize rather quickly, that some people we once considered friends aren't really. They shy from our pain and are eager to accept our lies when they're forced to ask how we're doing. It's amazing how quickly we can sense the sincerity in a question, and surprising who will turn out to be our true friends -- not necessarily the people we might have expected, but not only the people who understand our grief either.

Our lies and silence when talking with people who don't fit the bill for true friends are also an act of kindness and self preservation on our parts. I feel like I'm carrying around a big bucket of pain, and that I don't want to splash it on someone nearby who isn't prepared to deal with it. At the same time, although my tears are healing and never in short supply, I'm not sharing them with just anyone. Only people that I feel really care will get to see me cry.

Angry at Life, Angry at Death, Angry at Myself, Too

Forty odd years ago, a look at the grieving process identified five stages of grief, beginning with denial and isolation, followed by anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance -- a generally accepted pathway for grief that of course, isn't a rulebook.

Yet I find that when I looked up the steps, they have indeed been the ones I've begun to stumble through, although I think bargaining will be more of a series of "what ifs," or perhaps a battle with the guilt I feel looming, as there is no negotiation with death.

A week ago, when I got the call, I sat alone and cried. I had stayed home sick from church after inheriting some upper sinus crap from the children, and when my husband called after service, I told him the news and sent him on to the the grocery store. I didn't want anyone to cry on. I didn't want to be comforted. I didn't want it to be made more real by existing in some space other than my telephone and the virtual world of my computer. I sat and spilled out my pain in the blog I sent out the next morning -- the blog I've shared repeatedly and begged people to share because it hurt, and I wanted it to mean something by helping someone.

For the last week I've done a fairly good job of hanging on to anger, but I know that will wear thin after a while.

It's easier to be angry at the young man who destroyed his life over and over again than it is to deal with all the other losses contained inside his death. Just like blowing up because his lousy father didn't even come to his funeral, I know I probably have to let this anger out to move on and really grieve.

So yes, I'm pissed at Ethan. I'm pissed at him for using drugs, for not calling except when he wanted something or was so messed up that he didn't make sense, for never seeming to care about anyone but himself.

I'm pissed at him for not going to the doctor because maybe, just maybe, there was something else going on that could have been treated.

I'm pissed at him for dying. At Christmas.

That's a lot of anger and it's not all purely true, but this last week it's been easier to hang onto those bits of anger because anger makes you stronger sometimes. When you're angry, you do things you wouldn't normally do. Like laugh at a funeral. Like let myself live because the depths of that the grief that consumes me might just drown me if I didn't have anger to hang onto right now.

But the facts about what I'm angry about will help me breathe a little easier, too.

I'm angry that Ethan decided, when just a little kid in middle school or maybe just as he was starting high school, that getting high might be cool. But I know that there was a time that he was very unhappy with the heavy boy who wore glasses and braces and that he couldn't see past that temporary reality to the man he would become. I know that his friends were doing it, and that he craved their approval more than I ever understood. I know that the DARE program that had warned Ethan about the dangers of alcohol and illegal drugs, hadn't caught up with the abuse of prescriptions and darn sure never touched on the dangers of dextromethorphan, which was so easy to get and deceptively safe.

I know that despite being so much alike in appearance and personality, Ethan wasn't a carbon copy of me. That loner streak that saw me through my middle and high school days didn't run through him. Unlike my first dog, the dog he loved wasn't the constant companion that got him out of the house and helped him find happiness in a world that didn't rely on friends (no fault of the dog's, mind you). He didn't develop the desire he had to create and do and accomplish things. I didn't have the addictive genetic makeup he apparently inherited.

I know it was an innocent choice at first, and that he was lonely and angry and confused and terribly young, and by the time he started sorting himself out of those feelings, he was addicted and it was really hard to fight. Addiction doesn't go away just because you aren't taking your drug of choice, it hangs around and whispers about the good times you had. It changes the way your mind works. It comes up in conversation with your friends to remind you how you miss it. When something goes wrong, it's there waiting to welcome you back. It takes over your brain so that other things that people think will bring you pleasure just aren't that great. It deceives you, like the Devil, promising only wonderful things while it wrecks your life and you cannot even see it happening.

Despite our efforts to help him negotiate being clean and learn to function without his old friend, Ethan just couldn't. I know he did his best, and while I'm angry, it's beginning to be the at the drug and its availability, not at the boy/man who couldn't escape it.

And no, he really didn't just call when he needed something. Sometimes I know he called just to hear my voice and that he missed me as badly as I missed him. But our connection was damaged and neither of us could fix it or say the right words. The love that pulled us so close meant we hurt each other, that I was the one he lashed out at in his pain. It was probably easier to ask for money than to ask for some less tangible thing he couldn't identify. It was probably easier to lean on the friend he could find at the Dollar store than confront the tangled emotions we had toward each other. And of course, we both thought we had time, a lot of it.

I know that he cared. Sometimes he would tell me I worked too hard. Sometimes he would admit he was glad I had a husband that took care of me. Sometimes his conversation was mostly about how things were here because he didn't have a life he could share, and sometimes a rambling, adolescent tale about what he wanted to do with his life. He still dreamed of doing things, but like a kid, not a young man, because the drug had stunted his emotional and mental growth. And how many kids actually remember a parent's birthday? But just this year, when he'd been clean for ages, he skipped a Mother's Day get together when I was so looking forward to seeing him. The little cards and gifts that other moms can count on never came from him. He was a tornado, taking everything in his path and needing more and that hurt and still hurts. Those moments of compassion were so consumed by his needs, by the fact that the drugs made him focus on himself because nothing else could bring him pleasure.

I wonder why we could not persuade him to see a doctor when he was in so much pain the last couple of weeks -- not just the emotional and mental pain that I think he dealt with almost constantly (and which he also refused to accept help for), but the physical pain. He'd never resisted seeing a doctor before when he felt bad. Had he done something he didn't want to deal with in a doctor's office? Was he afraid he knew what was wrong?

I'm angry that he died, not at him. I'm angry that whatever demons drove him were too much. That God decided he'd had his share of pain (how selfish is that?) and let him finally escape. I'm angry at God, and He knows it.

I'm angry at the people who went with him down the path of addiction, not so much the kids that he stumbled into it with, but the men who were still involved in it with him and eager to help him return whenever he got clean. I'm angry at everyone that failed him in any way, because it's almost impossible to accept that something could not have changed him.

To be honest, I'm angry at me. I'm angry that I couldn't force him to be different, better, happy, clean. That I couldn't find the words that would make him change. I'm angry because there is a part of me that no matter how many times I tell myself I did the absolute best that I knew how, that I prayed and wept and talked and gave and gave and tried to practice tough love too, feels like I failed.

I'm angry at me because no matter how much I love him, I couldn't save him.