Scheduled Maintenance

By Sherrie Cassel

The five and a half year angelversary of my son’s death has come and gone and the next one is waiting for me to catch up to it in January, a new year, another without my son. I know how much it hurts to love someone with every single cell in your body and then lose him. I can still see myself in the early days of grief, curled up in the fetal position and wailing until I couldn’t breathe. This is an accurate picture of pain, deep, deep emotional pain. I can’t tell you how I felt, but I can show you. As much as I love words, they fail to even skim the surface in describing the raw nerve ending that is jagged from having been torn from its holy counterpart. We’ll not see them again in this lifetime.

The day he died I thought I’d never be okay again. I thought I’d be a hemorrhaging ball of grief for the rest of my life. I wailed every single day, and I’m talking loud sobs of utter grief. A momma in mourning. Time passes and so does the intensity of the mourning. You learn to navigate the ebb and flow of the waves, sometimes ferocious waves, and sometimes waves so small, you can scarcely see them, but their effects are every bit as powerful, perhaps, they move one to be peacefully introspective, without the sustained throb like in the early days of grief. The memories don’t knock us down anymore.

For those who follow me, you’ve seen me morph in several permutations over the years. Grief is like that; it transforms; it transcends. Some of the email I receive from readers has been like a topo-map of your own transformation and transcendence. You’ve shared with me how your grief process was tamed by your willingness to grow and respond to grief with the determination to live a life of purpose and as much joy as you can stand. I am both honored and humbled by your stories. I have been inspired by your own blogs and I appreciate the readership.

I’m finding that as each season of grief has come and gone for the time I’ve been in grief,  I’ve learned how to prepare myself to acclimate to the everchanging weather patterns of each season. I haven’t had a tsunami in a very long time. My eyes moisten and like a tiny spiderweb I’ve walked into, I wipe it away, unscathed. Certainly, I have those heart flutters when a trigger passes through me and I feel it like a shot to the heart, but then I’m able to normalize the anxiety that comes from thinking, “Oh shit, here comes a meltdown” to breathing through it, and allowing myself to ride it out.

I’ve also found that I was the one who needed to introduce myself to grief as the alpha and not her beta. There are many times in our lives when there is absolutely nothing we can do about a situation, and that is a fact, but we learn to accept it and work within that situation. I have lost a person who was my heart and soul, and that is a fact. I was thrown into grief having had no healthy role model to emulate: it was truly sink or swim.

I hope to be a person who offers hope that the grieving process is navigable and that as much as it hurts, you will retrospectively see the beauty as you transform and transcend the pain into a life worth living again, or maybe even a life worth living for the very first time. As an artist, passion fuels every aspect of my life, but I had no idea the passion I poured into my craft could just as easily be poured into my life. I was busy raising a child as a single parent, climbing the academic ladder, learning, ad nauseam, to the exclusion of some very important relationships. In retrospect, certainly there is a twinge of regret, but how rich are my relationships now? So vibrant and full. I celebrate those I love as often as I can. I celebrate life.

Who knew that a momma who lost her only child would find a reason to celebrate again? I made a comment on a Facebook post about feeling like a pariah right after my son’s death – you know, at dinner parties and small gatherings. I felt as if people couldn’t handle my grief and so I would work so hard to not fall apart in front of anyone. Maybe that’s how they did feel. I know the fact that I had lost a child made the possibility more real to other parents; I felt tainted. Of course, reality is all about perception and all the concentric circles vibrating outward and inward like a heartbeat. The comment was about how at the time I couldn’t see past my own grief. Every single thing in my life was interpreted through the Rosetta Stone of my grief.

I don’t see myself as one dimensional anymore. I am not a giant ball of grief. I believe, however, through grief we will know ourselves better than we ever thought possible. Much introspection is done when a person is in grief. Best-case scenario is that a person will work her process. I’ve written about this many times over the years I’ve been writing about grief and my grief process; the process can be grueling, and it can be wonderful. If you’re newly grieving, you won’t believe me about the wonderful part right now and I totally get it. I didn’t believe it either when someone told me I would heal.

The gifts that have emerged through the grief process have been hard-earned and substantial. I have sobbed, screamed, and scoured the academic literature in hopes that I could find a way to escape the process. Science has some great insight into the grieving process, the part that can be measured through statistical formulae. But see, the heart is both a muscle and a metaphor, and its metaphorical contents cannot be measured with numbers. The metaphor is a picture, the red heart on your refrigerator that your child made when he was in kindergarten, the red heart with bleeding arteries, the red heart with Cupid’s arrow through it beating for a lover, ad infinitum. And sometimes, although it can get buried under life’s aches and pains and schedules and priorities, there is an infinitesimal spark waiting to be fanned by the flames of your passion for life. Grief doesn’t take passion away from us; it doesn’t extinguish the spark. We do.

I didn’t just wake up one morning after my precious Rikki died, and declare myself healed. I dragged myself through the jagged terrain on bloodied knees, begging the God of my Understanding for relief, by any means. I researched and read. I sobbed. I journaled. I sobbed. I wrote. I sobbed. I felt every single pang that hit me like a lightning strike straight through to my soul.

My parents gave their children a strong work ethic, maybe that’s why I think of the grief process as work: conscious work. Others may have other analogies they use to describe their processes. I strongly encourage you, when you can catch your breath for a few hours, check out books on grief. Read about others who have incurred a similar loss as you. Breathe. Pray to the Spirit of your understanding. Develop a new exercise program. Write. Sing. Sob – every single time you need to.

I strongly encourage grievers to read When Bad Things Happen to Good People by the Rabbi Harold Kushner. I read it soon after Rikki died and I knew early on that healing was within reach; blood, sweat, tears, and time, would be necessary. Another book I recommend is The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart by Daphne Rose Kingma. I’ve read this half a dozen times, while my son was dying from addiction, and several times since. There are some great suggestions about things to do when you don’t think you can take one more tear. There are just so many wonderful resources out there. Even so…as painful as it is, we all will break a little…and on some days, we will shatter.

I like to see things repurposed. I like beach glass and how creative people can envision beautiful jewelry in the smoothed multicolored pieces of glass. I love to know that something I used to drink from is now an item that can be reused for other beneficial purposes. You get my point. I love knowing that we can take our grief and repurpose it into something marvelous, something that will fan the passion in our heart to a roaring flame. I love knowing that we can take our broken selves and put the pieces back together in a way that is so seamless you can scarcely see the scars.

I’m finding that I have vision now beyond my grief. I see possibilities for a beautiful future now.

“I see trees of green, red roses too.

I see them bloom for me and for you,

And I think to myself, ‘What a wonderful world.’” (Louis Armstrong)