Rainy Day Schedule

By Sherrie Cassel

So, here I am, working through my mom’s recent admission to a skilled nursing facility, for what I hope will be a short stay, just for physical therapy and physical rehabilitation. I’ve been staying in her apartment since Thursday, and I’m surrounded by all her things: pictures of family, many of my son, Rikki, her only grandchild. There are art projects my son made throughout the years that line her walls. I’m in the town where I raised him, and it is bittersweet. Hurricane Hilary has me homebound and I return home to my husband on Tuesday.

I recall storms, weather, and emotional ones, Rikki and I experienced together. We would put two chairs by our front door and sit and watch the lightning, and hoot and holler for the thunder, and appreciate the rain together. Mother Nature’s mothering of a single mother and her beautiful son. I miss him even more, if that is possible, in our hometown, with the art his little fingers made, art from the love of a grandchild who loved his grandparents and his family so much. I miss that love.

Some friends and I were chatting today, three single moms relating to one another how our kids worry about us. Two of them have daughters and they called on their mothers to see if they were okay in this now tropical storm. I remember when Rikki used to worry about me. Once I was volunteering at a youth center in San Diego. The groups were filled with angry teenagers, some gang members, who were court ordered to be in anger management sessions every Thursday. One Thursday evening a group of rival gang members were fighting in the street as I was trying to turn into the parking lot of the center, and they surrounded my car, and started fighting on the hood of my car!

When they proceeded to a safe distance, I turned around and drove home. This experience startled me very much. I spoke with my husband and son about the event, and they both suggested I quit, not because I couldn’t handle myself with this group, because I was loving working with the groups. I was being trained to have my own group of angry teenage girls. My son was most concerned. He was an adult already, married, with a child, and he was concerned because he said I didn’t consult the “family” when I decided to put myself in danger. He was so adorable being so concerned about his momma.

I suppose to comfort myself, when I’m in a good space, I think about good things; I pull up good memories from the annals of my brain, memories that are always bittersweet. When I used to think about my son early in my grief process, I would just sob until I couldn’t breathe, even with the really happy memories of our times together. I wish I could remember at what point things began to turn around for me, when I began to allow life to embrace me and imbue it with joy and purpose – again.

My purpose had been raising a son, good, bad, or very challenging. No matter, we loved each other fiercely. Our loved ones left us with amazing memories, and of course, no one escapes tough times, especially tough times as a family. I want to think about good times. The tough times are over, and we learned from them, best-case scenario. I want to think about the wisdom gained from being Rikki’s mom. He taught me so much. We learned about life and love and pain and tough times together.

Think about the good times, sometimes with tears in your eyes and a lump in your throat – forever and a day.

I often wonder how I survived the death of my precious son. I scarcely remember the really tough days anymore. They seem to have passed and seven and a half years seem to have flown by — on some days, days when I’m fulfilling my life’s goals, developing my gifts, even at sixty-one.

Once someone close to me told me that my son’s death gave me the opportunity to concentrate on myself and on my dreams. I was wounded to the very core by the statement; it was said insensitively but with good intentions.

But I have always been driven. I’m sure those of you who come here to read about how to rekindle joy in your lives are driven to heal because you reach out to others who grieve to learn how to grieve and still be okay. Isn’t it the way it always is, to strive for healing and a reclamation of your lives? Unless we are in complicated grief, striving toward emotional health is an inevitability. As I’ve said before, however, the ability to heal is proportionate to the emotional healing you did before your loss.

I think about Jaycee Dugard, the young woman who was kidnapped, raped, and who gave birth to the rapist pedophile’s children, and how she had been so loved by her mother. She would look out the window from her prison and talk to her mom when she looked at the moon; it was something they had done together until she was kidnapped. Her rescue from that nightmare brought her home to her family who had waited for her for eighteen years. However, during her formative years, until her kidnapping when she was eleven, she had been loved by doting parents who gave her the resources that kept her safe inside her mind where the love of a family basically kept her alive. See, she was emotionally healthy before the kidnapping. She survived until she and her children were rescued.

I lost my son, but I had spent years in therapy prior to his death. I was gifted with the resources I needed to survive the loss of my only child –through years of therapy. I worked hard for them. Further, I’ve been gifted with the desire to share those gifts with others who are grieving, including the person reading this post. My greatest desire is to bring comfort, and then hope to those who are hurting and need to reconnect to life, a life where the pain is no longer acute, but manageable; in essence, I want to help them normalize their pain, so they can grab hold of a life that is immeasurably joyful in between sad memories and wonderful ones, in between chaos and calmness, and in between your life and your death. Life is fleeting, and as cliched as that sounds, and it does, I realize that, but as quickly as life flew by for our loved ones who have passed, ours is fleeting too. I’m sixty-one years old now. My son was able to live for thirty-two. He left behind a six-year-old son who is now fourteen and in high school. Where did the time go? How did we get through it? How are we managing now?

Hemingway said, “The sun also rises.” I waited and worked through my complicated grief for three and a half years before I began to see the light. In the interim, I read everything I could get my hands on about grief. I worked very hard to find the spark to live far beyond my chronic pain and despair. I despaired because acceptance of my son’s death, irrationally so, was too much to ask of me in the early days of grief.

We grievers have kind of compassionate disagreement about the ability to heal after losing a child. After I began to heal and discovered my purpose when my son died, when being a mom had been my purpose and joy for thirty-two years, I began to feel a bit of excitement about life – again. Before my son got sick with substance use disorder (addiction), my life was amazing. I had met the man of my dreams. We got married. I began work on my bachelor’s degree in psychology. I was on cloud nine and the world was my oyster. Once my son got sick and the descent to his death began to drag him down a destructive spiral where he was irretrievable, he was lost, and I lost my ability to enjoy life because I was so busy trying to save his.

Once I began to heal, I thought maybe I could heal completely, but you see, maybe you can’t. Maybe you won’t heal completely. Best-case scenario, you learn to allow grief to walk alongside you, but you take the lead. You’re in control of your life and of your emotions. We really can walk through the storms during the rocky high tide of life, and then we learn to dance across the water, instead of drowning in it. Maybe you can heal completely, and I’m just not there yet, and maybe I’m wrong, and there are some people who do. I know I’ve experienced a transformation from chronic heartbreak to a place where I am whole, even though a bit of angst and pain arise from time to time.

The loss of a loved one bores a hole in our hearts, and it is up to us to fill that hole with purpose. I read a meme that said that our tough experiences will one day be a guide for others who are experiencing tough times. I concur. We are here to be servants (not in a way that keeps us enmeshed with others) to one another. Prehistorically, our species learned to work cooperatively in groups. We learned to live in a system of balanced reciprocity. I think balanced reciprocity is a good system. Things certainly have changed, but we still have pockets of those who want to live their lives in service to others, and that brings us tremendous joy.

If you’re in a good space, write, draw, paint, sing, do your healing dance and invite others to join you. I miss my son. I feel his presence in all the places that were special for us. He was a remarkable and marvelous human being, just like the person(s) you all have lost. I’m looking at a butterfly he made for my mom when he was in kindergarten, and below his butterfly my mother has placed his son’s butterfly he made in kindergarten. Life insists on its continuance, and we see this in nature, the first cry of a baby robin, the sun rising, a newly born baby, a person who struggles with addiction entering rehab with all the hope of healing and kicking his or her compulsion to use, or a grieving parent who transcends grief and allows for its transformational power to change his or her life from one of despair to one of hope, to one that compels you to live fully.

You can. You must. My hope is for your healing, as far as you can take it.

Namaste.