Grief to Gratitude

By Sherrie Cassel

As the 8th year angelversary for Rikki approaches, I become more contemplative about life, before and after Rikki’s death. I think about the hopeless and tortured child who used substances until they killed him. I know why my son chose the path he did; he suffered a lot in his life. My heart will always have a crack in it, and yes, that’s where the light breaks through, but light also exposes the things we choose to not see, including sadness about and for our lost loved one. Our children who’ve died from hopelessness.

Early in my grief journey, there was a deep discussion about whether addiction and the deaths of our children were suicide, and about half the parents at my grief site said, “No.” And the other half said, “Yes.” I disagree with those who say it is a suicide, a long, slow suicide. My son was hopeless about the pain he was in. He used drugs and alcohol to subdue his pain; he never wanted to die; it was an outcome of years of substance use.

I wish I could have given Rikki hope from my wellspring of hope; I’ve always been an optimistic person, maybe too idealistic at times. I just knew with all my heart that Rikki would make it; he was so smart, funny, and full of life, even in the last words he ever said to me as I wrapped him up in a hot blanket in the hospital, “Momma, I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but it feels so good.” I finally find comfort in those words for that soul shattering day.

I never lost hope for my son…even as he took his final breath, I held on for a resurrection like Lazarus. “Come on, God,” I said. “Please, you brought Lazarus back from the dead. Please, please God, bring him back.” In grief we sometimes think in unrealities. In my head I know Rikki would not rise up from his shroud of death, but I so wanted to believe he would. Eight years later, I see the woman who was in utter grief with a shattered heart that oozed out sorrow in every aspect of my life.

I had to let go of my hope for my son; he died, and I will not see him again in this life. Perhaps I will see him in the moon, in the sunrise… I’ll hear his voice in the howling wind. I’ll never let go of his memory, even though I’ve had to let go of him. Does that make sense? I wanted to do as Hemingway did and end my life. The pain was greater than I could handle – at the time. I get it Joe. The pain is so overwhelming that sometimes, in order to get through the days and nights, I’ve had to shut down just to be able to put one foot in front of the other.

The pain will never be gone completely, but the intensity does decrease over the months and years. I thought my life was over when Rikki died. The adjustment to him not being physically present was more than I could handle at the time, so I stagnated, and writhed in my sorrow for so long I forgot how to live in the world. I died when Rikki died, perhaps not a physical death, but a spiritual one. I don’t mean I abandoned the God of my understanding; I felt abandoned. I felt cheated. I felt wounded deep in my consciousness by “God”.

I lost my way. My ever-present optimism vanished for nearly three years. I ached in a way that my entire presence howled sadness into every aspect of my life. I turned my back on my friends, friends who so wanted to be there for me, but I couldn’t stand anyone touching me or reaching out to me; I couldn’t love from my damaged and broken self. Loving one more person, or anyone, really, was just more than I could emotionally and spiritually handle. I was trying to hold on to life, even though I was hopeless I would ever get better.

Am I better?

I know my hope has returned, a hope  for me and for Rikki’s son and my husband, and all the people who the GOMU has entrusted to me to care for their hearts, to lead them through the grief process, and help them safely to the shore of the living, where hope still floats, and where my son reigns supreme in my memories.

I’m hopeful for my future, however much longer I get to have one; I mean, I am 61, and life has flown by in a blink of an eye, and my schedule makes my days go by quickly, so, life is meant to be lived, and as long as there is breath in us, there is hope.

Please remember this. You’re in pain now, and the pain does subside to a more manageable emotion to navigate, but there will always be a twinge of pain when we have sad memories, and even when we have happy memories, because our children are not here to share with them how much an event they participated in has touched our lives.

My husband said to me when I told him I missed having my mom to call when something good or sad happened in my life, and that I’m still adjusting to not being able to talk with her. He said, “Tell her now.” He’s absolutely right. I’ve been talking to Rikki his entire life, and now I talk to him in death. I’d like to believe he hears me and answers me through music, books, poetry, literature, the weather, when I pray to the GOMU, ad infinitum.

Hold tight to the hope you will begin to heal in whatever that means to you. I know healing is possible. I didn’t have any hope for my life improving after Rikki died. I was just a bundle of pain, wounded throughout. Everything is bittersweet now. I think about how Rikki made me laugh harder than anyone, and how now, it’s been years since I laughed as hard. I’m still healing, maybe differently than I was in the beginning of my grief process, but I’m healing, and in some areas, because of the hope I had to go back and get my master’s degree, I’m thriving – and I miss my boy, my beautiful and amazing boy.

Hang in there…work the process…get professional help…lean on a loving friend who is capable of sitting in the dark with you. Another quote from the tortured Hemingway, “The sun also rises.”

Thank you, Lynne E. for being my muse this morning.

By Sherrie Cassel

The Hospice nurse said a dying person’s hearing is the last sense that remains once a person is unconscious, so … I spoke to her. I told her I loved her and that it was okay for her to go. I also made a promise I’m not going to keep; I told her that I would do my best to keep our disintegrating family together. We make promises to assuage the final fears of our loved ones. I kept the promise to my father when he died. I promised him I would take care of Mom, and I did too. I was her go-to girl. We talked several times a day. Enmeshment is not emotionally healthy, but even with it, there are latent benefits.

 

Mom squeezed my hand when I told her that I would do everything I could to unite our family. I told a white lie to a dying woman, and wherever she is now, I know she knows I meant well. I’m off the hook.

 

 Yes, I believe there is sacredness in the transitioning of a person from life to death and whatever exists beyond death, but that sacredness exists outside the realm of what can be expressed in words. The night my father died, there was such a peace to his transition. He fell asleep and awoke in paradise. He said his parents were in the hospital room the night he died; they came for him, wholly and finally in a place where they could love my father in the way he always deserved to be loved.

 

Mom fought with everything she had until the very last conscious moment she said, “Mija, I’ve suffered so much.” She had too, not just through all the illnesses she endured over the last six years, in and out of the hospital, and on death’s door a number of times, but she had suffered for many years as a child and as a wife from domestic violence. I knew she was telling me she was done. She died a few days later. She was tired; it was time.

 

I think because of the finality of death, there is a tendency to imbue the moments directly following the death with a holiness, a numinous quality that in quantifiable terms is simply not there, at least it’s not measurable . As Mom lay dying, I could hear the Hospice nurse’s voice explaining to me the logistics of death, the physical dying process, and the reminder that Mom could still hear us, and that first her extremities would get cold, then her breathing shallower, until finally, Mom would be dead.

 

In that holy moment between life and death I made a promise. Is that promise holy? No, it’s not. My paternal grandmother made a promise that if my father came home from the Korean War she would climb the stairs to a mountain in Texas where the Virgen Guadalupe welcomed those who had been blessed by her. My grandmother never made it to the top of those stairs, and neither did my father, who had promised her would fulfill that homage to a cherished saint. I thought about taking on the commitment myself after my father died, but then I thought, “Not my promise to keep”.

 

I made an unrealistic promise to Mom the night she died. I wanted her to leave in peace knowing that the loves of her life would be okay. She seemed particularly concerned that I take care of my younger brother by asking me to take care of him. He and I have always taken care of each other, through hell or highwater, and a shit ton of domestic violence.

 

Do you think it crass that I lied to my mother on her death bed?

 

Mom loved her children more than she loved herself – true story. She sacrificed for us. She rejoiced with us. She grieved with us. Mom was also a chronic worrier; I’m talkin’ she made herself physically ill from fear and worry. I didn’t want her to die worried. She didn’t. I kept my promise to my father; I took care of Mom until her very last breath, even perjuring myself to give her peace of mind as she left us for a place where she is now whole, no fear, no worry, no pain, and no more suffering.

 

We make promises to those who are dying, and sometimes we make them after our loved one has died. I’m a pragmatic person. I think logistically about everything. How can this work? What makes this work? How can we make this work better? These are the things I think about. I was grateful our Hospice nurse explained the dying process of a human being; it helped. I did my best to warm her hands as her body began to shut down; it was an irrational gesture, and to be honest, may have been more for me than for Mom. She was unconscious.

 

We bring what we need to the death scene of a loved one, and the more knowledgeable about the physical death  we are, sometimes brings comfort to family members. Mom suffered physical pain until she could take no more, and then she soared into heaven and finally got to meet her mother who died when Mom was very young. We talked about heaven; Mom and I did. I told her that she would finally get to see her mom and dad and that they’d welcome her with open arms, and my son Rikki would be there to show her around. I wasn’t lying that time.

 

I don’t know how heaven will play out for me. I hope it’s a nice place and I hope to see my son and catch up with what’s been happening up there. I promised my son after he died that I would take care of his son, and I have. My place in people’s lives is where they want me and where I feel safe and loved, and I reciprocate by being a loving and safe place for them. I do not need to promise to do anything. Louie is my grandson, the light of my life, and he is a kid, who needs the guidance a grandmother who adores him can give to him; it was a given that I would always be a presence in our grandson’s life. A promise was not needed.

 

In the Christian Bible, James advises us, “Let your no be no and your yes be yes.” I like the idea of KISS, keep it short and simple too. Academics do their best to eschew verbosity, but … when your vocabulary rocks, sometimes it just happens. Since I lied to Mom, I have returned to my logical and rational self. Mom is gone. I have my younger brother who works to maintain a relationship with me, but I am beholden to none of my siblings. I cannot promise to work on their behalf too. A promise was not needed; a lie was.

 

I have no regrets with Mom; I was always there when she needed me, and we had a close and sometimes contentious relationship. I don’t feel bad about telling a lie that helped Mom to die in peace. We do what we can to help our loved one’s transition be a nice ride out of here. Some people are in agony when they die. Mom died gracefully and looked so elegant as she took her final breath. I knew she was gone when I watched the oxygen meter descend to zero.

 

I knew she was at peace and I walked away from the longest relationship of my life. I’m grateful I knew what to say that night to comfort her as she prepared to leave; she was ready, so was I. Even though she’d pulled through many times before, I knew this time was different. She said to me the night she was taken to the emergency room that she was so glad I was there and about how scared she was. I promised her while she was alive that I was going to be with her until the end. I kept that promise.

 

Mom said her mother never knew who her father was, and it was a sadistically well-kept secret by Mom’s grandmother and her aunts. On my maternal grandmother’s death bed, so the legend goes, she asked my great-grandmother to tell her who her father was, and my great-grandmother turned her head away and walked out of the room. My grandmother had no peace in this life. I wanted Mom to have the peace that surpasses all understanding on her way out … and so, I lied.

 

Life isn’t always black and white, nor is death. There are good deaths and there are bad deaths. I have a friend who served as a chaplain for Hospice, and I asked her how it was when someone embittered died, and she said that their deaths were horrible.

 

Mom’s greatest desire was that we would have a family reunion before she died; that never happened. I couldn’t promise her that in life, and I can’t promise her that in death. My heart misses her so much. My brain gets it, all of it, but there is an adjustment period. Grief is a process that must be navigated and grown through. I feel the loss, but I also feel the joy Mom must be experiencing in a heaven of her desires with family and friends who have gone before her.

 

The family is having Mom’s Celebration of Life in November, a few days after what would have been her eighty-second birthday.

 

We’ll be there as a family then.

 

https://www.facebook.com/shitgetsrealhere

Death can be a dark topic; it certainly can; however, when we plan for the inevitability for ourselves, or a cherished loved one, I know from experience, it takes some of the sting out of the process. My mother just passed and had hospice care and her family surrounding her on the night of her transition. I really could have benefited from Wendy’s services. Please check out her Facebook website.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090569731975

By Sherrie Cassel

All she wanted was to walk again. She fell and broke her pelvis at 80 and her life changed seismically after that; there was an adjustment that took her from us after two years of pain, sickness, disability, fewer and fewer joyful days, but when she did have them, they were beautiful to behold. I’m missing my mother tonight in an emotionally-sound way. I cried in my husband’s arms for a few minutes the night she died, and then we bucked up and went to Denny’s. We had a waitress who came right out of Oz, with the metaphorical pink bodice dress and with about five hundred petticoated rings, and she did make me nervous at first. My perception when she first approached us is that there was irreverence to her loudness, an insensitivity to her boisterous personality

She grew on me.

My mother, my dear sweet momma, had just died a few minutes before and we hadn’t eaten all day, and we had a long drive home. See, I’m justifying fulfilling a basic human need, sustenance. I mean we’d had no food from 6 a.m. until 10:43 p.m. – when the world dimmed a little. I was numb. When we go numb immediately following the death of our loved one, I think, basically, the numbness keeps us from the inconceivable grief that awaits us. Having lost a child, my only child, I had no idea one could hurt so deeply in one’s soul and survive the depth of the pain. I had no idea I could cry convulsively. I never imagined myself curled up in the fetal position or staring into space for hours at a time.

Grief is a miserable place to be. But as REM says, everybody hurts sometimes. Let me qualify this statement so I don’t come across sounding insensitive. The fact of the matter is that everyone does hurt sometimes. And everyone also has the personal power to heal. My mother’s last few years were lived from a corner of her tiny apartment in her favorite chair. She spent the last few years grieving her former life. But as I survey the life I found unfulfilling and I wanted so much for my mother, I take for granted how much she brought to me from that green and brown striped chair in her living room as we watched her television shows: first the news, then Let’s Make a Deal, Price is Right, news again, then soap operas, followed by a nap, news, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Steve Harvey’s Family Feud, and then, lights out.

I used to go spend weeks and weekends with her, not just when she was sick, but just to chill with her. We’d laugh. Sometimes she’d break routine for me so we could watch a Lifetime movie, and we always wondered if they could be true, and then we’d laugh some more. She’d tell me stories about her childhood, about my childhood, pieces that are missing from my developing parchment. I remember one night, an actual memory of when my mom and I stayed up one Christmas Eve and made tamales and watched the Midnight Mass on television. Mom was not Catholic, but she passed her syncretism on to the elder of her daughters. Mom was Southern Baptist. Dad was Roman Catholic, and I was very confused. But this is a fond memory of my mother.

Another time, in my hometown, where it had been reported that it snowed in our little hamlet only once every one hundred years, and guess what? Mom took us outside, bundled up. And like an Ancient One, I always wore a scarf tied under my chin because I had chronic ear infections.

I hope as you grieve your loved one(s), there are more happy memories associated with their life than the sad ones associated with their death(s). Again, I cannot emphasize enough: it is vital that you find something in which to pour all the love you have for your loved one and allow it to make great sweeping changes in your life; it will anyhow, whether we become embittered by our losses or whether we find a holy transcendence along the way. I’ve seen them become ways of life for some. I pray, and I do pray, in my own way, for those of us who share in the grief experience.

Sometimes, and I say this compassionately and sensitively for our hearts, including mine: we are each alone in our grief for a spell. We find ourselves enclosed in a shell of grief, all alone, and we must talk ourselves through it, because even with all the love our friends and family pour on us through our healing process, it really is we who must make the decision to heal or to continue to leave the wounds gaping. I took three-and-a-half years in complicated grief before I talked myself through to the other side where grief did not rule me or my life. I hope your journey has been emotionally sound; mine was not. I was a ball of pain, initially, because even though I read every single book I could find on grief, and attended grief groups, and created a site for those of us who grieve the loss of a child who struggled with addiction, I ached and found it difficult to reenter life and find my purpose in the world.

I made a choice one day, to allow the healing – true healing to take place in my body, mind, and soul. No matter how many therapists I saw in desperation to stop the pain, they each failed me because there is nothing you can say to deliver someone to a renewed sense of joy during the acute period of grief; it’s just not going to happen. I sobbed until I physically (as well as emotionally) ached. My chest ached and I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. I hyperventilated. Twice I went to the hospital thinking I was having a heart attack. There is a panic that came over me every time I thought about leaving the house. I have heard about the anxiety that comes from having to face the world without your loved one. I was afraid to live because my son could not; I paused living, learning, and loving for three and half years.

I worked so hard to be where I am today. I was an emotionally desperate woman. I was frightened of having to say out loud that my son had died. I was afraid that everything I encountered would remind me of my son and I’d have a meltdown in front of God and all God’s creation. I’m tough as nails. I’ve lived a rough life. I don’t cry because I’m the daughter of a gung-ho United States Marine. Well, when you lose someone with whom you had an exquisitely intimate relationship, all bets are off. I had no idea I could cry so much, or that I would double over in pain every other hour, or that I would have four years of insomnia.

Sound familiar?

Life is remarkably different than it was eight years ago in January. There is a transcendent peace about life now. Losing my mother was so peaceful. She died beautifully and elegantly. She fell asleep. I saw the signs when my son died; he was so dreadfully sick. I knew it was coming and I still felt like I had an arrow straight through my heart; I felt like I was physically dying. My mother’s and son’s deaths were very different from each other; one was peaceful, and the other tormented. I think it makes a difference how a person dies. Did he or she not go gentle into that good night or did he or she go willingly and peacefully. My mom was ready; my son was not, but the addiction overrode his entire consciousness. My heart breaks saying this. See, I’m an eight-year veteran of grief, and I still have moments when the arrow pierces me again, but each time, less intensely and less frequently.

My husband and his best friend took a cross-country trip two years ago, and they stopped at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. The event took place almost thirty years ago, and my husband met a couple whose son died in the bombing. They were there on the angelversary of their son’s death, nearly thirty years later to put flowers at the site that honors him. My husband said they were very nice and lively. How does that happen after such a tremendous loss? How does one pick her or his self up by the bootstraps? When does it happen? When will it happen for us? Each of us is different and we grieve according to our psychological health; some will have such a difficult time with grief. I did. The relationship with my son was loving and manic. I had to heal from a few more things before I could navigate grief in a healthy way.

I miss my mother, and while her death was peaceful and elegant, it was also unexpected. She’d just been cleared of breast cancer, but her frail body could take no more, and so, now I feel like a motherless child. Yes, I miss my mother, and I’m grieving, just not as viscerally as I did for my son. Perhaps grief is on a spectrum; maybe it is.

I wish you transcendence in whatever way you accomplish it. The most important thing for me was to reclaim my life; of course, we will never be the same. Our personalities have been forever changed by the deaths of our loved ones. I hope it’s a purposeful change.

By Sherrie Cassel

The world has been silent, different, incomplete somehow as I adjust to my mother’s death, in the same way I’ve been adjusting to my son’s death for nearly eight years. I used to wrestle in the early days of grief with the possibility that there would be an end date for grief, that there would be a date when I would truly “get over it”. In my hope of relief, I sought unrealities. Now, of course, I’m painfully aware that my son and mom are not going to rise like Lazarus from the dead to heal my broken heart…and the Cheshire cat laughed toothily.

Today, Mom’s been gone for one month. Tonight at 10:43. We used to call each other several times a day. We had a standing appointment at 7:00 a.m., but sometimes she’d call me at 5 a.m. to tell me some horrible crime that had been committed “near” me – when, in fact, it was not near me. Her sense of direction extended only within the radius of her very small world.

I don’t think I’ve really begun to grieve. In some countries, people take months, years even, and sadly, some — take their entire lifetimes to grieve. In all my research I’ve done into the grieving process, I read there is a difference between grieving and mourning; mourning is process, acute in nature; grieving is process, less acute, manageable, a return to the homeostasis afforded by emotional stabilization. Grievers learn to be in the proverbial driver’s seat with our emotional overflows. For example, it is not safe to lose it while you’re in the driver’s seat, so you pull off the road and lose it for a minute, and then when you’re safe to get back on the road again and merge with the world, you do, and when it happens the next time, you look at the clock on your dash and you use all your might to pull your shit together because you have some place to be, you have people who are relying on you, you must engage in the world and so mourning’s process morphs into grieving’s process – and the overflow will just have to wait.

Yes, I’m intellectualizing; it hurts less.

I mentioned on my personal Facebook page that I had a contentious relationship with my mother. I loved her and she was often cruel, in her brokenness. She also had moments of incredible kindness, and a sense of wonder she passed on to her children. “Traumatized people traumatize people” (Van der Kolk). All’s understood so . . . all’s forgiven. Can’t do anything about the past, and to hold on to our darker experiences to our detriment robs us of a full life. Rumination is best used on our creative energy…a goal…a victory story, not on things that keep us in a state of chronic discomfort.

I do have a thorn in my side, but life has moved on beautifully for me and Ben, despite our own human drama, and life for my thorn has left a sad shell of a human who had once been so bright and beautiful. I don’t believe in karma, but I do believe in consequences, and as my dear, sweet mother often told me when I made HUGE, GLARING mistakes, “Well, Mija, you made your bed.” (She was sweet that way). The implication is that I must now lie in the huge mess I’d created, and so must we all. This does not mean we are not all phoenixes rising from the ashes of the nests we’ve burned on our pathway to self-actualization. We blow it, and sometimes, we rise up. Sometimes.

My mom reached her own self-actualization from time to time, but her low self-esteem was deeply engrained, and she would second-guess herself and revert to a masochistic religion, then she’d beat herself up and let everyone who ever hurt her off scot-free.

There’s a meme that circulates on social media that alludes to the phenomenon of how we at some point start sounding like our parents; it’s true. For those of us who had consistent parenting, biological parents or adoptive parents, good, bad, or horrid, we are conditioned even down to their very tonal inflections. Rikki was a small child and one of my friends pointed out, “My God, Rikki has your tonal inflections.” I have weird and lovely friends. Fallbrook, represent! But we are extensions of our parents, and best-case scenario, we grow beyond their dysfunction, far beyond our own, and become the best our parents would have wished for us to be had they been well.

Where was I?

Oh yes, my mom left each of her children a treasure chest of memorabilia. I found a scrap of paper on which she had written a prayer, “God, please don’t let me hurt my children.” If you’re a survivor of domestic violence, you know that you have the propensity to reenact your childhood on the rest of the world. Mom knew, just like, at some level, we all do. She knew that we can repeat the cycle, or we can break it. We’ve spent the better part of our adult lives trying to break the cycle in my family. The journey has yielded everything from enmeshment to estrangement.

My deceased father, whom I do not hold in high esteem drilled into our heads “family first” – even though he never kept to the commitment himself. But Mom is who kept the family together, not because of an illusion, but because, as she told me on more than one occasion that her children were the light of her life – through hell and high water – all of which we navigated during the Gonzales family saga.

How do you mourn for someone with whom you had an exquisitely complicated relationship? That’s a good question.

I think I’ll chew on that for a bit.

Stella Hernandez Gonzales

November 2, 1941 to September 8, 2023

By Sherrie Cassel

Living in the high desert, I’ve become accustomed to quick weather changes. Two days ago, it was nearly one-hundred degrees in Joshua Tree, and today, we broke out the fluffy comforter. We’re hunkering down for an el Niño winter in Southern California, where the weather is practically perfect every day. My husband and I are native San Diegans, beaches, palm trees, chaparral and sagebrush, and sun for days and days. We moved to Joshua Tree when my husband retired from a lifetime career as a high school theatre arts teacher. I don’t think I’m retirement material, and especially, if I’m doing what I love, why would I ever want to retire? I hope to retire kicking and screaming about how as long as I’m breathing, I still have purpose.

I love the Morongo Basin. I’ve been able to heal in the desert. I don’t love the two days of snow or the chill leading up to it. I love the sunrises and the sunsets. I love the geological history. I love the slow pace. I hate that it’s a drive to go anywhere, down two winding grades with two lanes, one for natives who don’t mind putting their lives and the lives of others in danger by speeding down the grade, and the lane for those who choose to navigate it sanely and prosocially. But … we take the good with the bad, or at the very least, we tackle challenges with finesse or with defeat. I choose the former.

The weather is changing, and the sun is taking more frequent breaks. I’m not a winter person, although I love bright colors underneath gray skies and sweaters and scarves. I love it for about five minutes and then I’m wishing for spring. I’m not enamored of rain in the desert, where roads flood and people drown in the elements, and this is not hyperbole.

Next Sunday one month will have passed since I last saw my mother alive … since I watched the life force leave her body and witnessed her transition into the infinite, in whatever that meant to her. She was a woman who believed in a Theos, she called “him” Jesus, and she was very strong in her belief in a God of mercy, a God who became more loving as she became more self-aware. One month has slipped away and I’m just trucking along, making progress, in an internship I’m absolutely loving, in a marriage to a man who supports me despite the many sacrifices he’s made to make sure I stay in school. Yes, I’ve done the work, and made a great deal of sacrifices as well, but Ben has encouraged me every step of the way, even when I wanted to throw in the towel because I’m tired or behaving self-destructively.

January 22^nd will be here before I know it, the eight-year angelversary of my Rikki’s passing. Many of the grief experts say the language we use to refer to our loved one’s loss is important. For example, saying someone has died is much more final, and they say, it is healthier, than leaving room for the possibility that your loved one lingers with the characterization that he has passed, from point a to point b, from life to the afterlife, if one holds to this belief. Some days I do, and some days I must put my fingers into the wounds of the Christ, or I have to dig really deep and wrestle with reason and the heart. My heart and head are in a chronic love-hate relationship, or at the very least, siblings who vie for center-stage, in a listen to me/don’t touch me exchange on the daily.

When Rikki first died, I immediately bought several books on grief, everything from “how to” to “how not to”. My coping skill set includes the rush to normalization, so I don’t have to feel bad emotions for too long, if at all. Intellectualizing pain helps, but it also hurts. In my experience, we must feel every emotion as it arises. In the beginning, there is a passion play between utter pain and deep despair. For me there was no middle ground. I was pain incarnate, or I was numb and scarcely there at all. Everyone grieves and regroups in her own way. I read and educate myself on best-practices for how to effectively grieve the loss of a child. I thought I was doing it the right way. I wasn’t.

I needed to let go of all my preconceived notions about how grief was supposed to go, and about victory stories that occurred at light speed, so fast, there was no time for tears or heartache, only a rush to the end where fireworks and accolades awaited the champion griever. Hogwash (keepin’ it clean).

I’m a firm believer in support groups. I have healed in large part, a very large part, because of the blogs and because of the vulnerability and courage of other grieving parents. I know, beyond what the academic literature says about peer-to-peer support and empirical data, that having support, the kind of support that catches you in the net of varying tensions of experience, strength, and hope, is the oxygen to the grieving heart, mind, and soul.

My family at After the Storm is among the most amazing group of people I’ve ever (not) met. I’ve watched them grow and they’ve watched me ebb and flow too. If you don’t have a supportive network of people to love and encourage you through your grief, create one. Start a blog. Start a support group. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a group of friends, supportive and emotionally sound family members (we don’t all have them; I get it), etc. Isolation is necessary at times. I know. I handled my life alone as a child and so when I’m in pain, I still go to that private, lonely space, where no one can see me, and where no one can help me either.

Grief has resurfaced. Losing my sweet and complicated mother has enlivened the grief that I keep normalized most of the time for Rikki. I manage life better than I manage money. Life is good. I’m doing what I love and what I worked hard to do. I’ve found my purpose and I have the passion to pursue it. There’s a line in one of my all-time favorite movies, THE BIG CHILL, where Meg Tilly is asked if her lover who had committed suicide had seemed unhappy, to which she responds, “I don’t know very many happy people. What do they look like?”

What does a happy person look like? Is there a formula for happiness? Is happiness sustainable? I can’t answer this for everyone, but I can say that I believe that our imaginings of happiness may overlap in some areas, while they are chasms apart in other ways. My husband says that I have set a low bar by saying that happiness is not being hurt. I was just learning to ride a bike with no training wheels or protective gear when I entered the relationship with him. I’ve since learned, through being in relationship with him, that happiness is so much more than not being hurt.

Grief has shaped me more than anything, even more than a challenging childhood. My childhood comes to me in wisps and phantoms, and I paint with a Jungian brush, what I feel, formless and sometimes threatening. Grief pulled me under, a non-swimmer, with a compromised respiratory system. I struggled to find my aquatic NorthStar. I flailed. I nearly died, and then…I learned to ride the wave.

What is happening in my life right now, post- another loss, is growth, another spurt spurred by grief, deep, howling grief, the kind of grief that pulls the rug out from underneath you and leaves you disoriented, but fully awake, fully alive. I’m scarcely adjusted to the fact that my mother and first best friend is not present in the world anymore. Months went by after my equally complicated father died before I was able to achieve emotional homeostasis. Losing a child, well, there’s no rhyme or reason for how grief presents in one’s life after such a loss.

I have fewer days of despair than I used to. The death of a loved one is an adjustment. One day you’re talking, laughing, or fighting with your loved one, and the next day, he or she is gone, forever from your life. I’ve adjusted to my son’s death after nearly eight years. I’m adjusting to my mom’s death, and it is very fresh. Mom and I were exquisitely enmeshed; it happens in dysfunctional families. Rikki and I were enmeshed. I think relationships of enmeshment are triply more difficult and painful. Enmeshed relationships are chockful of unrealities, fantasies, mythologies, each with a fragility of its own.

I’ve suggested before that our ability to heal from losses is directly proportionate to our emotional soundness, to how many healthy resources we have developed through good parenting or good therapy, on our way to self-awareness and self-actualization. Life will move forward whether we are ready for it to do so or not.

I’m trying to not feel guilty for enjoying the changing of the seasons when my mother is not here to enjoy them with me. I’m trying to move forward with my dreams to be of service to marginalized and disadvantaged populations without also feeling as if I should shroud myself in black and mourn indefinitely. How much darkness do we carry when we grieve the loss of a loved one? How long? How deep?

I lost my oldest relationship, and I lost the most important two people in my life, my mother, and my child. How do you go on from there? Not easily done, but the cliched “one foot in front of the other” – is truly the ticket. My professor told me the other day, “You cannot be what you are not.” I can’t rush to wellness. I have a friend who was shot with a BB gun when she was a kid, and the BB never was removed from her body, so it rolls around her leg, and she feels it every once in a while. I think of grief as the same kind of process; it moves in my body and emerges from time to time, just to let me know it’s there, just to remind me that life hurts too.

Death put the kibosh on my idealism. My head was in the clouds for much of my life, the clouds Mom painted in the sky for us when things were rough in our home. Life is not perfect; it never will be, and death opened my eyes to that fact. I don’t want to live in the mythology, even though it is lifetimes better than my childhood reality, I take the gifts from the painful experiences in my life and I use them to make my life better and to be of service to those who haven’t discovered or developed their voices yet.

I’m still here. I told my mom when she asked only very recently why she was still here, that her work here wasn’t done yet; it is now, but mine is not, and neither is yours.

By Sherrie Cassel

Dedicated to Erik Erikson

My mother has been gone now for two weeks and some change; I’ve never been good at keeping track of dates. I’ve been hoping that my muse would give me something to say about the last two weeks, where I’ve been and how I’m managing. I just haven’t had any surplus energy. I have a new schedule and new responsibilities, a new circle, a new cycle has begun in my life, at sixty-one! And as exhausted as I am, it’s the kind of exhaustion that says I’m a productive member of society who is making a difference and learning, learning, learning.

Erik Erikson was an ego psychologist who developed the theory of psychosocial development in eight stages. I won’t bore you with the minutiae if you’re not one who finds this phase in our collective knowledge fascinating, but the last two stages are of the most interest to me, one, because I’m currently in that stage, and the last stage, because I’m headed there in the blink of an eye.

The seventh stage of Erikson’s model suggests there are two options, as he suggests with all his stages. The seventh step is generativity or stagnation, and it is here where I find myself. The longer I live, love, and learn, the more wisdom I gain, and as the great and wise Solomon suggested, the more we know, the more clarity we have into the human condition, and the more sadness this brings to our consciousness.

Grief is the same way.

I think of all the headspace I have that gets used daily, tiny units of information racing through the neural pathways as my language center tries to make connections with all that random input. Our brains take care of us. Oh sure, there are malfunctions, organic or created, that help or hinder us, but our brain’s job is to keep us at homeostasis, balanced, calm.

I’m intellectualizing, of course.

Science is so much easier than messy emotions. The fact of the matter is, yes, I’m grieving hard right now. If I were not so busy these days, I’d have more time to sit in mourning like I did when my son died. Two totally different relationships, and both losses — seismic in nature. My world has been rocked. If I hadn’t watched the monitor record my mom’s last breath, would it be less real? My relationship with my mother was the longest relationship of my life, sixty-one years. She was 21 years older than I am, and I was 21 years older than Rikki.

Chance can be beautiful too.

The book of Ecclesiastes from the Hebrew Bible is my absolute favorite book from any sacred text; it is ancient Jewish existentialism at its finest, in my opinion. Solomon, I believe was grieving time he spent in hedonistic self-absorption as time lost when his pursuits might have been better spent on the things that don’t rust or wrinkle. Grief awakens us to the things that are infinite, in whatever that means to you. My eyes were opened beyond what I was emotionally ready to handle when Rikki died. I’ve spent the last nearly eight years adjusting to the light, the light that exposes his absence in my life in a way that is manageable.

Mom was eighty-one. She was in poor health. She loved her LORD. She never gave up on him despite the many times his presence was not apparent in her life. Over the past ten years, Mom was in and out of the hospital. Many of those times we thought it was going to be the end because as she aged, her body just got more and more frail. It was like death was coming after her, no matter how much she and her children dreamed in unrealities, of an exceptionally long life for her.

This time was obviously different.

I’ve cried a little bit. Mostly I’ve kept busy. I’ve learned because of my internship that I must learn to relax when I’m not in the office. I watched movies and documentaries about Jim Jones and read this weekend. Watching movies is not something I can sit long enough to do on most nights, but I forced myself to get into someone else’s reality and watched a movie about the war in Afghanistan; it was compelling and took me out of my reality for a couple of hours. I needed a break from myself… and a break from more grief.

I chatted with my husband. I read things that are comforting to me. Reading comforts me, and now that I’m in grad school, the books I’m reading are wildly interesting and healing. Self-care is important, and although I talk a good story about its importance, I fail miserably at accomplishing it on most weeks. In this new season of my life, I’m now realizing just how important it is. I’m also not twenty-one anymore.

Generativity, back to Erikson’s psychosocial development stages, is the proverbial second wind we’ve heard about since time immemorial. The analogy that comes to mind is from a recent experience, as we, my sixty-two-year-old brother, my fifty-nine-year-old brother, and my sixty-one-year-old aging, aching body moved all my mom’s belongings out of her apartment. We were kids together, strong, vibrant, able-bodied. Well, that ship has sailed. Moving a tiny apartment full of memories did more than hurt our hearts; it hurt our bodies too.

So does generativity. I will say that finding my passion in my sixties has both its benefits and its challenges. I actually do tire more easily and do injure myself more dramatically. For example, I carried a duffle bag to my mom’s when I spent the night with her on occasion, and I pulled a muscle in my neck; it took months to heal.

Another gift grief has given to me is clarity of vision. I didn’t just emerge from the ashes the victorious phoenix; I flew above the detritus and found the jewels in it, and I carry them with me in my medicine bag. In this bag are the lessons in life that have sent me toward the healing process, where each sunrise brings with it a shard of the missing heart piece, completing the whole, a little at a time.

I want to encourage anyone who is feeling generative, awesome, please share that regeneration with others, or find a group from whom you can charge and recharge. If you’re in a place where stagnation is threatening to rob you of your ability to have a full life, whatever that means to you, find someone who is charged for life and borrow some of her light until yours is refueled to flaming.

There was a time when I wasn’t properly housebroken. I champed at the bit because I did not have an easy introduction to life. I had no reason to trust anyone. I always loved the tabula rasa (blank slate) analogy. I also like the analogy of the tightly wound ball of string. I was each one in equal parts. I learned to strive for more than just the status quo. I learned to do this several times in my life. There are, have been, and will continue to be many opportunities to learn this again and again.

Generativity is plausible even in deep grief. I’ve had many second winds, and where I find myself now, in another round of grief and the reminder of the grief I will always carry for my beautiful son, is a time of gratitude and growth, generativity, indeed.

I had no objective this morning, but to write my bereavement, with a twist. I can experience grief with my whole being, but…I still must go on. There’s still so much work to do.

Grief