Grief to Gratitude

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

By Sherrie Cassel

Artist, Giovanni Bragolin, 1911-1981

I lost the one person who meant more to me than life itself when I lost Rikki. So, I foolishly thought my heart could never be broken again as viscerally. Boy, was I wrong! Losing Momma last night really hurts. I haven’t cried as hard since Rikki died, and I cried buckets and buckets of tears. I wept in my husband’s arms last night when they pronounced that my momma had in fact passed away. I’m blessed that I have a husband, although short, he has shoulders as broad as the Universe; he carried me through.

The relationship I had with Momma was the longest relationship in my life, sixty-one years. I miss her being in the world. I miss her being in my world. We had a tempestuous relationship, but I know my mother loved me, and she loves me still from the infinite heaven, in whatever she envisioned that to be. She’s at peace now, no more pain, no more sickness, no more fear. All of those things are gone now. One of the last things Momma said to me was, “Mija, I’ve suffered so much.” And she had too, from cradle to coffin. She loved her LORD and Savior, and she had no doubt that God is real and living in her heart. She wasn’t afraid to die on her last day on earth. She was barely conscious.

I sang her favorite gospel songs. I talked to her and rubbed her forehead and held her hand, before they got cold. I didn’t stay in the room when my dad died. He had pneumonia and had that death rattle and his breathing was more like gasps. I said my goodbyes and slept in the car until my sister came and told me he had passed. I stayed with Momma until her very last breath. As soon as we found out that she had declined a surgery that quite potentially would have killed her on the operating table, I knew we needed to head down the mountain, and I stayed with her from 3 until she died around 11 p.m.

Mom said that her kids, grandson, and great grandson were the things that brought her the most joy. She loved us more than life itself. As a matter of fact, when she first entered the hospital, we were talking, and she said she was scared, she asked why she had to be so ill, and she told me she was glad I was there with her. I’m glad I was too. I miss her so much already. I called her, or she called me, every morning at 7 a.m. and we’d talk and talk and talk. This morning I felt the vacancy in my heart because I couldn’t call her to chat. As the GOMU would have it, my best friend called me at the time Momma and I would call each other, and I was comforted by our conversation.

We will be planning her Celebration of Life and we want it to be a celebration too. She taught me so much. We fought. We wouldn’t speak to each other sometimes because of foolishness, things that now, in retrospect, don’t matter at all. She did the best she could with what she had, and I did the best I could with what I had. I loved, love, her so much and my heart really hurts right now. I was her go to girl, even when I would get resentful because she always called on me for everything. I wish she was here to ask me for something now. I’d give her anything she wanted.

Unlike with Rikki, I have no regrets with Momma. I was there for her every time she needed me. I wouldn’t change a thing. She brought me into this world, and it was an honor to help her transition, and to make her laugh and feel loved. She was so concerned about her kids even on her deathbed. She was quite a woman. She had suffered a great deal in life and yet, she never lost her faith. I’m so jealous of that faith. I ride its coattails and pray for certainty, at least 95% certainty.

Momma always presented herself with grace and beauty. She wore makeup when she was younger. Her hair was always styled. She dressed in the most adorable, frilly, and feminine clothing. I may not be frilly, but she taught me to always put my best food forward, even if I was in pain. She didn’t try to hide her pain; she couldn’t. She had one of those beautiful faces that gave her opinions away, no hiding behind the mask because the mask was flesh and bone.

Recently, she was asking me if I had eaten yet, and she said, “Mija, did you eat shit yet?” I was like, WTH, and she said, “I mean did you eat yet?” We laughed so hard we were both crying. Every time I’d remind her about it, she’d laugh every bit as hard as if it just happened. Momma had a beautiful laugh; it’s where I get my laughing fits from. We had joy in our family on occasion, but that was all Momma bringing our awareness to the sunny side of the street. She always believed that things would get better, and they did, for her and for her kids too. She taught us it’s okay to not get things right the first time, or the second, or the third.

I’m trying to figure out how the world operates without a Momma. Those of you who’ve been through this, please tell me how you got through it. I lost Rikki and I navigated the grief process, and I know how to grieve a child, and I lost my father (very complicated relationship), but losing Momma is a whole different level of pain. I said to Ben last night, “How am I supposed to live without my Momma?” I know it was the grief talking, but it still hurts that she died and is never going to be in my life again, this side of heaven.

I’d like to honor Momma like I honor my Rikki, by living a life that is filled with joy and hope, even in the face of deep, deep grief. I miss you so much, Momma. I know you’re no longer in pain and I will accept that as the gift from losing you. I will never forget you and I will miss you until we meet again.

hermanlaw.com/child-sex-abuse/

“We represent victims of childhood sexual abuse from all across the country. We know what we do for victims is only one piece of many things that go into the healing process from this horrible trauma.

We have put together an extensive guide on how to assist children who have been sexually abused. We have included things like the long lasting effects from this abuse and how/where to get help. Check it out.”

By Sherrie Cassel

One of the purposes of Grief to Gratitude is to encourage and to even tease out the joy that still exists in the lives of those who grieve intensely and yet, those who are still able to find the joy in everyday occurrences, i.e., the sunrise, the sound of the wind, the mountains, the oceans, the desert, the sound of a baby’s cooing, the touch of a lover, ad infinitum. As those of you who have followed my blog know, grief has touched my life in more ways than I ever thought possible. Loss of a loved one is a lifetime grief process, certainly. As we begin to heal, however, grief loosens its hold on us and we switch to the control center of our grief where we manage it, consciously and intentionally.

I encourage you to find something to pour yourself into that gives you joy and purpose. I just started my first internship in the spiritually integrated psychotherapy program in seminary. I can’t discuss what we do there, but it is a training center for future psychotherapists. I’m sixty-one, and if I didn’t have something to pour myself into, a place to be, working with an amazing team, I’m sure I’d still be the mess I was directly following my son’s death. To be sure, I’m an older student, and I’m beyond wiped out, but so exhilarated.

My husband taught theatre arts for many years. One play his students performed under his direction was called, “One True Thing.” One of the skits in the larger play was called, “Paint What You Feel.” The person who played the life-artist gave a brilliant performance where she talked about getting your emotions out, each time she said “Paint what you feel” a different color would splash onto the stage walls, and she said the words forcefully, and she would move her hands as if she were the one throwing paint at the wall. The skit was powerful, especially, I would say, coming from a teenager. Teach them young, I say.

How many of us did not have an emotionally well group of people to fill our audience who had the resources to be there for us as our colors painted sadness, anger, shame, desperation for the love of people who could be there for us? I sure didn’t. I learned through therapy and the conscious cultivation of a whole person that I could be there for myself, and I could also choose people who were emotionally safe and available.

When in grief, it’s essential we find people who can love us through the worst part of our grief, and there is a worse and a getting better, less intense, and less ever-present. I cannot emphasize enough that as soon as your grief is no longer as acute as in the first days following your loss, that you find a hobby, start a grief group, seek therapy, paint what you feel, dance your emotions, write your pain and your healing process. I read a meme recently that said that our grief process and its navigation would one day be someone’s roadmap to healing. I like that. Our experiences are not just for us to suffer through, but their successful navigation can, will, and do help others to see there is light at the end of the dark tunnel of grief.

Rituals are so important that when I didn’t think about them, I just ached from the loss of my precious Rikki. I started to light candles in his memory. “One if by land, two if by sea…” I thought maybe he would know in heaven that I thought about him every second of the day. I took his ashes and scattered them in every beautiful place I wanted to share with him. Those places are now sacred to me. Whenever I visit them now, I feel his presence. The rituals, taking some puffs off his favorite flavor of cigar on the angelversaries, lighting candles, painting what I feel in the medium in which I’ve been gifted, i.e., through the gift of language, are each important in how I’ve managed grief. Getting back into school after taking six years off to be available to my son and grandson during the eye of his storm, was one of the most important activities I engaged in toward the beginning of my healing. I sat in complicated grief for three and a half years after Rikki died. I wish I could have those years back to begin healing sooner, but healing takes as long as it takes. Those years were rife with emotional meltdowns at the drop of a hat.

When I returned to university work toward my B.S. in psychology, I was on fire for my son’s story. I wanted to conquer the addiction world and I was on a mission. A woman from one of the FB sites I follow told me that addiction had robbed me of enough time and to not let it rob me of one more second. She encouraged me to grab hold of life and to stay with the living. This is the same thing my psychiatrist told me when I was spending money on jewelry where I could put some of my son’s ashes and wear those ashes, a piece of him, and keep him close to my heart. When we are in deep grief, there is no rhyme or reason for the things that comfort us. Some people turn to religion. Some turn to other types of spiritual practices. Again, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of therapy, especially if you find yourself in complicated grief.

I recommend chaplains, social workers, and spiritually integrated psychotherapists who work with the grieving regularly. Many therapists have minimal training in working with those who grieve, especially in the acute stages. In my undergraduate program there were no classes on grief, and you can apply to a certificate program to specialize in grief, but it is not a requirement. As a matter of fact, I saw four therapists after my son died, and none of them were familiar how to work with a person in grief. I chose to start a grief blog on FB for people who had lost a child or grandchild to addiction, the most healing thing I’ve done for my benefit and the benefit of others. The parents/grandparents who frequent the site, have gained amazing strength, and shared their own wisdom they’ve gained throughout the years. I’m constantly humbled by the grace they share with our members, even with their own pain looming over them.

This morning my heart feels raw and unprotected. I know those of you who share this grief experience with me, understand what I mean. I’m listening to the Stones sing blues, a couple of gospel songs. I’ve read some texts that comfort me. Some days I miss my son so badly that it’s difficult to concentrate on anything but the hollowness in my heart and the ache in my soul. I know how to glean the joy that is still accessible now. I do rituals that bring me to the present. I pray to the God of my understanding. I meditate on something beautiful, a painting, a pretty song. I write. I share my experience, strength, and hope with others. I learn. I work toward the goal of having the credentials I need to help others at both the professional and the spiritual levels.

Finding something in which to pour yourself is very important. Some people I know have created the most amazing gardens for their loved ones. Some go on pilgrimages and find tremendous healing in them. Did you have a creative hobby before you lost your loved one? Is there something you always wanted to do but didn’t think you could? Grief shapes us into more compassionate people. Grief carved away the bitterness I had before Rikki got so sick and died. Grief molded me into a better version of myself. Of course, I had to go through hell before I stopped fighting against it. I think of how rushing water leaves its imprint on boulders. Something thought impenetrable is affected by the flow of the rushing waters. I was hardened by life, early life, and the life I desperately shared with a child who struggled with addiction. I have a heart for others now.

I want to encourage you this morning to get outside, smell the flowers, feel the wind on your face, summon a beautiful memory of your loved one(s), and let your eyes moisten with happy tears because of the gratitude you have for the time you got to have him or her with you. I feel better encouraging each of you this morning; in doing so, I have encouraged myself to have a good day, to grab hold of the joy that is explicit in most everything. If you find that the work is difficult, that is evidence that you are on a healing path. We had no choice about boarding the grief train, but here we are. Some of us are newly grieving. Some of us are veterans in the grief journey. Lean on each other.

When you get to the fork in the road that leads to healing or following the one where acute grief is recurrent, try to take the healing one, when you’re ready. You’ll get to a place where healing to reclaim your life is the only choice. Your family, friends, and you need you to be whole – again, or maybe for the first time.

I’m listening to Willie Nelson now singing “A Bloody Mary Morning,” and the music makes my heart sing. Rikki loved when I was joyful. I owe it to him to maintain that joy, to keep it close to my heart, to think of beautiful experiences I had with my son. I painted my feelings this morning with words, and I’m feeling less acutely in pain. Thank you for reading, and if you’re in a funk this morning, afternoon, evening, listen to some music that makes you happy…even through the tears.

Namaste.

By Sherrie Cassel

There is no rhyme or reason for how a person grieves the loss of a significant person in her life. Some light candles and leave them in their windows to let their loved one know they’re still thought about every second of every day. Some people sob for months and months. Some people are stoic, stiff upper-lipped, and sober. There’s no template for how one should grieve. We do. We just do. Here’s a weird effect of grief for me: I have loved the music group Bread since I was a kid. My son was into Korn and hard rock from the nineties and two thousands. After he died, I was sitting in my home office numb and deeply despaired. A song by Bread began to play, and it took only the first two notes to have me weeping inconsolably. My son would have hated Bread. He would have found it sappy and saccharine, and yet, there I was, a weeping mess over two notes of a song.

I’ve had the gift of healing from my son’s death. I’m grateful for the healing that came from the hardest work I’ve ever done in my entire sixty-one years. I miss my son more than there are words in the English language with which to describe just how much. Tonight, I’m aching in my heart. My mother is in a nursing home and not getting better. I started an exciting internship which will prepare me for working with people who are struggling with spirituality and tremendous grief. I don’t know when I’ve been so tired, exhausted really. When I’m tired, (HALT), I feel things viscerally. Tonight, I’m deep in thought about the ache that is at the center of my heart.

My mom’s name is Stella, and I’m listening to “Stella Blue” by the Grateful Dead. I’m keenly aware of how little time I have left with my mom. I have some time to love her this side of heaven. I had time to love my son on this side of heaven because a momma knows when she’s going to lose a child from addiction, and I had time to make amends, to let him know he was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Surely, there are victory from addiction stories; my son did not have one. If you’re a parent, you love your child to the ends of the earth. When one of them dies, or like us, an only child dies, grief is profound, a howling, cavernous pain. Some days I wonder how I’m still standing, how I’m still moving forward in my life, and how I’m having days filled with joy and laughter. How are those things possible when I’m constantly missing my son? His absence is felt deeply.

I’ve read so much about grief I could write several volumes on my experience, which although different from others, is relatable to so many who’ve also incurred significant losses. Some of us had time to prepare, as much as one can, ourselves for the long goodbye. Some of us had no notice and were shocked, had the rug pulled out from underneath us, and sucker punched by the loss. How is it possible that we could live in this world without a piece of our heart? In grief that is healthy, we learn to adjust, and it’s a lifetime of adjustment. The thing is, we can overcome, not get rid of, but we can get to a place where grief does not command our lives, but is an emotion that can be tamed, like fear, anger, etc.

I recommend a grief group, particularly one that addresses your specific grief, i.e., I reach out to those who’ve lost a child to addiction. Additionally, I reach out to anyone who grieves any type of loss, from any area of one’s life. Death will have an impact on every area of your life; it just will. How will you normalize your grief enough to stay with the living where joy can still be found? In the beginning, as you reclaim your life, the work is grueling, and despair will creep up on you when you least expect it. Despair keeps us from acceptance, and acceptance is the place where we begin to heal. I remember saying early in grief, that I would never accept my son’s death. How wrong I was to think I could heal without accepting the reality that my son had died. I’ve since accepted that I will not see my son again in this life, but I have confidence that I will see him in the next. At the very least, he is no longer in pain, and I find great comfort in this fact. He was so dreadfully sick from addiction in his last few months of life. He was lost and I could not save him.

I know many of you have watched your loved one(s) physical bodies degrade as they transition from this life to the next, whatever you believe this means. We find ways to comfort ourselves. Some of us turn to religion, therapy, deep grief work, and all manner of things. We must find a way to heal ourselves if we are to return to a life of purpose. To what end will our healing take us? Will we use our losses to infuse life with love, compassion, and purpose? I hope so. I know, for me, it took a bit of time to discover a new purpose in my life. Everything about me changed because of my son’s death. I was shattered, and then, I began to ask myself if darkness and despair were the things that would heal or hurt me. Did I want to stay stuck in the darkness and despair? Did I not want to heal and move forward in my life? If you’re asking yourself these questions, in my opinion, you’re at the precipice of healing and loosening your grip on constant sorrow. We can let go and think of the love that still exists for your loved one(s).

Rikki is gone. He will not return to me in this life. I miss him more than I can express in words. But life waits for no one to get his or her heart together. We love. We lose. We love still. Love is forever. I love my son in the present tense, not in the past. To love my son in the past tense will never happen. You love your person with all your heart, and when they die, you love them still. I remember after my son died; I bought all sorts of cremation jewelry to put some of his ashes in. I took some of his ashes to various places that were special to him and to us and sprinkled them in those places. I wanted to cling to him and never let him go, even in death. I wanted to see him in every beautiful place I visited. I slept in the sweatshirt he was wearing the day he died; I wore it for months. I have the last fork he used to eat with before he died. I have the last cup he drank from on the day he died. Is it ridiculous to have done these things? No. We each grieve and hold on to those things which are meaningful to us, and which were meaningful to our loved one(s).

I’ve learned so much from grieving people, parents, lovers, friends, siblings, strangers, ad infinitum. I hope I’m helping people who are currently navigating the grief process. Hopefully those of you who are healing in great leaps and bounds will help those who are not. Everyone grieves something or someone at some point in his or her life. As we grow in grace after our traumatic losses, we learn to be compassionate with ourselves and with others. I’m sorry for anyone who is hurting today because you’re grieving the loss of a loved one. I hope you have the support of people who will love you through it. Certainly, there are people from whom you will steer clear. Emotionally stunted people do not have the emotional resources to be there for anyone else; they may be in survival mode from their own traumatizing experiences. Gravitate to those who are emotionally well enough to be able to help you as you navigate your process. I know it’s easy to say, but difficult to do, but you can get through this; it just takes a lot of self-love and a lot of work toward healing. Healing is possible, and in some cases, it is inevitable.

I find my strength in the GOMU, in those members of my family who are emotionally resourceful enough to love me through it, in friends, in music, in writing, in seminary, etc. What are you finding helps you to heal? Leave a comment and share your experience, strength and hope with others who are grieving. I find that helping others helps me to heal. We all hurt from time to time after the loss of a person, place, or thing. But the goal is to live fully, and once you’re able to tame your grief to where you are in control of it, you can.

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.