Grief to Gratitude

By Sherrie Ann Kolb-Cassel

Google Images, artist unknown, 2020

Working the grief process is like finding your way through a labyrinth and getting lost along the way from time to time. I find myself returning to places I’ve been before – pain, longing, utter sadness – and I stay there for a while trying to figure out why I’ve returned and what I’m supposed to learn. Often the lesson is profound – and sometimes there are tiny lessons that roar through my mind: He’s gone. He’s gone.

And I take another step toward acceptance.

In seven days, four years will have passed since I lost my son. The knowledge that the angelversary is coming is a lot like the tired old metaphor, but am adequate description, the feeling of impending doom from a careening and out of control train – and I’m the only one on it, no conductor, just me, and I’m watching the whole future play out, the one where my son dies – and I can’t stop it, no matter how much I pray, or how much I wish with all my might that he did not die, reality rears its head and I am right back to the intense feelings of the worst day of my life.

I’m ruminating on where we were four years ago on this day, when he was still alive. I remember everything. When you love someone who is terminally ill, like a child who struggles with addiction, memories are like labor pains after full dilation, quick and unimaginably hard hitting.

 My son was going through a lot his last week of life. The details don’t matter. His life was difficult, and he suffered a lot the last couple years of his life. Watching someone you love suffer at the hands of others is a helpless feeling. You know you can love them, be there for them, and sometimes are even able to successfully comfort them, but you can’t stop the illness and you can’t stop the cruelty of others, and so you wait in the wings until they call on you to sit in the dark with them.

 

I hurt today for the pain my son suffered the last few years of his life. I try to not do that. I try to stay in the light of his joie de vivre. He was a happy guy before the bottom fell out for him. I try to remember the good times, his hardy laugh, his sharp and sometimes cynical sense of humor, his kindness toward others, even those who hurt him. He was a remarkable human being.

 

This post is a selfish one. I need to talk about my son. I need to share his beauty with others. I need to cry, and I need to do so with utter abandonment of how I may look or sound to others. I’m an eternal optimist, and I believe I have found healing on this rocky terrain. I’ve stubbed my toes, figuratively. I’ve bled through my shoes. I’ve sat stunned and numb as I tick off the days on my calendar of fluctuating emotions.

 

Today is Wednesday, the middle of the week, Hump Day – and I would like to rest in the knowledge that this week is ending, but I can’t; next Wednesday is the day that four years ago, I said goodbye to my son. I kissed his forehead and I walked away from the love of my life, my only child, my best friend. We had a tempestuous relationship. We loved each other fiercely – but when you love someone who is addicted to drugs and alcohol, there are frantic words of desperation that are said, and after they die, there is a tremendous amount of guilt and regret. There are many I should haves.

 

If you’re very lucky, you will have had opportunities to make amends while they were alive – and so the regrets are fewer and the guilt is more easily dissipated as life moves forward. If you did not have the opportunities to say what you now wish you would have, say it now. I don’t know what my readers believe, and I’m not even sure I know what I believe, but on a good day, I see my son whole and in a place that is only beautiful – and my forever 32 year old son is no longer sick or in pain. A mother’s heart believes the unverifiable possibility that she will see her child again and they will traipse hand in hand in fields of the favorite flower of her loved one – red roses – spinning and dancing like when they were young, a momma and her little boy. No more struggle. No more pain – ever again. Sometimes I actually believe that.

 

Some days – the loss just weighs heavy on my heart – and I do my level best to keep busy, to find some shred of hope to fight for my wish. He’s not gone. He’s alive somewhere – beautiful and whole. Sometimes our loved ones suffered so much here, it would be an injustice to have their life trajectories be one of non-existence, with no opportunity to have wholesome and beautiful lives, the lives they should have had.

 

The thoughts that angelversaries bring up for grievers can be maudlin and dark. I am trying to stay with the living, but I am feeling the pain all over again, and next Wednesday is impossible to plan for. Will I cancel all my appointments, appointments I scheduled to keep busy? Will I be able to follow through with plans I made to celebrate his life? Will I be able to take a few ceremonious puffs of his favorite cigar in memoriam? Will I be able to say his name without a meltdown? I hope so.

 

Numbing through sleep or some other numbing agent wastes time, valuable healing time. I try to not numb out. I work really hard to feel every pang of longing for what I can no longer have. I know I have spoken about having a relationship with my son’s Spirit, and I talk to him every day; is that an extension of our relationship from life to death?

 

I read about grief, both academically and for sentimentality. I educate myself – perhaps as a distraction from the intensity of the final moments of my son’s life. Think, don’t feel. Intellectualizing grief is helpful for me – during those intense moments when I’m holding back my tears and my heart is beating rapidly in my chest.

 

Four years is a long time to not see your loved one – alive. How do we reconcile our broken mind with reality? He’s gone. She’s gone. They’re gone. I’m still here, alive, but struggling to face the angelversary, the day my son got his wings, ascended to the Heavens, was no longer in pain, mercifully taken out of his suffering, which was extreme, in his final years, on his final day.

 

I’ll get through this; I have for the past three angelversaries. I weep. I celebrate. I double over in pain in the darkness of our bedroom. How one spends the day of remembrances is a crap shoot. I will do the best I can; that’s all I can do. That’s all any of us can do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Sherrie Ann Kolb-Cassel

Dedicated to Rikki Kolb

I want to send my heart
up to the heavens
in a paper lantern,

with the flame burning brightly,
fantastic and lovely,
but isn’t fire

beautiful, like your
funeral pyre, a ritual
for warriors,

warriors who fought
for their lives against
the enemy but lost?

I want to send my heart up,
broken and bruised,
up to the heavens,

where I gather you are
whole
and happy.

I want to light a fire
as bright as you in
my soul, and hold

you always in my
mind, commingling
our consciousness,

one spirit, one
bloodline, one heart,
in a paper

lantern, rising high
in the sky
like the man you met

when you were three,
tallest man you’d ever
seen.

I want to send my love
up to you in a paper lantern,
as high as the sky

and as deep as the ocean,
spilling over into infinity.
I love you more than that.

I want to send a paper
lantern to where you are,
before my flame burns

out, before I can no longer
tell the world how much
I love you,

before I can no longer
speak your name,
before no one can

hear your name,
before I come to meet
you.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

 

 

As I’m navigating this wild phenomenon called grief – I sometimes reach forks in the road for which there can be only one choice as I make my way forward. Sometimes I reach dead ends, and sometimes, mercifully, I reach a space where I don’t have to exert myself, emotionally or physically, a space where I am neither aching nor soaring. A place where I am at peace. Perhaps it is only temporary peace, but when I have those peaceful moments, I am grateful.

 

Intellectualizing my grief sometimes makes carrying it more tolerable. There are days when the pain is so excruciating that numbing is the coping skill one may choose; I have, and with various methods, some emotionally sound and some – not so much–. And there are days when I rise up from my stratified grief and come within inches of the next rung upward toward healing, but I relapse into grief and I am down for a day.

 

 

I’m driven to finish what I start, and I sometimes foolishly think one day I will finish grief, but as I plumb the depths or skate tentatively around the fragile perimeter of my grief, I know I will find myself between ascensions and descents many times for the rest of my life. I have accepted this reality.

 

For me, keeping busy has been a way to take myself out of the constant ache of grief. I was running myself ragged with altruism toward anyone who needed help just to keep from feeling the pain. I thought if I didn’t have time for it – I wouldn’t see it and hence, speed up the process.

 

Right.

 

I know I’m getting better when I can engage in pettiness or politics. Both offer ample opportunities to be a putz or an activist. Relationships which prove to be hurtful or harmful I gladly abandon – for self-preservation. I fight the good fight for people who struggle in and with this political climate. I work at the loving and supportive relationships I am blessed to have. I keep an eye out for my beautiful  sister and others who are in abusive relationships. There are many activities I can engage in that take me out of my pain – and keep me future-oriented, hopeful, and in love with life.

 

 

In a country that has rediscovered racism, misogyny, pedophobia, ephebiphobia, xenophobia, homo- and trans-phobia, and other gross misperceptions that cause people to find ways to hurt one another or to express their detestation of an other in hateful ways, i.e. Westboro Baptist Church, KKK, and other hate groups —  developing a stronger sense of compassion, even when you’re hurting, should not be out of the realm of possibilities. Even grieving people can make a difference in our world. Making a difference in our world using our talents and our lived experience(s) is a way to be proactive in our healing processes.

 

 

I read an article this morning that suggests group meditation does help society, if for no other reason than it helps one to center herself and clear her mind so she can be of service to our world. I pray, but I think of it as a passive activity. Using elbow grease is a much better and proactive method to making positive changes in our world and in American society. Prayer opens up a conduit for a stronger relationship with my Creator – but it is not a panacea for the ills in our world. Group prayer, not unlike the clarity of mind one gets in a meditation group, makes us want to be better people who contribute compassionately to society.

 

 

I recognize the healing taking place in my life as my mind and heart open up to engaging in evermore prosocial activities. I will be training for the sexual assault center in my area to help survivors of rape and domestic violence. I haven’t been out there in a helping capacity for some time; it’s time now.

 

We are the hands and feet of the Creator, the Universe, the Father, the Mother, whatever you call your Higher Power. Simon Wiesenthal in his book Sunflower recounted an experience he had while in a concentration camp. He spoke of a saying popular with those who were being tortured: God is on leave. Sometimes it surely can feel that way, and perhaps, the God of whom the tortured spoke and speak today, is absent.

 

 

I prayed for my son to be saved from his disease. I watched him suffer and die. No amount of justification from those who believe prayers are answered according to God’s plan for my life will assuage my utter sadness that I lost my son and no one heard my prayers. The Rabbi Harold Kushner who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People also lost a son. His son died at 14 from complications of progeria. He blamed no one for the terrible loss. He suggests that loss, tragedy, sickness, and all manner of painful experiences are pretty much the luck of the draw. I feel less angry with the God of my understanding having randomness affirmed for me. My son was sick and he died. Certainly, there are behaviors we engage in that cause us to suffer in life and sometimes they cause us to suffer unto death, but no one deserves to suffer, and I will spend my life working toward helping others to find joy — even in the face of challenging life experiences.

 

 

The fact that my mind is clear enough to wax philosophically and wonder spiritually is an indication that I am healing, and that I have learned that I am not a victim of circumstances. Shit happens – and I’m responsible for how I address it and how I respond to the fallout from it.

 

 

Sometimes life is chaotic and sadness can be overwhelming, but at the end of the day, take a look around you, see the people who are suffering more than you are, feel your pain, work through the muck, but remember this amazing world has so much beauty in it – and allow all of life’s circumstances to hone your compassion toward others. You’ll see, healing is a group activity. We are not alone on our pale blue dot.

 

There’s a whole world out there waiting for you to join in the hard work it will take to get it back on track.

 

Welcome home.

 

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

 

When I was a little girl, I had frequent ear infections. My parent’s socioeconomic status didn’t afford them the luxury of an education. But they had folk wisdom that comforted me or kept me in line when I was a kid. I still infuse my writing with the imagery of superstition, Catholicism, and biblical motifs. My mother tried several home remedies or things she heard about from her friend Doña Sara who had a fair amount of curandera in her. One such remedy was a cannabis leaf steeped in rubbing alcohol, which would later be rubbed behind my ear. She tried various permutations of earache magic, but nothing really worked except aging out of it.

 

 

What the hell does that have to do with grief? Well, I have been thinking about and planning activities for the angelversary of my son’s death on January 22^nd. I plan for events when I’m under stress about them because it helps me approach the event with less trepidation. I know it’s coming; and I am preparing for two eventualities, one which will make me proud of myself, and the other, the one that becomes necessary because of emotional overwhelm of remembering the last day we spent together. My memories of the night he died are fuzzy, even though I was with him.

 

 

The compulsive planning, not without panic and pacing, is a relatively new behavior. I’ve engaged in the behavior only since Rikki died. Planning is one of those top ten things that helps me face stressful situations. I think university life had a hand in it too. Planning can be a gift to yourself; it really can.

 

 

This time of year “making a list and checking it twice”…three, four or more times, makes my life a little bit easier. I actually got a jump start on Christmas because I have a grandson, Rikki’s son, for whom I must make magic during the holiday seasons. He’s not so much a distraction from the pain as an embellishment of the season. I try to see the world through his wonder-filled eyes, and I get caught up in the buzz and festivities.

 

 

Finding a good book or movie that makes you think about the future and your purpose in life is very comforting. I used to have five weeks off during winter and summer breaks and I’d go to the library and check out books on everything from deep sea diving to Eugene O’Neill and read leisurely through my breaks learning and making connections. Intellectual activities are great diversions from breakdowns.

 

 

Finding a creative outlet is also a good way to use your pain to commemorate your loved one or to create a piece, a talisman, if you will, to help guide you to your next stage of grief. You will return here many times, but if you have something to pour that pain into that benefits you, it will also benefit our world.

 

 

Spending time with cherished loved ones, family, friends, or family of choice, is a wonderful way to get and give support. I plan a birthday party for myself every year. Right after Rikki died, I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I did, and we all had a lovely time.

 

 

 

Volunteering at a homeless shelter, animal shelter, foster care center, hospital, or with some other organization that contributes positively to our world is also a great way to divert a meltdown, if you just don’t want to have one. I fully believe the fast-track to healing is by being of service to others.

 

 

 

Like my mom’s cannabis and isopropyl concoction, there are many ways we can continue healing through the holidays. I’ve shared what has worked for me. Each of us has to find our own way to cope and then to thrive in our lives after the loss of a loved one.

 

 

I do feel the tug, but it’s a daily thing, a moment to moment thing. I can control my responses to the tugs, but I can’t control when they rise to the surface. When they do, they do, and I do get to choose whether to navigate and ride out the pain, or to sublimate it some other way, so I can function optimally in my life and in my relationships.

 

 

In the early days of grief, there was little consolation for my heartbreak. I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. I slept to keep from feeling. I sat staring numbly into space. Personal hygiene was excruciating for me. My husband took over a lot of my daily tasks because I just couldn’t manage them –and– the absolute devastation from losing my son.

 

 

Charles Bukowski, a pig and a poet, is famous for his sentiment, “Don’t try.” Sometimes trying is more than we can manage, so during that year of firsts, I didn’t. I had never lost a person of such profound significance in my life before. I had no idea how to grieve. Now initial and immediate grief is not something even I, a compulsive planner, can plan for.

 

 

If you’re in the early days of grief, cut yourself some slack. Allow the holy unction of tears to offer you comfort and release; I did. There is no shame in grief and how ever one navigates it, it is truly an  individual re-creation of yourself. Rebuilding is not an easy task. I will admit, however, I am reaping the benefits of painstaking grief work.

 

 

I believe in therapy. I got my first degree in psychology and I respect my colleagues who went on to be clinicians. I have also spent a significant number of hours in a chair opposite a clinician since Rikki’s death. I was looking for someone, anyone who could make the pain stop. In retrospect, I now see, no one could.

 

 

Grief is messy. I can’t think of a single good adaptive reason for it, but grief and its many configurations of rituals are the stuff of art and healing. I took some of my son’s ashes to my favorite giant, multi-million year old boulder in the desert so I can go and be with him in a spot that is sacred to me. The first time I was there, I said a rosary and I wept. Across the expanse of my landscape, I swear I saw Rikki squatting down, very pensively looking back, as if to say, “I’m here, Momma. I’m still here.”

 

 

I felt comforted and a peace washed over me. I wept some more, but this time, from gratitude that I had him in my life for 32 years. How fierce is our love for one another, even posthumously. Perhaps we were always connected — in a universe 13.8 billion years old and our love will always be present — until the “sun falls into the sea.”

 

 

 

I send out a prayer to the Creator of my understanding for those who grieve this holiday season, for a moment, no matter how brief, or how long, of peace — and tidings of comfort and joy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

 

One never knows what will be the trigger that takes one out of months of optimal functioning to spend a few hours in angst and longing. Holidays are tough for a lot of people. The first few for me were very tough. I have my grandson every Christmas break, so I was not able to sink into despair, which was truly a temptation, during the first Christmas after my son’s death.

 

 

Louie looks to me for guidance on how to healthfully navigate the grief process. I cry. I talk about him. I allow whatever emotion in my heart is to be expressed on my face and in my voice, and then I resume my part in the living; it is where we each belong.

 

 

My son was loved by many. He had amazing friends throughout his life. I am blessed to be in touch, even if just on Facebook, with his closest friends, one of whom he chose to be the god father to his son.  One of the things I did after Rikki died after the first two years of intense and utter grief was move away from the home we last shared together. I purged things that hurt me, and I kept only those things which remind me of my pure and awesome love for my son and his for me and for life. I have items of his that I use as a sort of conduit for our spiritual connection.

 

There is nothing my son and I have in common in our new home. I think the distance from the last coordinates we shared together has been beneficial in my healing process. I can think in the new place — beyond my grief.

 

I hadn’t thought of how much of a learning curve life after loss would be, but it has been, and it is. I know what works for me, and I’m often inspired by what works for others. I am empathic with others in a way I don’t think I was before. I had always been introspective but losing my son has required a determined soul driven to wholeness and to make sense of the world again.

 

Maybe you can’t move to a new place, or maybe you don’t want to. Moving for me was the absolute right thing to do.  My true healing began in my third year after the loss of my son –and after my move. I am proud of the progress I’m making, and I’m grateful for the many, many things that and people who have brought me to this place.

 

I thought early in my grief naivete that I would grieve for a bit and there would be an endpoint.  I would rend my clothes and shroud myself for a proper time and then merge seamlessly into life again. I’ve made the gods laugh many times. Every single second since the day my son died has been double-edged. I suppose all the seconds since his death and until my own will be so.

 

 

I have been able to keep some things at bay in my new home. The aesthetics are different. I know my son would love the beauty (not the heat) of the desert, knowing this is a good conversation starter with him. I am rebuilding a relationship with my son, even posthumously.

 

Triggers…yes. I was able to forge a new relationship between my grandson and his dad’s best friend, who he appointed as Louie’s godfather. Another bittersweet moment. Spending time with them without my son highlighted two polar emotional states for me: joy and sadness, in fluctuating and rapid intervals.

 

Christmas shopping? The most wonderful time of the year? Lights, tinsel, happy children’s faces – joy – and sadness.

 

You see, I do function well in my life after four years of intense grief work.  The loosening of my grip on pain has been a process. I ache in my healing heart for my son, and I am living a full life as a whole person.

 

 

I don’t know what it feels like to have an appendage torn from my body, but I do know what it’s like to have a child torn from my life. I can’t imagine the former. The latter experience takes a toll, however, that is not always visible to the outside world.

 

 

I write in response to my emotional insights and I share in hopes that my optimism for wholeness is a welcome message to some. I ramble. I rant.  But mostly, I heal through each trigger, through each tear, through each word, and through each day.

 

Healing is possible…in fits and starts. I’ve merged back into life, older, wiser, and back on the road to self-actualization; it’s a lifelong journey.

 

 

I was honored to spark a friendship today. The two people who were brought together out of love reawakened in me a sense of continuation for my son. I traveled many years in a day. My soul is tired from the rapid cycling of intervals of joy and sadness.

 

 

The experience gave me pause for thought, however. The new place provided a tranquil detachment to process my thoughts and emotions without the walls dripping with agony. Today’s present moment brought with it a lot of epiphanies. Today I will play basketball with my grandson where I will be fully involved in play with a 10-year-old. I look forward to it.

 

I encourage you to allow your insight to fuel the recovery as you make your way to your best life. Create from your pain something beautiful as a legacy to your loved one.

 

Emotional triggers that remind us of our loss can be beneficial to our healing process. I write; therefore, he is. He is in every breath I take and every dream I pour myself into. He is still my north star.

 

 

Dedicated to Alex Gonzalez

 

 

 

 

 

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

 

Any day in life is filled with all sorts of experiences, for example, tense exchanges with shitty bosses, good camaraderie with great colleagues, laughter, tears, ad infinitum. When you’ve lost a loved one, someone with whom you shared a time in a relationship of some significance and intensity, a day in the life is infinitely many configurations of infinitely many mutable parts – like trying to catch a feather in a dust devil. Love is an abstraction, perhaps even an adaptation toward survival, with a single individual or with a collective, in my opinion.

 

Whether or not love is an adaptation, one thing is certain, however; love appears to be a need as deep as the ocean and as wide as the expanding and contracting universe, breathing in love, breathing out isolation and loneliness. Grief is like love; it is a necessary exercise in our personal development. When it hits you, you are always ill-prepared.

 

Grief is one of those life experiences that is inescapable. We each have moments of grief, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be because of the physical loss of a person. When I had cancer in the early 90s, I had a hysterectomy, and it wasn’t so much the actual organ I missed, but it was what a uterus represented, in fact, what it has represented historically to the human race: the ability to procreate.

 

I am still in grief over the loss of my son, and I disagree with those who say suffering is optional. In the early days of grief, suffering is absolutely necessary. The loss of a loved one hurts at the level of the viscera, deep into the nerve center of your blown mind. There’s a fair amount of messiness one must claw her way through.

 

Certainly, one will not sob convulsively for a lifetime, at least, that’s the goal. We must return to our lives, transformed, more insightful about ourselves and more compassionate toward others. Liberation is waiting on the other side of suffering.

 

I’ve learned a great deal about life through suffering. I learned that as with my son’s short life, and as with the lives of all who are born into this magnificent world, all things have an end date. I have found the Buddhist precept of non-attachment to be a bit easier since the loss of my son and only child. I held on so tightly to him during his life that when I lost him it was as if my heart was torn right out of my chest, and there was a gaping wound, blood gushing over the different layers of muscle and skin, and through the ragged arteries, ragged because of their violent separation from the heart.

 

Whether you believe in the existence of the soul, the pain from losing a loved one, is not just physical; it is also metaphysical. There’s a heaviness on your chest that can be truly frightening the first time you feel it. I thought I was having a heart attack, and twice I went to the emergency room to be told I has having a panic attack.

 

Your brain has to make sense of the loss, and the absence of one’s presence is felt profoundly, and since it is a new experience in your relationship with your loved one, you are temporarily aphasic as you work to make sense of someone’s non-existence. Where did he go? Why did he go? What do I do now?

 

I knew how to be in relationship with my son, with many blunders along the way, but he was here to offer me feedback in our mostly symbiotic relationship. I don’t know how to be in a relationship with a ghost, an apparition, a memory.

 

Forging a new relationship with a loved one who has passed is also necessary in my experience. Meaning comes after an unimaginable amount of work. I felt painfully misunderstood when someone said to me, “There is a reason for everything.” There was no reason for my son’s death. Certainly, there was causation, but a reason, some purpose, some lesson I needed to learn, no. Nearly three years would pass before I began to see that making meaning was my responsibility. My responsibility was to take my experience and make it meaningful, not just for me, but for others too.

 

I believe we grow in relationship through one another. I am who I am because you mirror for me the characteristics you find most complement your own, poor self-images notwithstanding, and we merge our perceptions, one into another.

 

I started a Facebook page eight months after my son died. The site is experience- and relationship-specific. I tried three different counselors early in my process, but none was adept at working with a grieving person desperate for comfort. Seeing someone in abject pain is extremely difficult, even for professionals, some who have only minimal training in grief.

 

I was desperately seeking understanding – and I was not getting it from conventional human resources. I remembered, however, a study done about the success of peer-to-peer support groups. I needed someone to talk with who knew exactly about my type of grief, and there are many types. Grief is not just grief. Some deaths have stigma attached and in some of the catch-all grief groups, some grievers fear recriminations in response to their loved one’s type of death.

 

There are many online grief groups for several types of experiences and losses. One may pick and choose from a wide variety of groups. After the Storm is specifically for parents/parent figures who have lost a child or children to addiction. The type of drug was not a consideration, but in the face of the opioid crisis, heroin, fentanyl, oxycontin, and oxycodone, a tragically growing population of parents who grieve do so because their child or children succumbed to accidental deaths from using opioids. Many who struggle with addiction have dual diagnoses, e.g. addiction and bipolar disorder. Grief is complicated; it may be a common experience, but there are many components to grief, regardless of how your loved one died.

 

Finding the right group for your loss is essential. I had attended grief groups and therapy sessions that were a complete waste of time. I left as bereft as when I first arrived. I found my way to a few online groups, but some of them were pits of despair, and I so needed some hope that I would start to feel better, that I would find some comfort, that peace was possible. I wanted desperately to return to the world, one I knew wouldn’t be the same without my son in it, but one where joy was possible again, and I wanted to offer my vision of emotional wellness and resiliency to others as much as I needed to be surrounded by people/parents who truly understood, not just the loss, but also understood the chaos that precedes the death of someone who has struggled with the disease of addiction for some time and all the emotional rigor that comes along with it.

 

Again, finding a group that fits your particular loss is very important. If you can’t find one, start one. Starting the Facebook page was the best and most proactive thing I’ve done since my son died. He did not die so I could find purpose in his death. He died, and it is my life’s work to find purpose in my experience from losing him.

 

Choking on my own tears, not being able to catch my breath from crying so violently, benching myself from life, and volitional isolation were necessary steps on my ascension from despair to hope to healing. There was always a roiling of deep emotional sludge working its way up to where impurities could be skimmed off. With things like guilt, regret, and anger sloughed away, I have been left with a joie de vivre. I admit, achieving tiny manageable meltdowns has taken a significant amount of work on my part, but I am grateful that the intensity has lessened to fewer days of chronicity. Sharing my pain with safe others and listening to them share their pain, has been the most healing thing I’ve done for myself – and by extension – it has illustrated to others, internationally, their own ability to grow through their pain, and to express their utter heartbreak unabashedly and unashamedly .

 

Suffering is optional? Suffering is a natural experience in the human condition. I was arrogant to think I would escape a loss so great and thus escape suffering. There are days when I suffer, not by choice; there are days when everything is a trigger and my loss comes hurtling into my chest and it knocks me on my ass, and all of me is in agony; those times don’t last quite as long anymore. The first year and a half of my grief process, agony was my homeostasis. I went through the motions of living, but I felt empty and dead inside.

 

In the third year after Rikki died, I started living again. I reinvigorated long-time dreams and brought them to fruition. I am allowing myself to be of service to others. I am not alone in my grief or in this world. I seek community, not just a grieving one either. I seek community in several circles. I ask myself, Where will I be of most value to a person or a group.

 

My purpose in life is two-fold: one, I must be responsible for my personal growth into a person of substance, and two, I must be responsible for having a compassionate approach to all living things. I didn’t learn these things to give meaning to my son’s death. I learned these things by working my grief process. One day I woke up and asked myself, what contribution am I making to my world?

Grief will not be the end of me.

 

My heart has been transformed through the process and it has been placed back into my chest, and it is beating strongly again, and my meltdowns are tiny even though the loss remains monumental. I have found my footing again. I have not completed the grief journey, however; only death will end that journey. Until then, I walk proudly and resolutely in my life, hand in hand with my now tolerable pain and occasional suffering. My life’s task is to take my suffering and re-purpose it into something useful, something beneficial to others.

 

At no time in my life am I exempt from suffering. When it comes, I must navigate its complexities — I must welcome its accompaniment for the duration of my physical life and I must dance to the dirge as well  as to the music of celebration.

 

I’ll put a pebble in my shoe

And watch me walk (watch me walk)

I can walk

“By my Side” — Godspell