Grief to Gratitude

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

https://centering.org/grief-digest-articles/coping-through-christmas/

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

Photo by J. Galione

 

The lights are twinkling on our Christmas tree – and I am thinking about him. I am thinking about him as an infant, him as a toddler, about him as an adolescent, a teenager, a man, a father – my son. There is a tolerable wistfulness in my heart and my head says, “run with it.” And so, I will.

 

I finished reading David Kessler’s new book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. The book was a pinnacle reading experience for me. He is both a professional grief expert — and a fellow griever. He also lost a son. Honestly, if I never write another word about grief, I would rest easy knowing the apex of grief, for lack of a better word, rescue has been written.

 

I’m an early riser. I like the solitude I have while my retired husband is sleeping. I’ve always been this way, however, since Rikki died, I need more solitude than I used to require. We have days and days of social activity – even as we carry our grief; and there is a soul fatigue at the end of each day, that requires tears or something which will distract you, dependent upon where you happen to be.

 

Grief is a major hindrance in my life. I know it’s part of who I am now – and taking time, for me, for a meltdown is never convenient, but I still have them on occasion. In the early days of grief, I had no control over my emotions. As a control freak, in grief I’ve learned I can’t control everything, just one of the many valuable lessons I’ve learned through my grief process. Life is much richer now that I have let go of the reins I’d attached to people, places, and things. There has been a revolution in my worldview for which I am grateful.

 

I miss my son and there is never a second that goes by when he is not on my mind. The love you have binds you into an eternal relationship with the person you’ve lost and with the person’s soul, energy, spirit, or holy memory.

 

Deep, right? We each have metaphors and analogies that comfort us and it’s important that we bring them out when we need to get through an experience or a day. Socializing is something that has come easily to me. I love bars with loud music and lots of people, for example. Of course, I also love my quiet and contemplative time. In early grief it can be difficult to be out there with others because a meltdown is always two seconds away. Trust me, I forced myself to be out there too early. I went to church two days after my son died. I went out to dinner with friends three weeks after he died. I subsequently did not participate in social experiences for several months after my forced public appearances.

 

Going to the grocery store where we used to shop was excruciating. I couldn’t go in and so, I just sat in my car and wept until I could see to drive home. There is no shame in losing it when we reach that low point, to do so is natural.

 

Maybe some people are naturally stoic; I thought I was. As life would have it, you really have no idea what you would do in another’s experience, and for that matter, in your own – until it happens. Life is one giant exercise in improvisation.

 

I used to think there was a plan for my life, one that I had to wait until I was fully self-actualized to see, but that turned out to not be true. We each must create our lives post-loss because, although we’ve lost our cherished love one, life is still precious and worth the work it takes to create or co-create.

 

I still have days of sadness and sometimes I just take the day to feel and to weep, but I now have more days when I am excited about the work I am doing to sculpt myself into a person who can be of service to others. If I am going to have to be in grief, I’m going to transform it into something that can help others find peace with the ability to self-soothe through the arts or through being of service — however you envision this.

 

I say good morning to my son every single day. I say goodnight to him too. I find myself saying to his spirit, “Oh my God, Rikki, you would so laugh at this!” I’m not crazy; I just have an ongoing relationship and connection with my son’s spirit. There must be some evolutionary purpose for grief. I just haven’t researched the literature yet; I was too deep in my process to think about verifiable answers to rational questions. I was too bereft to do anything but hold tight to my pain and ask myself the grueling existential question.

 

Why? Why? Why?

 

January 22^nd will be here very soon; it is the four-year anniversary of my precious son’s death. One can never adequately prepare for the death of a cherished loved one – . We don’t think about death unless we are given the time to say goodbye, like with a terminal illness, for example. I knew my son was sick and that he would probably die in his disease, but I held on ‘til his very last breath. I had hope despite the visual degradation of his formerly healthy body – worn down by addiction.

 

I haven’t planned anything. I love to go to Joshua Tree National Park and take pictures of the amazing rock formations, big giant boulders, beautiful cacti and the majestic Joshua Trees, and an occasional ocotillo with its beautiful red blossoms. I like to smell the fresh air and watch the birds soar above the giant boulders. I love the peace I find when I’m there. Maybe, I’ll take myself out to lunch. Maybe I’ll weep. I don’t know.

 

I leave my Christmas tree lights on all day, and I turn out the lights at night, so I can watch them flicker from red, to green, to blue, and I think about my son who loved the holidays, and I miss him so much, and the ache with which I have become familiar, rises to the surface of my heart – a photon elucidating my experience and I latch on to the tiny speck of light in the brevity of a grief pang.

 

The pain is not meant to be a constant. Grief will be expressed in many ways as we live our lives. One day grief might be a day of tears, the next, a day of determination to reach a goal, and grief can fuel your vision to fruition.

 

I hope on January 22^nd, 2020, I will be able to keep moving forward. Afterall, it’s the lives of our loved ones, not their deaths, that continue to bring smiles to our faces. Memories are sacred – and we can choose to remember the ones that hurt us, or we can choose to work through them, so it is the light we are working in, and not the darkness of chronic pain.

 

 

 

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

Grief changes a person; it has changed me in magnificent ways, with an awakening of how much I am capable of great big giant accomplishments. On the other hand, grief has rocked me to my very core, and along the way some things are still recovering from the devastation of losing my son. My soul and my ego are bruised. I am careful in what I present here, and even though I am very vulnerable and open on this blog, there are two things I choose to not have on my page, and those, of course, are politics and religion. If there is one thing that brings us together and helps us to find common ground, it is that we all grieve at some point. I want to keep that sacred camaraderie.

 

I don’t want to talk about religion because there are too many landmines. Commentary on cosmologies is fascinating reading, and for me, the academic leads me to a spiritual connection with whom I call God. The academic path makes sense to me, and I generally have tiny or giant paradigm shifts the more I research things like culture, socialization, systems theory, theology, and disciplines that continue to be born in great minds.

 

I just want to illustrate how faith in one’s understanding of God goes through several metamorphoses after a horrible loss, but I am not advocating for any one tradition. I am on rocky ground spiritually right now.

 

I grew up with Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic influences. I had a tenuous relationship with God, and I continue to have a tempestuous relationship with God. I have vacillated between rock solid belief in the Divine and an agnosticism that tortures me; it is an uncomfortable thorn in my side, as constant as grief is after losing someone you dearly love.

 

Doubt is no friend to agnostics.

 

When you love someone, who is dying from a disease, hopelessness can cast you to your knees. I did the only thing I’d ever been taught to do during a crisis (and there were many crises); I prayed to a God I had seen no evidence of as a child in a home rife with domestic violence. I tried to be a good Christian – for my mother who spent an unimaginable amount of time praying for her children.

 

I did the same for my son who was dying from the disease of addiction. He was woefully sick, and I prayed. I took a rosary class and learned to say the rosary. I begged the God of my understanding to heal my son, to make him feel whole, to help him to love himself, to kick his addiction; but that didn’t happen.

 

So, what do you do when your anemic wineskin has been oozing in micro drops for 57 years and has very little, if any, reserve to carry you through the levels of doubt as you make your way toward healing from your loss and into spiritual maturity? My world has been rocked for most of my life, definitely all of my childhood. Trying to believe in a God who simply was not there while I, our mother and my siblings suffered, was just impossible.

 

I would have a Come to Jesus Moment several years later, after I took a Bible as Lit class at a community college I attended for many years. My relationship with God is rocky, at best, and angry at worst. When you have been taught about unwavering faith, Job, Joseph the carpenter, and about the provisions of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God, and if you could only believe with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul, and you want so desperately to believe that nothing bad will ever happen to you, and then something bad does, what happens to your faith?

 

Simon Wiesenthal, who was a holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, architect, and writer, said in his book, Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, that many Jewish people in the camps during Hitler’s inhumane rule said, “God is on leave.” The victims of the concentration camps were tortured with brutality and  the conceived in the rabid and animalistic imagination of the SS. Their methods of torture are inconceivable to the vast majority of humanity.

 

One can only conclude, God is on leave.

 

I felt this way during the most chaotic period of my son’s illness and after his death; my wineskin is devoid of any spiritual sustenance, and I am lost without an anchor. I think that many people in acute grief walk away from their spiritual base. I have. I never had a strong relationship with religion or with God, except the judgment part, that  I got down with a vengeance.  Thank heavens I came to my senses. Life is so much better when you have the ability to love others, all others.

 

I don’t know what the solution to losing one’s faith is; I have to reconcile my heart with my head. When you lose someone, in order that you have some relief from the immense pain, you intellectualize the loss, break it down into events and sublimate the emotions that fit the magnitude of the event because they are too much to bear on some days. And sometimes one never finds her way back to the God of her understanding and they still live rich and beautiful lives.

 

Unanswered prayers are tough to ignore. We can’t all be Job. I am working my way to a relationship with the God of my understanding. If I’m being honest, I’ve never had one before. I’ve always wanted to truly believe, but in my world, there was no evidence of God. Doubting Thomas is one of my favorite characters in the Judeo-Christian Bible because I so relate to his skepticism. I am a skeptic about many things in life and if there is no empirical evidence to support a proposition, I find it easy to dismiss. Life is too short to waste time on things which don’t have proof to back up their feasibility.

 

See, I lost my faith when I saw my son dying from addiction, and I am desperately seeking a way to a God who will comfort me on days when the intensity of my pain comes back full force. Not everyone needs an anchor and I don’t know if everyone has a God-shaped hole in his or her heart, but I know that I do. Maybe it was conditioning or the modeling by my terribly broken parents on their knees begging God for enough to feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads, that makes me need to believe in the miracles they did provide for us, which is not lost on me.

 

My son is gone, and I need a comforter I can lean into. I’m doing the best I can in all areas of my life, and save one, my spirituality, I am thriving. I live in a place that is so beautiful it takes my breath away. I was in the cholla garden in Joshua Tree Park and I was telling my atheist husband that, for me, I can’t help but be in awe of a God, an intelligent designer, not a God of judgment, not the wrathful God, but the one described in 1st John, “God is love,” and I try to remember that, and that “all things passeth away.”

 

So, emotional pain is temporary.

 

When I close my eyes and I hear the wind beneath the wings of a seagull in rhythm with the waves and the rotation of the earth, I feel God. I’m not a zealot about anything except for knowledge, but even knowledge has failed me as much as religion has on occasion. I seek wisdom now.

 

The most confounding and affirming words in the Judeo-Christian Bible are, “God is love.”

 

In my grief, that’s the God I’m limping toward.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

 

The weather is going to have us snowed in for the Thanksgiving Day. We were disappointed at first, but now, we’re planning a fun time with just the two of us and our cats (who will also get down on some tryptophan). We always have a contingency plan; life oftentimes requires one.

 

We didn’t grow up around snow and so for us it is still a marvelous spectacle to behold; it also helps that it lasts only a day or two. We have Scrabble and old episodes of Star Trek: Next Generation, and we have each other. I’m thinking it sounds like a perfectly romantic day with my wonderful husband.

 

Living in the high desert, we don’t get a lot of visitors from our former hometown, which is only three hours away. Two of my husband’s former students have been up and we were so honored. One of them helped us move here. We were so blessed to have so many people help us move – I was a bit overwhelmed. You live in a house for 15 years and your stuff multiplies exponentially.

 

I’m glad I went through things carefully. I’m also grateful for our helpers. We had some who were compassionate and some who were pragmatic and just started chucking stuff we hadn’t seen in years. Both sets of helpers were beneficial.

 

I still have several  of my son’s things, his artwork that tells so much, old journal writings, a calendar from the year he died with the Virgen Guadalupe that I got for him, and clothes I will never part with. He loved his Mexican iconography, so much of his artwork is styled after Dia de los Muertos symbols, and on his t-shirts were always images of scientific imagery and political phrases he could respect. The things you choose to hold on to when your loved one has passed are curious, but understandable, if you’ve ever lost someone with whom you had an intensely close relationship. I have the last cup he drank from on the day he died and a fork he used a week before he died, safely tucked away in boxes marked sacred.

 

There’s no rhyme or reason for the things we keep. I even kept some broken things and fully intend on getting them fixed – someday. The only thing I know for sure is just the thought of parting with them hurts, so, I hold on to them. My thought is, his son will want them someday. I’m aware I’m two months shy of the four-year anniversary of his death, but talismans are a comfort to my grieving heart. I take them out and look at them from time to time. I put my face in his t-shirts and I smell his aftershave, the laundry soap he loved, and his wine-flavored cigarillos. I have an altar I put up for him every year for his birthday. I don’t for his angelversary anymore; I don’t want to remember that day. I want to remember the day he was born and all the milestones in between his life and his death. I am beyond grateful I got to have him with me for 32 years, still not long enough. As grieving parents say often, the death of a child is unnatural, out of sync with reason, and “I was supposed to go first.”

 

I didn’t, so, I soldier on, changed, less encumbered by things that used to bother me. I figure if I can lose my only child who I adored more than life itself, what more is there that can hurt me? Despite my broken, but healing heart, there has been liberation and transformation.

I love the song, “Seagull”, by Bad Company. There is a soaring seagull and the artist has anthropomorphized it as having wisdom beyond human capability. I was in free fall when my son died, scouting a soft landing before I hit the ground – unparachuted. I have soared a few times in the last year, since our move to the high desert. There is silence here where I can grieve without distractions. When I have meltdowns, they don’t last very long, and even if they do, I still can function optimally.

 

The path to healing has been a trip, like in the Grateful Dead kind of way, and in duration. What does one do when she’s all cried out and a life of emotional paralysis is not the future she wants for herself? She changes. She grows. She finds pleasure in life again. The absence of your loved one’s presence is always there. You just learn to be a different person in a different world, one where your loved one is not physically present, and as much as that hurts, there is still a full life that requires your attention and your active participation.

 

I’m certainly not saying that grief ends, but as someone told me in my first year of grief, it gets less intense. I have resumed life with new tools; I still have some that are broken, some are steely sharp, and some no longer serve me or anyone else, so I am discarding them as they rise from the bottom to the top of my toolbox. I, for example, am laying down my ax.

 

The first three years I was in absolute despair. How could my son be gone? Why? Why? Why? I sobbed every day for the first year and a half. But as time has passed, I’ve done the grief work and the viscerality of my emotions has also lessened. Some days I think statistics would be easier, and I bled, sweated and wept through statistics! Life was just really difficult to navigate in the early days. I don’t share my tears with just anyone; it’s just the way I was raised. Daddy was a Korean War Marine; that’s all I need to say about that. I know how to buck up when in polite company, and I know how to let the dams burst when they are overflowing with tears. One must do what one must do to get through it.

 

You learn quite a bit about yourself when someone you love has died. If you’d never lived the examined life prior to the death of your loved one, the insight that comes with grit and gruel can catapult you into a transformation you will be proud of, if you work your process.

 

There is a meme that circulates on social media that says, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is all you have.” My husband says, when I am beating myself up for days when I am not feeling very strong, that it takes a strong person to live through this tremendous loss and still have days when all is well with my soul. He’s right; I know.

 

I haven’t had a good cry day for some time now. I believe it’s long overdue. I will schedule it for after our grandson goes home from his winter break with us.

 

Until then I take the next indicated step into my long, strange trip, and sometimes, I will fly.

 

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

For our tightly wound string of tangled lights

Here we go again. This is the fourth Christmas without my son. Our grandson will grace us with his company this year in our wintry desert home. We’re expecting snow (in southern California) over the next couple of days. The snow doesn’t last long, just long enough to utter a brrr, take silly pictures and stand in awe of nature’s gift of a white Christmas. I grew up in San Diego, where we made sandpersons instead of snowpersons.

I was out raking up the perpetually falling leaves from the giant maples in our front yard as a wind advisory was alerted for the next 24 hours and so, my leaf piles have been blown about and will need raking again and again until the trees are bare for the winter.

The circle of life.

Lifecycles are chockful of experiences. People come and go throughout our lifespan, both family and friends. For everything there is a season and a purpose under heaven. Some people wear out their welcome by repeat offending old behavior learned from their families, much of which worked only in their family system. When they leave our lives it is a welcome departure.

No one should spend special days dodging bullets from those who choose to hold on to every slight – from first blush of a memory to those more recent ones. No one should have to wonder  about their wild misinterpretations about tones and looks. Some wear their hostile worldviews like a misappropriated and cumbersome parka on a light sweater day, immobilized by the past.

For years I refused to go to my family’s holiday festivities. Old wounds have never healed for some, by choice, of course. No, we didn’t have the best childhood. No one escapes sadness or tragedy. I’m hopeful enough to want everyone to have had at least some happy memories from their childhood, even if you had to go and make them by yourself or with someone else’s family.

Mom and Daddy were not wealthy. Daddy worked hard, sometimes three jobs at a time to make sure he had Christmas gifts for his children. Mom told me the other day that we didn’t know it, but he would drive to where the Christmas trees that didn’t sell were and pick one up for our holiday. He and Mom would decorate it Christmas Eve night while visions of sugar plums danced in our heads.

My parents gave us magic each year and we knew Santa was going to bring us something we always wanted because we were so good from the culmination of Thanksgiving dinner to December 24^th. I am the family klutz. One of Daddy’s, among his many, less desirable traits, was the bestowing of offensive monikers, and mine was, “If you had a brain you’d be dangerous.” Sweetest man who ever lived, right?

I was an impressionable child. I’d read about Clara Barton and I’d want to be a nurse. I’d read about Abigail Adams and I wanted to be a president’s wife, because back in my generation, becoming wives and mothers was a cultural norm. One particular holiday, I watched the Christmas Eve parade and the marching band with its baton twirlers. I, of course, just had to have a baton.

On Christmas morning I opened it first. I began marching through the living room to the beat of my own drum major and flung the baton over my head where it landed squarely and with a bang on the top of my head. “Princess Grace” – my father said rather dismissively as Mom ran to get the ice pack while I cried — more from shame than from pain.

He made our lives hell on most days, but every so often, he’d find some tiny thread of kindness in him and it seemed like he would try to make up for the day before all in one fell swoop. Being children who were starving for loving attention, we would lap it up.

When you’re a child, you are sort of stuck where the stork drops you and all of heaven holds its breath hoping chance is on your side and you land where there is mostly love. We had love when they could catch a break from ancient ghosts that still had hold of them. We survived, maybe with scuffed up hearts and skinned up knees, but we survived.

Mom’s got a pipe dream that all her children will be able to sit in the same room together for a holiday meal without tension or having to dodge bullets from the one who chooses to hold tight to the ammo. I wish I could give Mom her heart’s desire, but I can be responsible only for my behavior. I cannot wish someone to be happy and if he or she chooses to build an ever-higher wall rather than a door, I wish the self-fulfilling prophet, a solid one.

I got lucky as far as in-laws go. I have only one with whom I am in relationship. She is a kind-hearted, queen of a woman. She knows us all and she loves us anyhow, even the outlier. How do we get through the holidays? One works every holiday, one and his beautiful wife will be with us and Mom, weather permitting – and one chooses to lick ancient wounds with a partner who also has anger management issues.

Americans seem to find their way to estrangement rather easily, hence the many books on the topic, particularly during the holiday season (and recall my “Not Choking Down the Turkey” from last year).

Herein lies the rub, apron strings are meant to be broken, parental, sibling, exes, adult children, and ghosts that no longer benefit us. Everything in life is a gift, people, experiences, wins and losses, loved ones who come and go, and loved ones who leave us for the next world.

Goodbyes are part of life; they smart sometimes, and sometimes they leave holes in your soul, but life goes on, and as long as we’re here, we may as well pick the winning team. Choose your friends and family of choice wisely. If your family members are unable to burst through old shit, let them go.

My son was always the kindest person at the holiday table when we were so inclined to nosh together. He loved the holidays while the rest of us hoped we’d suddenly come down with a 24-hour, highly contagious typhoid strain — for a legitimate reason to ditch the terse convivialities.

Family can be a true downer, a thorn in the side, a fly in the ointment, a targeted missile, or it can be a gangly girl with a dream of being a baton twirler and a lump on her noggin, a damaged father going through the garbage for a magical tree full of lights for his desperately hopeful children, with his mother’s antique angel atop, making all the rest of the things best left to the past march dutifully into the part of the brain that can be overridden by the sparkle in our mother’s eyes when she saw her children experiencing something that was always scarce in their home.

Joy may have been scarce, but we had it from time to time. My heart grieves the loss of my son every day and more deeply during special occasions I would love to share with him, but I find joy in the anticipation and the arrival of his son, our precious grandson for whom we will make magic.

For those who celebrate the winter solstice, the birth of the King, or another day with family and friends, may you have warm fuzzies with those who can let go for a day and who are capable of spreading joy instead of disharmony.

Peace from my family to yours.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

I’m an over-preparer. I pack for every contingency. I’m practical that way. So, when my son died, I approached grief the way I approach everything – very pragmatically. I wanted so much to outrun grief and get to the finish line where life was magnificent again, as quickly as humanly possible. My head was practicing the art of sleight of hand with my heart. I thought, “I’ve got this. I am not breakable, and damn it, I will survive.” I really did think I could manage my grief on a schedule in the early days following Rikki’s death. Denial is no stranger to my process. There are many tributaries that bleed into the different metaphorical arteries of my heart which I have not crossed yet. Grief flows through each channel and recirculates itself in many revolutions. I will get there when I get there.

 

Grief is a new layer of skin, soft and vulnerable. There is truly a place where having the ability to be vulnerable becomes an urgent requirement, a place where all people meet on the same playing field, playing different positions, expressing and interpreting their grief in their own unique way.

 

If you had told me one day, I’d be better, not over it, just better, even a little bit, I would not have believed you. Four years will have passed in January since I lost my son. Four years ago, without qualification, I was a hot mess. I cried loudly, sorrowfully, and was utterly inconsolable. The first three weeks will always be a blur. I raced through the planning of the celebration of his life, did every single thing that needed to be done. I even wrote the eulogy which my husband, with a few modifications, presented beautifully. I ordered flowers, scheduled the venue, I mean, everything. I got on Facebook and found all Rikki’s friends and got in touch with his childhood friends and made sure everything was PERFECT. I did not understand the concept of being on autopilot until those first few weeks immediately following his death.

 

I cried during those weeks too, but there was a compulsion to take care of all the public rituals so I could get to the business of grieving. I had never lost a child; he was my only one. After my husband returned to work from family leave and I was alone in the house, after all the casseroles stopped coming, and life had returned to normal for my friends and family, I exhaled and cried until I couldn’t breathe. I screamed into my pillow. I wailed and I ached. I slept – a lot. I thought that was going to be my emotional state for the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong, I still have days when life is just so heavy I can’t shoulder it and grief at the same time. I have triggers that cause me to feel that rapier in my heart – even now.

 

I allowed my historically emotionally contained self to hemorrhage onto pages, first for myself and then for others. I created After the Storm, a closed Facebook page for parents who have lost a child(ren) to addiction eight months after Rikki died. We are an intimate and powerful group. I am indebted to them for traveling this earth-shaking journey with me. I created Grief to Gratitude three years after my son’s death. Three years is a long time to have been entombed in my grief. Time flew by as I emerged from that sacred space of contemplative grief – where I had been germinating, getting stronger for my reentry.

 

I have this image of a cabin in the woods. There is no sound, not even from the babbling brook, reminiscent of a Thomas Kinkaid painting. There’s an abundance of light in the cabin, a nice wood burning stove keeping it warm and cozy. There is scant furniture, but what there is was designed for comfort. Each item in the cabin is like a worry stone in effect. I reach for the little globe with the dried flowers Rikki bought for me one year at the thrift store. He was only a little boy and he was so thoughtful already. I hold the globe to my lips, and I kiss it and say, “I miss you, Honey.”

 

I sit in the rocking chair; it’s like the one I had when he was just a tiny infant and I would rock him to sleep and sing gently to him, “Goodnight my Someone” from the Music Man. He would fall fast asleep on my chest and all was right with the world. I hold the little globe close to my heart and I hum our song and I sob, great big convulsive sobs. I’m looking through the windows and being voyeuristic about my own grief. I watch this woman in the cabin as if she were someone else, but I am she, and it is I who has a private place where my grief does not have to be wrapped up prettily for public viewing.

 

You see, even four years down the road, my cabin in the woods is a necessity. I must go there from time to time. I have moved forward from the worst day of my life, to days when I see a meme with an image of a songbird creating little tufts of breath that float away from her, and I weep from the awareness that life is beautiful. From the day I lost my son to this very second, there is not a moment that is not bittersweet. My son was the first one I wanted to send that meme to – but I can’t.

 

The death of a loved one is a daily adjustment.

 

I have more excellent days than I have cabin days now. I live in the beautiful Joshua Tree desert where there is only beauty and a fossil record of the earth’s formation that is staggering. How, even in grief, can I not be awestruck? I wanted to share the rest of my life with my son. I wanted to watch him grow old with a life of mirth and victory. But that didn’t happen, and I’m left with a spirit that will forever be tinged with grief. I think of my new normal as having a new color added to our visual spectra – that now shades and contrasts every remaining emotion I have, to be dually experienced, an optical illusion, if you will. Now you see it; now you don’t.

 

I have a new stratum in my own personal development, a ribbon in the sky, a feather on the wind, a perpetual ache, even when I soar in life. I am grateful for where I am now, of course the obvious, at this point, shouldn’t have to be explained, but for the sake of those who are in the early days of grief, there is not a single thought in which my son is not. And the bottom-line is the earth still rotates on its own axis, each area having its moment when the sun is more or less accessible and then a season of the sun’s merciful renewal. The same thing is true of grievers. We have our moments in the deepest, darkest, and temporarily inescapable despair; absolutely something we must go through in our own way. I encourage you to not compare your grief process to someone else’s. Rejoining the present moment took me nearly three years in real time. Others may have had a shorter duration by choice or by necessity, and some will take longer. I encourage every griever (and truly every person) to seek professional help, someone to help you navigate your process.

 

My son was sick for many years and I thought I had ample opportunity to grieve before he died. I thought I had taken all the steps, so I had only to roll up my sleeves and dive right into grief, wrestle with it, beat it down, and then come up the undisputed champion griever of the world! But I didn’t, and I haven’t. Every day I make it through is double-edged, a victory and resignation.

 

I accept that my son is gone. I accept and acknowledge all the events that led to his death. I accept all the ways I was imperfect during our time together. And I accept that resignation is not necessarily a bad thing. Facing reality for me, the first time I threw up my hands and said, Okay, this is my life now, my Kafkaesque frozen sea inside me began to melt.

 

The ease or difficulty with which I have healed is equal in proportion to the work I have done in my process; the ability to share it with others is a gift of the highest order. Sharing has also given me the opportunity to invite others into my warm and safe cabin.

 

If you had told me four years ago, I would be fully alive again, I would have bucked. I fought against grief so hard because it hurt so much to take even a small step into the new world where my son was not. When I surrendered, it was mind-numbing and chronic pain for some time, and after the first year I’d had time to writhe in my grief until I had developed the strength to pull myself out and fight for my life again, to create, to co-create, and to relish the days I have left.

 

 

ee cummings said it so simply and yet so accurately, my son is wherever I am; I carry [him] in [my] heart. He is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and he is in the place where all things become sacred. I go there often, and I retrieve those things which bring me closer to healing and I share them with you.

 

Your lived experience may have something to help another person navigate her or his process more efficiently.

 

I want to strongly encourage you to pick up David Kessler’s FINDING MEANING: THE SIXTH STAGE OF GRIEF; it is an important book for anyone who grieves, and so, for everyone. I am blessed to have found my way to it. I am comforted by his absolute understanding of the process, and how he rationally and sensitively explains our common experiences with the death of someone we have invested our hearts and souls in for very long or short periods of time.

 

Find something that you can pour your passion into once you find your footing in the world again.

 

 

 

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

I used to be chipper, nauseatingly positive, and I used to exude joy – even after a very difficult childhood. I am resilient. I have also just resigned myself to having lost my son, my precious only child, the love of my life. There are wrinkles around my eyes, and I look battle fatigued. Loving someone who struggles, hardcore, unto death, with addiction is a constant battle. You fight with the circumstance and you fight with your loved one. I can hear the anger and frustration in my voice as I remember the desperation with which I fought for my son. When begging, pleading and tears didn’t work, I resorted to desperate anger. I wanted to shake him and scream at him to WAKE UP because he would die if he didn’t. He’s been gone almost four years now. The time has passed too quickly. I think about when he was little and I used to kiss his forehead and leave my lipstick on it. I did it a few times when he was an adult and it always elicited an, “Oh Momma, I’m not seven anymore!”

The things you remember when you’ve lost a child are random, painful sometimes and other times they make you chuckle. In the beginning of the grief cycle, the emotional shifts are bipolar with no respite in between. How does one go on after such a significant loss? Significant doesn’t adequately describe the devastation in your life.

I remember weeping and truly wailing after my son died. I’d double over in physical pain and just sob until I couldn’t breathe. I had no idea one could be in such tremendous pain and survive it, but I have.

Healing is tireless work, and it is work. For anyone who has lost a loved one to death by any mechanism, her world is rocked to its core and rebuilding afterward is a tremendous undertaking. I believe that losing a child, limb of your limb, heart of your heart – is quite possibly the worst emotional pain a person can endure.

We carried our children in our bodies for nine months. If a child is fortunate to have been born to a loving father, much time is invested in raising well-adjusted children. Adoptive parents make the monumental choice to love a child who needs a stable and loving home and they reconfigure the entire trajectories of their lives. We love our children with every fiber of our being, and beyond that, we would give our lives to save them from harm.

When the physical dependence on a substance, alcohol, heroin, fentanyl (by choice or by accident), or meth takes over your child’s life, love truly does hurt. There’s love and there’s terror. For those reading this, you know intimately what those two emotions feel like  —  simultaneously.

On my son’s good days, I would rejoice and lap it up. He tried to get well. He went to rehab a few times. He started seeing a therapist. He tried to not use heroin. He tried to not drink. He went to 12-step meetings a few times. The one thing that people who don’t have a clue about addiction don’t understand is an addict doesn’t want to be an addict. Would you? Their bodies become slaves to the effects of the drugs/alcohol and they feel as if they will die without them. Withdrawals from drugs and alcohol can be pretty gnarly, frightening, and even physically painful.

People who have never loved an addict don’t understand how much goes into our grief process: utter despair, regret about the emotional tempests that were engaged in daily, and that’s when they were in touch with you, as so many isolate themselves out of a crippling senses of shame. They may frustrate you to the ends of your frayed nerves because your only desire, your only wish, your only dream, and your desperate prayers to the God of your understanding are for them to heal from the emotional wounds that made them use in the first place, and that they be healed, in all ways possible, from the cruel disease of addiction.

When you’ve exhausted all resources and you begin to see the physical effects of their drugs of choice, unless all the stars align for them, they will die in their disease, but not before the drug has apprehended their brains.

I know. I watched my son kill himself for ten years. He spiraled himself into congestive heart failure and cirrhosis. I watched his health decline to the point I said to myself, “Sweet Jesus, you’re going to make me bury my son.” My faith tradition is as decimated as is everything else in my life. The landmine I’d hoped to miss, I’d hoped my son would miss blew our understanding of what was right in the world clear out of the water and hurled us into a maelstrom. The apples do not fall far from the tree. One of my many regrets is that I was not a good mom. Certainly, I had my moments when I excelled, but I was as broken as my son by events in our developmental years, years that made the difference between self-love and self-loathing.

I believe the gateways to addiction, the things that cause our children to make the initial choice to use are emotional, physical, and socialized. I would argue that there is a spiritual component too, although some would disagree.

There is some great research being done into possible causation for addiction, some genetic, and then some, epigenetic, i.e. the transmission of secondary trauma, the probability someone will have addictive tendencies because of levels of cortisol in the body, a stress hormone that may cause a person to self-soothe using substances rather than having the developed skill of being able to do that with breathing, self-expression, and perhaps a spiritual component that helps him or her have the restraint to say no to self-destruction. Healthy coping skills are modeled, and when they are not, be prepared to welcome another generation of adults who are broken.

First, let me say, I am not an expert in the field of psychology, and certainly not with only a Bachelor of Science degree, but what I do have is first-hand knowledge of a life with historical trauma. I have a childhood rife with addiction and abuse. I can speak to my lived experience, and now, I can speak to the effects of the trauma my son endured in childhood and in his most significant relationships, trauma that he felt could only be comforted by numbing with drugs and alcohol.

How do you grieve not just the loss of your precious child, and not feel the relief too when the battle is over? I miss my son more than there are words with which to express my utter despair of having lost him, and it has taken me nearly four years to admit that even with my tremendous loss, the battle has also ended, my son is now at peace, and I am working toward healing myself, my entire self.

I’m not sure what I believe religiously or spiritually, but I have a sense my son is very much alive in a heaven-like place, a place where I will see him again, and even more, I believe I still feel him, and whether or not that is likened to an eternal love for him, I feel his presence in my daily life. I still talk to him. I kiss his picture. I am very much in touch with his spirit.

Fortunately, my son and I were able to work through a plethora of issues before he died. We cried together. I answered his questions honestly. I apologized for my part in his poor self-image. He forgave me. I forgave him, although he never needed to apologize.  He is the child I created. His biological father was a non-entity in his life, and now he is one in mine. A child needs two well-adjusted parents to thrive in his or her life; without that it’s a problematic childhood which bleeds into a problematic adult life.

I’m not saying all people with addictive tendencies came from challenging homes, because surprisingly some come through their tempestuous childhoods with not even an inkling of the desire/need to use. What I am saying is some are not so fortunate.

Grief is complicated and multi-faceted. The ability to work through it, and again, it is work, is incremental, randomly cyclical, and sometimes the most diminutive step forward is extraordinarily difficult, like jumping from one cliff to the next with no one on the other side to pull you up over the edge where you hang precariously. Grief is a solitary journey. Therapists, clergy, friends, and family have no effect on what you must go through in order to heal.

There are no words of comfort. If you’re fortunate enough to have a strong faith tradition, you may find some comfort there, but if you’re like me, a flailing spiritual being tossed about by the slightest shift of wind, the process takes longer, and you are out in the tempest on a flimsy raft with zero visibility crying out for relief from the most intense pain of your life.

For those who love someone who struggles violently with addiction, the process is conflictual, grief and relief. How can you feel relief? There is guilt associated with the exhalation after several years of chaos, but at some point, and in some way, your logic overrides your pain and you can see the culmination of a long battle with your child, for your child, and for your very own survival, and there is relief.

There are success stories from people who have lost a child(ren). I am one. I will never be the same person I was before my son died, and in some ways this a very good thing, but in other ways, the certainty of balance in my life has been shaken off its fulcrum.

I’m still picking up pieces of myself from the rubble of the implosion.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

My hair is blue. I am 57 years old, and my hair is blue. I also got a new tattoo. I got drunk with some friends a few months ago at a party. I hadn’t been to a party since Rikki died, a little over two months shy of the four-year anniversary. I can’t remember the last time I laughed a loud and raucous guffaw. My wings for scouting are weak from having no place to land.

There’s a part of me I hold back from the world. I think that’s true for all who grieve. After we’ve bled all over those who love us enough to stop the hemorrhage of early grief, we must set them free. If you’ve been fortunate enough to have someone with whom you could do this, you are blessed.

I mentioned a woman I know who lost a son, and who, sadly, allowed bitterness to be the stage in which she froze. I am not bitter. I still keep a healthy distance, however, between the griever and the one who so desperately needs to be back in the world again, with full participation.

Life waits for no one. The future rolls out before us in every passing second, and those seconds are precious. I sometimes forget this. I assign myself to places where I know I don’t belong, places that will, if I don’t get out, pull me into a life of resigned dissatisfaction. I have done this since Rikki died. I’m desperate to find a place where grief is not the center of my universe.

I have not found such a place yet.

I know fellow grievers feel this dislocation at some level dependent upon where they are in their grieving process. The world has changed as we knew it before the loss of our loved one(s). I haven’t found a place where I can snuggle into and feel safe and protected from any more pain. Death is a certainty now. If those closest to our hearts can die then the world is no longer a place where we escape from visceral pain. Maybe we get to a place where we can rebuild, but even after all this time, I’m still fumbling toward wholeness.

As a mother who lost her only child, I wrestle with being whole and never getting there – no matter how hard I try. How have I gotten this far? I’ve always been double-minded. My brain is a range of rolling hills with spastic ideas darting here and there; sometimes they are impossible to gather into cohesion. Since I lost Rikki I am consistently inconsistent. I straddle the fence on everything. I’m searching for a place my Soul can rest.

The day after Rikki died, I convulsively sobbed, for sure, but then I kicked into gear and made the phone calls to schedule a venue and a minister for his Celebration of Life. I wanted everything to be perfect, something he would have loved, and it was. My point is, I have been booking through life since January 22^nd, 2016 @ 5:55 p.m. in an attempt to outrun grief.

Until recently, in the silence of the home I share with my husband, I had never allowed myself to feel the full impact of my loss, not the emotional breakdowns, not the face down in the pillow screaming, and not the crying out to God, but the kind of impact that comes from an exhalation of a breath you’ve been holding for too long.

Grief makes it difficult to think with a clear head. I still have grief fog from time to time. I want to run away from and out of grief into the sun where I can see with perfect clarity, even if that clarity brings with it the knowledge that he is never coming back. Clarity also brings with it the risk of abandonment of faith and of lapses into despair. But I suppose it doesn’t have to.

Grief shakes us up spiritually. I’m searching for something to permanently take away the pain. I am unreasonable with hope sometimes. I expect more from it then it is capable of being for me. My faith has been rattled and no matter how hard I try or how many places I’ve tried to find an anchor, I am shaken to the marrow of my Soul. I’ve read and spoken to many fellow grievers who have either abandoned their faith traditions completely or are chasing rainbows as if the pot of gold were freedom from the constant awareness your loved one is gone.

Grief sometimes takes you to dark places where your vision is impaired and the perceived distortions you can make out serve only to replace one type of pain for another. The imaginings that come with what ifs can be worse than actual life events.

My husband and I have been out to Joshua Tree Park several times in the last few days, the national park, not the town. The park’s beauty never ceases to evoke a sense of awe. The spectacular geological record that spans the life of our planet, 4.54 billion years, is breathtaking. Grief can sometimes numb our ability to be awestruck. The double-edged sword is an apt metaphor. I see it now as plainly as I can see my son’s face when I look at his son.

Every single experience is bittersweet onward from the day you lost your precious loved one. I see the ocean and I feel its mist on my face and I ache because I can no longer share this with my son. I am listening to Pachelbel’s Canon and I have tears rolling down my cheeks because we so appreciated its beauty.

The first note of a favorite song can bring me to tears now because every beautiful thing makes me think of my son – every single thing.

There is no where I can run to eradicate grief from my heart, my Soul, my mind; it is the largest part of my psychological schema now. Grief runs through my veins. There is an umbilicus that runs from my heart to my son’s healthy heart in Heaven now. I can still feel his heartbeat. I can hear him calling me Momma. I can feel his bear hug. I swear sometimes I smell his wine, wood-tipped cigarillo, and his laughter, oh my God, his laughter. I wonder if I’ll ever laugh that way again.

The best I can say is, I’ll try.

I have switched to brighter colors, oranges, reds, and a head full of electric blue hair. I suppose black is no longer my color. Rikki and I wore black – a lot when he and I were much younger. Toward the end of his life, he wore bright colors, as if to say, “I’ve got this, Momma; I’m going to lick this.” Every beautiful thing reminds me of him, like bright colors that say to me Remember his beauty. I find I must go where there is beauty, where my heart can be fulfilled, where there is no conflict between heart and mind when I think about my son, to do otherwise is to forget his life by focusing only on his death.

I must admit, I am a bit confused these days about my place in the universe. I won’t stay here, but it is where I am now; it just is. Into the Mystic…that’s where he is. I know he’d laugh at my hair and hug me and say, “Momma, why you wanna be so weird?” So, you’ll never forget me, my Love, so you’ll never forget me.