Grief to Gratitude

By Sherrie Ann Kolb-Cassel

I feel the chill of his giant gray t-shirt on my face as I inhale his scent, his cologne, his deodorant, the scent of his wine-flavored cigarillos — or maybe it is just my imagination. We are unpacking our garage, even though we’ve lived in our new house for over one year. The boxes clearly marked “Rikki’s things” have remained unopened until this morning, four years after his death. Some grievers take longer than others. I threw myself into university work and into the creation of a blog I share with some wonderful parents called After the Storm.

We all second guess ourselves retrospectively after the death of a loved one. Did we tell them we loved them enough? If we were ever unkind, did we say we were sorry? And the list goes on and on.

Dependent upon your faith tradition, spiritual inclinations, or your humanistic leanings, death is a finality or, it is a transition. Each style of grief provides us with lessons that teach us how to live more fully and we must grab hold of that brass ring as it presents itself to us – and, after a time, it will.

I try to remember what my son thought about death and/or an afterlife. During my fundie days, I assured him there was a heaven, and I still believe this, although there are other things about fundamentalism that I reject absolutely; that’s a topic for another time, however.

One of the boxes I unpacked this morning was one my son had packed and then I put some of my stuff in the box when we moved. I find this fusion comforting.

I found a lot of his vast collection of eclectic music — some he borrowed from my collection throughout the years.

I found books he meant to read. I found papers with his handwriting on them, and I held them close to my heart. I allowed the systemic pain to rise to the surface and I had to stop and catch my breath through the tears. But it was release and I needed it.

You see, even though I am bereft about the 3 and a half years I lost through hardcore grieving and intermittent numbing, it was time to unpack – many things – and find a way to move quickly and appropriately forward.

You can never get moments back after they have passed. Bitterness is always an option, but it makes you old before your time. Ever see an elderly person with wrinkles so deep they lead you to want to know what they have experienced in this life. There are some wrinkled wise ones who can smile broadly and the wrinkles just smooth out and they are suddenly young again. So let the world enfold you and lead you into the land of milk and honey, a metaphor for an age-old home remedy that helps make skin new again.

Transformation will fill us with wisdom that will carry us through the rest of our lives – where we can walk in the warmth of the sun.

How do you touch and hold in your hand a belonging of a lost loved one and not have his or her spirit, energy, or memory flow through you? Yes, it’s bittersweet, but it’s a connection to your loved one.

Everything I see in this world reminds me of my son and it brings to the forefront the realization that I cannot share beauty with him anymore.

Sure, we talk to our loved ones – sometimes we even believe they hear us. I think we commingle our consciousness when we remember with our entire bodies. I feel the loss in my chest. I sometimes get vertigo when I feel the full impact of my loss. When my son first died, I thought I would die if I felt my son’s absence wholly – sometimes I welcomed that possibility because his death created a void in my world of the greatest magnitude and maximum emotional pain. I didn’t want to feel anymore.

Last week was a very difficult one because it was the fourth angelversary of his passing, and I was, quite frankly, an emotional wreck. I couldn’t stop the day from coming – and despite my best efforts to keep my shit together, I didn’t. I did make it through another year though.

As my husband moved boxes out of the garage and into my home office, I opened one box and I quickly closed it. I told myself, I’ll wait until tomorrow, so I did. I got up this morning and went through the motions, coffee, shower, hair, makeup, and then walked gingerly into my office as if I was going to awaken an unpredictable sleeping giant.

I took a deep breath and I dove in, just as I did as his mother. I dove in, heart first to fall in love with him. Just as I did for all his milestones, dips and victories. I wanted him back and I told the God of my understanding, Lazarus was dead for three days; if you’re a miracle worker, bring him back to me.

I’ve spoken about wishful thinking. When you lose someone, it can become desperate wishful thinking, unrealistic wishful thinking, and worst of all, flights of fancy and lapses into unreality.

For those of us who are doers, we just know that we must remain busy, active in our processes — in the present. Allowing ourselves lapses into fantasy and bargaining with the Divine brings only more pain and more desperation.

What can I do? Please God, the Universe, Creator, medical technology, bring her or him back.

Acute grief takes one temporarily out of consensus reality. We’re alone out here, even with tremendous support from loved ones and/or professionals; it is we who must take that first step into healing. Acceptance expedites the process.

I resisted healing for 3 and a half years, and then I woke up one morning and even though I was still in pain, the grief fog began to lift and I could see clearly what I needed to do; and I could see clearly what I had missed out on during my mourning stage.

I have returned to the resilient woman I was prior to my son’s illness and eventual death. Resiliency is within each of us. In the early days, I wanted my pain, and I resented anyone who tried to rush me through the process.

Leave me to my grief – I don’t want to feel better just yet.

There are actions we can still make to hold on to happier times, to help us to remember things about our loved ones that made them amazing, to comfort ourselves enough to be present in our lives now.

My son was an avid reader, and he eagerly insisted I read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m grateful I did so before he died so we could discuss what the important points he wanted to share with me were.

Our discussions were rich and of some mad longevity. His favorite book was The Count of Montecristo. He bought himself a leather-bound, gold-leafed copy and it was one of his prized possesions. He read a little every night to his son. I’ve been afraid to pick it up for four years. I found it…and I think I’m ready to delve into my son’s heart and soul. I want to know him – like I knew him in life. His stuff brings me closer to him, to his Spirit, to the memories that put a smile on my face — even as they tug at my heart.

I have more boxes to go through, but it’s really not about unpacking boxes, is it? Reluctance, hesitancy, fear of how we’ll feel touching their things, resurrecting memories, both good and bad are all extensions of Kubler-Ross’ 5 Stages toward acceptance and making meaning. Grief is something that creates a battle in our lives, one for our lives, against the potential for self-destruction through complicated grief.

My heart will let me know when it has had enough of unpacking and then I will follow my head which will encourage me to move to another task, one not so emotionally charged, — and I will imagine that  my son is telling me, “Momma, the sun is shining; winter is over – and you need to get outside and tend to the season’s new roses.”

And in his great big gray t-shirt, I will listen.

By Sherrie Ann Kolb-Cassel

You never think it will be your kid who will die from the consequences of substance use disorder, alcoholism, opioids, fentanyl, addiction. You can’t fathom death even though your child is hemorrhaging in his legs, he is gasping for air, and he has completely lost his ability to fight for his life anymore. I watched my son with each labored breath walk to his deathbed. He struggled for years with his disease, and in the end, his disease took another beautiful life.

I knew my son was dying, and despite my desperate words and ceaseless tears, I made no impact on him. I remember the very day I came to accept, sort of, that he was going to die. He was shuffling very slowly toward me, bandages on his legs, and breathing erratically. I remember saying to the God of my Understanding, “Oh sweet Jesus, you’re going to make me bury my son.”

He would be dead a few months from that day. I don’t know how he held on so long. His heart was compromised. He had cirrhosis. His brain was beginning to be less clear and less him as each day wore on.

Love is an irrational phenomenon. Perhaps we do sublimate the need to survive – through offspring, through creative endeavors, through leaving behind a legacy that will find its way back to the memories of your loved ones of all that you accomplished – maybe that’s why we create,  so we’ll be remembered, or maybe just for self-fulfillment. But love is its own reward, regardless of how illogical it is to put your heart out there – in a world that is sometimes unsafe and oftentimes scary – and more often than one can imagine, is filled with its share of painful moments.

I loved my son more than I love myself, and that is a telling sentiment. I love my son still. He was my only child and I watched him spiral very quickly to his death. He tried heroin when he was but just a teenager. He wasn’t on it long. I made him leave the home we shared because I was not going to allow him to kill himself in our home. My decision led to a year of estrangement, our first of two.

He was able to kick heroin on his own – somehow. Alcohol called to him next, and it was what apprehended his body for the longest period of time. He was going through an ugly separation from a woman with whom he formed an unbelievably toxic relationship. My son’s heart was broken from the guided missiles fired at him in the breakup, and he never recovered from the heartbreak and all the things that happened prior to his death. Ten years of emotional hell was his experience; that last challenge would require everything he had to survive. He didn’t make it.

I’m not a medical expert, but from the research I’ve done into the literature, I do believe addiction is a disease. If the reader is not familiar with epigenetics, or pre-, peri-, and post-natal insult, and you’re currently struggling with a child you adore who is deep in the clutches of the disease of addiction, this information is wildly helpful. I found the literature incredibly healing.

After my son died, I lapsed into a depression that lasted three years. I sat and stared into space from the safety of my couch. I stayed there for three years … not growing … not healing … not moving forward.

I started a grief site on Facebook 10 months after my son died. The site is for parents who have lost a child through the disease of addiction. Together we have saved each other’s sanity and stopped the bleeding when we experience our own overflow of visceral pain.

I saw therapists, with no experience in grief counseling. I tried talking to clergy, also who had very little experience in grief. Death should be easy, right? You do the “ashes to ashes” – “for everything there is a season.” You say your goodbyes or see you laters at the Celebration of Life and then you begin to pick up the pieces of your own life. The reclamation of your Self is the journey of a thousand miles, labyrinthine, dark, with a pinprick of light that is so faint it may not be visible right away.

If you keep clawing your way to the light through working your grieving process, you’ll emerge on the other side a whole person again, older and wiser. The goal is to not emerge so toughened that nothing can reach the soft tissue of your heart. The pain you first felt will become less intense, and other happier feelings will fill in the gaps. You’ll have a greater understanding into the heart of humanity. The potential toward the greatest empathy for others which you will become capable of is nothing short of miraculous, however you define a miracle.

So, what do you do in between the initial heartbreak and the first epiphany that wholeness is possible?

You improvise.

My husband taught theatre arts and is himself an actor, for over 50 years. I enjoyed going to the auditions for his different productions and seeing the kids, some full of confidence, and others terrified to be seen. I can relate to the latter but wish I would have related more with the former.

Watching his students jump into character during the improvisation exercises was always a treat for me. The kids were so inventive and such quick-change artists, that the scene would move seamlessly from one act to the next.

Life off-stage is much different, however. Life can be splintered and disjointed. You might think that I had prepared myself for my son’s eventual death since I had four years of being in the center of the maelstrom with my son. I watched him kill himself. But even then you’re never really prepared. As a parent you hold on until their very last breath. My son was dying right before my eyes, and I knew what the doctors were saying about his prognosis. I knew he was too far gone into his disease. I knew I was going to lose him, but still, there was that pinprick of light, maybe it would burn brightly for my son, perhaps he would see it before it was too late. He didn’t.

Grief is not a seamless scene change in a high school improvisation exercise either. Grief is messy, messier than you can possibly imagine. Kubler-Ross fleshed out the Five Stages of Grief for us, and for the most part, it is a terrific model, and in no particular order, the stages have been accurate for me. I have dug my heels into the bargaining stage so often that they bleed through worn and weathered shoes.

I may never find the end to this black, white and gray rainbow. Maybe grief ends only when our lives come to their own final conclusion.

Until then – I improvise.

My First People Warrior…my Aztecan Prince.

 

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.