Grief to Gratitude

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

 

 

 

 

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.