Grief to Gratitude

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

When someone disappoints us, it can hurt. If someone continually disappoints us, the pain can become a deep wound that festers for the rest of our days — if intervention is not sought. I was speaking with a member of my family this morning, and in less than one paragraph, I heard the echoes of dysfunction in each stinging paragraph. My childhood is grievable. I suffered a lot.  I don’t need to rehash the events or the types of abuse I endured, but I will say this: it’s as bad as you can imagine.

I learned to live with chronic disappointment. My parents were broken and so they broke me too. I’ve had a long road to emotional wellness, through bouts of self-destructiveness, bullying by adaptation, relapses into old self-destructive behaviors, and gratefully, many, many victories. Wholeness is that pot at the end of the rainbow.  Grief from death of a loved one to grief from having a well-nurtured and self-protecting illusion exposed to you is painful, but wholeness is attainable – even when you come from hell.

I’m not blaming my parents for my life post-childhood (anymore), but I do hold them accountable for traumatic events that happened when I was in their care as a child. Both of my parents were extraordinarily broken from domestic violence and generations of addiction. I have no doubt, had they had more loving and emotionally sound parenting, they would have been able to offer it to me and to my siblings. I am definitely not letting anyone off the hook but trying to understand and come to terms with the fact that no one is born into perfection. We all have flaws, some glaring and some hidden deep inside coping mechanisms we’ve developed through the pain, most of which don’t work outside of our families of origin.

People who are broken can be utterly self-absorbed and exhibit behavior that expresses there is no one else  in the world who has suffered as much as they have, and they often live in a defensive position until they receive the help they need, through professional help, e.g. psychologists/psychiatrists, or a trusted member of the clergy. I’ve sought counsel from both places.

Truth be told, I’ve been in a dynamic grief process from the beginning of my life. Every day as a child was a disappointment. I felt like Haley Joel Osmond’s character in AI, I was always close to the edge, and being plucked out of this world by self or by accident seemed like the only escape. I grieved all the idyllic days that I imagined everyone else was having, and to be fair, some were having those sweet days I envied. If I work really hard, I can find a few fun days with my family, albeit they were few and far between.  Hypervigilance was a coping mechanism I learned very early in my life – and so waiting for the other shoe to drop was pretty standard operating procedure for me.

Tom Robbins said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” And that is true. It takes work. If you didn’t learn to play when you were a child, it is difficult to play as an adult. My husband tells me that I am far too serious, even more so since my son died. I play easily with my grandson who is 10, and we act silly together. He gets me doing improv and making up stories on the spot and we laugh like lunatics over something we think is funny.

I think it’s necessary to revisit a challenging childhood and to dissect and analyze the events, the good, the bad, and the ugly, that shaped you as a person – even when it hurts. I’ve spoken to people who view the prospect of receiving therapy as terrifying, so they haven’t begun to work on their issues, and the dysfunction persists. I have family and friends who say they don’t need therapy and have managed to function in the world, but in the realm of survival. Thriving in life is the goal.

Healthy and emotionally and spiritually sound clergy can be of tremendous help in assisting you with navigating the road to surrendering dysfunction and coping mechanisms that have served to keep you from growing and thriving as a person made in the image of a loving God. In my own experience, when you don’t have healthy love doled on you during your childhood, it’s often difficult to dole it on others, and it’s near-impossible to dole it on yourself.

I grieve all the days I hated myself because I didn’t feel worthy of God’s love, my siblings love, my friends’ love, my husband’s love, and I didn’t feel as if I fit in anywhere in this great big beautiful world filled with magnificent people, all those people to whom I felt inferior. You never know what is going on in someone else’s home, and regardless of how large or small you believe their challenges are, every person is fighting to stay afloat in her own tempest.

Do you grieve your lost childhood? Were you fortunate enough to have a happy one? If the former, tapping into your grief is healthy; if the latter, bless you. You are in the best position to help others find their way out of their darkness.

I’ve read a handful of accounts about people from traditional tribes of native peoples who have chosen one of its tribal members to send out to the civilized world to go to school, immerse themselves in the dominant culture and then go back to their tribes as lawyers, teachers, doctors, etc., and serve their community with their new knowledge. Those of us who are a bit further in the healing process can be messengers of hope to a hurting world once we find wholeness through hard work and through the grace of a loving and healing God.

As we grieve and grow, we are in excellent positions to serve those who are still in the boat screaming for help as the storm tosses them about in the darkness. All of us have stories to tell. Some are pretty; some are not, but with each mulling over we do of the building blocks that constructed us, there is the opportunity to be choiceful about where we will go in life. The choices we make will determine our purpose in life.

Grief is a healthy mechanism; it is not a place to stay, however.

Grief is painful. Childhood can be painful. The past can be one that is not a place we wish to visit. As we grow toward who God created us to be, we find we must throw baggage off our boat that no longer serves us or others. I can’t wash your feet if my back is aching from years of allowing it to be a beast of burden to every stripe that cut me to the bone. I need to be able to surrender my dysfunction and trade it in for something more useful.

I do grieve my childhood. I wish things had been different. I wish I had stories that didn’t need embellishment to portray to others that I am normal because my childhood was not that bad. But I don’t. The best I have done for myself and for those with whom I am in relationship is reach out for professional help from therapists, psychiatrists, and from clergy.

When you’re a child surviving your parents’ demons, you may not have any place to turn, just as they did not have any place to turn. Maybe you haven’t learned how to grieve your lost childhood. I’m of the mind that one can change the course of her life at any age, even well into the post-childhood phase of our lives. We are blessed in the United States to have a plethora of resources that can guide us in the direction of wholeness and emotional wellness.

If you’re in a good place after years of dysfunction from the cradle to adulthood, share what you know with others who may still be in their own hells of domestic violence, emotional and physical abuse, and addiction. Be brave enough to be vulnerable. There are people who’ve never shared an emotional response to their experience because they don’t have the words. Be their voice until they can hear their own urging them onward toward wholeness.

You’ll find that in doing so, you will also heal yourself.

By Sherrie Cassel

Navigating the grief process takes work. There will be revolving cycles in the grief process, and grievers will have an initial time of visceral pain — and it’s hell while you’re in it. The first year is for nursing your broken heart and fumbling through, what was for me, the first stage toward healing. For example, I cried every day for a solid year. I’m talking about loud wails that must have had the neighbors curious about what was happening in our home. The pain was physical. The pain was spiritual. The pain was at the level of the soul; there were deep wounds bleeding out the person I was before my son died. Everyone is different and navigates her process in the best way she can given the resources available to her.

I must admit, although my son has been gone 3 years and 7 months and a lot has changed, I still remember vividly my first year after he died; I was in no condition to begin my grief work. I vacillated between numbness and heart wrenching and convulsive sobs. I was inconsolable. I bargained with God that if he would just raise my son from the dead like Lazarus, I would be a better person.

Obviously, that first year is a trip through unreality.

I could start from the beginning, but I choose not to. This much I will say, when your child dies from addiction and/or other diseases, your grief process begins well before his death. I, as have many of you, witnessed your once vibrant, brilliant, and soulful loved one wither away. Death is the end of a life — a person — a relationship, and best case scenario, we grievers make it through the grief process victoriously and with a sense of purpose.

Some grievers have physical pain that nothing will help, and some have spiritual pain that may send them off to spend the rest of their natural lives in intense and, sometimes complicated, grief. The viscerality of our angst will lessen in severity — and our minds will begin to clear. And some grievers will even go on to have full lives.

One day you’re busy, let’s say, tending to your sunflowers, and not thinking about the grief that has permeated every single thing in your life, and the next, you’re a weeping mess. I have learned to shelve my angst and schedule a day for losing it. Trust me, it took grueling work to get to that point. Certainly, there are triggers that make it tough to get through some days. But I must function in my new world – and the world I share with everyone else. How do you do that when your soul is screaming? You can’t.

I was in an impenetrable fog that first year. I have never liked the term zombie when referring to someone who maybe isn’t all there because that’s where I was that first year. I couldn’t pay attention to even small talk because I was lost in the numbness of early grief. The second anniversary of my son’s death hurt more than I thought it would, but I was coming out of my grief fog a bit and reacquainting myself with reality. I was able to reason with myself and talk myself off the ledge.

I know people who have quickly ascended out of the pit of despair, and I know some who take years, and there are even some who never find peace. I believe in stages; they are natural, e.g. caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. I think in terms of the warrioress whose own tripart path was one she traveled first as victim, then survivor, then thriver. I like that analogy. My heart is broken, scarred, but still beating. I remember wishing my heart wouldn’t beat after my son’s death, but it did, and with each heartbeat, that first year, it brought a pain with it I thought I would actually die from, but I didn’t, and I haven’t. I’m still here.

I don’t know what stage I’m in now. This is a first and an only for me. My son was my only child. I do know there is a time when you are learning how to walk in the sun again, how to talk to others who are not in grief, and how to accept a world much different than the one you and your loved one shared. During this time a glimmer of hope begins to take spark and it’s scary and it makes you feel guilty, like you don’t deserve and certainly should not enjoy yourself, so you leave the party, so to speak. Enjoying oneself takes practice, an indomitable spirit, and tenacity. There comes a time when survival is not enough.

Dusting yourself off and picking yourself up by the bootstraps are gross over-simplifications of what we grievers must do to get to a place where it is not angst that rules our lives; but rather a drive to truly live again – and allow ourselves the gift of knowing our loved ones, from eternity, have given us his or her blessing. How does one move from mourning to dancing? Everyone’s process is different, and there are some accounts that speak volumes to me in my own transformation.

For example, there’s an account in the Bible which has drastically changed for me. The account is far more personal now.

This account is about King David, in 2 Samuel 12: 15 through 23, who lost a son. I remember my childhood pastor preaching on this particular account many times throughout my 24 years in this church. I thought about it in terms of punishment, judgment, and disobedience toward God. And that is how it is preached most of the time. Since I lost my son, however, my eyes and my heart are focused on David and Bathsheba as grieving parents. David was inconsolable and grieved the impending death of his son. He prayed. He lay prostrate on the floor. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. He wept and pleaded with God to not take his son.

We’re not told about what Bathsheba is doing during this time, but it’s probably a safe bet that she was also grieving, praying, fasting, weeping. We’re just not told this in the account. One verse tells how David went to Bathsheba to comfort her. We, who grieve a loved one, need strong support during the first year, strong and consistent support. David obviously was that for Bathsheba. I’ve been blessed with a husband who has been my primary support. He asks me what I need from him – space to grieve privately, or a space where we come together for supportive embraces and words choked out through tearful gasps. Some are not so fortunate; if you don’t have anyone with whom you feel safe, and believe me, this is true for many people, I encourage you to find a grief support group, online or one in which you are physically present in a grief community, a clergy member, or a therapist. Talking with others about a common death experience, e.g. a parent who has lost a child to addiction or a group that speaks specifically to your loss, is helpful beyond measure.

Healing is possible. Grief is navigable. Rediscovering joy is inevitable if you do the grief work to climb out of that abyss where darkness has changed your perspective from one with a drive to live a full life to one of bitterness, hopelessness, and chronic pain that can and does sometimes morph into physical pain.

I don’t think I could have done as David did. After a long night of begging God to heal his son, he dies anyhow. What David did next was get up, wash his face, applied lotions, much like I do with makeup and hair — which I couldn’t do the first year. David takes some food after fasting all day and all night. His servants were befuddled by his 180˚ and ask him about this turnaround. He plainly says that while his son was alive maybe God would have mercy on him and save him, but now that his son has died, it’s back to life. This behavior is truly one exhibited by a strong person. I’m not saying that there are others who are not strong because their experience is different from David’s. Anyone who is currently in early grief and those who have been struggling with returning to life for an extended period are strong. You have no idea just how strong you are.

What I am saying, is that through grief work, however long it takes you, there will come a time when you can rise up, wash your face, take a little food, and rejoin the living. My heart sees this account much different than when I first learned about it. I can now relate to the grief from the loss of a child, the powerlessness of a king and father to save his son, a mother who lost a child, and I believe they were probably unable to accept comfort that first year. I understand their experience much more intimately now that I have experienced it myself.

Maya Angelou wrote the poem, “I’ll Rise” and this is, indeed, how it happened for me. I was finally able to shower without emotional exhaustion, to apply my makeup and put on bright colors, to attend social functions, to be more present in my relationships and, to enjoy my finite earthly life.

Life can be short or long. And it takes practice to be whole, but it’s possible.

There’s a statement that is attributed to one of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson. The statement was made, allegedly, while she was on her deathbed. She said this, “The fog is rising.”

And, indeed, it is.

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By Sherrie Ann Cassel

I am learning the different weather patterns in our desert town. San Diego was pretty consistently, well, perfect. I’m rediscovering myself and renewing my faith and hope in this beautiful area. My husband and I love to see the way the mountains look at different times of day. I love the pinkish sky that rises with the sun in the northeast. I love the silhouette the evening makes of our mountains. I am at a place in my life, and in my grief, where I am able to find gratitude for all the things, people, and this beautiful place that bless my life. Who knew?

I’m not saying this is a place where I am every day, but I am finding myself being grateful more often than I ever dreamed I would. Today is 3 ½ years and one month since my son died. My body feels his absence, like when he vacated my body and breathed his first, like when it was time to breastfeed him in his infancy, like when I said goodbye to him in those final moments I was able to touch his body.

Anniversaries of that awful day are hard to deny; they push up from the deepest soil where our pain resides – and like weeds choke out our growth and our peace of mind. I have been knocked down after years of achievement from grueling work, only to have the wind knocked out of me, or been brought to my knees in visceral pain. It happens.

I can speak in terms of great leaps and bounds in my healing, and that does happen, but to be honest, finding gratitude is a monumental feat in the life of a person in grief. We are to be commended. There are no adequate words to definitively describe the infinitely many cycles of grief we have endured and will endure until we close our own eyes in death, but there should be recognition for our grief work.

Grievers use powerful language to describe their greatest loss. Soul-crushing, heart-wrenching, heart-shattering, life altering, and various other configurations of pain. I’m a writer and there are times when I cannot speak my pain.

In Romans 8:26, the apostle Paul speaks to the inability to pray because we are in such a state that the words won’t come: And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for word.

Today an unexpected rain graced our desert. Today was an anniversary, just as every 22^nd of the month is, just as it is at every strike of the clock at 5:55 p.m. Today I took my grandson to the public pool, cheered him on, went home and watched my husband work meditatively in his Cowboy Zen garden, and I am contemplative, missing my son and being grateful for my life today. How is that possible?

I believe dirt-under-the-fingernails hard work is necessary for every good thing in life, like hope and a drive toward wholeness. I know I’ve said I’d never be whole again after losing my son, but I am whole; I’ve just rearranged the baggage I choose to hold on to. The heaviest and most back breaking piece of luggage is now at the top. I’ll carry it until I am home.

Triggers are funny things. I saw lightning and I heard the thunder and I remembered a time when my son walked to the store, and a clap of thunder so loud scared him half to death. He said he crouched down in the duck and cover pose and screamed, “I love you, Mom.”

Love never dies. My love and his love and our love – is in my DNA. I can look in the mirror and see his face. I don’t need the rain to make me think about my son; I just do so – with each labored breath.

Photographer: http://www.jeffmitchumgalleries.com/represented_artist_portfolio/all_jeff_mitchum_images/escape/3757/#add-to-wishlist

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

This page is about grief. I have lost a son, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, my heart and my soul, my only child, and I will navigate the grief process for the rest of my life. But certainly, there are other losses too, e.g. losing a parent, a sibling, a spouse, a job, a limb, a relationship, etc., and they also carry with them significant levels of pain and grief. We are not alone in our periods of grief…on any given day.

I was speaking with a friend yesterday and we were chatting about nothing in particular; about every little thing under the sun — from religion to world politics, self-image and all manner of topics, with no real purpose in mind.

We eventually got to epochs of our lives. I think we agreed that “Youth

is wasted on the young” (Shaw, George Bernard). I am approaching my 60s and he is moving toward that magic age of Medicare. Each phase of our lives redefines us and, best-case scenario, changes us into the people God has created us to be. We walk a bit, shaped by our families of origin and other social phenomena; we stumble and, with skinned knees and skinned hearts, we get up and walk a bit further, sometimes we even skip, and so on until the day we are called home.

In between birth and death, there are plenty of opportunities for grief. My friend has recently retired and is in the process of discovering who he is in a world that is not as cloistered as the classroom in which he taught for 36 years. This question still rattles me, and in my humble opinion, it should rattle us because it equates the value of a human to a task: “What do you do?” I know the question is innocuous and impersonal details about our lives are safe topics for discussion. We’ve all heard the discussion regarding the platitudes with which we speak when asked, “How are you?” It is seldom asked with the intent to really hear how a person is doing, and we are seldom in the practice of answering truthfully, as we have been socialized to keep to happy topics in the public forum — and be honest; we are not always happy.

I like the saying, “Be kind to everyone you meet, because they may be fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Humorously enough, the saying has been attributed to everyone from Aristotle to Ziggy (for those of you who are old enough to know who Ziggy – not Marley – is). The sentiment is a good one. The sentiment is a compassionate one. The sentiment is a truthful one.

My friend is currently experiencing an identity crisis. And in my unfocused musing I ask: are identity crises really just periods of grief? Change is not a rarity in our lives. We may go through long periods of immutability – unto boredom and sometimes apathy, because we are a dynamic species meant to move in service to one another and meant to create. Our lives are punctuated by joy and sorrow – smooth sailing and catastrophes. Each event shapes us and provides us with greater insight into the human condition – and into ourselves.

I like the symbol of the reptile that sheds its outer layer of skin as its body grows and changes. I also like the account of the apostle Paul on his road to Damascus (Acts 9:18), and how, something “like scales fell from his eyes” – providing him with clarity about his true purpose in life. Regrets, perhaps the “thorn in his side” – which one can never truly surrender, may have plagued him during his quiet time, as he grieved and regretted the behavior of his former self. Grief accompanies changes in our lives.

We shed our skins with every experiential punctuation. We shed the character traits that worked for us in early epochs, but no longer serve us now. We take the lessons we’ve learned along the way and, if we’re cognizant of our modus operandi, we look for opportunities for further growth in our next stage of life.

I grieve earlier versions of myself. Many of them kept me safe or gave me courage to navigate a turbulent life. But there comes a time when you no longer need to have those parts of you accompany you on the rest of your life journey. Letting go is a delicate balance between fear and courage, clutching tightly and surrendering, grief and renewal. Letting go also provides us with the gift of hindsight — and perfect acuity.

Each stage of our lives is fraught with emotional and spiritual knickknacks that we trade back and forth from past to present as the need for their use arises. I grieve the ones I never meant to lose along the way. I hold, lightly, to those things that give me warm fuzzies or have taught me lessons and helped me change the course of my life toward greater quality and emotional and spiritual soundness. Sometimes lessons escape us, and so, for me, God, must do the remedial class, several times before I get it. Sometimes I learn it straightaway – generally, from those unexpected catastrophes that rock my world; and there are some things that have taken me a lifetime to learn.

I think about my friend redefining himself, and he will need courage, the ability to relinquish things that no longer work, or that maybe never did. He’s going to need hope. He’s going to need drive. He’s going to need the ability to allow himself to let go and then he’s going to learn how to grieve all the roles he’s played in each stage of his life that he must now let go. And he is going to need to learn to welcome new roles.

He’s going to need an Anchor.

I am also in a period of redefinition. I am seeing a new world without my son — with ancient eyes exuding wisdom that comes from supreme pain — every parent’s nightmare. I am learning to endure that thorn in my my [own] side that plagues me: grief and pain from losing my son. Grief will travel with me for the rest of my days, but I have grieved a great many things in my life. I’m actually quite seasoned at it. I am handling it, just as every single person throughout the ages has. As time takes me through each phase of my life, I grow, when I was a child[…] (1 Corinthians 13:11). Sometimes I feel, irrationally, alone in my pain and in my grief, but I know that’s not true. Everybody hurts – sometime (REM).

Epochs, changes, and grieving the things we must leave behind – and carrying those things we must never relinquish are normal stages of human development.  Unfortunately, not one of us is exempt from moments of painful ruminations about our pasts, mistakes we’ve made, people we’ve hurt, and sometimes how we’ve hurt ourselves. We live. We die. And in the period in between is a lifelong procession of losses and wins.

My friend is in a period of stasis, one in which there are a plethora of insights, both those that feel good and those that hurt. Grief, for a self shaped by a zeitgeist that chisels us in only one dimension, is necessary for him and for us to move forward from one stage of our lives to another.

We’ve all been in his place, either figuratively or actually, and chances are pretty good, we will be there again. Learning who we are at any stage of the game is a monumental feat. Some never live a self-examined life — for various reasons. I sometimes envy them.

Some never get to the place where Paul was as he walked his path toward his greatest clarity. I wonder if it hurts the lizard to shed its skin. It leaves behind a shell of what it used to be. It is blessed with no sentience, and therefore, no grief.

We are not. There are times when we lose sight of our purpose here – which is to serve one another — because we allow grief and regret to deter us from reaching for the stars — at any age. Our lives on this earth are finite. What might we leave behind for our successors? We each have gifts that are illuminated by the fire that burns in each of us. Sometimes that fire is just a tiny spark waiting to be a flame.

We are never so old nor should we allow our grief and moments of apathy to convince us that we do not have contributions to make. I hope my friend gets that. I hope you do too.

For my American counterparts — this day is symbolic of so many things, some we patriotically take pride in, and some, we don’t discuss on festive days, in order that we may have them. I just wanted to offer the fact that every thing is a double-edged sword whether or not you are grieving…and holidays bring with them both smiles and smarts. I am doing my best to remind myself that I have gotten through every single day since my son’s death — and I will get through today too.

Memory: I raised my son in the Fallbrook Church of God. We were a mixed group of Americans, Guatamalans, El Salvadorans, Mexicans, and the major religion in most of those countries being Catholic with robust families, there was no shortage of rugrats running around. Every year Rikki and I were charged with the task of holding our beach spot while everyone else went to worship service. Just me and my little boy — watching our world prepare for a time of family fun — our individual families — and the family of God.

Rikki, my son, would play out in the water from sunrise to sunset. His lips would be blue and he and his best friend, Louie, would argue with us about how they should be able to play in the water for five more minutes.

Memories can bring joy and they can bring wistfulness. I am excited about spending the Fourth with my son’s son who is one month shy of his 10th birthday. I am also apprehensive that the pain may resurface during a public event. I see my son’s face in my grandson’s face. I hear his laughter. I see the light of wonderment on his face just as I saw it on my son’s face — even moments before he died.

It would be so easy to crawl into bed tonight in my darkened bedroom and shut out the world — . Who wants to celebrate as a family when your family is only a fraction of what it used to be? Grandma, Grandpa, Grandson — no Daddy to carry him on his shoulders like he used to on the Fourth when we walked to the corner of the street from a home we shared, and enjoyed the fireworks together. My son was so strong and our Louie so little. He felt like the Hulk on his daddy’s shoulders, and he would scream, “Look, Grandma, I can touch the fireworks.”

Two generations of single parents. He was much better at it than I was. I watched as he orbited around his son — the most important star in his galaxy. How is it possible that you can miss your child beyond words — and then also be overwrought with grief for the relationship his son will not get to have with him?

Grief is pervasive…there is nothing that is not tinged by it. I want to remember the merriment in my son’s eyes when he and his best friend were together as toddlers — into their teens. I want to — but it hurts. I am revving up to be around festive folks — and I’ll get there too…but I have been in a funk all day.

Rikki was part native-American Indian and he was well-versed in the atrocities upon which our country was built. He grew up with the heart of an activist — but he started with the sense of wonder about our world. He grew up to be a cynic, but he started as a starry-eyed boy who believed that nothing was impossible for humankind.

We had 31 Fourths of July together. How can such an innocuous holiday stab at a healing heart and make it tender all over again? He would change into his dry clothes just before dark, as everyone was settling in for the firework display. He’d walk toward the edge of the shore, just before the water could touch his feet, and he’d gaze toward the horizon. He was a little guy, but I knew he was wondering what was on the other side of his ocean. I knew he was happy at that moment. I knew he didn’t want the day to ever end. I knew he wished Louie lived with us so they could be brothers all the time. I knew he knew I was there and that his world was complete.

We were in the company of people who knew him from the beginning of his life, people who adored him, and people who knew everything about me and yet….brought me and my little boy into the fold.

Holidays don’t destroy me anymore — but I still don’t find them to be easy…and were it not for the grandson being here…I’d be content to stay home and rearrange my bookshelves. I haven’t found my own liberation yet, the liberation that tells me it’s okay to move forward and laugh on a day that used to be “our” day. I’m far too serious since Rikki died.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…” and he was my only child…of what now shall I be afraid?

Happy Freedom Day.

• 

The time here in Joshua Tree is 2:30 a.m. I woke up because I dreamed about my son. I don’t dream all that often. But dreams don’t hurt as much as being awake can. Rikki was/is the most important person in my life; I gave birth to him, and he knew me better than anyone.

When someone you love more than life itself dies – grief comes from the dissolution of a sacred relationship that never needed an explanation for its existence. He was my son, my best friend, my comrade and my confidante and I was his. I was a single mother for his entire childhood. Sometimes the boundaries got blurred, and we were like brother and sister. I was a young mom, and he was a remarkable son. Our relationship was one of rewards and regrets.

When a relationship is that close, the loss is monumental; the void is sobering.

I’m trying to fill that void with activities but trying to do so with people is still very difficult for me. I was always a social person, even though I also thrive in solitude. Since Rikki’s death, however, being around new people is exhausting. Or maybe, being around truly happy people is too much for me on some days. My happiness is weighted now. I’m still terrified of the question, “Do you have any children?” I do. I mean, I did. I mean, yes…’til the day I meet him again. He’s dead. He’s gone. He’s …

Moving to a new town in the midst of the grief process was necessary for my healing. But talking to people who know nothing about my great loss can be difficult too. There are days when I want to scream his name from the rooftops, and there are days when getting up in the morning is a feat of magnificent will. The delicate balance between grief and functioning well on any given day is tenuous. I know; I walk that tightrope every day.

No matter how busy you keep yourself…the pain from loss is now your life companion. Sure, you can find joy — but it’s a heavy joy, and your “incredible lightness of being” has faded into a distant memory, like a fifty–year-old Polaroid.

Sometimes it’s helpful to put yourself in places where people who also loved your loved one are. Seeing your loved one’s reflection in someone whose face softens or contorts at his or her memory is like seeing a friendly face in a group of strangers. Go there as often as you need to — or as often as you can.

In the movie, Phenomenon, on the anniversary of John Travolta’s character’s death, his friends had a get-together, a harvest party, and the movie ended with his loved ones celebrating his life. I tried to do that with my son. The timing was all wrong though. My son’s been gone three and a half years; it’s still too soon to feel truly celebratory about the day he joined his loved ones and his Maker. I know I should. My child entering that peaceful and loving light will bring me peace one day; it just doesn’t yet. Comforting thoughts are fleeting. They provide both moments of respite and reminders of your terrible loss.

A memory: my son loved smoking wine-flavored, wood-tipped cigarillos, as well as a fine cigar, finances permitting. I have his old clothes that still smell very much like his cigars and the laundry soap he loved…the scent is fading, and it hurts to have that experience taken from me too.

Time can be like a bulldozer compacting your memories and pushing them into a warehouse, dark and dank. I must climb through years of mental and emotional archives to find my way to those remembrances that have settled enough to no longer be mortally wounding, to sort through them, to consider which ones are worth trudging through the muck of memory back to where I live now – in a world without my son.

Putting one foot in front of the other, finding gratitude on the other side of grief, bucking up and moving on are platitudes that get us through on most days. Telling ourselves there is hope for us to still have meaningful lives, to be transformed, and to heal is not only helpful, it’s necessary. When a grieving person says, “I can do this.”, she is being proactive in her healing process. I’m not saying it’s easy. There are days when I succeed spectacularly – and there are other days when I fall to the floor a weeping mess.

I have listened to the loving words of people who have no clue what it is to lose a child, and they mean well – and I love them for trying, but no words truly comfort, except the ones you tell yourself as you begin rebuilding your life; those words that promote courage — you must say to yourself.

I know I use extreme examples for what the death of a loved one feels like: detonation, decimation, destruction, soul crushing, and to be honest, all of these words adequately describe my loss, and maybe yours too. To say the least, losing someone you adore with all of your being is life-altering.

I want to take the memories of my son, the good ones, the ones that make me smile and share them with those who also loved him, and I also want to hear stories about my son from those who knew and loved him. Do I want closure? No. There will never be closure. Do I want acceptance? No, the best I can do is resignation. He is gone. He is not in this world anymore. I am a childless mother.

I began this post with a dream about my son. Dreams, memories, and the fading scent of his cigars are all I have left of my Love, my Life, my Child. I am rebuilding in fits and starts. Life is life, or as the saying goes, “It is what it is.”

The Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People – provided a reasoned commentary on the facts of life, facts that made me aware that I was never exempt from loss or pain. He had a son he loved and cherished who suffered from progeria, the disorder that causes rapid aging in children . His son died after 14 years of suffering physically, emotionally, and socially. Rabbi Kushner concluded that his son’s death served no purpose. No one was to blame. He wasn’t a bad person who was being punished through the loss of his son. He didn’t lose his son through rotten luck or because God needed another angel. He lost his son. His son lived, touched his life, and then he died.

As we sift through the rubble of our lost dreams of a future with our loved ones and memories that both hurt and lift us up, may we find the peace to gather the shiny and colorful stones that have been buffed to a sheen that only intense moments can bring. I want my life to shine like Glass Beach — I want to smooth the jagged edges that still draw blood from time to time. I want to heal.

May your hearts be comforted as you find the absolutely acceptable and healthy resignation – without qualifiers – we loved and we lost and we’d no doubt do it again – just to have them here now. I know I would.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

As someone who has been navigating the grief process for three and a half years, this quote has left a lasting impression on me for a very specific reason: friends are essential for a quality life – so as we  risk letting go of our insecurities when we lose friends , it is important we reach out to make new ones.*

We’ve all had friends come and go in our lives. As a matter of fact, one can have lived several lifetimes in the years equal to your age, each epoch casting many configurations of people on your stage – all of them positioned rightly.

We’ve been blessed and not-so blessed over the years with friends. We’ve often been a blessing and, then – sometimes we are not so much a blessing. We have loved and lost and loved and lost again and again and again. We have certainly “unfriended” people in our actual lives for various reasons. And when friends move on from our lives, it doesn’t always feel so good, even if the reason to leave was what was best for them and for you too, even less dramatic, when you lose a friend because she moved to the other side of the world – even if it’s  just from California to North Carolina.

When you lose a friend there is a tear in the fabric of the universe, which is to say, there is a time of grief – and a time of readjustment. There is a time for tending to our wounds and then — there comes a time of acceptance. And finally – we begin to rebuild our posse.

For everything there is a time, and a purpose under heaven. Eccles. 3:1

In the past 15 years, I’ve said goodbye to my son, who died, and friends who were both fair-weathered and fantastic – sometimes all in one person. I’ve watched as friends have walked out of my life – never to look back. When you lose a friend, the entire world changes; making new friends takes courage, the same kind of courage it takes to admit your sorrow over relationships that have ended and the same kind of courage it takes to face your grief over the loss of your friend(s) and begin the journey toward healing. Life is all about having the courage to live it to its fullest. Living a full life means having a few close friends in the huddle – high-fiving you in your victories, picking you up off the floor when you don’t have the strength to do it for yourself, or coaching you upward when you’re about to do something really stupid.

Grief is a part of life … not necessarily because someone has died, but because relationships die too, and when they do, they leave a big gaping hole in the sense the world used to make. I lost a friend I had to let go of a year or so ago. I couldn’t help her and after losing my son to addiction, I didn’t have the strength to even try. She died a few months ago.

I don’t know why I didn’t grieve the loss of our friendship, but I do grieve the loss of her presence in the world. I have tried to not think about her, but tonight as I’m typing this entry, I feel the loss. I never grieved for her while she was losing at life. But I now see the tragedy of the loss of a beautiful soul. I also see the value of the grief process I didn’t allow myself when I said, “I can’t do this with you.” We must take care of ourselves, even if it means walking away from someone you love because his load triples itself every other day — and he has risen to the level of a “Yes, but” person with no understanding that he may be part of his problem. And sometimes it’s necessary to walk away – perhaps licking your wounds, or at the very least, saddened by his departure.

But — you still grieve the loss.

• Thank you, my beautiful friends from YVEVF Church for welcoming me into your circle.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

Weekends pass so quickly; it can sometimes feel like you never left the office. Time marches on and it waits for no one. Not even guilt can deter it. Even after Little Boy’s decimation of your former self, your brain still yields new neurons that beg for the continuation of life, a life that appeals to our natural hedonistic tendencies. Does a sunset make you feel good? Does a concert bring you joy? Does falling in love make you feel giddy?

Joy is possible — even after you lose a loved one.

Mourning is a timeless ritual in many cultures which helps begin a pathway to healing. For example, funeral pyres, entombment, burials at sea, and internment are age-old ceremonies that help us say goodbye. Celebrations of life are now common in the grief process. Death rituals make things real. They provide the opportunity to fully address the shocking impermanence of life.

Grief is how we deal with the absence of someone’s presence, and it is painful in every possible way something can be. There are days when we are beset with grief , when even focusing on our breath is a monumental feat. But courageously — we soldier on. We learn about ourselves through the grief process. We ask ourselves very tough questions. We judge ourselves harshly. Guilt is born out of grief and I can’t see a single reason why guilt should be so prominently placed in the life of a griever. Holding on to guilt has served me no purpose as I crawl, march, or sprint through the process.

I’ve made grief my pet project — and I see and have a lot of guilt since my son died. But I am healing in great leaps and bounds, in between days when melancholy falls on me like a shroud. If the truth be told, losing a child has both leveled me and strengthened me. I will always miss my son, and as any grieving parent would say, Not a moment goes by when my child is not on my mind.

I shouldn’t have to qualify or apologize for my ability to move forward — forward to— not away from. I know I sometimes find myself feeling guilt for having the survivalist’s compulsion to move on. Emotionally I chant mea culpa very well — a consequence of the lifetime of guilt I inculcated from the teachings of two prominent sources in my life.

Holding on to guilt and shame is a consequence of our need to judge one another, either for religious reasons, or for survival purposes as we navigate our complex social world on our way to a rich and meaningful life.

Guilt is temporary and illusory. For example, are we really the only ones who have done thus and such? Are we really the worst people who ever lived? These are doubtful propositions, yet we beat ourselves up quite often for all we couldn’t do or shouldn’t have done, all of the things we should or should not have said, but – we ran out of time.

Perhaps guilt is our common denominator, that one thing in which we are equal (unless one is a sociopath). We are our worst critics is a cliché because it happens so often it is now a normal expectation in American consciousness, followed closely by guilt.

Once I planted a sunflower when I was a little girl. I placed it in the shade underneath my bedroom window, so I could watch it grow; sadly, it didn’t survive my gardening prowess. My father told me some plants need to be in full sun for them to grow. I planted my next sunflower in the sun where it and several successive generations thrived. I beamed with pride.

Guilt prevents the sun from awakening our full potential. Grief hurts, no doubt, but I think we hold on to guilt sometimes because letting go of it completely breaks the chain connecting us to our loved one. Letting go of guilt, to me, has meant what it means every September 11th, I should “never forget,” as if not ruminating somehow erases your memory of your loved one. It doesn’t.

Guilt deters rather than promotes healing. Kubler-Ross’ model of the 5 Stages of Grief (b), has been our model for how to navigate grief. Originally, Kubler-Ross’ model didn’t impress upon us the hope that we could release guilt and begin healing our hearts and minds. She led us to acceptance, but no steps for what happens next.This model is one of the longest-standing theories we have on grief navigation. We have decades of new data to add to the scientific literature.

Guilt makes us not like ourselves; it distorts reality. Guilt keeps our self-images poor and anemic. There is nothing we could have done to save our loved one. There is nothing we can do now that they are gone. Each one of us gives our relationships the best that we have, and sometimes a chapter closes — and we are free to write the next one. I don’t mean to trivialize our greatest losses, but guilt serves no purpose in renewal.

Humanity is capable of amazing things, art, love, scientific discoveries, but we still haven’t found a way to stop our self-destruction, or let go of emotions that only cripple us as we come face-to-face with the greatest decision of our lives: to fully live, however briefly, or to die, even as we live.

Don’t think I’ve got guilt licked. I don’t. I have to remind myself of this every day when I feel the need to self-destruct and flagellate my soul. Letting go of guilt is a process. I wish I could have saved my son, but I couldn’t. My faith tradition compels me to believe he is alive in a heaven beyond my comprehension, and because I believe this, I can face the rest of my life, in peace.

Everyone keeps telling me love never dies, and guilt has no place in love. We make mistakes and sometimes we are remorseful, but guilt destroys people, and it certainly won’t bring us to wholeness. I encourage you to find a group, a therapist, an activity that feeds your soul, and pour your passion into rebuilding yourself. Start by clearing away the broken bricks that have crushed your self-image for too long, maybe even chiefly among them: guilt.

Honoring our love for someone we’ve lost should bring smiles, sometimes mixed with tears; it should solder the slivers of our hearts together again. Honoring our loved one means we make a pact with our logical selves to gradually let go of the guilt that inhibits our growth. I am healing from the loss of my son. As I build a healthy relationship with my memories of him, I mentally let go of all the sadness and hurt for as long as I can manage that merciful balance.

And when I hold guilt against my chest like a security blanket, I must instead force acceptance of my process and encourage myself toward perfect clarity to see my brokenness, to be my own good Samaritan, to tend to my wounds and to heal myself.

(a) Kubler-Ross, 5 Stages of Grief