Grief to Gratitude

By Sherrie Cassel

The past month was a difficult one. No reason, other than the fact that I lost the most significant person in my life: my son and only child. Three and one-half years have passed, and, holistically, I am doing well, which is to say, the visceral breakdowns are fewer and farther between. When I feel an overwhelm coming on, I choose to be alone, and allow the tears to fall as they are intended to do.

Tears help clear out debris; they promote growth, spiritual and physical.

Spring has arrived and everything is in full bloom. My roses are abundant and beautiful and aromatic. I have finished the coursework for my B.S. in psychology, and I am making plans for my next academic journey. Yes, I am moving on. I didn’t think I ever could and I thought I never should. Missing my son and not letting go was how I thought grief was supposed to be navigated. Hold tight to the memories. Hold tight to his Spirit. Hold tight so the world knows you are in grief, just as assuredly as if you were wearing a shroud.

I think about perpetual grief, the kind of grief that buries you alive. I don’t want to live in such a way that bodily functions and basic hygiene are all that’s left of me. Early in my grief process, I wept and wailed and slept and couldn’t eat, and then I developed terrible insomnia, and those sleepless nights were spent trying to not ruminate on the worst day of my life.

You, no doubt, understand, those of you who grieve in the present tense.

I have said the sentence more than enough times, “I loved my son more than life itself.” “He was….” beautiful, generous, forgiving, loving, ad infinitum. I shudder when I come face to face with his physical absence. “I loved?” “He was…?” No, death did not take my love away; it did not suddenly and eternally quash all of the lovely things about him.

Saying, “I love him” — does not mean denial. Saying “I love him” — denotes the infinitude of parenthood. My faith tradition, compels me to believe he is alive in a place of complete and utter bliss. I sleep better now. I hope.

Hope was gone the minute my son became so ill there was no reason to hold on any longer. Hope was gone when I became so angry with the God of my understanding, I could not conceive of forever; it was an impossibility. Hope was gone when my son took his last breath. But hope, like leafless and lifeless winter trees, springs buds.

When I speak about my son, I speak in the present perfect tense, the present tense extending into the future. Sometimes people look at me strangely when I say, “Rikki is amazing!”, “Rikki is beautiful!”, “Rikki is alive in a heaven I cannot fathom.” They look a little less confused when I say, “I love my son”, not I lovED him, because I love him even in his absence, even though I can’t see him or touch him or laugh with him or talk endlessly with him.

I talk to him still. He can’t hear me, of course. In heaven, I believe, there is no sadness, no pretension, no anger, and no sickness. I know that if he saw me on some of the days when my eyelids are heavy and my make-up is smeared across my face, he would be sad, and he suffered enough sadness while he was here; there is nothing more that I want for my son than to have absolute peace and joy — even if I cannot be with him — just yet. He is whole now, and that’s all I ever want for him — wholeness, peace, and joy.

The rest of my life is mine to choose its trajectory. I want to live in the present, and I want to muster all the courage I can to live in between the past and the present tenses.

Grief can consume me if I allow it to, or it can guide me to an earth-shaking transformation. I choose the latter and daily work at releasing the former. After you lose someone you love mightily, life becomes starkly short, too short to choose to stay in sadness longer than is absolutely necessary.

Today I am wearing yellow, and — I love my son.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

After some time, when someone you love dies, you find that you’re able to function, sometimes even optimally. You get out of bed, and are rarin’ to go. You have the energy to go for a walk, go to the gym, be around people, and move forward. Of course, the pain never leaves you, not even for a moment. It’s always just one heartbeat away.

Those “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day[s]”, however, do still rear their ugly heads, and a really beautiful day when you are smiling and moving forward can quickly turn into a tear-fest and even what is referred to as “grief paralysis.”

Have you ever had a day when even getting out of bed was nearly impossible? I have had plenty in the three years my son has been gone. The first year after he died I cried every day for a solid year…and then some days, I was just numb. I was like the Walking Dead, zombied out. I had a distant look in my eyes. I had what the mental health professionals call a “flat affect” — expressionless, basically, just “not there.”

I don’t think “numbness” means, necessarily that you don’t feel anything; I think it’s how we handle the pain when it becomes overwhelming; we shut down and bury the pain deep inside of us so that it becomes a sting rather than a decimation of our Souls.

I was a lump last Monday. I wailed all day. I didn’t leave the house. I couldn’t concentrate on tasks that absolutely needed to be done. I wanted so desperately to talk to my son, to say I love you to him and have him say it back to me. Sometimes unreality seems so much better than actual reality. Yeah, sometimes it does.

When my head finally reaches my heart to remind me Rikki is not going to “come forth”, that there is definitively no chance of that happening, I feel my heart crack open just a little more.

I’d like to think that underneath the slivers is a brand new heart. one that can move the mountain of grief I carry. Maybe there is, and maybe each sliver needs to be peeled back to expose that new heart. The Judeo-Christian Bible has this to say about such an experience, and I’m certain there are other Sacred Texts that make a similar claim:

²⁶ A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26 NRSV)

I believe that the God of my Understanding (the GOMU) — will guide me to my part of the work that needs to be done to cauterize the slivers, and smooth the fissures, so that my heart is one with the Divine.

I will have very bad days from time to time, and it’s my responsibility to uncurl myself from the fetal position and stand up so I can heal in the Presence of the God of my Understanding. Surrendering to emotional pain is not a fulfilling life.

You may have other words for the Divine. I call Him God, and God is Love and God wants to turn “my mourning into dancing”, and I want that too. I know it’s fine to weep and to wail when we are in abject pain when we lose someone to death, and there will be days we can scarcely participate in life; I know. I had such a day last Monday. But I know those days are meant to be temporary and that I have to cry out to my God and to my friends and family for support.

Sometimes it’s difficult to reach out to others. I learned to cry alone because of my family of origin. We were tough as nails. We were no sissies. We were children of a Marine — and my father said, “Marines don’t cry; they soldier on.”

Soldiering on doesn’t mean no fear, no sadness, no tears; it means we put one foot in front of the other on those days when it’s difficult to keep it together — and we move forward, sometimes one inch at a time.

My faith tradition may not work for everyone. You may have something that works perfectly for you, and it is my prayer that we each find something that strengthens us, that helps us look upward to the heavens where our loved ones are. I don’t know what your beliefs are…and to me, it doesn’t matter. We each find our way eventually.

I remember the night my Rikki died, I was standing outside the hospital catching my breath in the cold January air, and my sister-in-law came out and asked me, “What do you need us to do?” I said, “I don’t know. I’ve never lost a son before.”

We’re right on point when we say we weren’t aware how much of our lives since our children’s deaths grief would take up, and that there is no end-point. We will grieve until our own last breath. I have always been a nauseating optimist. I always look for the silver lining, the diamond in the rough, the hope “after the storm”. I’m still an optimist, but far more realistic now. My son’s death took my head out of the clouds and planted me firmly in reality. People are born and people die. Death is the most painful part of being human, IMO.

My professor emailed me the other day and said, “Losing a child is the worst kind of pain ever.” I don’t know why he said it. But he’s right. I have more good days than bad, but it’s not because I’m stronger than anyone else, or more highly evolved (please), or even delusional. I have good days because I force myself to live right here, right in the present moment. I have no other moment I can live in. It’s cliched, but the adage is true, “We’re not promised a tomorrow; we have only today.”

Isn’t that the truth?

I ache pretty much every day. I miss my son. I get a catch in my throat from time to time during the day. Every single thing reminds me of Rikki, and everything reminds me he’s not here anymore. I force myself to get up, do the hair, the makeup, go out, and face the day.

I think the one thing I fear most is when someone asks me if I have any children. My eyes used to fill up with tears as I said, “My only child died two years ago?” I don’t get the same intensity that I used to, you know the kind when you’re doubled over in pain, crying ‘til your face is puffy, and your nose is red, and you can hardly breathe from the energy it took to cry that hard?

Those kinds of cries are fewer and farther between the moments of living a full life. Sometimes I flounder and fall back into the grief and it’s like the night he died all over again. I have to fight to not let those memories of the most horrible day of my life consume me.

I was a single mother – it was just Rikki and me for 32 years … even though we were both married and on our own. We were very, very close, and my worst fear, and I did have it, because I had never loved anyone so much, was that my son would die. I had a horrible dream one time and woke up just choking from sobbing. Rikki ran in the bedroom and hugged me and said, “Mom, it’s okay; it was just a dream.”

I wish it had been just a dream, but it wasn’t.

Grief is like a nail in the heart, a Tyson punch in the gut, a blow to the brain, and a crushing of the Soul. I don’t know any other way to put it. There are only metaphors to express grief…metaphors and tears and fetal positions and darkened rooms, and withdrawal from those who love us and want the best for us.

Trust me, I engage in all those coping mechanisms.

Time is a blessing and a curse. Time takes me further from the day of my Rikki’s passing, and farther away from the last time we laughed together, and it sends the memories hurtling toward a piecemeal remembrance. I can see my son’s face. I can hear his laugh. But even the scent from his clothes I held on to is fading with time. I’m so blessed I have so many of the things that were important to him, pictures, videos, phone messages, text messages, and pictures he painted, even some he painted when he was in rehab. Those things are all I have left of my son. My grandson,Louie, my precious son’s son, is certainly a piece of my son, but he’s not my son, and I have to let him be his own little man. He is as unique as a snowflake, just as we all are, just as my Rikki was.

There will never be another Rikki. He was here. He blessed my life. He made me worry. He showed me what love is. He loved me fiercely. He was his own man…tortured and beautiful. I still feel all the emotions that I did the night I lost him, but I can breathe through them now. Sometimes I make this sound when the pain comes like a knife in my stomach. I even hold my stomach and stop whatever I’m doing for just a moment, until I can breathe again.

I know you all know what I mean. You may use different metaphors and express your supreme grief in other ways. Some people paint beautiful pictures. Some use their grief to help others. Some people crochet and give scarves and beanies to the homeless. Some feed the poor, etc. I write in between the tears and the death pangs – every bit as real as the birth pangs I had with the one person who was closest to me.

How do we do it? How do we get up and put one foot in front of the other, go to work, conduct a marriage/relationship, and for the love of God, how do we smile and play again? All extremely difficult tasks to accomplish in grief. Right? But somehow, we are making it, one tiny or one giant step at a time depending on where you are in your process.

I remember when Rikki died, I was buying books about heroin and alcohol deaths, wanting to be with his friends, buying cremation jewelry like I had money to burn, and other things that took me away from my life, the one I have had to learn to live — without Rikki. My psychiatrist told me that she wanted me to stay with the living. I was wounded when she said that. I wanted to be close to Rikki, even if it meant reliving the day he died, and replaying it over and over again in my head. I didn’t understand that I could still express my love for him even after he died, through play and through moving on with my life.

We are not the same people we were prior to the day our child died. We have changed. We will never be the people we were. We now have an incredible opportunity to rebuild ourselves. That idea means something different to different people. How do we do that? How do we rebuild ourselves? We do it as we are able. Some days we champion for ourselves – in small or giant victories. Some days, and I think this is the greatest victory, for me, we champion for others and reach out a loving hand to help someone. We sit in grief with someone else.

Maybe I couldn’t do that before my Rikki died. I was all about me and all about him. I was focused on that academic carrot and striving for upward mobility, but in the final analysis, in my 56 years, my perspective on life has changed. I know what’s important and what I can live without now.

Time didn’t heal any wound that I’ve had, but it does put some distance in between the awful day my son died, and where I am now.

And now is where I need to be.

Time really doesn’t heal all wounds. Wounds heal in fits and starts and sometimes the nerve endings spark in a painful fusion — and sometimes those wounds split wide open — again, dependent upon where we are on our grief journey.

Disuse of a body part causes it to atrophy; it causes the part to weaken. In my utter grief I have not forced myself to return to the gym with the same gusto as I have in the past. There are muscles I haven’t used in the three years I’ve been grieving the loss of my son. Certainly, there are consequences for being sedentary, for sitting around weeping and wailing, and for allowing myself to get lost in my heartache.

Have you been there? Are you there now? I designed a Facebook page eight months after my son died in 2016. Along with over 300 members, we are healing from our losses. Designing the page and being a part of this camaraderie of these amazing parents has fueled a passion in my heart to work harder toward healing so I can help others toward their own.

Passion – it is one of the most valuable gifts we have as human beings.  What fuels your Soul toward elation, even in the face of supreme grief? We must find something that temporarily takes us away from our mourning, so we can move forward. Perhaps we lost a child who was our entire world, for whom do we live now?

I’ve tried to justify my willful immobility with excuses about my pain being too overwhelming to move forward. Those of us who have been grieving for some time now know moving forward does not mean moving away from our loved one. There will always be times of grief as we live our lives without our cherished loved one.

However, if we want to heal, and I believe most people do want to heal, we will search out those things that light fires in us, e.g. pouring ourselves into the arts or helping others who share grief for the same reasons we do, e.g. having lost someone from a terminal disease, an accident, suicide or addiction. The best type of support is peer support, in my opinion. Followers know I lost my precious son to the disease of addiction. My greatest support has been from other parents who have had similar experiences.

Others who share in your specific grief can steer you in the direction of what can prove to be the most healing for you. For example, I write to heal. I purge my heart and doing so, I’m told, helps others whose medium may not be language. Some create works of art that stem from their pain, but that reveals their courage to soldier on, reveals their inner-strength and their hope in ways that no spoken or written language can.

Some people I know have poured their time into reaching out to others who share in the same type of grief as they have. I truly believe helping others is the fast-track to healing ourselves.

I believe we can wither away and die while we live — in our grief. I also believe we can soar from the initial destruction of our loss and rebuild our lives. I have a meditation CD for people who are challenged with PTSD. One of the meditations takes the listener to a place that has been utterly destroyed, like a bomb had decimated it. Belleruth Naparsteck asks the listener to take a visual survey of the destruction, and then she has her pick out things from the rubble that she wishes to keep. Everything has the potential to be purposeful.

What can we do with our rubble? Can it be a building block for a richer life, for our new self, the one who has risen above the pain? Can we polish a piece that has been neglected to an exquisite glimmer, one we can share with the world? I know we can.

An acquaintance I went to school with died last weekend. I suspect it was from a broken heart. She never recovered from the loss of someone she loved with all her heart. She didn’t find the one thing that she loved so much it could have healed her heart, fueled her Soul – and catapulted her healing process.

Passion – where does yours come from? Can you channel it into something meaningful and purposeful? Can you use it to help others, to make the world a better place, to heal yourself? I urge you to pour yourself into something that feeds your essence and helps you to heal. Find that gem among the destruction and polish it proudly and share it with others who are not as far along in their grief as you are.

Vincent Van Gogh suggests that in pouring himself into his art, he lost his mind, and by all accounts, we know he did. I’m not willing to go so far as to lose my mind, but I am willing to redirect my pain toward something beautiful, something I can use to help others heal. I can take my passion and use it for good, and hence, lessen the intensity of my pain, long enough to lose myself in love and concern for my fellow sojourners.

I’m talking a big story, right? What am I doing to assuage my grief? I’m immersing myself in research about grief, about faith traditions, and about how people heal from tremendous losses in their lives. I find the work to be meaningful; it’s also work I can share with others who may be struggling and unable to move forward because of their broken hearts. The research also helps me to heal.

We have the power to heal ourselves. We do. We have the insight – it’s there, in the rubble.

Peace.

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Anniversary dates are difficult. Some people have attempted to soften the blow by calling them angelversaries. I admit, sometimes it helps me to call them that too. At any rate, my son’s angelversary is next Tuesday, January 22^nd. Three years will have passed since the day he died. He didn’t leave me. It wasn’t God’s “will” that he died, i.e. God didn’t need another angel. He didn’t die because I am a bad person who needed to be punished. He died because of life choices and genetics. Knowing this helps me on some days, but truth be told, it doesn’t help me enough to not feel the anxiety that has begun to flow through my veins, making me cold with fear.

What am I afraid of? I’m afraid I will ache in the same way I did the night he died, and the entire year following his death. I was a wreck. I wept and wailed every single day for one entire year. My eyes were permanently puffy, and they’ve never really returned to the bright eyes of the optimist I once was.

Death has a way of making a person a realist.

Every 22^nd of the month is difficult. 5:55 p.m. every day and every night is a time when the memory of my son’s death tugs at my heart, and I am painfully aware he is never coming home again. I will never be able to make him laugh again, hug him, tell him how awesome he is, make up for my imperfections as his mother, or learn from his brilliant mind and his eloquent speech.

How do you navigate an anniversary? One thing that comforts me, is an altar I set up on special days, i.e. birthdays, holidays, angelversaries. I have several candles he would have loved. One candle is a Dia de los Muertos candle, another is the Virgen Guadalupe, and others with symbols of his Mexican-American heritage of which he was so proud. I have his favorite ashtray I gave him, a nice heavy ceramic ashtray with skulls all along its perimeter. I have pictures of him, my favorite rosary, a rock that was special to him.

He loved smoking cigars, wine-flavored, wood-tipped. I have a box of them on the altar. When I am really hurting I’ll go in the backyard and take a few puffs to make me feel close to him. I’m not a smoker, and it makes no sense, really, to do it, but the inevitably of angelversaries leaves me feeling powerless to stop the day from coming, to stop the pain I know I’ll have to deal with. Something as simple as taking a few puffs of a cigar is not passive; it’s an action I take toward healing – in the moment, in the present moment.

In the three years he’s been gone, I haven’t been able to celebrate his liberation from his disease. Others tell me he is free now, no more suffering, no more sadness, no more of this world and all its dysfunction. Sometimes I am comforted by these thoughts. Sometimes I am jealous of his liberation. Life can be so very hard, and losing our loved ones is painful, so painful there are few words to describe our pain. I know. I’m a writer and I don’t know if I’ve ever adequately described grief-pain to another person.

We each must find a way to get through the anniversaries of the worst day of our lives, the day we said goodbye to the loves of our lives. Holidays and birthdays are difficult, certainly, but I’ve always been able to find a way to bring my son with me to our celebrations.

Once I had each member of the family share one beautiful memory about Rikki.  I stopped doing that because it wasn’t fair to the rest of the family. It comforted me, but it hurt them. We each carry our grief in our own way, and it is up to them how and when they want to share it. I’m learning that my grief process is individually my own. My grief can’t be fused into someone else’s grief. I can ask for hugs, space, Kleenex, but the bottom line is, I grieve in a place where I am the most alone I will ever be.

I’ve already booked myself for next Tuesday. Someone needs me more than I need to wallow in a sadness that produces nothing but more sorrow. I’d like to think I will find a way to be joyful about the life I have, allow the sun to shine on my face, allow the scent of healing eucalyptus to soothe my Soul, accept a soft touch from a loved one, find laughter, and gratitude for the 32 years I had with my beautiful son, ad infinitum.

But I’ve learned all about making plans. If you want to make the gods laugh, right?

We can do only our best. Tears, in darkened rooms in the fetal position, finding distractions with friends, books on grief and the afterlife, a rosary, lighting of a special candle, and maybe, if we’re veterans of this whole angelversary thing, a conscious moment of silence, a peaceful conversation with our loved one who is in Heaven, and a deliberate release back into our present moment will be the gifts we give to ourselves on that difficult day.

I will do my best.

https://centering.org/magazine-articles/article/2019/01/07/working-toward-peace

So out with the old and in with the new! Holidays can be tough for many of us who are dealing with the loss of a loved one. I thought I was doing just fine. I was ready to spoil the grandkid and enjoy the sparkly holiday season. I fancy myself a strong person who delights in shiny things. What better season to bedazzle me than Christmas and New Year’s Eve, right? Riiight.

I was sitting on the floor wrapping our grandson’s gifts when I got this pang in my chest. After nearly three years of grieving, I knew it wasn’t a heart attack, just that familiar feeling when the absence of your loved one’s presence is felt so profoundly in the viscera of your soul that it feels physical. During my son’s illness and after his death, I found myself in the emergency room a few times because I thought I was having a heart attack, but it was stress and deep, deep grief. The doctors told me to get a grip or I would have a heart attack.

In that moment when the pang hit, surrounded by bows and wrapping paper, I curled up in a ball and wept. I couldn’t help thinking about my son during the holidays. He was 32 when he died, so not a child at the time of his death, but he was my child, my only child, and as a single mother whose “husband” bailed on our son at 11-months-old, I was it. I was the only parent he had, and we were very close. I lost my baby boy, my precious son, the love of my life. My worst fear had been realized.

I hadn’t cried in months. None of us knows what will trigger the overwhelm and the torrent of tears. When the trigger comes, it does so with the velocity of a speeding bullet. BOOM! And you’re out for the season. I had to pull myself together because our grandson was arriving the next day. He needed a happy grandma, one filled with joy, with a smile, someone who could mirror his enthusiasm about the holiday, and I had to be up to the task.

Yes, it’s okay to cry with a child after the loss of a loved one. I mean, you don’t want to terrify the kid, but you also want him or her to know it’s okay to grieve the loss of someone he or she held dear.

What do you do when you’re conflicted and torn apart between two polarities, sadness and the expectation of joy? I think it’s best to honor your sadness, of course, but then I think at some point we have to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on. I don’t think I faked it ‘til I made it, because I really did feel joy at my grandson’s arrival. I watched as he excitedly opened his presents. I sat in the dark with him as the lights on the tree twinkled, and…I thought of my son.

Louie, our grandson, is quite intuitive, and he asked, “You’re thinking about my dad, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, Honey, I am. I just miss him so much and I’m thinking about all the Christmases we had together when he was a little boy. I’m so happy you’re here so we can enjoy each other and tell Daddy-stories.”

He hugged me and said he missed his daddy too. He’s a nine-year-old sage.

Maybe you don’t have a grandchild to warm your aching heart. Maybe you have no family members left and you feel as if your friends have their own lives. Those things are tough to deal with. I have chosen to be alone many times during the holidays, because I have a mad dysfunctional family, but being alone when you don’t want to be is hurtful, and well, lonely. I hope you are able to reach out and have your needs met, to reach out and ASK for what you need. It is we who must be responsible for getting our needs met. Healing is not a passive process.

Can I never enjoy Christmas again? The memories of him make me wistful. They hurt deep inside me. The loss is deep, and the absence will never be filled, not by my beautiful grandson, not by my husband, not by the perfect tree, or the most angelic Christmas hymn. Nothing will take away the longing that will permeate every single day for the rest of my life. I’d like to think he is in Heaven, but wherever he is, he is not here.

I wanted to feel alone during the holidays. I wanted to brood and weep through the entire season. I did; I really did. I think doing so would have assuaged the irrational guilt I have for wanting to enjoy myself, for allowing myself to get wrapped up in all the reasons for the season, and for celebrating … without my son.

One thing I’ve found helpful is making lists. They are great for getting things done.  They are also good for reorienting yourself. For example, gratitude is lost on us when we are not practicing good emotional hygiene. Being grateful is a discipline. Gratitude takes hard work. Certainly, there are times when good things fall into our laps and gratitude is easy, but that is not the norm. Gratitude is something for which we must dig deep.

Anything wonderful is worth working for. I was sad for a few minutes while I was sitting on the floor tangled up in Scotch tape and cutting crookedly the wrapping paper through watering eyes and with a knife in my chest. I feared I would not be able to be present for our grandson. My heart ached desperately for my son.

I was making the choice to separate myself from people who love me. Grief is necessary, but when we are in grief we can sometimes exclude and punish people who want to celebrate – because they can, and they should, and we should too.

When my son was dreadfully ill, I would make lists of things for which I was grateful. Sometimes I really had to reach for those things, i.e. “I’m grateful my coffee pot is working.” No, really. But the more things I listed, the more I realized how many blessings there were in my life. When my son was sick, I’d be grateful that he was still with me, and now that he’s gone, I try to be grateful that he is no longer suffering.

Our grief morphs from guts to glory in zero to 60 seconds every day. In grief, and perhaps at no other time, finding the blessing in the horror is vitally important. I allow for the pain, but I also hold out for the promise, the promise that I won’t always ache to the depths of my soul, but that as the intensity of the pain decreases, the possibility for enduring peace will take its place.

1. I am grateful for my husband.
2. I am grateful for our grandson.
3. I am grateful for our home.
4. I am grateful for my dysfunctional family (although I am also grateful that I have the ability to steer clear of them too).
5. I am grateful for the years I had with my son.
6. I am grateful he is no longer suffering.
7. I am grateful that I am in a space where I can work toward my dreams, and…

I am grateful that I made it through the holidays with both laughter and tears because that is the stuff of life.

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

When you lose a child to addiction and  in the chaos surrounding his or her death, there is so much unfinished business to contend with. I was fortunate that I got to tell my son some very important things before he died, but I still have regrets. I have regrets about things I said in anger and desperation. I have regrets about not being a better mother, for not being the mother he deserved. I have regrets about my judgment of his disease. And I have regrets about when I was less compassionate than I could have been.

I’m learning to let go. I read a lot of Ravi Zacharias. He may be a little to “Christian” for some of you, and sometimes he’s a little too much so for me, but most of the time his words comfort me, and I have found a greater understanding of the God I need to believe in. Ravi said that one cannot truly forgive others until one has adequately forgiven oneself. I’m sure others have said this very thing in other ways, but his words really spoke to me.

Ironically, I took a class at my former church, and the participants and I took a journey into how forgiveness plays out in our lives. When we went around the room for participants’ definitions of what forgiveness meant to them, one person said that to him, forgiveness is a “process” – one that is ongoing in our lives.

I related to that definition. I forgive. I take it back. I forgive. I take it back. It’s as cyclical as is grief, and in some ways, maybe it is a type of grief. Perhaps it is grief because we have to let go of the ideal person we want to be, and accept the imperfect person we are, the imperfect person who blew it with our kids, partners, siblings, co-workers, etc., from time to time.

Forgiveness has been a hard road for me, and I’m sure for some of you too. I wrestle with my “sins” or flubs, or fuck ups, whatever words you want to use for mistakes you’ve made that hurt someone else and now hurt you because there’s no way to make amends.

I’ve come to a place in my spirituality where I believe I will see my son again. When that happens, it won’t matter anymore what happened here; it will only matter that we are in total bliss together. He will welcome me into eternal joy and show me the ropes. I have to believe that. It keeps me sane and comforted.

I also, from time to time, come to the realization that to hold on to self-loathing for mistakes I made in total ignorance, or because I fall short, way short of perfection, takes me far away from the present moments with my living loved ones. That is a terrible price to pay for the unwillingness to forgive ourselves. Trust me, I know how easy it is to fall into that trap of self-blame and regret. I do it less than I used to, but I still get angry with myself, which sends me spiraling into the world of self-loathing.

People who have incurred recent losses are in enough pain already. I think it makes matters worse, as if they could be any worse, to hold on to things over which we no longer have any control. I’m not saying it’s easy to do, because I struggle with it too, but we have to find ways to release those negative and hurtful feelings to truly transform ourselves through heartbreak.

I think for me, there’s been enough pain already and if I am constantly beating myself up for things I can no longer do anything about, I hurt those who love me and need me to be present in their lives. I need to be present in my own life too.

Someone turned me on to the Akashic Records a couple of years ago. I tried it once; it wasn’t really something that worked for me. But I developed my own spiritual cleansing practice borrowing some things from the Akashic Records.

One of the steps in the 12-Step program is making amends with those you’ve hurt. What do you do when the person you hurt has passed on?

Well, I sit in silence for a few moments and I talk to my son. I ask him what he wants me to do. I tell him I’m sorry for not having been a perfect mother. I ask him to forgive me, and then I sit in the silence for a while longer and I wait for a response. I always get one. Maybe it’s just me comforting myself, but I really want to believe it’s my son loving me from the other side.

He loved me despite my imperfections. He knew he scared the hell out of me and even apologized for making me worry so much. He looked to me for guidance. He needed my approval to feel whole. He wanted the best for me – always. Two weeks before he died, he called Ben to tell him he was glad I had found him because now he didn’t have to worry about me anymore. He told Ben he was a good man who he had learned a lot from and who he respected and admired greatly. I truly believe he was saying goodbye that night. He was so ill from his congestive heart failure and his addiction.

But I digress…if Rikki, may baby, my angel, could love and forgive me despite the mess I was (and still am) – how could I not honor him by loving and forgiving myself? It’s a process. It’s not something that is easily maintained. We are constantly in flux and our own worst critics.

If you are having difficulty forgiving yourself, try talking it out with your loved one, either those who are still living or those who have passed on. You will feel better; I promise.