Grief to Gratitude

Family Trauma and Posttraumatic Growth

By Sherrie Cassel

There was an article I read in ~Nature~, one hundred years ago that discussed some research that was done with plants. One plant was nurtured and loved, taken care of with all its needs met. A different plant had all its physical needs managed, water, sun, foodplant, the difference, however, was the second plant was screamed at daily and had loud, dissonant music blaring toward the plant. Guess which one thrived and which one either died or was on life support unless some bioconscious green thumbed researcher brought it back to life?

I was the plant who survived under less-than-optimal circumstances, and found ~the sun [DOES] also rise~. Those of us who have been blessed and worked hard for the pot of post-traumatic growth as we scratch and claw our way through dysfunction and intergenerational and historical trauma. The sun ~will~ come out tomorrow – and indeed, it may not come for many ~decades~ of grueling nights of the Soul…of course, eventually Job had a reprieve from unimaginable suffering, Viktor Frankl and others accounts of the horrors they experienced during the Holocaust. If you haven’t read MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Frankl, I recommend it; it’s a game changer about how we can shine and find a thread of hope after we’ve arrived safely on the shores where domestic violence, inconceivable torture, and all the sickening ways humans can hurt each other, are no longer present.

Some of us have to wait a very long time – all the while trying our best to survive in a horribly broken system, family systems, et al. Certainly while we’re in the moments of violence, humiliation and shaming, starvation, welts and WTFs, it’s all about just getting through the moments – if there is no one to come rescue you. Right?

I talk a lot of shit about my broken family. Both parents are gone and we, my siblings, are estranged from one another, all four of us. In a culture that has rammed a monotheistic and patriarchal ideology down our throats, the push is on “forgiveness.” I was a fundamentalist Christian for most of my sixty-two years; it’s been only since seminary (I graduate on May 20^th!) that I began to question my early religious indoctrination. Before I could read, I heard the Word. When I learned to read, I was required to read its pages. I’ve never been good at memorization, so I failed in Sunday school, and then I taught it for seven years. 😉

I took a class called Trauma and Grace in seminary, three years ago, and the class moved me toward some of the most monumental healing experiences in my life. I suppose I can give my parents grace now that they’re dead and I no longer play my conditioned role in the family through denial and pretension. See, it matters where we come from; it matters what we do with our struggles, both the heinous and those that are more common.

I have always been haunted by Goya’s ~Saturn Devouring His Son~. It’s dark, nearly too dark, and I spent a lot of time there. Admittedly, the visual arts are not my thing, other than knowing what feels right for me, and ~Saturn Devouring His Son~ is disturbing. I shudder to think how a child would conceive of such an act of cannibalism on his person by the person who is supposed to love him.

I don’t find it sad or have any angst over walking away from my remaining siblings and/or the friends for a reason and friends for a season. Sometimes, to maintain the family mythology, or the corporate mythology, or relationship mythology, we lie to ourselves and stay despite the fact that to do so means we will always have gaping wounds that will never heal. If you can escape violence, get out; get your kids out. Otherwise, history will repeat itself, and this just adds another generation of fucked up kids.

“Teach your children well; their father’s hell will slowly go by[…]” Graham Nash

I don’t believe forgiveness and reconciliation are necessary to heal, and in many ways, shaking the dust off one’s sandals as she leaves a culture of lies, deception, toxicity, and cruelty, is the first step toward healing.

In AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, Meryl Streep is a pill popping, alcoholic, mother who is prone to cruelty. Julia Roberts is among the siblings who initially had chosen to stay to help the sick Streep. The end of the movie has Roberts making the MONUMENTAL choice to walk away from her dying mother and reclaim her life. The movie cut me to the core because when I saw it my mother was still living in a delusion that we were a happy family – and I didn’t shatter it until after my mom died.

I didn’t change the family narrative and my role in it until therapy, many, many moons of therapy. If I hadn’t, I’d be stuck in a time warp, one in which posttraumatic growth would not be possible. I wouldn’t be able to be in healthy relationships because I’d still be holding on to the past and coping mechanisms I needed for survival which don’t work in the rest of the world, although had I started younger, I would have made a great corporate executive: cut-throat and always ready with a sharp and targeted tongue.

Seminary has changed my worldview … and with each mind-blowing moment, I’m paring away behaviors, things, and people who are not kind, compassionate, and most of all, emotionally sound or beneficial in my life. I’ve had too many whack jobs in my life, friends ~and~ family; I’m sure many of you have too.

How does one grow from trauma? Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I think when we’re deep in the throes of degradation, dysfunction, and domestic violence, the best we can manage is survival, just fucking getting through it. Once we begin to have a little physical independence, we see the world and how the rest of it doesn’t operate like it did in your family. You begin to awaken, to read, to learn, to transform, and finally to transcend our family, friends’, or company’s abuses.

One of the most difficult things to ask for is help. If you’re reading this and you, your kids, or someone else who can’t defend herself and you’re safe enough to do it, ask someone to help you. I don’t know your circumstances, but I know what I, my siblings, and my mother went through. I also know what my father went through as a child; none of those things make awful behavior okay. Intergenerational and historical abuse – go back centuries.

Even though the great Solomon said that much wisdom can result in much sorrow, and those who increase their knowledge also increase their grief (Ecclesiastes 1:18), knowledge saved my life. I wish I’d known sooner what I know now, perhaps my son might have survived the intergenerational trauma that should never have been his lot in life. I offer grace to my family and wish them well. I get it, but at some point we must step back and claim a life of emotional health, joy, peace, and the ability to think outside of the familial Pandora’s box, full of things that no longer work, my verbal switchblade, for example.

Freedom is not free, to borrow from our precious military; it takes harder work than one can imagine. Face your demons and the memories that are still oozing. Fight for that freedom. Rise up and say I will no longer take abuse in this family, friendship, or corporate system. When my mom was young with four children and an alcoholic batterer, there were no resources, and she had no family willing to take us all in if she’d left him. The cops would return my father back to the family home with the admonition to my mother that she was a “bad wife”. Bastard. I do have empathy for my parents, but I don’t forgive them or my siblings for all the abuse I took as a kid from 0 to 62.

I had a few moments of transcendence in my last two classes, Religion and Science and Models of God and Ultimate Realities. I finally have the inner strength and confidence to say no, not now, or never, and in doing so, I have the energy to build a life of beauty and relationships that are wholesome, honest, transparent, and confidently vulnerable. We create our own families, those of us who have no immediate biological family. I have a family of choice with people who have always been there for me emotionally and practically. I try to provide those spaces for them too.

How do you develop growth from your trauma? You choose it, once the therapist can get you to wrap your head around all the deception and dysfunction, BOOM, either an act of conversion to a bedazzled Oz of your making, or you dig in your heels which only yields stagnation and the death of a life full of potential.

Telling the truth to ourselves after a lifetime of abuse is one of the most difficult things one will ever do. Self-awareness is a gift to oneself and to one’s society. When we are whole, despite the trauma, life is beautiful, even when our bodies are wracked with pain like my husband’s back, or we were raised in a violent and challenging family system, or are in a bad marriage, or being abused by your parents, or in a job where the leadership is abusive. Yes, abuse starts ~somewhere~, but when someone breaks the silence of the dysfunction, true self-healing can begin, and one can grab hold of the most magnificent life one can create.

I thought I’d grieve the loss of the remaining members of my family; I’m not. I’m finally able to walk away after decades of no self-awareness. Who deserves abuse? And who gets to do the abusing? And why? After a while the answers to those questions can only be answered by the perpetrators of the abuse, and by and large, they are not willing to admit to their atrocities.

After a while, not even the perpetrator’s unwillingness to own up to his or her violence can dampen your mood. When you’re able to walk away from those who’ve been in your life forever because you now realize you never deserved their abuse — freedom.

Self-awareness and therapy, sometimes medication are key. We deserve to be happy, each of us, without allowing ourselves to continue carrying the dysfunction into the rest of our relationships, into our offices, and into our world. It’s no longer trendy to say it, but … “breaking the cycle” from the zygote in utero to the child, post-natal, and through its lifespan, is what is going to break these generational curses, one person at a time.

I believe this with all my heart.

I’m the plant who has recovered because no one is screaming at me, or committing other atrocities against my person, my heart, my soul, my body anymore. You can heal. You just can; but it may take years and relapses, so hang in there.

I’ve told my story until even I’m sick of it; I want to share the hope that springs eternal – sometimes, and especially in the dark.

May you continue to liberate yourself…in great leaps and bounds.

Easter Vigil

By Sherrie Cassel

Christians all over the globe are keeping vigil over the tomb of Jesus, their Savior, who will shock them in the morning with a magic trick so potent, its effects have survived two millennia and through many iterations. The Gospel story speaks to them, and because of my own familiarity with the Hebrew and Christian cosmologies, the stories and the rich mythology also resonate with me, even though I’m one giant chasm away from my cosmology of origin…because the template of what it means to be holy is viscous and malleable, ever expanding. Thank the God of My Understanding (the GOMU).

This is a post about grief, so allow me to publicly grieve the loss of my religion on this, the day after Jesus was to die on the cross, a humiliating and cruel death…so the story goes. I was raised Roman Catholic up until I made my first holy communion and was raped by a priest. My mother was Southern Baptist and the closest she could find to a Southern Baptist church in our tiny town was a Church of God (COG). I attended the COG from the time I was twelve until I was twenty-eight, after which I was asked to leave because I refused to allow familial abuse to go unnoticed from a leader in the church. Some things … many things … too many things get swept under the rugs of what it is proper to speak about – ; churches, government … and families are the worst offenders.

I’ve allowed my worldview to be deconstructed, and I’ve pared away things, beliefs, coping strategies, and I’ve Windexed the fuzzy mirrors that had reflected distorted images of myself, seen through the eyes of a wounded child. When I was a child I spake as a child…

I’m reading Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know – about the abuse she endured, the journey she embarked on to heal and to create a version of herself she could love, admire, respect, and heal. We have similar backgrounds. My son had a similar background. If you’re really fortunate, lucky, blessed, call it what you will, you will have a moment of clarity and you’ll begin to see things as they are, how they always were, and how different they can be. You’ll begin to see you have agency. You have choices.

I’m not saying it’s easy to step out of old patterns, religious, familial, relationships, harmful coping strategies, etc. Stepping away from the familiar is a frightening prospect. In family systems, especially if you’re chronologically a child, and worse yet, if you’re an adult with the mind of a child, breaking free does seem like an impossibility. Many of us endure decades, generations of domestic violence, and more recently in human history, addiction.

I thought it fitting this Holy Week to do something that revived its magic. Yes, I’m aware of the diametric opposition magic is in with Holy Week, but even as a language person I’m unable to articulate just how transcendent, which sounds woo woo, but just how transcendent the story of the Christ remains to me. I attended an Episcopal Good Friday service because I needed something Divine this week.

We had our grandkids and their mom over during Holy Week. We don’t share religions, but I’m thrilled she’s found something that makes her happy and allows her to feel the Divinity that has always been hers, ours, yours. There was a lot of healing, and for me, the gist of Holy Week is that there is something transformative that will take place. For me, historically, it was something that hurt so good, a reminder of the shared physical and emotional pain I knew intimately, with the God of the Universe. Perhaps if I had not had so much physical and emotional pain during my formative years, my need to be attuned to the Holy would not have been expressed through suffering. Sometimes empathy can be debilitating…my heart will forever be for the underdog, but sometimes, hope runs thin.

I was pleased to hear about a homeless man who won the lottery and his first words were, “I’m not homeless anymore.”

Mary, did you know that a prophet has no honor in his own home?

I used to love the Stations of the Cross and the pomp and circumstance of the rituals that honored the Holy – until I was raped by a man of the cloth. It’s taken me decades to rediscover the love of the Mystery in the Catholic Church although I believe in none of its doctrine, the beauty, the candlelight flickering on the wall through the red votive glass, the choir in the loft with young children, many who had also been raped.

Carrie Doehring is a theologian and an amazing mind. In one of her books, Internal Desecration, she discusses how a woman’s template of the Holy, of God, can be thwarted, or what I would say really fucked up, because mine is, dependent upon the types and the duration of traumatic events. My God had been shaming and punitive. My God was a white male and women were scum, here for men to use for their pleasure and because I was a child, here to rub my nose in my powerlessness. I’m sixty-two and while I won’t resume the damaging religiosity in which my spirituality was developed, I remain affected by the conditioning.

I still have vestiges of religiosity that make my heart race from time to time, and it takes me a minute to get rational … again. Faith is funny, curious, strange, unpredictable. I grew up being told that if I had the faith of a mustard seed, I could move a mountain. As a child, I would clench my fists and beg the god of my young understanding to make my life better. Where was “He”? “He” never showed up in my life. I waited.

I’m not anymore. I can’t say if I’ve found THE God, and mostly because through seminary I know there are many expressions of the Holy. Intellectuals call the Ineffable Ultimate Reality, and to be sure, if one was able to articulate satisfactorily to another her understanding of Ultimate Reality or explain God to someone else, there might be a chance for peace.

I have dear friends who love me with everything in them who don’t understand my reasons for going to seminary. One question I’ve heard is, “How can you align yourself with a doctrine that so disrespects you?” I attend a progressive seminary, and many religions are represented there. We look for the familiar … even when we walk away from the familiar during growing spurts, there is something that needs to feel familiar. We secularize the Resurrection story into the cycle of biological metamorphoses. The Holy Trinity into Mind, Body, Soul. We are compelled toward Ultimate Truth; I know I am, but I am no longer devastated when I find my God lacking. I believe we are reflections of the Divine, each with an intimate relationship with the Reality of her desires. Dependent upon our spiritual location, our understanding of the Holy can be life-giving or life-limiting, loving, encouraging, nurturing, or hurtful, shaming, guilting, and damning.

My religions of origin were as scary as the torturous hell I had seared into my very soul at a very young age. Sometimes, many decades removed from a life-limiting spiritual location, I’ll have heart palpitations if I did something that would disappoint a vengeful god, and I have to say out loud, “God is not THAT god.” The war Christianity wages against its own people through gross misinterpretations of a text meant for a specific people has spanned the ages and continues to spread – some sects like bacteria killing everything in their path through hateful judgment of others and perverted forms of justice, i.e., capital punishment, our prison system, child abuse, spare the rod, ad nauseam.

At the end of the death vigil, Jesus rises from the Dead, and there are few more lessons to wrap up before the Ascension, and then the administration changes and so do the characters who make up the next round of mythologies.

After our heroes take us as far as they can – to the precipices of life, we have decisions to make, and when you can release yourself from a harmful and life-limiting religion and either find one that is life-enhancing, or create one that fills your heart, i.e., charitable work, getting a degree, creating art, etc., your life will truly be one worth living. My husband is atheist and I am not, although I don’t know how to categorize my new religion.

I mentioned I attended a Good Friday service at an Episcopal church. The people are amazing. The message was beautiful. The service was LONG, and the service was a reminder of the things I disliked about the Catholic church, things I still don’t like. And I wonder why we have to enter into religious sanctuaries and worship the same, no individual whorls on our spiritual fingerprints, fingers that will leave an imprint on our children and so on our world.

Look at history, and whether you’re a Scribe or a Pharisee, a Padre or a Dodger, have a penis or a vagina, there have always been polarities; everyone wants to be right. Might makes right. To the victors go the spoils. History is written by the victors.

My husband and I, continuing with Holy Week, after our daughter-in-law and granddaughter left, broke out our turntable and listened to the four-album set of Jesus Christ Superstar. I get all gushy when I listen to it. My son and I memorized the parts and would sing and act them out throughout his short life. Beyond that, I wanted to honor the people who I love who celebrate Easter, Resurrection Day…a day whose significance for millions of Christians is not lost on me; it’s just different for me now.

I remember Easter egg hunts with my son and grandson. I remember the choir singing Ave Maria and watching midnight mass with my mom while she made tamales. The time spent with my mom was more of a religious experience than any typical religious experience, i.e., visions of saints. I just wanted my mother to love me.

Is that who God is? A mother’s love? A father’s love? See, even after four years of seminary, I’m still searching. I will always search for my own Easter egg, a tiny tomb with a surprise in it, something sweet, something that lasts but a second, and something that renews magic in our lives, wonder, amazement. Birth, death, rebirth are the stuff of wonder.

Tomorrow we will celebrate my dear friend’s sixtieth birthday. I have honored a ghost religion because I miss my son and the knowledge of or understanding of Ultimate Reality/God comforts me. There is a Love greater than individual love; this love is communal; it is global; it is universal. The love that I feel when I contemplate the Universe heals me … in groans too deep for words.

The day is significant to my dear friend and me for other reasons, and none of them have to do with Easter.

May however, whomever, and/or whatever you celebrate be peaceful.

Psych Meds and Other Coping Strategies

By Sherrie Cassel

This morning, my husband and I were listening to John Prine, a sage intellectual with just enough hick to make him truly entertaining with his similes and his metaphors for cheatin’, heartbreak, and a good shot of whiskey. He has passed away, but he left a musical legacy behind that is right up there with Elvis in my book. He sang with everyone. He was poetic like Kristofferson and deep like Leonard Cohen. “Sam Stone” is a song about a soldier who comes back from Vietnam addicted to morphine. I used to not be able to listen to those songs, but now I can, still a tug, but I’m grateful people are getting the word out about addiction and its fatalities. We need to keep the discussion on the table – until we start to see the stats change. There is an organization called No Mas Muertos, which means “no more dead”; its purposes are different than the dead we bury each year as our children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers, die from the complications of years of addiction.

As a professional spiritual counselor, I understand the brokenness in our world, not because I’m “smarter” than those who don’t hold degrees because my mother was not educated and she had some amazing and sage counsel, but some people can’t handle “bad news” – like the stats on addiction, sexual assault, domestic violence, ad nauseam. Some people are so Pollyanna, difficult topics are glossed over with glitter and resistance to unpleasantness. I get it; there’s a part of me that thrives on butterflies and sunny days, but the part of me that craves lyrics from Leonard Cohen and dark literature, is all too aware of how bleak things can be for people from time to time. I get that too.

I lost my son, my only child with whom I had a tempestuous relationship; he died when he was thirty-two, a broken man, addicted to heroin and alcohol. He died in withdrawals from a very compromised heart. My life has been altered beyond recognition. My former self was demolished after the most significant loss of my life. I have not, nor will I ever be again, the same person I was before my son died.

I’m graduating from seminary in a few weeks; it’s been a very long trip, and it has been a trip. When my son died, I needed answers. I mean, I knew why and how my son died, but when you’re in deep grief, you ask yourself and your Higher Power some really tough questions, and sometimes we abandon our Higher Power because we can’t see the answers just yet. I went all the way to seminary for answers, and I have worked the grief process until I’m blue in the face. I’m not saying my grief is resolved; it never will be resolved. I couldn’t live a life without my son for four years of complicated grief. I often prayed I would fall asleep and not awaken. I slept to numb the pain. I ate to numb the pain. I spaced out to numb the pain, and I isolated to numb the pain. I wasn’t in my head, but neither was I present in any meaningful way.

Grief workers and those who struggle with grief often talk about “grief brain”…there is no action that does not affect our physiology, our neurology, our psychology, etc. I believe our bodies react to trauma, and while the effects of grief are multiple, it is not taken seriously in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-V). I believe grief and certainly complicated grief are in the DSM-V as “major depressive disorder” – in acute phase. For some of us, the acuteness lasts for quite some time. My acuteness lasted for four years. I had a lot of shit to work through in my own personal development, a lot of skeletons in my closet I needed to bring out into the light of truth and I had to learn to dance with them.

Grief is extremely exhausting work; it rips us in two, and it’s we who must stitch ourselves up and find a way to move through the world without our loved one(s). How do we do that? I ran the gamut of emotions, and reacted to triggers every single day, and everything was a trigger. I cried loud and hard every single day for months, and then – I just numbed out. I got up in the morning, and getting out of bed every day was a chore, and sometimes I showered and put my makeup on; sometimes I just didn’t have the energy – sometimes.

Have I been able to maintain my joy and peace of mind? No one has. No one can. Joy and Peace are beautiful experiences, but even they are not sustainable. Shit happens and life blows up in our faces sometimes, like having your child die, for example. What do you do then? There is a book I recommend often called Ten Things to do When Your Life Falls Apart by Daphne Rose Kingma; it is filled with practical things to do when your world is decimated by harsh life experiences. If you pick it up, I’d love to know your thoughts. Sometimes a small shift in the wind is all you need to feel a moment of peace, and sometimes, a good comedy will bring you joy, and sometimes, nothing will. Life is a crapshoot and there is often no rhyme or reason for how things turn out.

I never thought my son would die before I did, but that’s how it turned out, and I’ve had to learn to adjust my entire life because he did. Again, I’m not the same person I was before my Rikki died, and even before that, when he was so sick from addiction and congestive heart failure it was difficult for him to breathe; he was only thirty-two. Sometimes I am a little angry with him for not being able to conquer addiction, but I know that’s unfair; he tried. He went to rehab, tried going to meetings consistently, but he was just broken from life events and people who hurt him, so broken, like his mother after he died, he just wanted to numb out. Numbness is so much easier than delving into our feelings.

I’m a hardcore advocate of psychological counseling and psychiatrics. I believe in them. I use them. I’m also in the business of spiritual counseling. My son started seeing a therapist shortly before he died. He was learning about his pain in a safe environment. He tried. I carry his thirty-day chip on my keychain so I can be comforted by the knowledge of how hard he tried to get well. I have his journals he kept so I can give them to his son one day. I have his artwork which project so much angst. His former wife told me that my son’s spirit is everywhere in our home. I’m glad. For the longest time I couldn’t look at his pictures, especially his baby pictures. Bread songs slayed me. Colors. The scent of springtime Fabuloso (his favorite cleaner). His favorite soap. You name it, and the triggers were unpredictable. I used to physically double over when I was faced with triggers. My heart still skips a beat when a trigger presents itself, but I’m able to maintain. I still find myself touching my heart or my stomach as the need to purge and cry arises.

Even now, nine years and four months later, pancakes make me cry. When Rikki was little, in his always brutally honest fashion, used to say about my never round pancakes, “Mommy, I got Africa this morning!” Angelversaries, birthdays, holidays, significant dates of significant milestones still hurt, but they don’t slay me anymore.

There are so many coping strategies from religious practices, from all religions that help guide one through the grief process. There are psychological techniques that can guide one through the grief process. At the end of the day, it is we who must pull ourselves out of the mire of complicated grief. How does one do that? I guess like those who struggle with addiction, when we hit rock bottom, and we’ve begun to lose our relationships and sometimes when we begin to lose our minds. I nearly did the first few months. I was aching and irrational. I wanted my son back like Lazarus from the Christian Bible. “Rikki, come forth!” We’re allowed unrealities when we’re in deep sorrow.

Our grandchildren will be here this week for spring break. I’m inordinately happy about this. Nine years and four months ago, happiness was not on my radar. In fact, happiness was an impossibility, but here I am, looking forward to something, to people, to participation in life, to a connection to the Universe and the Universal Spirit, the two guiding principles in my life. My heart will never heal completely, and I dicker back and forth on this, but I feel on top of the world, and then…my husband will make pancakes, and I find myself having to work doubly hard to be present for the day because of a reminder of how much I miss my son.

Christians will be celebrating Holy Week next week…the grisly death of a man named Jesus, and the resurrection of this same Jesus into complete and utter wholeness and Oneness with the Universal Spirit of G_d. Resurrection, transformation, and transcendence must occur – as we navigate sadness and darkness, if we are to have lives in which joy and peace are possible.

Life has changed drastically, and I do mean drastically, for me. I can hold down a job. I can keep relationships. I can learn enough to apply to my own healing and the world’s. I can go back to school and get a couple of degrees. I can miss my son to the ends of the Universe, and still manage to have a life of purpose. Nine years and four months have passed, but truly, I was a mess the first four. I had never felt more alone in my life than I was in my grief. No one can yank you out of your grief; it’s the journey of one-thousand steps and the pathway is uncertain and filled with emotional landmines. But if you keep walking, putting one ragged and calloused foot in front of the other, you’ll eventually get to the road that is less rocky with just as many clear pathways as there are uncertain ones.

Grief, I’m afraid, is lifelong. There are many ways to comfort ourselves, ways that are not harmful to us, but are helpful to our well-being. Pack your satchel with good emotional resources and coping strategies; it’s the ride of a lifetime.

May you continue to heal.

Twelve Stepping Baristas at Al Anon Meetings and the Fourth Step

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

The coffee at Al Anon meetings is always perfect; it’s like those whose service task is making coffee for the meeting have a gift for concocting the magic elixir that keeps one awake until her voice shakes as she shares her angst about her addicted loved one. Al Anon did save my sanity as I watched my son’s final descent, unable to climb his way out of the vortex of addiction. I wept and I listened … and I learned. There were accounts that broke my heart, or made it soar with hope. We do “love” each other at meetings. I believe I went for three years and made two beautiful friends who taught me so much. I will tell you, shortly before my son died, I was on Step Four: A Fearless Moral Inventory, and it royally sucked. Gratefully to the God of my Understanding, I jumped to Step Nine: Making amends before he died, and I had a lot of them to make. I did. I learned from my two friends how to love and take care of myself; go get my hair done, find a hobby, pursue my dreams – even if my hands shook; and they did – for the four years my son, my tortured son, was dying. I learned to keep on living – even after the heartbreak of a lifetime, accompanied by a pain so great it can knock the wind out of you, sometimes with no visible provocation, a song, the geese flying south for the winter, a pink sky, the scent of his favorite household cleaner; it could be nothing anyone else can understand unless she has lost a significant loved one with whom she had an intensely loving relationship. Each of us has. My grandson lost his dad (my son) when he was only six years old. They were very close; for our grandson, it has been his greatest loss.

Twelve Step potlucks are a huge spread, like when we celebrated the anniversary of my home meeting, or there were speaker meetings, and Thanksgiving, Christmas at shelters, auditoriums, and rehab facilities. During the holidays, one can find a meeting any time, anywhere for twenty-four hours, and now with the internet, the Twelve Step message can go out to even more family members who love and are stressed out about their addicted loved ones; however, if one utilizes only the virtual meetings, she misses out on the perfect coffee and the camaraderie of real people in real time and the handholding ( less so since COVID) and reciting in union, a communion of sorts, the Serenity Prayer.

See, when an addict is so sick and compelled to use, no longer in control of his compulsion, the effects on the family and other loved ones are substantial. One of the tenets of the Twelve Steps for Al Anon is: We didn’t cause it. We can’t control it; and, we can’t cure it. Some of us do bear some of the responsibility for our addicted loved one’s personal angst, not all the responsibility, but for whatever secondary gain we received from our willingness to ride that mechanical bull of hardcore addiction with our loved one and for however many mistakes we made, one can still make amends and in that single task, one can begin to heal. I used to beat myself up – on the daily; it was almost like I needed to hurt in the same way my son needed to use heroin. If I could just hold on to the pain, he would always be present in my life. I wanted that pain. I needed that pain…and I’d begin to heal and then I’d rip off that scab and I knew that the force and disregard for the progress I made – time and time again – one step forward, two steps back — I knew it would bleed. I tell my friends and family (with whom I’m still in relationship) – that just because we fuck up doesn’t mean we’re fuck ups. We have all made mistakes in our lives, in our relationships – make amends to those who are still willing, as the Ninth Step says, “Make direct amends to such people wherever it is possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” There will be times when it is too late, and the damage is too great to keep a relationship, even with family – maybe sometimes especially with family. There must be some common energy that flows through DNA, and DNA of our Souls. I was created in the climate of domestic violence, and some can’t ever be healed – and that’s okay. I watched a movie years ago called Rachel Getting Married with the beautiful and amazing Anne Hathaway. In one scene, she’s in a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting and when she was able to share, she was on the Ninth Step, she was asked by the secretary of the meeting what she could expect facing the making of amends with her family. Hathaway’s character said, “They can forgive, or they don’t have to, and that’s okay.”

See, it is okay.

We move forward with our life after a significant loss; we must. If we don’t move forward – forward from our mistakes, forward from our self-flagellation, forward into life, we die to so much of life. I know. I’m sorry to say because my grief compadres may disagree with me. I used to wonder why Twelve Step programs are so successful in helping millions to stay sober and for reaching out in love and compassion to those who still struggle. I wish I’d been able to offer more of the latter, and as much as addiction is a family disease, and as much as I was raised in an alcoholic family, I did not reach out with compassion some days, but there was always love, and he knew it.

See, addiction makes the whole family system crazy – all the way to an infant who grows up in alcoholic tension. There is a play, my absolute favorite by my absolute favorite playwright, Eugene O’Neill called LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, and in the play a mother who is addicted to morphine has relapsed and has started using again. The tension in their relationships is palpable. The refusal to discuss the glaring issue that their mother and their father’s wife is steeped deeply in addiction is also glaring. It is exactly what happens in codependent families affected by addiction.

Sometimes “talking” doesn’t work, because when one is loving and so angry she can scream, the addicted loved one is high or drunk or jacked up on meth or nodded out with heroin or ODing on fentanyl. Screaming at an addicted person is like screaming into a canyon; the only thing you hear is the echo of your own words coming back to you. Screaming NEVER works; we’re only hurting our relationship with our loved one, or we hurt ourselves with the inability to release some of the responsibility to where it belongs, squarely on the shoulders of the first choice to use – and while your addicted love one still has her faculties, you might be able to reach him; but by and large, we perpetuate our own pain by not being able to let go, to truly let go.

I don’t mean to say I’m angry with my deceased son. What I want to express is whether it’s a grief support group or an Al Anon meeting, find your niche and allow the healing to begin with you. Again, I like the Al Anon I’ve written about above, “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it”; it’s true. We each have agency, i.e., the ability to think for ourselves, even if we are burdened by ghosts from our past. Of course, there are some exceptions. There are some people who are so wounded in their brains, hearts and Souls they truly can’t think rationally and trying to rationalize with them is an exercise in futility; it ain’t gonna work! I tried…and failed….and tried and failed. There were days when I was wildly successful loving my tortured son. I know what it’s like to love a child so much it hurts. I know what it’s like to fuck up with a child and I know what it’s like to love a child so adequately that he will love you ‘til his dying breath, the way I love him, in spite, yes, spite in of the face of dysfunction and a dystopic family environment.

If I had not attended Al Anon I might have gone insane. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t manage my own life because I was so busy trying to save my son’s. He was wounded by his family, and he was wounded by others. When he died, his heart wasn’t just physically sick; it was broken. He used until he couldn’t feel anymore and then he used until he died. He died in withdrawal. His heart was so sick it couldn’t handle the harsh and violent withdrawals from heroin. I understand Jerry Garcia died the same way.

I just can’t recommend Twelve Step programs emphatically enough, and not just because the coffee is always excellent and the potlucks are right up there with church potlucks, but because the people who accompany you on your journey of realigning yourself with the rational world where you know that addiction hurts everyone in its path and it’s not that you’re crazy, but powerless, “We admitted we were powerless over [whichever substance your loved is using] and our lives had become unmanageable.” (Step One)

After my son died, I thought Al Anon might still be helpful and I missed the friends I’d made through the years, so, I went to a meeting. Big mistake. My qualifier, we didn’t use names of our loved ones in our roundtable sharing, my son, was dead and I could no longer commiserate with the group; it hurt too much to attend a meeting after I’d lost the love of my life. I haven’t been back. I started this site and another private page on Facebook, and the parents at our site have been my Higher Power and my healing power. Research has been done regarding the success of the Twelve Step programs; what has been suggested is peer-to-peer support is helpful to people who are struggling and with others who share similar struggles, i.e., those whose loved ones are addicted to a substance, or several.

I strongly encourage you to find a grief group in which you will find your healing niche. We have a group dedicated to parents who’ve lost their children/grandchildren to addiction. We know each other’s battles intimately – even though the circumstances surrounding our child’s death may be different shades of black on the spectrum of grief. At the end of our darkness is a life rich with possibility; but first we must relinquish whatever residual irrational thoughts we carry into each day, holding on to that angst, holding tightly to visceral feelings that hurt us and ruin our ability to thrive. Compassionate Friends is tremendous grief group. I highly recommend it. One of my members went on to form her own in person grief support group. I went on to finish my Associate’s, my Bachelor’s and now, my Master’s degrees because I started focusing on myself after thirty-two years of being mother to a child and man who battled demons his whole life. The last four years were horrible with snippets of joy, and then…he’d relapse. I formed the group because I was inspired by the Al Anon meeting, I attended ten years ago, and because I could find no therapist who specialized in grief from losing a child. They just weren’t out there. I went all the way to seminary for answers and gleaned from the Facebook page all the amazing wisdom from parents who’ve been on this terrible journey for a substantial amount of time, and sometimes, some of us saw it coming…and as hard as we tried to prepare ourselves, no one is prepared to watch a loved one take his last breath and leave our world forever.

I don’t care how the Twelve Step programs work; they are wildly successful for attracting others through behavior change and compassion. As of 2021, Alcoholics Anonymous itself, was active in 180 countries with an estimated membership of nearly two million – that’s nearly two million Souls who have found their way to sobriety and a life of promise – and the coffee’s not too bad either.

Be well. Forgive yourself for your mistakes with a loved one(s). Make posthumous amends. I’m not sure what I believe every day of the week, but on my most in step day with my son’s Spirit, I feel its Presence. I can hear him. I can smell him. I just can. I talk to his Spirit all the time, on my four hours of traffic time in rough traffic. I tell him I love him and miss him, and then I shrug my shoulders on other days and remember that I have no knowledge about the afterlife, only hopeful speculation.

I’d love to know about your experiences and perhaps we can help others through this terrible/wonderful journey. I want my son back; I always want my son back, but I’ve had to move forward from a situation I could never cure or control; I’ll accept some of the causation, but there were others who contributed to his ultimate choice to use until he made himself so sick his heart could no longer manage keeping him alive – and – I lost him.

Forever…but the show must go on; it just must.

I wish you a day in which you find peace and maybe even a snippet of pure, uninhibited joy, maybe even through this blog post. Peace.

A Good Cry

By Sherrie Cassel

We are each fortunate from time to time, even those whose lives resemble a life likened to Job in the Hebrew Bible, or perhaps Sisyphus of Greek origin, to have days when there is smooth sailing and our loads are light enough for us to catch a moment of relief from the onslaught of the barbs of life. Two weeks ago, I had such a day of tranquility. I had nothing to do, for once; I was caught up with my weekly notes, caught up with my homework for my Models of God class, etc. I was on top of things. I realized there was nothing going on, nothing that needed to be immediately prioritized.

I hadn’t cried in months, not that it’s my thing, but grief is for the lifespan and triggers are unpredictable, so, every so often a song will come on, and sometimes it’s a silly song that Rikki would have hated, and I’ll be in tears, months, and now, years after his death. Grief makes no sense, other than to prove that love is eternal – even when there is no physical entity with whom to share it. Find a way to sublimate that love connection which you now grieve; it took me a while to get that the connection is still here. Even if the placental remnants from his birth didn’t link us forever, our spiritual connection has always been very solid, even in turbulent times. We were emotionally enmeshed, a two-person household, just him and just me, and – just us.

I recently said that someone I know is too “task-driven” and that it drove me crazy. Pot, allow me to introduce you to Kettle. I realize that I too am task driven. I have a reason for every single thing I do during my day, from housework and homework, to scheduling time for emotional meltdowns. My husband and I are planning a trip this summer, along whose way we will see beautiful things my husband is dying to share with me and with our grandson who will be accompanying us. My husband is very excited and keeps adding things to see on the “trip.” He was adding the events at a dizzying speed, and I’m reminded that this is supposed to be a “vacation” too, after a traumatizing and amazing internship and culmination of my master’s degree program.

I graduate in three short months and have a lot of tasks to accomplish before I walk across that stage, shake hands, smile for the camera, and walk away with a tremendous sense of pride and relief; it’s been a very long journey. I realize how I’m also task-driven, and after decades of academic work, I want to slow down for a semester, before starting a Ph.D. program. From the moment I wake up to the moment I hit the bed, I have something to do. I keep it that way, maybe so I can stay in a state of comfortable numbness. Grief is great and it is ever-present.

So, busyness keeps my attention on things other than my broken heart, but just like oil rises to the top of a puddle, so too does grief, no matter how much or how deeply I stuff it down, it will rise at the first scent of a rainstorm reminding me that my loss is for my lifetime. I work hard two days per week, and I live peacefully with my adoring and brilliant husband and cats. I know how important self-care is, and I also know that those of us who work in the helping professions do a pretty piss poor job of taking care of ourselves, and I was majorly guilty of this before my internship. I was fortunate to have a supervisor who was firm, but not harsh about urging us to take care of ourselves. I’m grateful, even though it was a hard, but necessary lesson to learn. I know it’s a tired analogy about the oxygen mask on the airplane and using it first on yourself before assisting someone else. One cannot adequately care for others if one is not taken care of herself. Makes sense.

So, I’ve been taking good care of myself. I booked myself solid on the angelversary of Rikki’s death. I never melted down during the day or night, but I did allow myself some measured tears, and then I collected myself and resumed a life of blessѐd peace and two days of chaos on the freeway and the amazing fortune of seeing people who are awe-inspiring. Life is give and take … and acceptance and adjustment to things not always working out the way we want them to.

Two weeks ago, I was feeling antsy because I don’t know what to do with myself when things are going too well – for too long. I still have vestiges of C-PTSD and occasionally need to fuck up something, because may the gods forbid, smooth sailing last for too long. On a Saturday morning, I was avoiding doing housework, and I was playing music on YouTube, and watching animal rescues and ridiculous things people do.

I was feeling like I needed to be doing something, because in my task-driven character, I don’t know how to relax, really, even on my days off I’m busy…and you should see what’s in my head! I was also in neither a good nor bad mood. I just was. The dog videos weren’t helping me tap into my emotions this particular morning. I wasn’t feeling anything but anxious, and nothing was going on.

There it is, a video of sons returning from the military to surprise their mothers with the accompanying music, Christina Perry’s “Thousand Years.” So, I wasn’t feeling bad (yet). I thought this will help me to feel – like an emotional emetic. I was right. I hadn’t truly commemorated Rikki’s angelversary a few weeks back sufficiently. I sublimated my raw emotions and poured them into tasks and into people, and I gave myself a gold star and checked the day off my calendar.

As the first mother’s mouth fell agape, my eyes welled up and I wept a blue streak. You see, my son will never surprise me again, not here anyhow. If there is an afterlife, I hope to meet him there. I live in my head most of the time, and like Persephone, I come out in the spring to pick daisies and hide in fields of sunflowers. My crone is now appreciating the longevity of summer days and short summer nights. My mother’s heart burst wide open – again.

My husband taught high school theatre arts and English for nearly forty years. He taught even the most introverted and shy students to those whose fire shone through each character they played. I was blessed to be a part of his last fifteen years of teaching and watching the productions he directed his students in. I, myself, could never have been an actor, and in high school, I was a gangly nerd, so no acting (other than the presentation of my public persona). I always wondered how actors could cry on demand. I myself cannot. I need a video of sons returning home to mothers who’ve missed them for a very long time.

I cried at the first vignette, and I wept for two hours, unabashedly and unashamedly, the tears of a grieving Momma who keeps herself so busy she has no time to stop in for a spell to allow herself even a safe space in which to grieve.

I didn’t schedule this meltdown, but I needed it, nonetheless. I miss my son. He is no longer here. I have had to move forward in my life – and I race, as task-driven as I accuse others of being. I asked myself the day of self-imposed mourning why I needed to tap into visceral emotions. Did I need to impale my already and forever tender heart because life was just going too damn well, and I needed some reason to hurt myself for the day? I always overthink my grief. I lost a child, yo, my only child; I have a right to grieve as silently or as sonorously as I need to.

I remember in early grief, sobbing and wailing loudly and not caring that the neighbors might have thought I’d plum lost my mind; I kind of did. One can be beset with grief; I was. Because of an infernal American worldview that insists we be constantly cheery, I worked hard to keep my shit together in the company of everyone I know. In private moments I would lose it. Even if my husband were in the next room, I wanted to be alone with my grief and with the ghost of my son. How does one grieve the loss of her child? There are no rules, time limits, or methods to get through the acute phase of grief. I recommend screaming until your throat hurts, sobbing until your chest heaves and hos, curling up in the fetal position and sleeping so you can’t feel – in the early days and months of grief.

Everyone is different.

I recommend meltdowns – in safe places and/or with safe persons. Writing and pouring myself into something that evokes passion in my Soul are things I would also recommend as you grieve. I’m amazed by the creativity that has emerged from my grief process. I’m inspired by the things many of the parents at my grief sites have gone on to do after the loss of their child(ren). We spent our seasons in hell, both while they were living and since they’ve passed on. Nine years and nearly one month ago, I said goodbye to my son. Seasons have come and gone and I’m getting older and grayer, and hopefully, wiser, and time marches on.

Crying is nothing about which to be ashamed of. Grief is a natural reaction to death. Meltdowns are natural. Songs are meant to be emotive. Art is meant to help us express those emotions for which there are no words, only colors, textures, and soul energies poured onto canvases, and sometimes, our emotions are too deep for words, and so, the flow of emotions can burn hot, but inexpressible. Paint, hum, compose, dance, ad infinitum toward the healing of your heart.

Two weeks ago, I was in a funk that lasted for two days. I suppose I needed to cry; it had been a long while. I read that tears release hormones that help us to heal, to regulate the intensity of emotional states. I hope that’s true, because I cried a river … elicited by a YouTube video that slayed me.

I guess we each do what we need to do to “feel” the things we need to feel so we can find our way back to lives of purpose where we can use our pain and our grief to reflect growth, compassion, love, and transcendence – back out into the world toward healing others even as we continue on our own healing path.

Like I waited too long for my last oil change, I waited too long for a meltdown; it was well past time. I didn’t need to hurt myself that day; I needed to feel, and I’d kept myself too busy to do so.

I’ll pencil it in for next time.

Stoking the Embers

By Sherrie Cassel

I held it up to my face,

my left cheek, of course,

because of your handedness.

_____________________________________________

The round ceramic dish

with your name scrawled

on the bottom is

_____________________________________________

shiny and green, like a cactus,

no spines, just innocent little

fingerprints, proof you were here.

_____________________________________________

Years later we would laugh

at its resemblance to an ashtray,

and we thought, “In the first grade?!”

_____________________________________________

I wish you were here to remember

this with me, to laugh at the absurdity

of life and to cry over – your death.

_____________________________________________

I kiss your tiny signature and I

put my fingers in your fingerprints,

and I remember those tiny hands,

_____________________________________________

and my heart swells with so much love

that it encompasses the whole world,

as I spill my love for you into the Universe.

______________________________________________

I’ve been broken wide open. Unlike this

little ceramic dish that has traveled with me

for over thirty five years, I’ve been shattered

_______________________________________________

because I lost you,

because …

I lost you.

_______________________________________________

But I have this little token of your love, and

every so often, I hold it up to my face, and I

try so hard to connect to your Spirit, and

Sometimes, I think I do.

Grieving Mental Health in America

By Sherrie Cassel

I’m a writer tonight, not a spiritual care intern, not a psych major, but just a writer who is teetering on inappropriate characterizations of a segment of society that struggles to be noticed, other than as spectacle. There’s no other way to say it, and I’m not a clinician, so I won’t dare offer a diagnosis, at best it would be a guess, carefully consulting the DSM-V, but … the guy was batshit crazy. We were stuck at an exit off I-10 W in California. The traffic was particularly heavy at this offramp, and we were at a standstill for at least an hour. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and so I turned to see if it was an animal. One might characterize the crazy man as animalistic, but they’d be wrong. Certainly, there was some serious mental illness. For a person to jump over the guard rails on a busy freeway weighed down with metal poles is self-destructive and high-risk behavior. I was initially afraid he was going to take one of those poles and start beating our car, or the other cars in line. When he climbed over the guard rail and squatted down beside our car, I nearly had a heart attack. He jumped back over the rail to an area that was a bit ~safer~. As I called 911 (my husband was driving) – the gentleman jumped over the guard rail again, very careful to not jump in front of a car or into the freeway. I thought to myself, “Okay, yeah, he’s crazy, but he’s not crazy enough to really put himself in harm’s way. At some level, he knows there’s a line not even some of the most mentally ill folx will not cross – the one that takes them out of their mental illness – and life – forever.

I gasped as I watched this man live by the skin of his teeth and the survival skills of a person who may still be in there, and but for piss-poor mental health care in the United States, he could very well be recoverable. I’ve seen medication do miraculous things in a person’s life, in my life. I have the luxury, a very expensive luxury, of health insurance. Although some of my recent decisions of late might lead one to think otherwise, I’m not insane, but I am challenged with a mental disorder which I’ve discussed many times here and on my other pages. I’m beyond fortunate to be able to pay for the meds that keep me balanced and in love with life.

I read somewhere once that behind every insane person is a sane person watching. I wonder if this is true. From personal experience, I knew when I was losing it, and I knew when I’d lost it. I wonder if this guy knows he’s lost it – and if he wants to come back. He lives off the side of the freeway. He was filthy, wearing what looked to have been a nice jacket once, now torn and grungy. He spoke into a piece of cardboard as if it were a cellphone, then he screamed angrily, unintelligibly (my window was rolled up – and my door locked) … as he kicked and stomped on a piece of scrap metal on the inside of the guard rail.

I don’t know what has inflamed this man’s brain to insanity – but something did, and no one is watching out for those who can’t take care of themselves and so, in this one short life, he is not enjoying it. I find that tragic. Don’t you? I knew immediately this gentleman would be the subject in my next writing assignment, when I saw how close this guy got to getting hit by a car, but how he was able to stop himself from getting too far out into the freeway, like he may still have a “life wish.” Is it possible that those who are certifiably insane want peaceful and quieted minds, want normalcy, want minds that don’t burn them until they writhe in the hands of the gods of insanity – no anchor, no insurance to rescue them, and rife with historic and ignorant stigmatization?

I watched this man struggle with the ease of someone who is non-existent in the eyes of those who are privileged to blindness. I admit, I was afraid, first for myself, as is the case with the human animal, but then – I was terrified this poor soul would get hit and killed – and I would have to watch it.

The police dispatcher asked a bunch of questions as I watched this kid cheat death. Yes, there is a pedestrian on the side of the freeway, oh, my God, he’s jumping over the guard rail!

Hold on, Ma’am, I’ll transfer you the dispatch for that area.

WTF? All this unfolded as we sat in traffic for over an hour; it’s amazing what one can catch if one is willing to edge out of her comfort zone and explore what’s out of her safe peripheral vision. I thought I was way beyond my own judgmental characterizations of those who are more insane than I am, and more insane than you are.

Didn’t the Mad Hatter tell Alice that “We’re all a little mad around here”?

The perception that even I have as a person in the helping professions surprises me. I didn’t get out of the car – too dangerous and I’m not one to jump out of cars on busy freeways, but here was this man, either full of faith or in a bad way. If you’d seen him, I wonder what you would have thought. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think you would have done. It’s a hard call. I still give money to the unhoused. I still help out my neighbor. “Who then is your neighbor?” I do what I can to help those who are ignored and then marginalized. My super power is love, the kind of love that compelled me to love myself enough to not put myself in harm’s way by helping this lost soul in a dangerous, potentially fatal situation, the kind of love that compelled me to call 911, the kind of love that has me thinking about him still, and offering a prayer of deliverance for this man, deliverance from an unquiet mind. I wonder what his voices tell him.

I know they tell him to not get too close to death, and so, he didn’t. At one point I covered my mouth as I gasped as he kept getting too close for my comfort to the cars, and he laughed. It’s difficult to tell if he was laughing because one of the voices told him something that struck him funny, or if he was laughing at my fear, and there, you have it, I’ve wandered into crazy land.

There was a gentleman, a person who was challenged with schizophrenia, and he attended a liberal and moderately progressive church I was attending at the time. He would every so often burst out into raucous laughter, right in the middle of a sermon. He was harmless, smart, and unhoused. He lived under a train track and he was stabbed to death by another houseless man who shared the same mental illness. There’s an entire universe of unhoused people who are mentally ill, without access to mental health care. I wonder if the traffic hadn’t been during rush hour, would I have offered him a meal? For safety purposes, for my safety and that of my husband, and even of this young man, I stayed in the car and offered a prayer.

This event transpired over a little more than an hour. These are the thoughts that ran through my head as my heart stopped and started over and over again while this man negotiated his dance with near death like a seasoned tango dancer.

We finally got up to the light, to the Light, and left this man’s presence, hoping the police really were on their way and that they’d be kind to him. Sometimes…they’re not. I imagine they’ll put him on a 72-hour hold and then cut him loose back on to the street, a different offramp, where perhaps a Good Samaritan will endanger herself and put him in her car and buy him a meal, and get to know his story. Maybe she’ll even tell it to others, his story, her story, our story.

In January 2024, 770,000 people were unhoused in America. 18.4 percent of people who experienced homelessness in 2022 had serious mental illness (SMI). I don’t know where on the spectrum of mental illness this young man is, but it doesn’t take a shrink to see this man needs help.

We were on our way to a party where we would be eating prime rib and drinking adult beverages and laughing it up with friends and family.

I wonder if he was hungry.

Promises to Keep

By Sherrie Cassel

Happy heavenly birthday? I’m not sure I even believe in heaven, but desperation to see my son again compels me to hold on tightly to my doubt – because then I can hold on to some belief, some inkling of hope that there is a place where a parent can meet her child on the other side. Today is nine years ago that my son died. I usually get a little morose a few days before; it’s the dread of the overwhelm of feelings, when I’ve worked so damn hard to keep them controllable. I don’t mean that in a control freak manner of speaking, but in the way that a person who’s been working her grief process for nine years can learn to schedule meltdowns – except for triggers that knock the wind out of you. Yeah, right. I stayed up until 12:05 a.m. so I could get the entrance to the worst day of our lives over with. It worked. I went to bed and cried myself to sleep and then woke up resigned to another year without my son.

So, this site is about joy, and I know I get off track– often. I’m human, and I need an outlet just as much as my readers say they are helped by my work. I appreciate the readership – when I’m focused and when I’m like WTH is she even talking about. My brain is a many-splendored thing. Hey, you know what, so is yours.

On this day, this ninth year without my son, I will do my best to not think about the months, days, hours leading up to his death. No, I’ll not do that to myself. I won’t think about the ways his death wounded me deep in my Soul, or how it changed my perception of the God of my understanding, how it made me more compassionate and more open to sitting in dark places with friends, family members, even strangers. My eyes are opened more widely and I see more and more of the “bigger picture”. If I have to think about how much his death has changed me – then I have to remember the agony it’s taken to get here.

So, I’m supposed to talk about joy on this day; I’m going to do my best. Often, speaking about your loved one to someone else who loved him or her too helps a great deal, providing the other person has worked through whatever residual emotional challenges he had with the person who has died. Sometimes…the person at the bus stop has more compassion than a family member.

I’m doing remarkably well. My heart hurts and I’m doing my level best to keep my head above the torrent of tears that historically breaks free at the end of my work day. I took the first part of the day off to do busy work and to mourn – and to write this joyful/not joyful blog post. Angelversaries are lonely and so I reel in anyone who will listen to me say, “My son died on this day.” But I do know to whom it is safe to say it and from whom I will be met with tense gazes and quick getaways; it’s okay. Not everyone can sit in the darkness with another person.

What about joy? The first year after Rikki’s death, I got in touch with my immediate family to take a couple puffs of Rikki’s favorite flavor of cigar at 5:55 p.m. in honor of my beautiful son. Everyone did and they took pictures of themselves from wherever they were…even his ex-wife. I was moved by the gesture.

See, I may not always have the energy to hold up under the weight of impending and significant dates, but sometimes, I can catch the fire of someone else’s charge, and I can get through the day. I don’t even necessarily have to tell someone I’m the wounded one in our dyad for the day. Great emotional strength from a growing set of healthy emotional resources have helped me through the grief process. As each day proceeds, there are lessons that come from our pain – and with skinned knees and eternally bruised hearts we get up and we turn our grief into something spectacularly service-oriented.

I love the quote by Mother Teresa, “May my heart be broken so wide that the whole world falls in.” I feel that way too. My pain is great. My love for my son is greater. I’ve always said the fast-track to healing is through helping others. The love I can no longer shower on a living child, I pour into the lives of as many people as I can. Do unto others … was a platitude to me until I lost my son and since I’ve spent nine years grieving his death, adjusting to a world where he does not physically exist, and learning how to live again. None of those tasks has been easy … but joy, that’s right…

I’ve been pushing away any bad memories I have of the day he died. I choose to think of the day he was born, a beautiful and frightening prospect. He was beautiful. He was so tiny. He had red hair when he was born, but as the days and weeks progressed, he went bald, a little old man baby. He was adorable.

I want to think about his milestones: his first step, his first word, his first heartbreak. I want to think about the times I was emotionally able to step up to the plate and be a good mom … however intermittently. I want to take his baby teeth to a psychic and hope against hope that I will hear nothing, but also afraid I won’t.

I want to hear his laughter and I’m grateful for the videos and voice recordings I have of him laughing and speaking. He had the most genuine and unabashed laugh. We would laugh until we cried.

I’m going to listen to his favorite songs today, but only the ones from which he derived joy; I’m going to share in my son’s posthumous joy. Some say he’s gone, just gone, but I’m not going to bring in questions of Ultimate Reality today; I need the energy I have to keep my shit together while I’m out in the world.

I want to go read the birthday cards he wrote to me with his own hands. I want to hold up to my face the little ceramic dish he crafted for me when he was just a small boy. Will I feel his spirit through these items, through these talismans? I’m going to try, for joy’s sake…for my sake. See, I can calm the storm in my heart; it hurts today. Emotional pain is acceptable and understandable – for any occasion. Like REM sang, “Everybody hurts … sometime.”

But damn it, I will be joyful today … if it’s the last thing I do. I miss you like no one can comprehend, my beautiful son … but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” (Frost, Robert)