Grief to Gratitude

No hard feelings

by Sherrie Cassel

Anger is poisonous; it wrecks relationships irreparably, and if not irreparably, then shaky forever after. I know. My son and I. His wife and I. My sister and brothers and I, and a string of former lovers who might have turned into relationships had my anger toward men not been so prevalent in my psychological schema.

I think after Rikki died, I was faced with my many, many mistakes, ways I fucked up with men, friends, and mostly, how I fucked up with Rikki. Even though he gravitated toward the broken, those who were even more broken than we were, I get the need for communal understanding, either dyadic or in a group, gangs, for example, or two broken people with broken coping skills falling in love until their childhoods come hurtling to the present — with a vengeance.

I know. I married the first boy I dated in high school. He was broken. I was broken, but we found each other. Broken people find each other. We see each other. We get each other. But the tools that were necessary in our broken families, don’t work in the rest of the world, and because it’s all we know, we recreate our childhood chaos again and again and again, or until we have the wherewithal to extricate ourselves from the bad situations we live in.

Physician, heal thyself.

It’s okay to be angry with our loved one who has died. Sometimes children are angry that a parent has died and left them. I’m angry from time to time with my son who really couldn’t get well. I get it now. But I still find myself angry, like when my grandson misses out on father-son conversations that really can only take place with the safety enough to be vulnerable with someone who really knows you. I’m angry with my son today. Being angry doesn’t mean you stop loving your son, daughter, husband, mother, etc., it means you’re human and you allow yourself to run the entire spectrum of emotions. I love my son, and yet, I’m angry, the child side of me, the one my son left behind. Why did he not love me enough to stay?

Sometimes we are unrealistic about our grief process. My mother elevated my abusive father to sainthood. She pretended the domestic violence didn’t happen in our family, and nearly two years after her death, I’m allowing myself to purge the illusion and admit to myself and to the world that things were far from ideal in my family and there are days I finally allow myself to be mad as hell at my mother, and especially my father who beat every one of us and snarled verbal abuses at us, but Mom’s not off the hook either, and being able to be angry with them has been the most healing experience of my post-humous relationship with my parents.

I love their broken-ass selves. I love my broken-ass self; it’s taken me decades to be able to say that. See, as angry as I am from time to time with others, I’m in no position to judge another person. I use my intuition and critical thinking skills to determine if a person is safe and emotionally sound enough to be in relationship with, and if he/she/they are not then I take the next indicated step (12-Step) and move forward. To be angry with someone because he or she cannot be what you’d like them to be is a waste of time. If someone was a mess in life, he/she/they is/are only lily white now because we’ve elevated them to absolution of their sins against us. I’m not lily white – oh, in a plethora of ways. I will never be in a position to judge another because I am not lily white.

In my Trauma and Grace class, I found grace for my parents despite the fact they were abusive. I have found grace for a great number of people, but I choose to excise them from my life and grieve the loss for a time, hold on to the good memories, and then again, take the next indicated step and set myself free from anger, toward the living and toward the dead…a little at a time, in fits and starts, and sometimes it takes decades, or even an entire lifetime. We’ve all heard of deathbed reconciliations, tearful and saccharine.

The Avett Brothers have a song called, “No Hard Feelings” – it’s about the way I want to go out, peacefully. I have no hard feelings for anyone – anymore, not even my ex-husband, the biological father who bailed on my son, okay, maybe a few hard feelings, but truly, I enjoy my peaceful life too much to hold on too tightly to my anger.

If there is a heaven, I know my son is there. I know my abusive parents are there, and I know one day I’ll be there, if …

I was angry today, and I was angsty. I miss the laughter despite the turbulence in our relationship. We loved and we fought. I know he knew how much his mother loved him the night he died. Damn it! He died in withdrawals; by the time I got him to the hospital he was already dying. Yeah, I get a little angry with him from time to time, but my love for him overrides my irrational anger, my selfish anger, the kind of anger that makes it all about me.

It’s not all about me.

Anger is one of the stages in the Kubler-Ross model of grief. We know grief is not linear and it’s not even cyclical; there is no rhyme or reason for triggers, what they will be and how we will handle them. I was devastated when my son died so young. He was thirty-two.

My anger has subsided, and I am free to only love my son and continue in compassion because of his brokenness that led all the way to his death. He turned his anger inward; turning it outward is not much better.

Fearless Moral Inventory

by Sherrie Cassel

I know my son was in a tremendous amount of pain when he died, emotional, physical, and spiritual. His marriage had ended, and he was wounded to the marrow of his soul. His problematic childhood didn’t help either. He chose alcohol, LSD, meth, marijuana, and finally heroin to stop the pain, but none of those helped. There is some pain no drug can touch. I lost my son to his pain and his tortured brain, his inability to self-regulate, and to every person who had ever hurt him. I carry so much sadness for the pain my son was in, pain that turned him toward the very things that would kill him. My heart is forever broken, and even as I heal day by day, my heart will always be tender, to its core – and Rikki is branded into it, inseparable from me, connected by the umbilicus of a shared soul. I know the common perception is that a soulmate is a romantic partner, but not true. Rikki knew me better than any one human being ever has. He was my son, my friend, my brother, my soulmate.

Our relationship was intense…but we laughed a lot too. I have a picture of us on my office wall where Rikki is laughing gleefully and I’m laughing with him. Sometime the picture makes me laugh and sometimes it makes me weep. I miss him so much. I strategically keep myself busy, have kept myself busy since Rikki died. Oh, I mourned too. I wept. I sobbed. I hyperventilated. I hated. I loved. I hurt. I felt nothing. I was angry at the God of my understanding. I wanted someone to blame. I navigated the horrible cycle of grief, over and over again, until I realized I get to choose what phase I’m in at any given time.

Today, I’m in the light of acceptance, always bittersweetly tinged with resignation. He’s gone AND, I must carry on. If I didn’t have Rikki’s son with us who needs us so much maybe I would have abandoned my dreams and just withered away from the sheer heaviness of losing a child. Maybe. Giving up has never been a weakness of mine; I certainly have others! I don’t know what made my son give up on himself. I screamed and sobbed and begged him to get help, and he did, a few times. He even went to rehab and was learning to like who he was; he was beautiful, tortured, but absolutely a quality human being, and smart, oh my God, so smart.

His son is lying on our couch covered in a fluffy blanket. He looks so much like his dad. I’m hoping our love and devotion will help him to heal from losing his father and for having a very challenging childhood.

My tenure in seminary has ended and I walk across that stage on Tuesday. In my bipolar brain, I already feel the let down from the anticipation of boredom and stagnation after being on the fast track for four years; the prior four and a half years were a bust in complicated grief and emotional paralysis. Everything just hurt too badly. I encourage you, when you regain your physical energy, to find something to pour it into, a hobby, a charity, an art project, a book, a poem, a new job, go back to school, etc. Find something that makes your heart sing. I didn’t do that right away; I’m not sure in the nine and a half years that I’ve been in mourning for my son, I know anyone who emotionally was “ready” to return to life immediately. Many of us had no choice but to return to work for purposes of economic survival, whether or not we were ready.

In the nine and a half years we’ve had AFTER THE STORM, we have lost two to grief madness. I encourage you to seek professional help, pastoral care, shamanic healing, whatever you can do to be a balm to your broken heart until it begins to heal.

I was spinning in my office chair this morning, as I often do, listening to Van Morrison singing “Into the Mystic” – and it always makes me think of my son, and I hear the sound of crashing waves, and I see his blue lips from the cold water as he refuses to come on to the shore, complete and utter joy on his little face. I got to have that beautiful human being for thirty-two years, beautifully broken, but so fucking amazing.

Life is neither fair nor unfair. We’re born and we die and in between are many experiences that shape us into those with a high tolerance or a low tolerance for pain and frustration. Rikki reached critical mass and imploded.

I accept my responsibility in my son’s choice to use, to use something that would numb the pain – until it no longer worked and nothing else did either. I drank myself into oblivion in my thirties when I was working through some shit. I was lucky I got therapy and started to realize I could heal without substances. Rikki wasn’t interested in therapy until it was court-ordered. We went through hell with my son. We were frantic. We were desperate. I lost it a few times when he was alive; I’ve lost it many more since he’s been gone. I don’t melt down as often, as a matter of fact, I think the last meltdown I had was January 22, 2025, the nine year angelversary. I worked. I worked. I worked. I drove home, fell asleep in my clothes, and didn’t wake up until the day was over. We each have our coping mechanisms.

I tried so hard to race through the grief process, hoping against hope that the other side would be a place where I no longer hurt. Fantasy. Rikki’s death opened my broken heart open so wide that like Mother Teresa said, “the whole world fell in.” I have a deeper sense of who I am. I have greater empathy for those who struggle – across the board. I have more grace toward others, who are equally as imperfect as I am. I don’t know if four and a half years of complicated grief was too long, or too much time “wasted”. I know that as I revisit the years leading up to my graduation from seminary, there was a nearly five year span when no growth took place. I was safe in a cocoon – just me and my pain, cells dividing into the butterfly until there was no room for the new creation and the pain. I had to let go of it; it was choking the life out of me; it was killing me.

Whether it’s a konk on the head under the Bodhi tree, or some other vehicle of transformation, be ready for it. Yes, we ache to the very marrow of our souls, deep and indescribable. But when you’re ready to rejoin the living, we’re here waiting to welcome you.

I’m feeling wistful for my son today. We had comedy and tragedy in our life together. I wish he could have found another way to tend to his wounds. He didn’t, and now I’m a spiritual advisor to others who are hurting – even as I tend to my personal wounds through healthier coping skills.

Trust me, I see the irony.

Picture is of Rikki and my mom

Desert Perspective

By Sherrie Cassel

Funny what we remember. Sometimes we remember things to the minutest detail and other times we miss the elephant in the room, no matter how many times we ram into its tusks. I’m listening to the Eagles, “Take it Easy”, and about the band’s time in Winslow, AZ. I’m not aware of the band members’ escapades that made some women want to stone the singer, but I think about times my husband and I go away for a few days of fun and naughtiness and some of the places we’ve landed in on our way to whatever paradise we feel like navigating in our Rubicon. We love the desert together. I love the beach alone, and that’s okay, her sound and the mist from her exhalations heal me and that is a solitary space and a sacred activity. Physician, heal thyself.

We were on our way somewhere and we had booked a cheap motel in Blythe, bleak and bleh Blythe. We got there around nine o’clock p.m., tired and hangry. There was a fog that covered the road and nothing was open. We made our way to our dingy motel in that dingy town and forced ourselves asleep early so tomorrow would get there quickly. Funny, how we play games with ourselves. Twenty-four hours is twenty-four hours. We awakened early the next day and I had said a silent prayer that Blythe would look less bleak in the light of day; it didn’t.

We got the hell out of dodge and headed off to one of our adventures. I wish I could remember which one. In November, the end of 2025, my husband and I will be together twenty years. We “hooked up” later in life. I was forty-four and my husband was fifty. Our twenty years together have been both comic and tragic. One year we lost five people in less than eight months; that was a little rough, and to the mythical god I shout, fist in air, “There was absolutely no reason for that!”

And there really wasn’t. There was no greater lesson I was supposed to glean from the abuse I endured at the hands of my father, mother, and siblings. There was no great epiphany to be had in the first marriage, a disaster, and a waste of time. And, above all, my son did not die to serve a greater purpose to help others who struggle with heartbreak and heroin. These things all happen, and we get to choose how we will move forward when our world falls apart or there’s a financial crisis, the death of a child, ad nauseam.

We were in Blythe in midsummer; that was our first mistake. Blythe is not a touristy hot spot. Obviously, it left an indelible mark on me. I’m able to find beauty in the most dismal places. We live in the desert. Some of our friends come up for the day and marvel at the desert’s beautiful landscape and bask in its tranquility, and others? They see rocks and loathe the heat. Beauty is a matter of perspective and Blythe was a pit stop, a place to gas up the car and then drive through the car wash and head out. To be honest, there was beauty shrouded in fog, barely enough streetlights to see through the windows of a dying town.

I heard its cannabis industry is booming though.

There’s a little dusty town in the Anza Borrego desert in southern California, Plaster City. Yep, you guessed it, gypsum, the main ingredient in plaster is mined there. I looked up the population of the area and Plaster City’s own website said it was a “populated” area, but difficult to peg just how many people live there at any given time because of the inhospitable heat in the summer; most people live there seasonally. If Blythe was bleak, Plaster City was a place where people go to hide or die. There really is nothing there.

We spent a lot of time in the Anza Borrego Desert when my husband volunteered for an organization that left water out for anyone who needed it, often even unprepared border patrol agents. We’d cruise through the Carrizo Badlands, enjoy the heat, the vultures, the tarantulas, cautiously marvel at the dangerously beautiful rattlesnake, and socialize with the natives; unbelievably, there are actual natives in Ocotillo, natives and former CEO divorced men looking to be off the grid, far from the ol’ battle ax and avoiding child support. The desert, despite its summer heat, again, is a great place to hide.

We heard stories from the people who landed there and stayed. People are so magnificent and some are unbelievable storytellers – and whether you paint it or print it, TELL YOUR STORIES!

I had always meant to have my mother write down her stories, most of which I knew because I was her confidante from a very young age, but I wanted her stories for my siblings, all from whom I am estranged, so, now, it’s a moot point. So, tell your stories, for your kids, for the population to whom your story will most resonate. Put it out there. Be brave. Be vulnerable.

How long do we hide out in the deserts of our own lives when there is an oasis of self-discovery that’s waiting for us on the other side of our dark secrets and dysfunction? I saw a dance performance at CSUSM at least a decade or so ago in which the performers were crawling across the desert on their way to America, in search of a life of promise. Crossing the desert in blistering heat is hard work, so is healing from our wounds, so is claiming our true selves, the self that is dying to be seen and brought to life. He/she/they are there just waiting for you to see that elephant in the room. Oh my God, it’s right in front of you! You just need to open your eyes and be courageous enough to cross that place whose heat makes people move to a cooler climate, only to return to a place they must flee three months out of the year.

I love spring; in the desert, it lasts only very briefly after a long southern California winter. But I love the short time of renewal and then back to it, work and play in the summer heat; it’s a dry heat that is navigable, no humidity, perfect for stillness and contemplation. I haven’t been able to enjoy my desert much over the past four years of seminary, but I finish on Tuesday of next week, and I will take some time off to enjoy the best my state has to offer, beaches, mountains, deserts, forests, and people I adore in all those places.

We’re planning a trip to Texas this summer to see my family from both sides of my parentage. I remember from summers past the humidity, the mosquitoes, the lightning bugs, crickets, and the size of Texas’ burgers, and the joy we had chilling with our family — rife with family secrets that have been ignored for generations.

I remember going through New Mexico and Arizona, and my father romanticizing the desert, and I’m sure that’s why I have found a home in the desert. Even children of abusive parents want a love-connection, any connection with their parents. I rarely think of my parents anymore. I rarely think of my siblings. We were never really a family, just a giant receptacle of darkness and maladaptive coping skills. Sometimes we have to shake the dust from our dysfunctional families off our shoes and move into a brave new world.

Stephanie Foo in her WHAT MY BONES KNOW, walked away from her unbelievably cruel parents, even though she said it hurt to do so; it really doesn’t feel good — at first, but the more times you do it, the better you get at walking away from toxicity, even from your own family.

Whatever obstacles persist in your life, people, places, things, if you’re serious about unloading things that hurt you, you have to yank it like a bad tooth, no anesthesia; the wound will heal, and we’re responsible for our own healing. Waiting for apologies you’ll never get is time wasted, and we really never have “enough” time – for ourselves or with our loved ones.

If you’re in a bleak and bleh Blythe, Ocotillo, or Plaster City, and not able to escape your prison of poverty or immobility, find something spiritual to hinge yourself to; create beauty from your pain. Read everything you can to feed your mind with things you’ll blend with your own thoughts compelling you toward creativity — in your art, and especially, in your life.

All things being impermanent, things will change, so too will our circumstances, and so too will we. In the deserts of your perception, beautiful or dusty, you can grow in grace and in wonder. Some of us need empirical data, evidence-based practices, and I’ve seen post-traumatic growth time and time again in people’s lives, including my own. We can grow past that elephant who has been ignored for too long already.

I also like the analogy about the blind men feeling a part of the elephant but not “seeing” the whole. Open your eyes and make that crawl toward that oasis of self-discovery and set yourself free. You’re so close.

Mother’s Day

by Sherrie Cassel

I’m remarkably calm this Mother’s Day Eve. I know it’s coming. I’ve known. My life is punctuated by special days I can no longer celebrate with my son, and sometimes those days tear me up, and other times, I’m as calm as I am today. I no longer melt down when someone says, “Happy Mother’s Day” to me. I admit, it still smarts a little, but I can get through the day now.

For those of you for whom this is a first or a second or a third, take care of yourself as best as you can. If you have a big family and a gathering is expected, walk away from time to time and let your family know you just need a moment to gather yourself. Those who love you will understand. If you just can’t make yourself go to the family gatherings, honor your broken heart and what it can handle.

We are mothers. We were born to be mothers. We will always be mothers. And when someone asks me if I have any children, I now say boldly, “I have one angel child.” I had no other children; Rikki was my only Boo.

Allow others to hold you up or to leave you alone in your mourning on a day that brings into focus the very real fact that we are mothers and that one of our children is not here to celebrate the most significant days of our lives.

I usually stay home on Mother’s Day – restaurants are crowded, people are celebrating their mothers, and their adult children smile with joy at another year with their mothers, and how grateful they are for that. I still can’t even…so, I stay home and feed my soul in other ways, read, listen to music, write, weep, remember, laugh, clean, sleep, whatever my mind, body, and soul need.

I encourage you to do the same. This day really is all about you.

May you have peace and happy memories this Mother’s Day.

Brilliant!!!

Talkin’ about a revolution; sounds like a whisper. ~Tracy Chapman

That’s how the Light gets in

By Sherrie Cassel

I love watching the Light go on in others’ eyes. There’s a monosecond when a person becomes self-aware, at once exhilarated and exposed; it’s glorious and terrifying. I just finished reading Stephanie Foo’s WHAT MY BONES KNOW; it’s all about healing from C-PTSD (Complex PTSD). Stephanie was raised in an abusive family. Her story is horrifying and was demoralizing; I can relate. But the beautiful thing is, she healed, or is healing, but at a stage in her healing where the Light has gone on. This is a woman who spent years and who was fucked up by her parents, but the one who was remarkable just because she was born, the one who deserved love and nurturing, the one whose fault it was NOT that she was horribly abused and parentified by her parents. I relate.

I emphatically recommend this book to anyone, really, but especially to anyone who has endured a shit ton of physical, emotional, financial, sexual abuse, and/or any of the infinitely many ways abuse can be exacted on us.

I used to have a compulsion to purge my abuse story every time I sat down to write, and the purges were necessary toward my healing because I didn’t have a voice in my family of origin, so I would go inward with my books and I read, still do, all the time. I learned to love language and I excelled in writing all throughout my academic career. I told my story in metaphor for most of my life; it’s been only very recently, since the death of my son, that my story is told in starkness. But I don’t need to purge like before, only when I have an overwhelm of intellectual data that must be expressed through art, through the only artistic talent I have, through my writing.

I often have wished I could paint or sketch or sing, but those are not the gifts I was given, and I’m grateful for all the inspiration those other gifts provide to me evocatively. I’m still working on a piece about Goya’s ~Saturn Devouring His Son~ but it’s too dark and I’m in a good head space right now. I’ll tackle it later – because it is a remarkable painting – and I don’t know anything about the artist’s life so any interpretation I bring to it is completely and utterly subjective. That’s cool though because – I can only tell ~my~ story, just like the Goyas and Helnweins of the world, or the Capotes and the Kafkas, tragedy and comedy – and like in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL – sometimes our stories are a devastating mixture of both.

I used to laugh – a lot – and I’d laugh hard too. I didn’t laugh much as a kid, from what I can remember. C-PTSD has limited the memories I can access because those I have readily available in my brain are already horrifying enough, I can’t imagine how much worse they can be. Foo’s book brought so much up to the surface. She called the healing journey many things, but the term I’ve learned to embrace, she did not use, even though it is the place she’s worked hard to be, is posttraumatic growth. Foo was horribly abused by her mother and both physically abused and parentified by her father. One wonders how someone can make a comeback from the horrors of domestic violence and the vile ways parents can hurt us. I believe it’s more than just plain ol’ grit and the gumption to heal; I believe it’s our – Whom or whatever you would thank, journey on our way to self-actualization and transcendence of all the bullshit that drives those who continue to give it more attention than it deserves meaningless lives with no purpose.

For too many years all I knew was rage and revenge. I’m grateful for therapists, so grateful in fact, I went into the helping professions as a spiritual advisor. I lost my son and I needed answers; I demanded answers from the God of my understanding. As you all know, I took my grief all the way to seminary, and I laid my burden down. When Rikki died I had so much old shit I hadn’t worked through which only compounded the supreme grief I was in. I maintain, the more shit we’ve worked through the better equipped we are when tragedy strikes.

I was ragged from the last several years of my son’s life as he wasted away from heroin addiction and alcoholism, as he wasted away from a heart so broken it would not heal in this lifetime. Some of us die very slow deaths. I think zombies are such an amazing metaphor for the walking dead who infect everyone with their virus of perpetual death depicted as hideous and threatening. I know we’ve probably all heard the term ~emotional vampire~? The walking dead, the zombies among us can be so draining, in order to save your life, you must run away from them. They look almost human, and of course they ~are~, but you can’t save them, ever, not ever. They weigh you down with their resistance to change, to be made well. They’d rather eat away at your wellness – and we let them – until we don’t. Zombies and emotional vampires are bred in dysfunctional families – and they are sent out into the world to perpetuate violence by omission or commission.

This is not hyperbole. Domestic violence is real and although I can speak at large on the topic, I’d rather talk about posttraumatic growth, the very gift Foo found in the rubble of her horrors with her parents. I believe, although separated by decades, Foo and I have found this posttraumatic growth that ignited the Light we can now share with the world. She’s a bit more disciplined as a researcher than I am, but we are both gifted with words. She started her healing process much sooner than I did, and it’s taken me every second of my life to heal, and I guess I’ll be healing until I’m released from this body and this place, transcending matter in an explosion of oneness with the God of my understanding. I know how much like woo woo that sounds, and that’s okay. Each of us finds our own numen, the Source of all things, the thing that gets you high on life and drives you to stubbornly find your purpose.

What would a clear pathway toward healing from a dreadful childhood look like to you? What would a day without focusing on a tragedy look like to you? Foo suggests there is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is an unavoidable part of the human condition: emotional and physical. Suffering is the consequence of choosing to focus on that pain to the exclusion of all else, i.e., ruminating to the point of extreme angst. Guilty as charged. I can actually joke about guilt now. As a recovering Catholic/Southern Baptist, guilt is in my DNA, as is shame. I’ve learned to defuse their volatility in my life and find that healthy remorse when I fuck up is not the same animal as guilting myself to the point of a shame so deep it can only lead to self-loathing and a self-fulfilling prophecy toward a purposeless life.
I know. I was a zombie for many years – and I chose only other zombies to surround myself and my son with. My trajectory was — being raised by vampires and being sucked dry as a parent to my parents, I became a zombie through dissociation; it was just easier that way. Do you know what I’m talking about? Am I making any sense to you?

Once the Light goes on it can’t ever be extinguished – not even tragedy, not even losing a child can completely extinguish it. Trust me; I know. The buzz acronym was PTSD for so long that the gifts of developmental growth and empathy, compassion and concern for others, are overshadowed by the dark results of domestic violence, i.e., mental illness, historical trauma, repeated dysfunctional and anti-social cycles. I relate – to ~all~ of it.

I’m grateful for therapy and spiritual counseling. I’m grateful for a husband who loves me enough to have walked my emotional healing journey with me when I asked him to and who leaves me to my own journey when I ask him to do that too. I’m grateful for posttraumatic growth (PTG) … let that acronym replace our former model’s.

You can grow from your pain so you no longer need to suffer with secrets that you’ve carried alone for too long. Come into the Light; come into ~your~ Light.

That is all.

Note to Self

By Sherrie Cassel

Everything I cherish most in this world is in our home tonight. My son’s presence and absence fill the empty space between all that he loved most, the young man asleep on our couch, his son – and me, my son’s mother. My husband is singing a Flying Burrito Brothers’ song. The cats are sleeping and I’m feeling only gratitude for this Moment.

Grief and Graduation Blues

By Sherrie Cassel

Grief is funny; it ebbs and flows in and out of our awareness. Today I’m starkly aware I’m a woman, a parent, who has lost a child, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. Some days I feel the separation – just like the moment he was yanked from my body. Indescribable pain; indescribable joy. There are moments when I’m creepily aware of the loss, my greatest. There is nothing much going on. I’m tying up some loose ends as I complete my master’s program and internship. I have administrative tasks and farewells to navigate – and I walk bravely into the future, at sixty-two years old feeling like I’m just getting started.

I had a recent health scare, a serious one, and I dodged a bullet this time – but my husband, a few close friends and I held our breaths while ultrasound, CT scans and lab results trickled in. Time ekes out painstakingly when you’re awaiting test results. Genetics and neglecting one’s triune-self equal poor health outcomes, and I’ve had a few cancer scares in my sixty-two years already. Each negative result brings with it a momentary resolution to work and play harder, to live with gusto … in these twilight years, she said tongue-in-cheek.

Again, I’m just revving up.

We had rain in our desert yesterday and the scent of the moistened earth and creosote waft in the crisp air, the last gasp of spring before our beautiful and blistering heat. I will traipse freely this summer, my time my own … my very own. I’m aware of the seasons of grief changing as I mark another milestone, one for which I have given my all. Another milestone. Another day I do not have my son to celebrate our milestone together, here, in the present, not in the Spirit I must settle for. I want him here.

Our grandson is with us; he’ll be sixteen in two months. Unbelievable. His father would be forty-two. I place my hand on my heart as it skips a beat in deference to my son. I acknowledge his absence, and I wonder – as I often do – if he knows how much he is missed. Love – I pour it into his son, my marriage, my friendships, the people I’m blessed to work with, my art, my healing, my Self.

Today it hurts that it’s enough my son and I shared genetic existence, familial existence, spiritual existence – and that I continue to move forward toward dreams I continue to dream when for four years dreams were inconceivable. Rikki and I were tight, and we were broken, each in our own cocoon of dysfunction. I’m raw today. I feel compelled toward contrition. I’m sorry I was so broken and wasn’t able to give you the absolute best you deserved, Boo Bear. I’m sorry for every time I ever failed you.

I’m sorry I wasn’t perfect; you deserved perfection, but that’s not the way the world works, Kiddo. I see the guts and the glory we muddled through – together and sometimes alone. And I feel our shared tears in my gut. I also feel our howling laughter deep in the viscera of my soul. I feel empty. I feel the hole in my reality…at once a deep and a surface wound. The scab hangs precariously close to being yanked, like my son, like you, Rikki, being yanked from my body, four decades ago, and here I am still grabbing my phantom belly to feel your heartbeat … I miss you. I feel it today so much.

You should be here in this victory with me.

I will buck even as I beam with pride.

I will look for your face out in the crowd, my giant manchild with a round-faced smile, loving the mosaic who raised him. I will look at the faces who are there, loving me, being proud of me, but YOU, my beautiful son will not be there…and I’m ashamed because suddenly Spirit is not enough, and the pain nearly knocks the wind out of me.

I can’t go home…ever the stone desiring no moss. I don’t belong there anymore. You’re not there and the rest of us have become economic nomads, there’s no place… home is where the heart is and mine has always been with you…will always be with you…but it is also here, with them.

Yeah, grief is funny; it renders everything forever bittersweet. Rikki traveled with me for thirty-two years, his entire life. We waltzed and we warred. We loved and we hated. We hurt and we healed. I was in college for all of Rikki’s life. He deserves this degree too. When I walk across the stage I take him with me, in my flesh, in my blood, in my bones. His son will be there, the next generation. I will never let him forget you, Rikki.

My grief is mixed with gratitude – always. I ache for each moment we no longer have together. I mourn the minutes I now must celebrate without you. I’m grateful for the moments we had together. I’m grateful for the times I got it right and for the grace we found for each other.

Nine and a half years have passed since you died…and I have resurrected with a vengeance. I will not go gentle into that good night. But it will always be a battle; pearls will always be formed in the grit and grime of grief.

And, yes, even though I’m happy … it hurts to not have you here.

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.