I'm sure that almost five years in most people would think I would be well on my way out of the dark and while I am not in total darkness most of the time the shadows certainly still loom.
The thing is that I had been distracted for the most of that five years and while I have not tried to bury my grief in alcohol, drugs or the usual culprits I have, as I said once before, attempted with no success to "Type A" it into submission.
By nature I am a very logical, analytical person. I'm a problem solver. A fixer. I assess the problem. Carefully consider my options. Gather my resources. Attack. So I set about to survive this the only way I knew how. I have systematically gone through my bag of tricks, the things that have worked for me in the past with lesser trials --what else could I do? I have no point of reference for such an enormous tragedy. It's not like I can look back and say "Oh yeah, the last time this happened I did this or oh yes, when this happened to my friend Trina, she got through it by doing that."
Nope. Flying by the seat of my pants here.
So I have approached it striking at it with everything within my reach. If I haven't gone through this before and no one I know has gone through this before so then we take the circle wider. Surely somebody has gone through this before? Right? Not that I can find. I know they have but nobody is talking about it. That's because it is a taboo subject. Because they are shamed into silence. Because the last thing on earth you want to do is publicize it and draw attention to yourself. Therefore there is no support out there that I can find for families of tragedies and the aftermath of this nature. No websites. No Blogs. No How-to YouTube videos to instruct you on how you live through this and salvage what's left of your life and sanity. So logically --again I regroup. What resources can I use that may be "close" to this? And the best I could come up with is grabbing a little here and a little there and piecing them into a weird mosaic of self-help.
I have read books - piles and piles of books searching, learning, taking notes looking desperately for that one magic book that is going to help me to dig out of this. If I just keep reading surely I will find one that can: give me hope, give me inspiration, tell me how others have made it through, show me how to recover my faith in prayer, my trust in law enforcement, find my confidence in my abilities or fix my family.
We had shame and judgment from a murder accusation so I find a book about a mother whose son goes to prison for shooting someone. How did she cope? How did she maintain her sense of self? How did she face the public? How did she fight for her son? Does she tell people and if so, how?
We had a media circus and circumstances with the investigation that made us lose faith in our justice system so I find a book about a couple that lost their precious child and then were promptly thrown into defense mode when they were the first and only suspects. How did they survive it? How did they walk around in public when they were so well recognized from the media circus that was created from their tragic circumstances? How were they ever able to even grieve their child when their lives and family and freedom were on the line from day one? How did they ever trust law enforcement again? How did they ever find their faith?
We had the death of multiples, that resulted in other families losing loved ones. As a result we bore undeserved guilt so I find another about a mother whose son was a famed school shooter. She was hated. Stalked. Not allowed to grieve her son. Thrown in to a nightmare of a life. How did she cope? How did she find beauty from the ashes? How did she survive?
Then I start breaking it down into the individual parts; books on surviving a tragedy; books on losing a child; books on grief in general; books on Complicated Grief, books on Disenfranchised Grief. (I had never even heard that term before I was living it.) Then I moved onto faith. I found a book about faith in the face of tragedy, Finding Hope in horrible circumstances, How to let God fight your battles and on and on.
What I have learned is that there are others that have it worse than me and that you cannot fix an illogical circumstance with logic. You cannot stop grieving your family by reading a book or a hundred books. Grief is not dealt with by systematically checking things off of a list.
I have been in survival mode for so long until I forgot how to come out. "Breathe. Put one foot in front of the other. Do the next thing. Keep busy." And part of my survival tactic was to not look this full in the face and feel what I feel. I ran desperately from my feelings because the pain was unbearable and I was afraid if I let myself fully absorb all of this I would sink to a place I could not come back from.
What does grief feel like today? It feels like sadness. Fear. Shame. Guilt. Sorrow. Remorse. Frustration. Hopelessness. Deep, deep emptiness. Pure physical pain. Confusion. Crazy. Anger. Betrayal. Lethargy. Mistrust. Insecurity. And did I mention crazy?
Sadness for the huge loss of my youngest son, the life of the party, the practical joker, the loving and loyal dad whose love and many talents are now wasted. Sadness for the loss of the baby that I finally let myself relax and love with abandon. How I miss those tiny hands and feet and how I long to bury my face in his soft baby hair and smell that sweet baby smell, to hold him, rock him, roll fire trucks with him and hear him laugh hysterically when we play hide and seek behind the sofa pillows and I finally "find" him, watch him run a million miles down my driveway pushing his toy. And how sad I feel at the waste of the life and talent and beauty and blatant honesty that was my daughter in law - she loved life so much and it was cut short before she had a chance to even live it. And sadness and deep guilt for her parents; the only other people in the world that know our same loss.
Fear of literally everything now. I went from fearing nothing in the beginning when I didn't have enough sense to care --to fearing everything as my world is now so shaky, unpredictable, temporary, unstable and small.
Insecure as my innocence in believing such as this could never happen to us has been forever shattered and I now live knowing my world can be rocked beyond belief with one phone call. All of my life I'd believed God would surely protect my family like I prayed. I know now that is not true. You can pray till the cows come home and the worst of the worst can still happen.
Shame, Guilt & Remorse because I chose not to see them; guilt that I couldn't have fought harder for the truth because I felt I had to put the living above the dead; shame because my logical mind thought of that; guilt because there is another family has this same god-awful pain and loss and they believe my son caused it...
Anger at myself first and foremost for not having the strength it took to see them or keep up the fight for the truth; anger at the Sheriff's Department, anger at the Deputy Coroner, anger at the media, anger at everyone that had ever hurt Brian, anger at the general public that did not think I should love and grieve my son. Anger at God and then add that to the top of the list of things I'm angry at myself about.
This is what it feels like today. And still it is soooooo much better than it was.
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