This Says it All...

I was sent this yesterday by my dear friend; another mother that lost her child. The one other person that had the same tragic loss that I have. She lost her precious child and her "only" grandchild.

Today is her birthday. I know better than to say the trite "Happy Birthday" for I'm sure there will never be another truly happy birthday for her because tomorrow is the day she lost her child and grandchild. Like me, today, five years ago was the last time she would ever hear her daughter's voice. As she so aptly put it when she sent this: "This says it all. And we are not crazy!" So I am posting it here for her and all the mother's that sadly may need to hear this.

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I am a mother. I am a bereaved mother. My child died, and this is my reluctant path. It is not a path of my choice, but it is a path I must walk mindfully and with intention. It is a journey through the darkest night of my soul and it will take time to wind through the places that scare me.

Every cell in my body aches and longs to be with my beloved child. On days when grief is loud, I may be impatient, distracted, frustrated, and unfocused. I may get angry more easily, or I may seem hopeless. I will shed many, many, many tears. I won’t smile as often as my old self. Smiling hurts now. Most everything hurts some days, even breathing.

But please, just sit beside me.
Say nothing.
Do not offer a cure.
Or a pill, or a word, or a potion.
Witness my suffering and don't turn away from me.
Please be gentle with me.
And I will try to be gentle with me too.

I will not ever "get over" my child's death so please don’t urge me down that path.

Even on days when grief is quiescent, when it isn't standing loudly in the foreground, even on days when I am even able to smile again, the pain is just beneath the surface.

There are days when I still feel paralyzed. My chest feels the sinking weight of my child's absence and, sometimes, I feel as if I will explode from the grief.

Losing my child affects me in so many ways: as a woman, a mother, a human being. It affects every aspect of me: spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally. There are days when I barely recognize myself in the mirror anymore.

Grief is as personal to me as my fingerprint. Don't tell me how I should or shouldn’t be grieving or that I should or shouldn’t “feel better by now.” Don't tell me what's right or wrong. I'm doing it my way, in my time. If I am to survive this, I must do what is best for me.

My understanding of life will change and a different meaning of life will slowly evolve. What I knew to be true or absolute or real or fair about the world has been challenged so I'm finding my way, moment-to-moment in this new place. Things that once seemed important to me are barely thoughts any longer. I notice life's suffering more- hungry children, the homeless and the destitute, a mother’s harsh voice toward her young child- or an elderly person struggling with the door. There are so many things about the world which I now struggle to understand: Why do children die? There are some questions, I've learned, which are simply unanswerable.

So please don’t tell me that “ God has a plan ” for me. This, my friend, is between me and my God. Those platitudes slip far too easily from the mouths of those who tuck their own child into a safe, warm bed at night: Can you begin to imagine your own child, flesh of your flesh, lying lifeless in a casket, when “goodbye” means you’ll never see them on this Earth again? Grieving mothers- and fathers- and grandparents- and siblings won’t wake up one day with everything ’okay’ and life back to normal. I have a new normal now.

As time passes, I may gain gifts, and treasures, and insights but anything gained was too high a cost when compared to what was lost. Perhaps, one day, when I am very, very old, I will say that time has truly helped to heal my broken heart. But always remember that not a second of any minute of any hour of any day passes when I am not aware of the presence of my child's absence, no matter how many years lurk over my shoulder, don’t forget that I have another one, another child, whose absence, like the sky, is spread over everything as C.S. Lewis said.

My child may have died; but my love - and my motherhood - never will.

By: Dr. Joanne Cacciatore

The Emotions of Grief

Last week my counselor suggested that I write a post on the emotions of grief that she believes I do not acknowledge.  I kind of thought I acknowledged all of them and feel like I am more than fully aware of all of the emotions of it.  I may not talk about some as much as others but believe me I am well aware of them.  The ones she thinks I should acknowledge and "feel" are:

Sadness and Fear

I have blatantly acknowledged that I've experienced:

• Anger
• Confusion
• Depression
• Betrayal
• Guilt
• Shame
• Helplessness
• Isolation
• Loneliness
• Apathy
• Numbness
• Disbelief
• Thankfulness
• Shock
• Uselessness
• Weakness
• Uncertainty

I am sure I have made myself clear on sadness as well albeit not to the true magnitude that I feel - because you can't really convey that easily and I won't let myself wallow in that mud for fear it will turn out to be "quicksand" and I will not be able to pull myself back out of it. So out of self-preservation I allow myself to experience the overwhelming sadness of this only in short bursts. Then I find a distraction and turn away from it.

So we'll go with fear.  I do admit I have not thought much about fear in a while but it is absolutely a crippling and very real part of this.

So what could you have to fear in this?  I can tell you first of all that it is NOT fear of you yourself dying.  But it is just about everything else.

But when you have been rudely awakened from your magical thinking that things as horrific as this --cannot really happen to you which opens you up to any and all possibilities.  Nothing is off limits.  The worst of the worst has already happened and so you feel very vulnerable and believe me that scares the living shit out of you.

And you have lost all belief that you and your family are being watched over and taken care of - and that too, makes you extremely fearful.  If you've lived your entire life believing that a good and merciful God watches over you and your family and that prayers for your children's safety really matter - a tragedy on this scale - can rock your world in ways I cannot begin to describe.  So you have a spiritual fear that if "that" wasn't true - what else that you have always believed is not true?  It's kind of like waking up on Christmas morning when you are a child and finding out your parents are Santa Claus. Suddenly you find that something you had believed all your life is not true. All of the magic in life suddenly fades and you feel sad and insecure and betrayed.  All of the colors of your world turn to gray as you realize that you've been duped your entire life and worse still by the people you love and trust the most in this world. Your first thoughts are "What else have they lied to me about?  Am I even theirs?  Do they really love me?  Will they someday just go to work and never come back home?  Is anything good --real?"  Of course unlike Santa I still know there is a God and this is no comparison as far as the magnitude but the feelings of confusion, disillusionment and insecurity are pretty much the same.

Then there is the mind-numbing "terror" of losing someone else you love.  So much so until it keeps you up at night and makes a raving lunatic out of you and some part of every single day - miserable.

For instance your son or daughter in law are suddenly plagued with some weird health symptoms - and you automatically jump to worst case scenario and are wringing your hands and pacing the floor;  calling until you drive them both nuts.  Asking questions, looking up symptoms on the internet, searching your past history for anything that sounds like what they are experiencing. hounding them to go see a doctor, and calling for test results and consulting your friend that is a nurse living in a total but as yet unreasonable panic.

Or perhaps your daughter and son in law stop to help a stranded motorist in a parking lot late at night after leaving a restaurant and you find yourself in a panic-stricken screaming fit because now they won't answer their phones.  When they finally do you are screaming at them to stop taking risks with their lives;.angry and yelling about your son in law putting their lives in danger.  The same son in law that you dearly love and have always admired for his selfless, kind and compassionate ways.

Or maybe your sister doesn't answer her phone when you call because she's in the shower - and your mind goes instantly to "laying in the floor unconscious alone and in a diabetic coma."

Or your husband breaks out in a rash or has another bout of skin cancer suddenly you are hysterical imagining the worst and obsessing about the stitches, infections, possible incompetence, not getting all of the cancer cells or the lab reading the biopsy wrong and on and on.

Or irrational fears of dates on a calendar.  Like August 23 and 24th.  I superstitiously will not "do" anything or go anywhere out of the ordinary on those dates.  I don't even like to see then written down.  I've NEVER been superstitious.  What's up with that?

I even fear my 18-year old dog dying.  (Really?) It's not because I think she should live forever and not because I can't face the fact that dogs have shorter life spans than people.  I've lost many pets over my lifetime but it is because she was Brian's dog.  He rescued her from the pound and raised her from a pup.  And ten years ago he gave her to me when he and Kara married and moved to where they had no fence.  She was the last thing that I have that he gave to me to take care of and love.  It will be yet another loss related to his family.

How do these fears affect the quality of my life?  I can't sleep.  I stress eat.  I cannot focus on anything except trying to think of ways to keep all the balls in the air and keep everyone safe - which of course is totally out of my control and that morphs right into "Helpless" which is yet another reason for more fear.  Fear of the realization that I am totally powerless to stop anything further from devastating what's left of my life and family.

And maybe she's right.  I haven't really fully acknowledged all of the faces of fear that I live with everyday that contribute to the misery that comes with this grief and actually, I haven't scratched the surface still because it seems to change everyday.

August

August 1.  The fifth August.

The month I dread all year long.  Other months bother me as well - March and December are always hard.

But August is the month that life as we knew it completely fell apart.  And every August still brings some of those exact same feelings  as from "that August" flooding back to cripple me.

August was the last time I ever saw them --my very last visit two weeks prior.  The last time I would ever hug and kiss Kara and Paxton and the last lost opportunity to hug Brian.  He was never comfortable with open shows of affection and that one day, I opted to give him a break and let him off without a hug.  Of course having no idea it would have been my last opportunity ever.

August was when I gave Kara her last birthday present - early something I never, ever do.  But that day I did.  I didn't know why I did but I did.  It would have been her 30th, she never lived to see it.

August is the month of her mother's birthday.  The day before they all died.  The last time she ever got to hear her daughter's beautiful voice.  She would never have another good birthday because every birthday from then on would bring back horrific memories.

August is the month of Brian's oldest son's birthday.  The next day after they were found.  He will never forget that birthday. And he will never have another birthday with his dad which was always a big day around their house his entire life.  He will never have another birthday that isn't tainted remembering his birthday 2014.

August - the month that marked the worst days of my life.  The 23rd, the day I was awakened at 4:00 am and burst into tears for no known reason.  The 23rd the day they actually died.  The 24th the day that is on their death certificates incorrectly marking the days of their lives.  Also the day I tried all morning with a pit of dread and fear in my stomach to reach them to no avail.  The 24th the day they were all found shot to death in the home I helped them purchase and forever I will wonder if I hadn't done that - could the outcome have been different?  The house that once was a great source of pride for both of them - a testament to his unbelievable talents as well as her love, hard work and determination --now a horrific murder scene, a memorial to wasted lives and devastating loss, sold to the highest bidder on the courthouse steps.

The rest of August after that a blur of questions, anger, grief, devastation, learning new words as they applied to my child and grandchild like cremation, autopsy, memorial service, urns, toxicology report, death certificate and then calls to people and places that have never touched my life before that day like the County Sheriff Department's Homicide Investigator,  the County Coroner's office, The GBI, The State Crime Lab.

The last day of August - Kara's birthday.

August - three birthdays and one horrific death day

No, August is not my favorite month.  It is a month I tiptoe through just trying to survive it without further collateral damage and hoping and praying that I will get to the other side of it as quickly as possible.

This is my 100th post on a blog I started four weeks after that first August five years ago that changed every part of my life forever.

Five years has given me a perspective that I had not had before and has brought things to mind that time and distance have caused me to connect like the dream I had about the train trestle when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old.  And there are other things like that.

One day I thought about a word I used to describe accurately the person I am today --"Broken". Broken in every sense of the word.  My spirit is broken.  My family is broken.  My life as it relates to hopes, dreams, aspirations --broken.  My relationships --all --broken.  And one day I walked into a restaurant and a country music song was playing.  A song by Larry Gatlin and The Gatlin Brothers.  I laughed out loud and thought of Brian as a three year old.  It was his very favorite song.  Anytime we were in the car and it came on the radio he would get wide-eyed and squeal with delight and scream out:

"Mama!, Broken Lady song -- Broken Lady song!"

I used to laugh knowing how literal small children think and I could see that from his three year old perspective he was picturing an actual lady broken into a million pieces like a glass figurine.

That day as I thought of that it stopped me dead in my tracks as I remembered the many, many times I had made reference to myself as being a broken person and suddenly it seemed like an accurate prophetic depiction from a three-year old and realized that what he pictured wasn't really that far off.

Lost

Fifty nine months and 6 days ago life as I knew it ceased to be.

At sixty-one I did not feel I had any time to lose.  At that point the average life expectancy for a woman was seventy-eight years old.  Since I was still working and not able to retire until 65 four years of that would be spent commuting in ridiculous traffic for threes hours a day and working on my job nine.  So from 65 to 78 I had maybe 7 good years and that is best case scenario.  At that point in your life, you really have no time to waste.  And here I sit here wondering how many days have gone by that I have no recollection of?  How many hours have I now spent sitting and staring into space; doing nothing and watching the hours of my life drift by?  Five years I have been existing like someone already dead that just hasn't fallen over yet.

These were the years we had worked and waited for.  We were going to travel and finally after 40 years of working and raising a family, get to enjoy a little of our lives before they were gone.  And here I sit day after day without the energy, stamina or desire to "do" anything.  I am wasting what time I've got left - living in a state of limbo - not dead - not living.  Just waiting.  I realize I'm doing this and I hate it but I cannot seem to find what it takes to pull out of this.  I seem to have lost my zest for life.  I've always been a goal-oriented person.  I make lists. I set five year goals, one year goals, monthly and daily goals. But now I have no goals.  Waking up that is my big goal.  What do you do when you have no direction? What do you live for if you have no dreams, no goals, no desires and no hope.

We do enjoy days together from time to time.  We talk a lot.  Unfortunately, "this" is mostly what we talk about.  We laugh and joke and I am certainly thankful for that.  But life isn't the same --not just in my family but in my head, in my spirit and in my heart.

I feel I am drifting aimlessly.  Sailing without navigation, without so much as a map and worse still without a destination.

I want to live life again.  I do.  I just can't seem to find my way out of this.  Writing used to be my life and now I try to write and I get lost and ramble.

How do you find your way back? Can you find your way back?  If so, pray tell how?

This is the result of being a survivor?

About as I always imagined.

Survivors - I always wondered at those people that build bomb shelters and stockpiled weapons, food and supplies - what would they have to live for in a world decimated by a nuclear bomb?  Why on earth would they want to survive?  Me --I've always said I hoped I'd go out with the first blast.

Now I really know how true that is.

Thankful

For the sake of trying to get in a better place I need to think back over the past few years and be able to see ways that God has shown up for me and ways that I have been blessed.  Sadly, it seems to get more difficult everyday.  Not that He isn't showing up, it is just the frame of mind I'm in makes it difficult to recognize sometimes.  But there are things.  Things like moving us to this area.  This was not the house of my dreams and not at all what I was looking for or in an area I ever thought about living - but it was exactly what we needed and where we needed to be.  It's low maintenance with lots of storage and lots of privacy, a great place for the dogs and God knew that I needed to find my next door neighbor. He also knew that she needed to find me.  We needed each other.  She lost a son to a drug overdose 10 years ago.  She never talked about it and was somewhat stuck in her grief.  She had some of the same issues surrounding her son's death in that she could not openly discuss it and felt that she was deserted by friends and family over it and was expected to just get over it and move on.  It had been eating her up for 9 years when we finally started to talk.  Here she has found a safe place and I too, have found a safe place in her. 

Our church.  It still seems impossible for me to believe that at this age I could settle in that quickly and become so close to the people so fast.  We love the church and I look forward to going every week.  We now go on Wednesday's too and we enjoy a special relationship with the preacher and his wife.  I never thought we could ever fit in at another church after being where we were for 23 years.  I was on committees.  I had a regular job at the church.  We had keys to the church.  Here, I participate in the ladies ministry - my husband is on committees and is doing the job that our deacons handled at the other church and he has keys to the church. It is amazing to me how my husband is taking such an active role here.  It is like - this is where he always belonged.  He has come out of his shell and clearly this church is home to him.

I have more people here that I did there after 23 years.  When I moved here I thought I had only my best friend.  But I also have two granddaughters and their families, three cousins, my oldest and dearest friend and two new close friends and my sister is 37 miles closer than she was.  And my husband that never talked to anyone - now knows all the neighbors by name and walks over and talks to them??? 

We have doctors close and I have actually found a Physician's Assistant that I really like.  A good dermatologists, a really good Mohs surgeon and general surgeon, and one of the best hospitals and level one trauma center, and number one heart center is 13 miles from us.  A second newer hospital 9 miles away.  I found a counselor that is helping me after almost five years.  Now all we need is a new dentist that we really like and we have everything we need. There is shopping, doctors, hospitals, library, restaurants, post office, antique shops, a huge recreational lake and a college are all within 15 miles of us with no traffic.  As difficult as it was to wait for God to show us the right place - He absolutely did.  It was not what we were looking for and it was not where we were looking to be - but when the time got right, He brought us straight to it.  That is definitely something to be thankful for. 









          

What Grief Looks Like Today

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.

Another Wave...

I have told you of several really weird and unexplainable things that happened early on like the incident with the pendulum on the clock, Siri asking if I wanted to ask her: "Where is Brian?" etc. All of that happened early on and there has been nothing odd or unexplainable since.

However, until a couple of months ago when another weird thing happened.  My phone battery had depleted while I was in the car without my charger and the phone went completely dead.  I had to wait till I got home to plug it in and let it charge a while before it would even boot up.  When it finally did and I picked it up to use it there was an email on the screen as if it had just come in.  I opened the email and it was from --Brian; from five years ago --on his birthday!  It said:

"He's saying: "Here comes another one." He's talking about a wave."

Well this didn't make sense out of context so I had to go back through five years and thousands of emails to find and read the email string that lead up to this to see that he is referring to a video he sent me of Paxton at the beach.  I'd sent him one saying that I couldn't understand what the baby was saying in the video and this email was his answer to that.  But it was just those words:

"He's saying: "Here comes another one." He's talking about a wave."

Well I have referred as have many others to grief coming in waves and I have also referred to this being like a shipwreck with me being overcome by the waves so this was unnerving to say the least.  Here comes another one?  Oh God, I hope and pray not --but let me tell you, it totally rattled me.  I tried to blow it off and try and get on with my day but the weirdness of the fact that out of literally thousands of emails that sit on my email account - an email from five years ago, from my son that died five months after that, on what turned out to be his very last birthday shows up on my phone screen as if it were brand new and unread - was strange enough but "this" being the actual message of that email?  Beyond weird.

Well I finally settled down about it and chalked it up to a freaky weird coincidence when two days later it happened again.  Same deal.  Email shows up on my phone screen like a brand new email.  I open it.  It is from Brian.  Same exact email now a second time.  The following week I get an error message on my screen that said:  "your text could not go through."  Well...I had not sent a text.  I opened the error message and it lead me to the actual text it was referring to... and it was the last text I ever sent to Kara; asking "Are you okay?"  She was not.  I had been texting both of them alternately all morning with no answer and that was my last text to her before I sent someone to the house to check on them.

But again "this" a few months shy of five years ago! And believe it or not - that too, actually happened a second time a week later.  And this past Monday - I got the email from Brian now a third time!  This has never happened with any other emails as long as I have had a smartphone. Never.  And now out of thousands of archived emails - this one email has come up on my screen as if it had just been received - three times! And I have also never had an error message come up like that and did not in fact even get that error message the day or days shortly after I sent it.  But I get it twice almost five years later and within days of the emails from Brian???

That is crazy and I really do not know what to make of it.