“And can it be that in a world so full and busy the loss of one creature makes a void so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of eternity can fill it up!”
— Charles Dickens
From my journal March 14, 2002:
“Jason’s gone. How can it be true? The most incredible guy I know. My precious boy. Sometimes I feel like one of those boxes you can fold open both sides so you can see right through. I’m an open box – an empty square with appendages. I wake up in the morning feeling like there’s pain filling my entire torso. It seeps to every part of my body. Sometimes I’m so weak I can hardly stand up or lift anything. I saw him. I know it’s real. I just can’t believe it. How do I go on without him? The sunshine in my day. The hugs, the sweet spirit.”
As I sat on the front porch in the sun this morning, I reflected back on the past twenty-two years since Jason died. All the places we have lived, all the ways I have tried to integrate his loss into my life, all the ways I have tried to be a person of whom he could be proud. It’s not an easy thing to do, this trying to figure out a way to keep on living after your child has died, to try to find something meaningful in the life that is left to you.
I’ve filled journals full of my thoughts and struggles. I’ve written this blog for years. We finally built a home we hoped would be a healing sanctuary. We’ve lived from one side of the country to the other and in between. I’ve taken up new hobbies. I’ve tried to develop a meaningful career. I’ve tried to make friends so we are not alone. I’ve tried to trust again.
I guess all have “helped” to some degree, if there is such a thing as “helping” a grieving parent. The journals gave me an outlet to say what we were going through when no one else wanted to hear or to be around us because our deep grief made them uncomfortable. I hope I have helped by writing this blog, given other parents an understanding that they are not alone. I’ve tried to live my life with integrity. I have not truly felt “at home” since Jason died. I love our little house. It suits us, but has been somewhat problematic from the get-go. It’s only been in the last few months I’ve begun to feel “at home.” Friendship has been somewhat elusive. I’ve trusted people, only to have them disappoint.
No matter what we do, grief never goes away. It ebbs and flows, sometimes strong, sometimes flowing under the surface. On days like today, the agony and emptiness is close at hand. Today, I am once again the empty box, an open box with appendages. I miss my boy. I miss the life we had. I miss the person I was.
We have a neighbor who has become a good friend. She is a widow with a cute little dog. My husband sometimes walks this dog for her. It gets Joe out of the house and provides some exercise, gets the dog some exercise, and gives our neighbor a break.
Earlier this week, when Joe texted our neighbor to see if the dog needed a walk, our neighbor texted back that something awful had happened, that a 17-year old good friend of two of her granddaughters had died in a car accident on her way to school. I had heard the waves of emergency vehicles that had gone past our development and knew something terrible had happened. It appears the young driver pulled out in front of a utility truck. She died instantly.
Joe read the text out loud to me when it came in. As he read the part about the girl dying in a car accident, he physically reacted as if something or someone had punched him hard in the stomach. He bent over, saying an agonized, “Oh, no!”
It’s astounding how something instantly can take you back so clearly to that moment in time when your own child died.
For me, when I heard the text message, I instantly went back in my mind to the day Jason died. It wasn’t something I did on purpose. My mind so clearly just took me back to that time.
We invited our neighbor over last night for pizza and to watch Groundhog Day with us. As Joe was picking up the pizzas, she asked about the night Jason died.
It’s been nearly 22 years. But, as I talked about that night, it was hard not to feel like I was reliving it all over again. I felt raw with pain, raw nerves making my insides quiver as I talked about that horrible time in our lives. It was like I was walking through that night and following days all over again. It wasn’t as intense as the actual time, of course, but it surprised me how deeply I reacted. No matter how much time has gone by, the grief is never far away, just under the surface ready to raise its head and stare you right in the face.
I intimately know a lot of what those parents are going through – not exactly, of course, but probably more than most people. I know the road ahead for them will be agonizing for them, their family and their friends for many, many years. Their lives will never be the same. My heart and prayers go out to them.
I learned to sew when I was quite young. I made a bright green button down shirt for my brother when he was in junior high because he asked me to. I made clothes for myself growing up, made my kids clothes when they were little. I sewed t-shirts to sell at the farmer’s market. I sewed a lot.
When Jason died, I felt like all of my creativity died with him. I no longer sewed. I no longer worked on photo scrapbooks. I no longer took photographs. I quit baking for the most part. Cooking was a chore. About the only thing I did was pour out my heart and hurt into journal after journal.
When we left Seattle, I sold my serger, gave away my sewing machine to a missionary group taking sewing machines to underprivileged countries. Amazingly, I kept scraps from clothes I had sewed over the years. A few years ago, my sister gave pieces of fabric from my mom’s and grandmother’s sewing over generations, along with pieces of fabric from of things she had made for our family. I have pieces of a dress I wore to my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, pieces of my wedding dress made by my sister, pieces from a dress my daughter made for herself, pieces of pajamas I made for the kids. So many pieces. So many memories.
My original intention in starting to quilt was to make a memory quilt. I wanted to take those pieces of heritage fabric and incorporate it into a quilt with pieces of clothes I had saved that belonged to Jason. I chose to make the quilt by hand using the English Paper Piece method. I wanted to remember the people who wore the clothes those pieces represented as I stitched them together.
I was a little hesitant to start with, especially the finality of cutting everything in case I made mistakes. There’s no replacing those fabrics and the memories they hold. I decided to set it aside and get some new fabric and make a practice quilt for my granddaughter. If I made mistakes, I could always get more fabric.
I have to admit it took a long time to finish – years, as a matter of fact. Besides the fact that it’s a time-consuming way to make a twin size quilt (the cutting and making the shapes is a huge project by itself, each side of the hexagon took 20-25 stitches per side), we moved twice and had most everything in storage part of that time. I finally finished it earlier this year, afraid she had outgrown the pattern I had chosen. I held my breath as she opened it and had tried to prepare myself in case she didn’t like it. Fortunately, she loved it.
Since then, I have machine-sewed four other quilts, all using purchased fabrics. I have started working on my hand-sewn memory quilt again and hope to work on it more consistently after Christmas.
One thing I still cannot make myself do is cut up the clothes I kept that were Jason’s. Even after all these years, I can hardly look at them without crying. As I was organizing my fabric today, I stopped and stared for a while at the box that has his clothes in it. My heart still hurts so much when I think of him not being here. It amazes me in some way that I still can’t do anything with those clothes after all this time. It feels like I would be losing more of him, if that were possible.
This is not an easy time of year for me. Between the holidays and the time leading up to the anniversary of Jason’s death, I feel like I am on an emotional roller coaster and trying to avoid emotional land mines. I still miss Jason so much. My beautiful bright shiny wonderful boy.
I woke up this morning thinking of Jason’s birthday the year our stove/oven had been damaged by a kitchen cabinet that had fallen off the wall and hit the stove. Undeterred, we fired up the grill on the back porch, borrowed the griddle from the damaged stove to put on the grill and cooked breakfast out al fresco. I can still picture Jason with a big smile on his face as he flipped pancakes.
The thing about losing a child is that you no longer have the opportunity to make any more memories together, don’t have the opportunity to see them get married or have children, no longer get huge bear hugs, and so many other things that are missing. We have a Jason sized hole in our lives that never, ever goes away. On days like today, the huge magnitude of the things we have missed and lost mixes with the wonderful memories of having Jason in our lives. He made the world – my world – a better, happier place just by being in it…and I miss him with all my heart. I’m heartbroken. Our precious, wonderful, thoughtful, kind, intelligent, beautiful boy.
Recently, a friend who was approaching the fifth anniversary of his son’s death asked me if it ever got any better. I wish that I could have told him that it did. I told him that grief changes over time.
Grief ebbs and flows, but never goes away. Some days it’s a ways below the surface and doesn’t seem to show; some days it’s a gaping open pit I struggle not to fall into.
As I lay in bed last night, thinking about the significance of this day and how many years we have lived without our precious, wonderful Jason, it felt like my heart was breaking into so many pieces that it was turning into a pile of fine sand. Today I feel like I am moving in slow motion, my mind foggy as I struggle to think of what I need to do next.
We recently set up a small home gym in the garage. As we rearranged our storage boxes to make some room, I took the opportunity to organize the mementos in those boxes so that I can begin putting together some scrapbooks of my growing up years and those of the kids. It was an incredibly difficult thing to do. School projects, birthday cards, notes passed to a friend in class, pieces of paper with fingerpaint handprints of a small boy, drawings of a toddler with love notes to mom and dad, stories written by Jason about how he had met one of his best friends, poems about a dear friend and a girl he loved. Joe, who was helping me, kept saying from time to time, “It isn’t fair.” Again today, he said, “It isn’t fair.” No, it’s not fair. Such a wonderful young man, our precious boy, gone in an instant. For Jason, no college graduations, no weddings, no kids, no jobs, no more special events or holidays. For all of us, the memories and mementoes we have of Jason are all we will ever have. They all stopped March 3, 2002.
I wish I had some great insight, some great encouragement after walking this path for so many years, but I really don’t. I wish I could say that time heals all and that it gets better, but I can’t. The friend I mentioned earlier told me that I am an encouragement, but I’m not sure how I do that. I just try to live my life in such a way that would make Jason proud. As in the beginning, one day at a time. I look forward to the day I will see him again.
We love you and miss you, Jason. Every single day.
Another year in the books. As a parent whose child has died, I think I look at the year ahead differently than most people. Since Jason died, I feel like I always have somewhere in the back of my mind a dread, a feeling like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something else to go wrong. I used to be naive and believe I was protected or immune from such disaster and trauma. Now I know the most horrible thing I could think about can happen.
The last year has been difficult, much more difficult than I ever could have anticipated. We started off the year with my husband coming down with COVID on New Year’s Eve. Having had a heart attack, he was considered one of the high risk groups and I was really worried when that COVID test came back positive. Thankfully, he recovered very quickly and, after having one day of fever, was out sweeping the patio the following day.
The year proceeded with me losing one of my jobs and accompanying financial adjustments, Joe being required at his job to work outside in really hot weather and getting really sick from being overheated, watching difficult relationship struggles that broke our hearts and feeling unable to help, ongoing health issues. We still haven’t seen our son and his family in nearly four years. Our grandchildren continue to treat us as irrelevant and we are lucky to get a grunt “hello” when we talk to them.
In recent months, I have lost my older half brother and two cousins. Although I wasn’t really close to any of them, it’s still sobering to have those family connections gone. Death brings such a finality to relationships, no matter how close or not you are. The similarities between the death of my brother and the death of my mom were eery and mind boggling. It made me realize that, having died in the shadow of Jason’s death and the deep, traumatic grief I was experiencing, I really have not dealt with Mom’s death. On and on it goes.
As the year proceeded, we were so excited and looking forward to finally having a home of our own. It represented hope, something to look forward to, a place to settle and put down roots for now. It’s been a mixed bag of good and frustration, a process that has been super glitchy and a punch list – six months in – that still is not completed with no end in sight and words/concerns mostly falling on deaf ears. My expectations were not realistic. I guess needed this to be easy and it hasn’t been. I think I wanted someone to be able to see the great pain inside of us of the things we have walked through and help create a place where I can sort through the physical mementos I have had in storage from Jason’s life and put together some things to honor him, a haven where we could possibly heal a bit. No one can actually do that for another person. No one can heal your grief for you. Life doesn’t work like that.
I am thankful for what we have. I like our house and I am thankful for it. I know that there are people struggling and hurting so much more than we are. Although I struggle at times with feeling hopeful, I know there are those who feel like they have no hope whatsoever.
It took me a while took me a while to get into the Christmas spirit. Christmas always hurts my heart. We ordered a new Christmas tree for our new house. It was missing the wall plug when it arrived. They sent a new plug which was the wrong size. Then they sent an entire new tree. We pulled out Christmas decorations and ornaments that we haven’t seen in so many years. I’m not going to lie – putting the angel on top of the tree that was always Jason’s job reduced me to tears. By the time we got the new tree and got it set up, Christmas was almost here and we barely got it decorated in time for our daughter to arrive for a few days to celebrate with us. It ended up being a good Christmas together.
On this last day of 2022, I peer over the edge into the new year with some trepidation. It’s always difficult to think of starting a new year without Jason. It’s easy to sit and reflect, looking back over the years at broken dreams and how our lives would have been so much different had Jason lived. I’ve always been a hopeful, positive person but feel like I’m running out of years and experiencing diminishing hope.
We’re going to spend today taking the Christmas tree and decorations down. We want to set up a small in-home gym area in the garage and will work on that today, too. Organizing, planning and doing the best we can planning for a healthy, good year ahead and hoping for the best.
As always, missing you, my precious boy, with all my heart. Another year without you, but another year closer to seeing you again.
Too many times lately I’ve heard myself saying, “He who expects nothing is not disappointed.” I guess it’s supposed to serve as a reminder to myself not to put higher expectations or my own expectations onto someone else. Since my expectations sometimes can be a little higher than is realistic, it’s a way of lowering my expectations to meet reality.
I’m a person who sees both sides of the coin, was taught that it was better to turn the other cheek than to fight. I have a long fuse and give people way more chances than is probably healthy for me. I hang onto relationships long after they are over.
After Jason died, it wasn’t too long before nearly everyone we knew disappeared and we were left mostly alone. With our extended family thousands of miles away, we truly expected our friends to fill in those gaps. It just didn’t happen and we were alone a lot. At the time, I made excuses. I lowered my expectations. We were difficult to be around, I told myself. It wasn’t easy to know what to say to us or what to do when we really didn’t know ourselves what we needed. I tried so hard not to make people uncomfortable. I said to myself many times that my head understood but my heart just didn’t understand. My head kept trying to tell me that it was understandable, but my heart was breaking. I tried to reason myself into understanding why people acted the way they did and to try to be okay with it.
As a personal standard, I try to do what’s right. I try to do a good job at whatever I am doing. I try to notice those in need and help out without fanfare or acknowledgement. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?
But isn’t this a two way street, too? Shouldn’t we ALL treat each other the way we would want to be treated ourselves? Shouldn’t we expect people who profess to care about us to actually CARE about us…and show it by actually doing something, by following through on their words? Do actions meet words for the ones who profess to be Christians, send a card with a religious sentiment, put a hand on your shoulder to pray for you or hug you but then don’t actually do anything or don’t act with integrity? As a person who has a strong sense of fairness, this just doesn’t add up for me.
I am not a squeaky wheel kind of a person. I am not confrontational. I usually internalize things and try to deal with it myself. If I do anything at all, I would rather calmly communicate, trying to help the other person see where I’m coming from while also listening to their side of the issue to (hopefully) come to a mutually-beneficial resolution. It’s not as easy as it sounds and rarely works out that way. It takes two people equally willing to work together and actually listen to each other’s point of view…and then actually DO something to fix the problem or address the issue.
I’ve never been a person who likes other people to see me cry. The person who cries openly and more easily seems to be the one people gather around to comfort. Or do people just disappear and avoid the griever entirely? I’m not sure. Perhaps if I had been more able or willing to show my grief, to publicly grieve, we would have had more support. I don’t know. People who didn’t see me flat on the floor, crying so hard I physically didn’t have the strength to stand or even sit, would tell me that it was okay for me to grieve. No one saw that…nor would they want to…nor would I want them to. If your child dies, people call you brave. I’m not brave. I never was. I just didn’t wear my grief on my sleeve; it’s not easy for me to be open and ask for help.
One day early on I was so worried about Joe that I did something very uncharacteristic – I asked for help. I emailed people we were closest to prior to Jason’s death, asking for support. No one responded at all. Not one of our “Christian” friends, people we considered extended family, showed up in response to my cry for help. Those types of things have had a lasting impact on me. I don’t trust easily. I don’t make friendships easily. From experience, professing Christianity doesn’t mean a person is going to do the right thing or is someone I can trust. I totally realize we’re all human and make mistakes and fail miserably, but sometimes you’ve just got to show up.
I would have to say that some of the people who I remember most clearly as showing up are people who I would not even know if they professed to be Christians. Joe’s boss who flew up from California to be with us – an extremely busy guy who simply showed up for us. The doorman at the Westin who genuinely asked Joe nearly every day how he was doing. The Westin manager who offered us employee rates so we could get away for a bit at a time when we didn’t know how to carry on. The officers investigating the accident, especially the one who told me he wanted to do such a good job that it would make Jason proud. The officers who took time off work to show up at the sentencing hearing to support us. The firemen who came to Jason’s memorial service. We were not close to them and had no expectations from any of them. We haven’t seen or heard from any of these people for years, but we have never forgotten their genuine kindnesses and how they showed up.
I consciously have been trying to let my guard down, to reach out to people, to make friends, to trust people again. It has not been easy. We have had a couple of situations recently where we specifically made the decision to step out side our comfort zone and trust someone else with decisions that have had big, lasting impacts on our lives. A couple of them have not gone well and our expectations have been lowered so much we practically had none left at all. It has cost us in the long run – money, trust, hope.
And, so, once again, I find myself telling myself, “He who expects nothing is not disappointed.”
But, shouldn’t we be able to have expectations of others, especially those who are in expected trust situations? Shouldn’t we expect people to have integrity, to keep their word? Shouldn’t we expect Christians to at least try to act like Christ? In practicality, how far does the “faith without works is dead” theology actually go? Shouldn’t we expect people who profess to care about us to show up when we need them and to do the right thing? Should we have to keep lowering out expectations until we have none at all, no trust at all in that person?
I include myself in this. Have I been dependable? Have I shown up when it was difficult? Am I a person of my word?
I consistently remind myself that I am responsible for no one’s actions but my own, just as everyone else is responsible for their own actions. This is the important thing. I am the one that will have to stand before God some day when all my actions (hidden or unhidden) are revealed for everyone to see, just as everyone else will have to. I do believe that there may be a great cloud of witnesses cheering us on as we run with endurancethis race called life. At least, that’s what I was taught in church. If nothing else, I’m sure God sees and knows all.
I’m running as best I can, but I get tired. I get frustrated. I get sad and lonely.
I was thinking recently about the story of the carpenter who had worked hard all of his life building houses, making a quality product but was never able to afford a home of his own. He was tired of working and decided to retire. His boss asked him to build one more home. Reluctantly, the carpenter agreed but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t build with his typical quality of workmanship. When the house was done, the boss surprised the carpenter and gave the home to him as his own. He quit too soon. He let his integrity slip because he was weary in well-doing.
They say integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. I suppose our “great cloud of witnesses” could be watching even if no one else is.
Jason had more integrity than any person I have ever met. I want to live my life so that I can make Jason proud. I want to keep persevering until I see my wonderful boy again. I look forward to and long for that day.
Grief: One Woman's Perspective 