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Just two weeks after our son died, my husband and I plowed into grief counseling. Even though the bitter truth was hard to swallow, we were afraid that avoidance would be the key to our emotional destruction, and that the only way to survive would be to get help. “Is it helping you?” My husband asked, that first night we made our way home. “I am not sure.” I answered. “I am going to think of it as a long-term investment.” An investment in a life I do not want to face. A life without my son. They told us at counseling that it would be a while for the reality to jell; that we were in a suspended state of disbelief which would ultimately lead to profound grief. I remember looking at those people like they had to be crazy. More profound than what we had experienced? “I can’t say it is going to be worse.” One of the fathers who had lost a son comforted, seeing the shock in our eyes, “but it will be different.” This week it really started to hit me. He was right, that father, it was not WORSE, but somehow it was the first time since the day he had died that I was compelled to cry and wail like a wounded animal. The noises coming from me shocked me; but so did the pain. Sharp and gnawing, ti was physical and accompanied by a thousands thoughts I wished to banish. “If only I had......” “Why didn’t I?” “I should have.....” I keeled in pain; crying out to God, to Carrick, to a world altered, for Carrick to come home; knowing that it could not be. No one should hurt like this. Grief counseling had prepared me for this inevitability, but not for the pain. Even as I experience the searing agony of losing my boy, I wonder how others have survived. It occurred to me, even as I suffered, that many, many had suffered before me. I thought to the days when every mother lost at least one child, sometimes multiple children. In those days, women were expected to deal with it privately and to get on with life. I am not even sure where fathers fit into the grief equation, but surely their grief was as devastating as our own, yet most likely suppressed completely in public. I am sorry for being such a downer. I told myself, prior to writing this, that I would try to search the data base of my semi-functioning brain for a lighter subject matter. Yet the truth of the matter is that I wake to the knowledge that my son has died; I pass through the day thinking of his face and imagining his embrace, and fall to sleep dreaming of the day we are reunited. I am stunted by pain and yet, like a blade of grass in the sidewalk, am compelled to grow. “I don’t have any choice.” I told one of the therapists, when he inquired about why it was that I managed to get out of bed, do the daily “stuff” that one needs to accomplish, and even how I managed to joke. “I can’t figure out what else to do.” I said, as tears leaked out of my eyes and plopped into my lap. “Here.” He handed me a box of kleenex. “I probably won’t need them, “ I said, taking the box anyway, “because in my own mind I am about to get this under control.” I meant the tears, but in a larger sense, I meant my grief, which I know in my heart is a run away train which I can no more control than the weather. So we soldier forward, because frankly no no one has given me another option. Could I turn back time...... of course I would take the option in a heartbeat. No options are offered, not in this life, so I pray and live for a day when it will be different. Long term investments are just that, so I look at my grief counseling as the first tiny installments on a self which may, just might, resume functioning on this earth. I think the day could come when I will think of my son’s face and remember the sunshine of his life without the storm of his death.
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