The Thing No One Wants To Talk About

Things happen in life that strike you dumb.

Death is one of those things. It is the ultimate thing that will happen to us.
Death tears apart the very foundation of who and what you are. It defies your comprehension, defies laws and our reality as we know it.
The ground you stand on, the very air you breathe doesn't make sense when we are confronted with death.

Western society does not have a history of incorporating the act or meaning of death into everyday life. Death is a feared and hushed process.
Unlike Eastern philosophies that embrace the dying process as they do the living process, westerners live in constant fear, death is curséd and distant. No one wants to live their life thinking of death.

Especially not the death of a child. A death that can be the most devastating event that will ever happen to you. Losing a child no matter what their age, or how, is a sacrificial purification of you as a human being.
Physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

How do you survive the death of a child? How will you ever be the same? Since the beginning of time children have died, and their parents have passed from their childrens deaths into new lives again. But they are not you now and this is your child.
Only those who have been to the Valley can comprehend all that you are thinking, feeling, physically suffering through.

Even so, each journey through death is singular and solitary. One of the first questions after awhile that you will ask is, who am I? Who you once were is gone. Who you are now unknown. Who you will be in the moments, hours, days and years ahead are yet to unfold, so very distant in some future you can not and will not realize yet.

The only thing known to us is the pain. The untouchable sorrow and guilt, the fear of where your child is without you.
What does death mean? Is it the really true real end?
Could I have saved them? Why didn't I save them? Oh, Where are they now?!
There is not one human emotion loaded with despair, sorrow, confusion and guilt that you will not live through.
The names of all the pains have yet to be written. It has been prepared for you, without your permission.

After my nineteen year old son died of a heroin overdose, I began searching for help. I searched everywhere and anywhere I could.
I searched in well lit places, in dark obscure places. In every religion and every language. Into the unknown I leapt, without concern for anything other than seeking answers and finding some small bit of peace.
I needed to hear what others like me who had survived the worst event of life had to say.

Was I crazy? Was what I felt normal? How did they survive? What do I do now?
Most people I spoke to gave me the general and usual guidelines for the newly bereaved.
But I think they either misunderstood me or didn't have the answers that I was craving.

I listened politely while itching under my skin, to a multitude of well meaning people reciting to me sweet religious poems
“God is good, He sees me through.”
What? God had abandoned me! God had deserted me to the deepest night. Thrown me without warning into the Valley of the Shadow with no one to save me. God, had skipped out on me, without so much as a goodbye.

These were the very people who once stood in the beginning place like me. People said so much, all so sweet and wonderful but they weren't saying what I felt. They weren't talking about the madness and pain. What did they themselves do, in the dark hours alone in their rooms, reliving death over and over again. How did they survive the utter madness of it all? No one talked about the dirty ugly side of grief.

I swore to myself then, if I lived through this, if I came out of it with something, anything intact, I would never utter one sweet religious poem or psalm to a newly bereaved parent. I would never tell them that in time it gets better. I would speak to their madness. Validate the ugliness. I would tell every truth I knew once and didn't forget. So that someone like me, would not feel pacified into an acceptance when they weren't ready to accept. So that they could freely speak whatever seemingly crazy or dirty emotion they felt.

This... is death.

Especially in the first days, months even years, people should know and see it is normal to tear out your hair. It is normal to hold a bottle of pills and a drink in your hand in the middle of the night wanting nothing less than death yourself.

They should know that it is normal to crawl naked, broken on the floor begging for salvation, and that they will walk unwashed, uncaring and unfeeling into the street, blame people and accuse them of terrible things, lash out at innocent people and break down at any moment without any warning.
You are a lost and wandering soul on the planet... in the universe.
The Valley is deep and wide and long.

It is said that there are five stages of grief. I have evidence there are more. Many can testify to that as well.
These "stages" don't come in neat little packages or in outlined on-time periods in grief.
You may go through all of them or only a few, sometimes the same stage over and over again. You can get stuck in one place while dealing with another place and all the stages of grief can crash down on you at once. And there are stages you aren't even sure are stages, or if they are that they are normal. Perhaps you've lost what little mind you have left?

Yes, that's what you've done.
There is no shame in losing your mind in grief. The thing about death?
Before drugs or alcohol or manic depression, death is the leading cause of losing your mind.
When you have walked a little way, a new mind will be born. You will have to feed it and change it and teach it to speak.
You will teach it to live for the first time in the world.
These are the trials and sorrows of humanity lived out in the deepest of senses all at once inside of you. And you can never truly use words for an exactness of what this all is.
You can try, but there is a missing link in language. It's name is death.

Stephen King once wrote:

"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head, no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to where your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear. "

For the last two years I have tried to speak truthfully about the dark beginnings of grief, without reservation or fear of what people might think.
I owe it to myself. But most importantly I owe it to the memory of my son's beautiful life. I want his life to mean more than his death, but I also don't want his death to be just a statistic without a face or name.

I want the world to understand what his life meant and that to lose him forever altered my own life and the lives of others.
Otherwise... what was it for! Some shifting of leaves on it's tree in a strong breeze?

I am in a different place now. I am able to speak the spiritual wisdoms of my baptism into life. My mind has reached adulthood, and is on the road to it's continuing journey. But I still have it's baby clothes, it's teething rings and training wheels. Neatly folded now.
It still whines often, in all it's ugliness, sorrow and fragments of disbelief.
I take it out and rock it back to sleep, but can never forget where it is.

With great devotion and respect to the late and mesmerizing Jacqueline Kennedy, her public display of stoicism and blank steely nerve at the funeral of John F. Kennedy, however full of grace and power that it had, did not help society's views on death and dying.
If anything, it reinforced the standard in this country to bear up and hold oneself together in public. Death should be private not shared with others.
But there IS grace in allowing yourself to wear death's sorrow. There is NO shame.
There is power and Holiness and enlightenment in it.

The views on death and grief in the west need more attention. Doctors, psychiatrists, clergy, teachers, nurses, school staff and every public service in communities across the nation need to understand more, prepare better, fund programs and give grants to facilities who study the process of dying and the effect on those who grieve.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross began tremendous work with death and dying. She was a pioneer and a spirited, gentle human being who patiently opened eyes to the mysteries of death. She came so far, but the work is unfinished.

Yes, the spiritual life will come to the grieving. It is a certain fact of death and grieving events. Hard fought for yes, but eventually won. Let us speak the true language of death without the fear of speaking it. There is healing only in truth.
Learn how you can help a grieving parent, or any grieving person.

You need no degree or DR. or PhD. at the end of your name. I think there are instances where these very people cease to be able to help.
They can be so busy following their diagnoses outlines and guides, they fail to glimpse the ancient wisdom that already resides within whom they are looking at. They can fail to be human. I don't think it is their fault, they are trained to be clinical.

And I believe they can help, but they can never do your work for you.

One needs humanity, one needs community, one needs touch when they are grieving. Everything is fragile and may be so for many years.
The only requirement when encountering grief is to feel human compassion, and desire to understand the whole of the human experience. And you must come with no expectations or beliefs, no preconceived ideas or plans for taking the pain away.

Only the desire to open your mind. And to listen..... sometimes only to listen.