Well, today's the day - in fact, right now.  It has been one year to the moment that we got the news.  Over the past several months, things had gotten to be better - the grief had lessened to the point that we were able to continue with our normal lives.  But the past two weeks, at least for me, have been hell.  As we approached Tim's first yahrzeit (Yiddish term, literally meaning "year time" but used as the anniversary of losing a loved one) all the grief seems to have come back to me.

I have taken today off of work, not to take an extra long weekend, but to be with Tim's mom on this day - she needs me infinitely more today than my job does - and I have a really good boss, she's in total agreement with me over that.

We do have some plans for observing this date.  We have ordered a beautiful lei to put on his surfboard, which is mounted over our living room window.  (Nice to have a vaulted ceiling.)  Today, we also will be mounting his shelf and putting his urn and photo (and a few other keepsakes) "up on a shelf" right by the surfboard.  We ordered some really nice shelf brackets - they are 1/4" steel dolphins, hand made.  We found a beautiful piece of wood (red mahogany?) which I have been finishing off by hand - one more coat of stain this morning, a final smoothing, then up on the wall it (and he) goes.  We'll also be hanging out some time today down in P.B., probably at the end of PB Drive, like we did for his birthday.

And maybe I'll write more later, I just woke up and had to put something down because it was the exact same date and time as when we got the news, and for me that will forever be the moment at which we lost our son.

Happy Birthday?

I came home to my wife crying today.  Tomorrow is Tim's birthday.  And she was so upset she thought it was today -- and finding out it's really tomorrow only made it worse. 

It's been over a month since we lost her father.  The funeral was nice enough, with full military honors.  (He was a veteran of WWII, Korea, AND Nam!  He earned it.)  But it's rough.  Having lost two close family members in one year is too many.  (Two too many?)  Even though we had been expecting it with Jack for a few years, it still hit hard.  But he's at peace now, and out of pain.

We keep going, because we have no real choice.  (Well, we do have a choice, but the choice to not keep going is not one we choose.  We have to honor their memory by keeping it alive as long as we can.)

Well, the roller coaster ride just took a left turn onto a new track.

Or, "oh no, not again."

Or, "here we go again."

Or....

 shit.

My father-in-law passed away 1:00 this morning.  So, let's start the whole grief-train over again.

More to come....
please stand by...

What we really want out of life?

What is it that we really want to do in this world?  I think that many of us feel that it is to leave our mark on the future, in some way or another.  I didn't used to care about anything but the present, but then I finally grew up.  Once I dated a woman who had children, and it didn't work out.  I decided that from then on I would only be interested in women without children, or I would never be "number one" in her life.  So what happened?  Yeah, I fell in love with a woman who had two kids.  And I married her.  Suddenly, I was a parent.  Kind of, they were HER kids, and I was helping her raise them.  (And believe me, they didn't make it easy.)
So, what happens?  Yeah, you guessed it - I actually came to love them as if they had been my biological children, too.  But that was my stumbling block - again, they weren't "my" kids.  As I got older I started feeling like I was leaving nothing to the future.  One reason I got into doing stained glass - any piece I do has a reasonable chance of still being around somewhere in hundreds of years.  So, I was able to leave "something" to the future, but it wasn't really satisfying in that respect.  (I still love doing the work, though - it's fun!)
But a funny thing happened to me, as the kids became adults.  They never let me forget what an important part of their lives I was, how much I meant to them, and I came to realize - I HAD "my" kids all along, I was just too dumb to see it.  So for the past several years, I no longer feel that I'm leaving nothing to the future - I leave two wonderful human beings that carry in them that part of me which makes me what I am.  Not my genes, but my values.  I had my investment in the future returned to me in full.  And more.

And then, completely unexpectedly, I had half of that future taken away from me.  My son, who I struggled with for those many years, was gone.  I've lost part of the future. 
Your kids are your investment in the future.  It may be cliche, but I've come to realize cliches get to be cliche because there's truth behind them.  I finally had a future even after I was gone from this world, and I've lost half of that.  (Daughter, you'd better outlive me.  Us.  Both your mom and I would be totally lost without you.)

Perhaps that's what makes the loss of a child "the most devastating loss of all."  Your children are the future of the world, you want to be part of that through them, this is such a primal need in all of us that it's the driving force behind almost everything we do.  Eating?  Of course, you need energy to raise kids.  Breathe?  C'mon.  Sex?  How else do you have kids?  "Investing in the future" is what we do.  And when we are secure in that we've raised our kids to be the best human beings they can, we can finally relax that primal need.  We've done it.  We did our jobs as human beings.  And then you lose that.  Instantly. 

Lose your parents?  You knew they were going to go before you.
Lose your siblings?  Well, you guys did grow apart as you grew older.
Lose your spouse?  Well, you can always find another.
Lose your child?  Well, uh, er, you've lost your future.

They say those who've lost a child can only really empathize with others who've lost children, but I can't even imagine what it's like to lose your ONLY child.  (The line, "well, you've got another one" is cruel, but there's a grain of truth to it - you still have an investment in the future.  Not true if you've lost your only child - and worse if you're too old to have another.)

And now I'm rambling again.  I'll try to summarize.  I postulate that our most primal urge is to influence the future, we do that through our children.  And that's why the loss of a child is more devastating than any other loss.  Losing a child is like losing the future, and short-circuiting that primal drive.

(ring-ring)  My wife's cell phone went off.  What the...it's 5:45 in the morning, who'd be calling now?  And I was going to sleep in a bit...

  She answered, after looking at the caller id, "Hi, son, what's up?" "What!"  "Honey, get up.  Tim's dead."  (It wasn't Tim, it was Ken, his biological father and roommate.  He had woken up and found Tim on the floor.  He had been dead for some time.) 

That was the end of our lives as we knew them, and the start of a new one.  One where we no longer had a son.

It's been six months since we got the news.  Six months to the minute that I officially start this blog.  Somehow that feels appropriate.

Six months.  How can it have been so long, where has the time gone?  That's not a paradox, it's been an entire lifetime for us, but the pain is so strong it still feels like it just happened.  

After we got that call, the first thing I did was call my boss and tell her, "I won't be in today."  "Okay.  Why?"  "My son is dead."  "Oh, well, I'll see you in a couple of weeks."  She knew Tim lived across the country, and I'd need a long week to take care of things.  I then got dressed and went to my doctor's appointment.  (That's why I was going to sleep in -- I was taking that morning off to go see him, but it was a mid-morning appointment.)  He was quite sympathetic, and was surprised that I was there.  But logically I knew I had to take care of myself, too - and it was a consult based on my latest blood tests.  (Good news, folks -- red yeast rice and fish oil can indeed help with your cholesterol levels!)  Oh, and I had to cancel my next-day therapist's appointment, they charge $50 if you give less than 24 hours notice of a cancellation.  Later that day, though, I saw him in passing as I took my wife to her psychiatrist's appointment (one which we definitely needed to get her to) and told him what happened.  

  Somewhere in there, I was able to make airplane, hotel, and car rental reservations.  We were in Florida the next night.  And I wonder why anyone would ever want to live there.  We set one foot outside the West Palm Beach airport at 10:30 pm, and suddenly felt like we were swimming in the air.  Talk about humidity!  In fact, the whole week the weather was like something out of Hell -- hot, humid, heavy rain, thunder and lightning -- which somehow seemed to be right.

  Unless you are also a parent who has lost a child, never - NEVER - tell a grieving parent, "I know how you feel."  You don't.  You can't.  Our children are our future, our investment in the survival of our species, the continuation of our bloodlines (okay, that one doesn't apply to the step-father, except by proxy).  They are what we want the world to know us by.  They are our hopes, our dreams, our (insert cliche here.)  But they are.  They are what we live for, they are what we die for.  For them to die before us is just so against the natural order of what we are, that the loss of that future makes us wonder what we have left.  Of course, we can't follow our children.  Okay, we can, and some have - but does that honor them, or shame us?  

  Oh, you may notice I'm free-associating here a bit.  Well, I do that.  It's how I think.  I have A.D.D. -- which was one reason why Tim and I related, I could understand his A.D.H.D.  We both would sometimes range all over the place in conversation, but it worked for us.  God, I miss that boy.

  I think I'll stop for now, it's hard to formulate what I want to say.  But stay tuned -- I intend in the future of this blog to explore my feelings as that happen, and as they happened in the past six months.  I will question the nature of our existence.  I will laugh along with my grieving parents as I post "things not to say to a grieving parent."  (Example: "I know how you feel, I had a goldfish that died once.")  I will open up to honest discussion through comments (but retain the rights to edit, being the blog owner.  Hey, if you want first amendment speech, write your own blog!)  And on this journey, I hope to find some healing myself.  And perhaps help share what I've learned with others, to maybe help them in their processes.

Prologue

It has been said that we don't teach people how to deal with grief until they are in a graduate program in psychology.  (My psychologist's comment to that is, "sometimes not even then.")  Well, my wife and I have had what you may call a crash course in it.  Our son died on September 2, 2010.  This blog is one way I am using to come to terms with this.  In it, you will see many things, some funny, some sad, but all meant to honor our son's memory.  You can think of it as a form of autobiography in many segments, complete with your comments.

A word on comments, while I'm here.  I am a firm believer in the freedom of speech, and will gladly support your right to say what you wish - but not here.  Not to say I don't want your comments, I do.  But I anticipate some trolling, and this blog is not a forum for trolls.  So be warned - if I find your comments to be completely out of line, I may choose to delete it.  Don't take it personally, this blog isn't about you.  (Quite frankly, it's really about me.  But isn't that what any self-respecting autobiography should be?)