A few days ago I wrote about how panic is always just a breath away for those of us who have suffered loss.
Like a friend of mine recently said, “We are branded. GRIEF is burned into our hearts and we are never the same.”
So how to live this altered life?
How can I manage that emotional tension that saps energy and strength from my heart, mind and body?
Our family has adopted some practical protocols that help. Sometimes they fail (as they did that night) but for the most part, they give all of us a margin of assurance that keeps panic to a minimum.
We carry our phones, all the time. I was never THAT person before Dominic left us. I used my phone mainly when away from the house or traveling. Otherwise it might be left charging in the kitchen or tucked inside my purse from my last outing.
Not anymore. When I wake up in the morning I grab it and my glasses from the bedside table and my phone is in my hand, in plain view or in my pocket until it is put back there at night. I make sure it’s charged and if traveling or going somewhere a plug may not be available I carry a small power cell to charge on the go.
We tell one another of our plans and, if appropriate, of our route. My kids are grown. I’m not interested in supervising their lives. But they understand my mama heart and graciously give me at least a general idea of where they are and what they are doing. They text when they get back home no matter how late it is.
I don’t stay awake waiting for it, but when I wake in the wee hours or in the morning, I have the reassuring message to greet me.
We answer texts/calls ASAP. Obviously we don’t encourage texting and driving but each of us has learned to give a “thumbs up” icon quickly in response to a text message just so the person sending it can be reassured. Then, when it’s convenient and/or safe, we respond more fully.
We keep each other informed when traveling. We distribute itineraries and give periodic updates on flight status, traffic or other appropriate information so family members not only know where we are but also if our time of arrival has been altered due to flight or weather delays or traffic conditions.
We share phone numbers of friends and coworkers which gives us alternate forms of communication should there be an emergency. Family phone numbers are in “favorites” in our phones so if we are unable to call for ourselves, emergency personnel would know who to call.
Truth is, we can’t stop bad things from happening and we know that.
But there’s no reason to create fear and panic when a quick phone call or text can avert it.
I already struggled with the sense that I was rarely able to meet everyone’s expectations before Dominic ran ahead to Heaven.
That’s been multiplied by a factor of at least 100 since then.
For those of you who are so self-confident or blissfully unaware, it won’t make sense but for those of you who are firstborns or “Type A” personalities you know exactly what I mean.
I cannot ignore the gap between what people need from me and what I’m able to give.
My internal dialogue is a combination of self-condemnation and pep talks to “do better”, “try harder” and “don’t give up or give in”.
But no matter how hard I try, it’s never enough.
And I need to let go of that. I need to let myself off the hook. I need to admit that some people’s expectations are unrealistic or self-serving.
But it is so. very. hard.
I have had an invisible disease for a decade that saps my energy, circumscribes my ability to do daily tasks and gifts me with chronic pain. Yet I tend to discount the impact it has on my life and try to ignore the fact it makes every. single thing more difficult.
It will be five years in April that Dominic left us. FIVE YEARS! I can barely type that. I don’t even know what to do with it.
A lifetime ago and a breath away all at the same time.
I feel like I am giving everything I have to my family, to my friends and to other folks that count on me to show up. So often it’s not enough. So often I fall short. So often I go to bed shaking my head and hoping that tomorrow is a better day and I’m a better person.
Last night I woke to my youngest son’s ringtone at nearly midnight.
I missed the call but when I looked, realized it was the third time he’d tried.
My heart skipped several beats as I dialed him back only to have it go directly to voicemail. I tried again and a second later, he answered.
“What’s wrong??!!!”
(Because he never calls me late at night unless something is wrong!)
Julian was downstairs at the front door and needed me to let him in because he’d received some odd texts from his dad- a series of random letters and emojis scrolled across his screen.
He’d tried to call him. No answer.
Tried texting him back. No message except more of the same random letters and images.
So he drove over from his house just a few miles away, the whole time running a dozen scenarios through his head.
“Is dad having a stroke? Mom is asleep upstairs and won’t know.”
“Is someone in the house and dad’s only able to randomly swipe his thumb on the screen trying to ask for help?”
“Why won’t mom answer her phone? Do they have her too?”
Five miles and ten minutes is a lifetime when all you can think of is another family member needing help- or worse.
As I was coming downstairs to let Julian inside, my husband woke up and asked me what was wrong. We got to the door at the same moment and let our big, burly bear of a son inside.
It took him a split second to realize that all was well and then it poured out–the fear, the panic, the intense self-control necessary not to simply break down the door and barge in, the pent up grief that lives inside each one of us since Dominic left and is always about to spill out and over when we think of another loss.
He melted into his dad’s arms.
This is how our hearts are wired since that morning nearly five years ago.
When the thing you never think will happen, happens, it becomes the first thing you think of when you can’t get in touch with someone.
I wish I could write openly about the things that are going on right now in my life, but I can’t.
So you’ll just have to trust me when I say these past months-really this past year-has been the most challenging since the first 365 days after Dominic ran ahead to Heaven.
I have cried more in the past three weeks than I have cried in the past three years.
I am forced to crawl into that secret space inside my heart and soul over and over if I hope to not vomit all these feelings on whoever happens to be nearby.
I look like I’m walking around in the world, but I’m really just walking around in a fog-putting one foot in front of the other and hoping I don’t trip and land flat on my face.
I want to be transparent, but I can’t be. Outcomes depend upon my ability to keep it together.
If I’m transparent, they will see that I’m falling apart.
So I plant a fake smile on my face, put on my good clothes, suck it up and suck it in and do what I have to do.
But I feel so very vulnerable.
Every day I feel like I’m in one of those dreams where you show up naked to class or to a job interview or to some other important function. And everyone just stares-dumbfounded-because they don’t know whether to laugh or cry at my predicament.
And I’m scared.
I know I write a lot about learning to set anxiety aside and not trying to figure out what the future holds. I really do take my own advice.
But some days, some weeks, some months I find I’m just as unable as the next trembling heart to do that.
So I’ve spent a lot of mornings crying before the sun rises too high in the sky. Letting all that vulnerability and fear leave my body through my eyes.
Then I dry it up and get dressed. Put on my mask and get going.
It is utterly exhausting.
I’m clinging to the fact that my track record for surviving hard days is 100%.
I repost this every so often because nearly every bereaved parent I know wonders, at some point, if they are going crazy.
Things that used to be second nature escape us. We can’t remember words, names, dates, how to write a check or address an envelope. Sometimes we get lost in our own neighborhood.
It’s not early-onset dementia (for the majority of us, anyway)-it’s grief brain.
If you’ve never faced anything very frightening, it’s easy to think that those who do and march on through are somehow immune to fear.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Courage is not the absence of fear but the mastery of it.
Yet you cannot master something you deny. You cannot resist that which you claim doesn’t exist.
Child loss is frightening.
So frightening that those not forced to walk this road usually choose to pretend (in practice if not in words) that it simply isn’t part of the world they live in.
It’s so frightening that most bereaved parents experience a period of time we would describe as “being numb” and “shock”.
It was probably six months until my heart truly understood the fact that Dominic was not coming back.
Ever.
It was frightening on so many levels-I had to face the fact I was not in control, had to face the fact my life was never going to be what I had envisioned it to be, face the fact that my surviving children would be shaped by grief in ways neither I nor they could anticipate, face the fact that I would live out my years carrying this heavy burden, and face the fact that no matter how hard I wished things were different, they were never going to be different-my child was dead.
And when the numbness began to wear off and fear creep into my heart, I had to choose: Was I going to embrace and experience this awful, devastating fear or was I going to try to deny it, distract myself from it or try to dismiss it as inconsequential?
Facing fear requires facing my own weakness.
Facing fear means becoming vulnerable-admitting that I am hurting, admitting that I cannot do this on my own, admitting that maybe, just maybe, I can’t climb this mountain without help.
Choosing vulnerability was its own challenge.
What if others mocked me? What if no one helped me? What if I just wasn’t up to the task?
I decided that NOT facing fear was not an option. As long as it lurked in the shadows I would be its prisoner.
So I turned and looked it square in the eyes. And I found, with God’s enabling help, I could master that fear.
Two verses became my touchstone:
When struck by fear, I let go, depending securely upon You alone. In God—whose word I praise— in God I place my trust. I shall not let fear come in, for what can measly men do to me?
Psalm 56:3-4 VOICE
When I admitted my weakness, His strength was sufficient.
Choosing vulnerability and facing fear opens the door for God to show His power in and through me.
Child loss is still scary.
I’m still afraid.
But the Lord gives me strength to master the fear.
That’s the standard, isn’t it? We trust our eyes to tell us the truth. We rely on our senses to winnow out the chaff of falsehood and leave us with the meaty grain of truth.
But what if my eyes aren’t as trustworthy as I think?
What if my perception is limited and unreliable?
Living in the south means long, hot summers.
In the middle of July I would sign an affidavit that it has to be at least 100 degrees outside and not much cooler inside unless I run my air conditioner to the tune of a huge electric bill.
But if I do a little digging, I find that the average high for July and August in my part of Alabama is only 90-91 degrees.
Now, that doesn’t mean there are no days hotter, but it does mean that my sense of interminable heat is inaccurate and untrue. As a matter of fact, the average temp begins to decline mid-August when we are all panting for fall to make its appearance.
My point is this: when I am sweating in the middle of summer, I’m not in a position to give you an accurate weather report.
All I know is that I am hot.
All I know is that I think I will be hot for days and weeks to come. All I know is that a cool breeze would be welcome but it doesn’t seem to be in the offing anytime soon.
I don’t readily perceive the tiny creep toward cooler temperatures that is happening right under my nose.
It’s been the same way in my grief journey.
Four years in and I am definitely in a better mental, emotional and spiritual place than I was even a year ago.
But if you had asked me at any point during that time if I could perceive a shift toward healing, I would have said,“not really”.
I was (and am) relying on my senses to tell me where I am in this process of embracing the life I didn’t choose. Yet they are easily overwhelmed by my daily experience-crying one day, laughing the next, undone by memories again, blessed by a friend’s text or phone call-filled to the brim with input.
I have a hard time sorting it out and looking objectively at what the data suggests.
When I can take a step back, I see that my heart has healed in some measure. I have enfolded the truth that Dominic is not here into who I am and what my life will look like until I join him in heaven.
And understanding THAT helps me continue this journey.
I don’t want to be stuck in the misperception that I can “never learn to live without my son”.
I am learning how to do just that.
I don’t like it. I will NEVER like it.
But I am doing it.
Little by little, in tiny increments, every day reaching out, reaching forward and making choices that promote healing.
Trigger warning: I discuss my loss in terms of falling. If you have lost a loved one to that kind of accident, you might want to skip this post. ❤
I really don’t know how to explain it to anyone who has not had to repeatedly face their greatest fear.
It takes exactly as much courage.
Every. Single. Time.
I have had a dozen major surgeries in my life. I am always just as anxious when they start the countdown to anesthesia. Doesn’t matter what they push in my IV line-that moment when I realize I am relinquishing all control to the hands of others frightens me.
I feel like I am falling over the edge of a cliff-nothing to hold onto, no way to stop what’s coming, no way to clamber back up and change my mind or change what’s about to happen.
It’s the same every spring since Dominic ran ahead to heaven.
From the middle of March to the middle of April my body responds to cues my mind barely registers. Sights, smells, change in the length of the day, the direction of the prevailing wind-a hundred tiny stimuli make my nerves fire in chorus declaring, “It’s almost THAT day!”
There is another underlying dissonance that begs the question, “Why didn’t you see it coming?” Or, at least, “Why didn’t you spend a little more time with him on those last two visits home?”
Dominic was busy that spring-an internship with a local judge, papers and responsibilities as a journal editor along with the demanding reading load of second year Law School meant he didn’t make the 30 miles home all that often.
But there were a couple days he came our way in the month before he died.
One was to bring a friend’s car and do a bunch of work on it. That day was chilly and I popped out a few times to chit chat as they labored under the shed in the yard. I made lunch and visited with them then.
Still, I kind of felt like I shouldn’t hover over my grown son even though I really missed him and wanted badly to talk to him about something other than car parts.
The jacket he wore and dirtied that day with oil and grease and dirt and gravel grit is still hanging in what we use as a mud room.
Unwashed.
Because they were coming back to do more repairs in a few weeks.
It is only now finally free of the last scent of him.
The next visit was on a day when I was busy, he was busy and we were all frustrated over equipment that wasn’t working properly. He brought me some medicine from the vet in town for a sick horse and spoke briefly about whether or not we’d cut some fallen limbs in a bit. Then he went to help his brother try to get the backhoe cranked. I was suffering from a severe flare in my ankle so was only able to hobble out to the spot the stupid thing had stopped for just a minute before needing to hobble back inside to put my foot up and allow it to rest.
He left early because I wasn’t up to cutting logs and neither he nor his brother could crank the infernal machine.
I remember that before he left, I made a point of turning him to face me and hugging him tight while telling him how very proud I was of him and everything he was doing and becoming. A little unusual because Dominic was the least huggable of all my children. He was no cuddler.
It was not a premonition-I was prompted by the knowledge he was going into finals and had been stressed lately.
But I am so glad I did it.
And then-poof!-time flies like time does and he and his brother were off on a Spring Break trip. They texted me faithfully to let me know they made it safely to their destination, safely to my parents’ home in Florida for a few days after that and then safely back home.
I never saw him alive again.
Spring is not my favorite season anymore.
While my heart can appreciate the promise of new life declared in every budding flower, every unfurling leaf, every newborn bird and calf and lamb, it is also aware that every living thing dies.
Living on a farm I’ve buried a lot of things in this Alabama dirt, I never thought my brother would be one of them. I miss you so much Dominic! ~Julian DeSimone
I’m on the edge and falling off.
I can’t stop it.
And it’s just as frightening this time as last time.
I remember as a young mother of four working hard to keep my kids safe.
Next to fed and dry (two still in diapers!) that was each day’s goal: No one got hurt.
It never occurred to me THEN to add: No one got killed.
Because the most outlandish thing I could imagine was one of them falling or touching a hot stove and us having to rush to the emergency room.
Then I became a mother of teens and one by one they acquired a driver’s license and motored away from our home.
That’s when I began to beg God to spare their lives.
One particularly frightening test was when all four went to Louisiana-my eldest driving and the rest in the van with her. I made them call me every hour and tell me they were OK. It was the first time I realized that I could lose every one of them in a single instant should they crash-all my eggs in one basket.
I was glad when that day was over. Although the irony is they were no “safer” at the end of those 24 hours than they were at the beginning.
Because what I know now, but didn’t know then is this: There is no such thing as“safe”.
Not the way we like to think of it-not the way we add labels to devices, seat belts to cars, helmets to everything from bicycles to skateboards. Of course we should absolutely take precautions!Many lives are saved by them every single day.
But. BUT…
Life is more random than we want to admit.And there is no defense against random.
There is no way to screen for every underlying physical abnormality, no way to drive so well you can stop the drunk or inattentive driver from plowing through a stop sign, no way to anticipate every foolish choice a young person might make that ends in disaster instead of a funny story.
My first response when Dominic died driving his motorcycle was that I wanted my surviving sons to sell theirs. They did so out of respect for me. Neither of them wanted their mama to have to endure a second knock on the door and the same message delivered twice.
I receive it as a sacrifice offered in love from them.
Because it was.
Since Dominic left us almost four ( now five!) years ago, I have had to deal with my desperate need to keep my living children safe.
And it is a real struggle.
Each child is involved in a career that includes inherent risk. None of them are foolhardy, but they are exposed-perhaps more than many-to potential bad actors and dangerous circumstances.
This branch fell just minutes after my son was standing in that spot splitting logs.
How I long for those days when I could tuck everyone in, turn out the lights and sleep soundly because all my chicks were safe inside my own little coop! How I wish the only danger I thought about or knew about was a bump on the head from hitting a coffee table!
How my heart aches for one more moment of blissful ignorance!
But I can’t live in some imagined water color past. I have to live in the world as it is.
So I remind my heart that safe is an illusion-no matter where we are. Life is not living if it’s only about preserving breath and not about making a difference.
![A Phone Call a Day [Almost] Keeps the Panic Away](https://thelifeididntchoose.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/hey-are-you-ok-memes-com-16222478.png?w=500)
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