Here we go again…

Six years.

I don’t know what to say.

Time flies … I guess. But it also goes painfully slow.

I can say I am breathing without a heavy heart most of the time. I don’t wake up and immediately think “Another day with Nolan not here. One more day closer to dying and reuniting with him and leaving this crazy, crappy F’d up world.”

Yes – those first years I thought about dying. Not taking my life. I saw how horrible it is for those left to try and go on. I would take my meds (was on an antidepressant the days after Nolan’s passing), vitamins and estrogen dosed from my weekly pill holder. Week after week I used to think it was a countdown to when I was done here….

 How many weeks, months, years do I have to be here and live like this?

Living a new grief life where I go through so many emotions in an hour? A life where I have to wear my mask to hide my pure grief, a deep sad that nobody, not even myself, would want to be around for fear of it wearing off on others? Exhaustion was completely an understatement. I went back to work three weeks after Nolan died. I had to. I am the breadwinner. And I had to be fully functioning and in complete working brain mode. Work made the days go by fast. And it kept me from constantly thinking about my loss. Kept me from the crazy thoughts of why.

It is still hard to balance the days of the “ordinary world” and the quiet days where my loss and emotions flood my mind and bring me back to sad memories of Nolan’s last months of his life.

So now we are six years from the knock on the door from the county police and coroner’s office. Are you wondering when I am going to get over Nolan’s passing? Will I ever stop lamenting about the loss of my son?

The question I would pose back would be “Have you ever stopped loving your child?” Even if you are mad or disappointed in your child – you still love them. And you can communicate your love, your emotions to that person.

I can’t call Nolan and hear his voice. I can’t hug him. Can’t watch him grow up. Maybe get married. Have kids? Maybe be alone and depressed. Maybe have an addiction. Maybe live a few years more and then take his life at an older age. All gone. No future.

I have all that love and emotion that just have nowhere to go.

That is grief.

Four years

Four years. It is how long we take to get through high school. Through college (that is the plan for most parents!)

Medical school is four years.

I should know how four years should feel. I have done four year tasks many times.

These four years have been painful and slow with my grieving.

The first year is all fresh with firsts – first Christmas, first Thanksgiving, first birthday. The Angelversary. You struggle to focus, you are exhausted.

The second year is horrible. It stings and all the milestone days come again and you are reminded he is not coming home. You are still exhausted. Wake, rinse, repeat.

For me the third year was the year of figuring out balance. How to still function as a full time pediatrician, mom and wife yet still honor my need to grieve.

Fourth year? My grief is still here but the need to stay current with the daily changes in a pandemic world keep me more as a doctor and less as a grieving mom. This world is getting harder for those struggling with loss, addiction, depression and anxiety. I have seen so much anxiety in my pediatric population.

I honor Nolan today, his fourth Angelversary.

I really don’t want to cry all day. I don’t have time for that. Life goes on. This day will come again and again. How many more I will have to live through I do not know. I would rather put my energy and grief today into my purpose – why I am supposed to be here.

100% preventable?

You have seen this saying before.

I agree- suicide does not need to happen.

But when a person loses a loved one to suicide this saying can sting. It can be read as “You could have prevented him/her from suicide. You missed the signs. You failed.”

The act of taking your life to end your pain, to be under the trance that suicide is the answer to your problems- that is what COULD be prevented. But not all suicides can be prevented.

The first year of life without Nolan I had no interest in advocating for suicide awareness and prevention.

How could I say it is preventable if I didn’t stop Nolan from ending his life? I FAILED. He was taking his medication and seeing his therapist. We supported his decision to go back to college. He appeared the healthiest he had been the months before.

The good Dr. Gold, a pediatrician with years of experience, she must of known Nolan was that bad, that low.

HOW DID SHE NOT SEE THE SIGNS??

The months after Nolan died I was a busy detective. What did I miss?

He was doing so much better. He had goals and he had plans. I went through his phone and read his texts. College was going well (at least that is what his professors told me) but he was seeking a relationship. With someone. With anyone. It appears he would have great anxiety (depression and anxiety love to hang together) in social situations. So when rejection happened he wasn’t able to bounce back. It pushed him farther to feeling like he didn’t fit in. Was this the final straw? Was it school and it’s stress? Was it because he couldn’t lose weight? Was his medication dose increase the push to give plan to taking his life?

I still do not know where Nolan was the night before his suicide, nor where he went for most of the day. I imagine he went to the dunes and hung out at the beach. All alone. It was a beautiful September day. What was he thinking? Was he at peace with his decision and enjoying his last day on earth? I understand from my research that people do usual everyday things up to the minutes before they take their life.

I will never know.

The detective mom did see what Nolan did the minutes before he got out of his car with a shotgun, walked a dozen yards to a large rock mound in a construction site in view of his home and ended his life.

He watched a mundane YouTube video on his phone of his favorite gamers. No goodbyes to anyone. No note. No hidden meaning in any texts to anyone. He just ended his pain.

Tell me where the signs are with that?

It will be four years since Nolan died by suicide. The guilt can still try and take over my thoughts.

When the guilt pushes me to think I failed, I remember the following:

You cannot control another human being
You can make home safe and give tools to find help but you can’t make a person heal
Suicide is not the survivor’s fault
The act of suicide is not to hurt others, it is to end pain

I see the phrase suicide: 100% preventable in a different light. It reminds me of my role in helping others and bringing awareness to pain that leads to suicide. I cannot prevent every loss from suicide. I can be the person who listens and offers the tools to help and redirect to a path of recovery.

My House of Grief

I sometimes think of my grief as a place in my mind – my house of grief.

game-rooms-house-1-728

I live my day to day life – with work and busyness and the routine- outside of this house.

But every morning I wake up – the second I am up – I am in my grief house and in it’s biggest room.

This is my missing Nolan room. I am in this room the most.

I have other rooms in my grief house.

I don’t go into the denial or shock room anymore. But I did in the beginning. The anger room is really small. I don’t go there much. I spent the first months in the searching room. I got some relief but unfortunately in my time spent there I found more questions than answers. I went into the depression room last year December and stayed there for a month or so. Didn’t mean to. But it happened. It was decorated for the holidays but that did not make me happy.

The room I hate the most in my grief house is the guilt room.

This is in the basement. I visit this room almost every day. I know all grieving moms go here often. Especially moms whose child died from suicide.

You know you don’t need to – and you shouldn’t – but you still do.

Something calls to you from in that room. It tells you to come and waste your time and expend your energy. You enter and go through the same routine….

“I should have known. I could have stopped him. I failed him. I should have fixed him – I have failed as a mother and a doctor. He is gone and it is all my fault.”

ermabombeck1 But us grieving moms know the truth. We only know what our child allowed us to see or told us. We cannot read their minds. Even though we are mother we cannot say we knew our child completely and in those last moments of their lives. WE CANNOT BLAME OURSELVES. But we still do.

I try to get out of the guilt room as fast as I can.

The new relationships room is so good for my soul. It is where other grieving parents and friends are and I get my strength when I go in this room. Sometimes I get lost and find myself in the disorganization room. That happens a lot on my days off. It pisses me off when that happens.

crazy grief

The house can be confusing because the rooms constantly change in location. Sometimes you don’t know which room you are entering . It really does feel like you are losing your mind. Unfortunately the guilt room never moves .. it is always in the basement and it demands a visit too often.

Thank goodness I do not have a loneliness or isolation room in my house. Never found it and I don’t think I ever will.

The room I like most is the helping others room. It is sunny and warm and really makes me happy. It has become a room that is missing a wall and is open to my everyday life and my work life. Thankfully it is a room in my house of grief that I spend more time in. This room is less and less hard to find. It does not move as much as it used to.

The missing room is where I end my day. It is where I think about Nolan, my parents, many other relatives and others who are gone. The list of people I am missing is growing. But they are all together in the best house ever- the House of the Lord. I expect I have a great amount of time before I get to see this house.

I will wait.