In the Company of Grief

It Evolves. It Pursues. It.Does.Not.Let.Go.

I’m a month and a day into my journey of forever without my kid.

This wound — opened by Grief — is as fresh and raw as the first day I got “The Call” that my son had killed himself. Still, the wound does not fester or grow fetid.

It evolves.

It pursues.

It.Does.Not.Let.Go.

Bits and pieces of his life fall from the pages of his journals like snowflakes on fallow ground, cold and yet alive. Some evaporate, some stick. Some cluster to create pictures both brilliant and terrifying. But each one is him. Precious and everlasting.

Torrey’s psychiatrist called the other day; she was out of the country — on her honeymoon — when he killed himself. She expressed her condolences and went on to tell me “what a terrific person he was.” She said “everyone here at the center loved him… looked forward to seeing him. He was a pleasure to be around.”

Still, “even when he was down, I’d see him reach out to others that were hurting and be positive with them and try to encourage them.”

And yet she acknowledged the unrelenting grip that depression and his illness held on him. She had no clue as to the ever-present “Why?” Her only surmise: he had gone off his medication, again. Yet she said he never missed an appointment and always refilled his prescriptions on time. But “filled” and “taken” are worlds apart, that reality born witness to by the dozens of half-full pill bottles I found in his apartment.

She said he was good at being deceptive with others about this true feelings; at least that is what I heard. Upon reading my notes of our conversation what I’d written down was “he was good at disguising his emotions.” And I suppose the two aren’t all that far apart…

“I’m so, so, sorry,” she kept repeating. “I know,” I replied. “Believe me, I know.”

Grief is a relentless, ravenous beast. It creates its own atmosphere by sucking all the oxygen out of your world. It becomes the center of one’s universe and its gravity too complex and deadening to escape. Its pull inescapable, demanding and consuming. Unlike depression or despair, however, it is not irrational and defeating. You somehow find the strength to get up each morning, go to bed each night and get up the next morning. There is a cold comfort in that deadpan routine, yet comfort still.

The love and support of friends is immeasurable and I thank you all for your diligence and condolences. There is a light… somewhere… I just can’t see it or feel its heat, but I know it’s there. Those that have gone before me tell me as much.

This is a lonely, sometimes desperate, sojourn but at the margin there are glimmers of what used to be, of what can be… of what will be. One.Day.Perhaps.