'Parents' Grief' built on idea of daily meditations
Very sorry for your loss. Hope the above may be helpful.
Very sorry for your loss. Hope the above may be helpful.
Death of my Son, I need some help
- Thread starter Superlyte27
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RockiesFan
Banned
Wow, I am so sorry to hear this. We all have a process for sorting out grief and right now the wounds are fresh and deep. Don't try to bury what you feel, just acknowledge it is there. Emotions can and will flood out of nowhere and just about anything can be a trigger. Sometimes it will have to be enough to just function with daily life. Focus on simple things like remembering to eat, taking care of of hygiene, and mundane household tasks.
caruso
Banned
Don't blame yourself for getting the bike. He would have gotten one sooner or later. He was old enough to drive and ride, old enough to make adult decisions. You can make yourself crazy with the "what if I didn't do it" cyclical thinking.
When people say stupid crap like "God had a master plan" just realize they don't know what to say, it's the best they can come up with on the spot, and just acknowledge that they are trying to show compassion. But I get why you can barely restrain yourself from saying "That is a really stupid thing to say". I don't think I could hold back myself.
When and if you feel up to it consider joining and/or supporting safety driving groups. You know, when someone loses a child they become an advocate to prevent it from happening again by increasing public awareness, pressuring the legislators for a change of laws. That way the death can sort of be turned into something with a positive outcome. Almost like a legacy for the person who has died.
You definitely need to work through the grief with a competent therapist. If you don't get it out it's just going to simmer inside of you and even worse can gradually wear you down into a deepening spiral of depression. The help is out there- you just gotta take the steps and go get it. Find someone you're comfortable talking with, it might take a few different therapists before you find one that clicks.
When people say stupid crap like "God had a master plan" just realize they don't know what to say, it's the best they can come up with on the spot, and just acknowledge that they are trying to show compassion. But I get why you can barely restrain yourself from saying "That is a really stupid thing to say". I don't think I could hold back myself.
When and if you feel up to it consider joining and/or supporting safety driving groups. You know, when someone loses a child they become an advocate to prevent it from happening again by increasing public awareness, pressuring the legislators for a change of laws. That way the death can sort of be turned into something with a positive outcome. Almost like a legacy for the person who has died.
You definitely need to work through the grief with a competent therapist. If you don't get it out it's just going to simmer inside of you and even worse can gradually wear you down into a deepening spiral of depression. The help is out there- you just gotta take the steps and go get it. Find someone you're comfortable talking with, it might take a few different therapists before you find one that clicks.
Asteve
Contributor
What the Chairman said. plus my mom die when I was 16, I found even if she was dead I could still talk to her, I knew what she would say, that and time helps a little. Stay busy.
I lost my son 10 years ago. He didn't come home one evening and his body was found seven months later. We never found out what happened. Time heals, even though it took some five years for pain and tears to subside. I still blame myself for this or that, but these are separate moments now, not a permanent state of emotional self-flagellation. I learned to accept that life can be understood only in retrospection but we have to live it forward. I had no way to know what would play a role in my son’s fate in order to do it or avoid it. It was hard but I somehow knew that in the abyss of desolation God left enough strength in me to live until the time of consolation. Most importantly, I knew that God in His love knew the right moment for our son. It is not a blind trust - I saw that he was in his best spiritual state in many, many years, but I had reasons to worry about his future. What concerns me; during the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola I realized that Christ lived a life, full of rejection, humiliations, maltreatments and pain. He had all reasons to be mad at His Father and at all people. My pain and my loss brought me close to Him and invited me to participate in His life. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, we cannot really be with Christ if we refuse to go where He is - at the cross. That brought some meaning to my suffering. Our situation became very public in media. There were many psychics offering their clairvoyance where our son might be but they just wanted money from us. But there was a church member with a gift of prophecy who had a vision that our son is "in water but in light". That was before his body was found in a river. There were other people who had dreams with our son - strong, happy and very alive in a spiritual existence. I don't know what to think about it but it was consoling.
My wife learned to dive in order to somehow participate in her child's dying. This was a consolation, too.
Excuse me if this was a nonsense or an additional annoyance to you.
My wife learned to dive in order to somehow participate in her child's dying. This was a consolation, too.
Excuse me if this was a nonsense or an additional annoyance to you.
Pete, I am very sorry you and your family are going through this. My mother died unexpectedly over a decade ago and that was, and still is hard for me to deal with. I hesitated posting anything here but since this happened in my mother's family, and I grew up with it too, I thought I'd pass it along.
My uncle, (mother's brother) died in a single car crash in my home town of Bradenton two years before I was born. He was one of three children of my grandparents and the only boy. He was 16 and on his way home from high school baseball practice with two other boys. One of which would become my uncle a handful of years later when he married my aunt.
My mother's family, now down to four, were of course devastated. My grandfather blamed God and basically washed his hands of church for the rest of his life. It wasn't until the year he died that he told my Mom he believed in God as she wanted him to go to heaven and had been talking to him about it. My grandmother, the picture-perfect Southern lady, was bed-ridden and basically didn't leave her house for half-a-year. My aunt, the youngest, was stuck in a grieving home trying to make some sense of it all and just survive. My father, even to this day, says that it was some of the strongest grief he's ever experienced. (And his grandfather too was killed in a car accident.)
Growing up, I was the first grandchild and boy did my grandparents spoil me! I was aware of my deceased uncle but hardly anyone ever spoke of him and there were no photographs of him anywhere. That was the case until after my grandfather died in 2000. Only then was my grandmother able to put some up. Apparently as a little boy, I told my grandmother that I was her son come back to her. To this day, I wonder about that and why I said it. I did play a lot with his old toys, which were pretty cool.
It wasn't until I was an adult that my grandmother told me what made her feel better and got her out of the house after the accident. She had walked into the bathroom that my uncle used and she said there he was. He told her that he was fine and for her not to worry. I don't remember what else she said, but it was that encounter that enabled her to continue on with life and I have never doubted what she saw. My grandmother went back to church after that for the rest of her life albeit without my grandfather.
One other experience. When I was a teen and living in the Los Angeles area, my Mom forced me to go to role play at a local church. This was done by a pastor who was a leading authority on families using role playing exercises to work through problems. Usually by turning the roles around so that kids would have to see and deal with situations from a parent's/adult's perspective. I had sat there stone-faced for many a meeting. Still working through anger about my mother's multiple marriages, etc. The one thing that broke through to me, and got me crying in that room full of adults, was seeing my Mom cry after working through a role playing exercise that dealt with the death of her brother all those years ago. That was an extremely strong moment and I still get goosebumps as I type about it. That was the first time we had even really talked about her brother.
Pete, a big hug to you. I have a lifetime of dealing with this family tragedy -- and its fall out. My hope is that something I wrote here can help in some way.
Gene
My uncle, (mother's brother) died in a single car crash in my home town of Bradenton two years before I was born. He was one of three children of my grandparents and the only boy. He was 16 and on his way home from high school baseball practice with two other boys. One of which would become my uncle a handful of years later when he married my aunt.
My mother's family, now down to four, were of course devastated. My grandfather blamed God and basically washed his hands of church for the rest of his life. It wasn't until the year he died that he told my Mom he believed in God as she wanted him to go to heaven and had been talking to him about it. My grandmother, the picture-perfect Southern lady, was bed-ridden and basically didn't leave her house for half-a-year. My aunt, the youngest, was stuck in a grieving home trying to make some sense of it all and just survive. My father, even to this day, says that it was some of the strongest grief he's ever experienced. (And his grandfather too was killed in a car accident.)
Growing up, I was the first grandchild and boy did my grandparents spoil me! I was aware of my deceased uncle but hardly anyone ever spoke of him and there were no photographs of him anywhere. That was the case until after my grandfather died in 2000. Only then was my grandmother able to put some up. Apparently as a little boy, I told my grandmother that I was her son come back to her. To this day, I wonder about that and why I said it. I did play a lot with his old toys, which were pretty cool.
It wasn't until I was an adult that my grandmother told me what made her feel better and got her out of the house after the accident. She had walked into the bathroom that my uncle used and she said there he was. He told her that he was fine and for her not to worry. I don't remember what else she said, but it was that encounter that enabled her to continue on with life and I have never doubted what she saw. My grandmother went back to church after that for the rest of her life albeit without my grandfather.
One other experience. When I was a teen and living in the Los Angeles area, my Mom forced me to go to role play at a local church. This was done by a pastor who was a leading authority on families using role playing exercises to work through problems. Usually by turning the roles around so that kids would have to see and deal with situations from a parent's/adult's perspective. I had sat there stone-faced for many a meeting. Still working through anger about my mother's multiple marriages, etc. The one thing that broke through to me, and got me crying in that room full of adults, was seeing my Mom cry after working through a role playing exercise that dealt with the death of her brother all those years ago. That was an extremely strong moment and I still get goosebumps as I type about it. That was the first time we had even really talked about her brother.
Pete, a big hug to you. I have a lifetime of dealing with this family tragedy -- and its fall out. My hope is that something I wrote here can help in some way.
Gene
I am very sorry for your loss, my son is 16, we ride motorcycles together, and dive together. I would be devastated just as you are if I were in your shoes. I hope you can find some peace somewhere, in religion, therapy, or anything else in the world that can help you. Good luck to you.
While I have not lost a child of my own, I watched my parents when my sister (and her friend) drowned in our pool. My father was a man of great faith and that got him through it. My mother...that's another story. I thought they would get a divorce. She retreated into something else and didn't want to be around the house where the drowning occurred. She moved out for about a year. She blamed herself for having been the one who insisted on getting the pool and using her wages to pay for it. She carried that guilt for a long, long time. She has dementia now and has forgotten it, but it made her very bitter and angry for a long time. Dad made us all get into the pool the day after her death...it was his way of saying "it's not the pool's fault or that of anyone who brought it here". Probably was the best he could do. This was a time (50 years ago or so) when it was considered a sign of character to soldier on without seeking help from a mental health professional. I wish my mother had gone that route. Heck, I wish I had gone that route. I was who recovered the bodies and notified the families, police etc. It took me decades to come to terms with. The fact that you are reaching out here says that you are not doing what we did: try and paper over it. I learned from this accident that there is nothing anyone can say or do other than be a shoulder to lean on. You need to try and find a way through. In my Dad's case, it was his religion. But there are other options more readily available in this day and age. Please consider grief counselling.
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