Grieving Ryan

Ryan died because he dissolved 4 bottles of pills in coffee and swallowed it. It was medication prescribed to him by his psychiatrist to make him feel better.  It didn't. Until it did.  Ryan saw his psychiatrist five days before he made his coffee. He told him that the meds were working and that they weren't working well enough. His doctor increased the dose of one of them. The pharmacy took 6 days to fill it.  We'll never know for sure if that change would have helped, but I don't think so. Ryan died because his doctor relied on the self-assessment of a depressed 17 year old, believing the part that wasn't true and missing the part that was.  I knew the meds weren't working. I was watching the slow decline as Ryan became more and more withdrawn into himself. It was gradual, not the sort of thing one sees from one day to the next. It happened slowly over months.  If he'd asked me, I could have told the doctor that Ryan was worse in February than he'd bee...

Grief went quiet. I didn't notice that it was happening so much as that it had. I was surprised to realize it had been days since I'd cried. I thought of Ryan still every day, but mostly of his younger years. I remembered happy times, his smile, the glint in his eye when he knew he was being clever.  With grief quiet, I went about a normal life, meeting with clients, planning meals, catching up on dozens of tasks that had been neglected in grief and in the months and years before when the burdens of motherhood had depleted me.   With grief quiet, Jamie and I planned our wedding, a trip east to see Megan's end-of-year show. I remembered that the last time I'd seen her perform in person was three years ago (pre-covid), when she was younger than Ryan is now. She told me she's better now. I said I hoped so, or something wasn't working right with her training program. We laughed and made plans to see a Cirque show together, something we couldn't have done with Ry...

Memory is a funny thing. We tell ourselves it works like a video camera, recording faithfully the events of our lives, but it doesn't. Memory is a far more sophisticated tool than that. Memory cleverly contorts our realities to make the meaning we need in the moment. It emphasizes the learnings we need most and diminishes the bits that cannot help us to survive. Sometimes memory tells us just what we want to know, sometimes it forces us to see the thing we wish could not be true.   If you had asked me two months ago what I remembered of Ryan's childhood, Id' have told you a story of struggle, his and mine. I'd have told you how Ryan's illness gradually revealed itself in words that made no sense, in actions that looked like vitality though they were really his way of coping with its opposite, in tantrums and violent rage that looked like the willfulness they were and didn't speak clearly of the pain driving them. If you'd asked me two months ago I would have...