Grieving Ryan

It's not that grief is intolerable in itself. I would guess it's a lot like my friend who lives with chronic pain. It hurts. It's there. Sometimes it flares and takes over life for a time, but mostly it doesn't. What it does is make everything harder. I'm less good at the things I'm good at. I make the mistakes I make more often. I'm slower to see them and it's harder to fix them.  I feel it most in the space of relationships. My emotional capacity is depleted. Also memory and task management, probably the whole bucket of things they call "executive function".  Of course it lands hardest on the one I'm closest to. Jamie is more with me than anyone has ever been. He pays attention. He cares. He spends hours and hours with me every day and holds me through the night. From the beginning, our relationship has been characterized by deep connection. It happened naturally at is sometimes does when you find your match. Even more, we worked at it. W...

Ryan loved games. At two he could beat me at Memory (the card matching game). By 3 Grandma determined that he was not only smart, but also insanely lucky. He drew more Sorry cards than three other players combined and reveled in their strategic use. He joined the advanced homeschool chess class at age 5 and generally beat opponents twice his age. He didn't care about winning actually.  He loved the strategy of it.  In Carrcasonne he was a spoiler because the most intricate strategies were for taking castles and meadows away from others which often did not result in ending up with the most points. He just loved the puzzle.  Ryan learned basic math facts by tallying Monopoly properties. We covered probability formulae and thus exponents when he asked which of two game scenarios would be more likely. He'd played the game at a friend's house and I didn't know anything about it, but he was still noodling days later, so he asked Mom. He loved to figure out the best possible p...

I think this is guilt. This heaviness that pulls at me when I think of the life I had before and the life I have now.  Three years ago Ryan and I moved into our new apartment, the one he chose. He helped decide where to put the furniture and carried boxes up the stairs. It was a space where we could make a life together, and we did. It wasn't easy for all that we loved each other. We had different ways of living. Parenting teens is never simple. Connecting with Ryan was particularly hard.  Yesterday I walked out of that apartment for the last time. I thought of all the life that happened there. And the death. I remembered the pain of being unable to connect with him both before and after he stopped breathing. I remembered meeting Jamie in that same space and thought of the joy and partnership in my life now, of the ease of living with the man I love.  Who wouldn't choose the easy joy of newlywed life over the struggle of raising a depressed teen? A mother wouldn't. I didn...

  A year ago I had them together. The twin blonde heads that for so many years bent together over a newfound wonder, bobbed side-by-side in a shopping cart, knocked against each other as only siblings can and then looked out for each other.  A year ago they talked and laughed together, and then I never saw them together again.  Thanksgiving was the same as ever: Grandma's golden bird and fluffy mashed potatoes. The steamed carrots the grandkids like - the ones Ryan once ate until he started turning orange on a diet we hoped would help him heal. The same dog with silky ears that grounded him when he could stand to be with us. The same two cats that kept him company when the people were too much for him as the dog was for them and they all retreated to the back room.  I knew he wasn't well, but I didn't know how to give him the help he claimed he didn't need, and I didn't know how urgently he needed it.  Ryan was still here a year ago, still laughing, still smilin...

Anacortes is the place I came when I left my old life. I drove away from two decades of friendships built and communities connected. I left behind the homes and parks and hiking trails where I had raised my babies and I headed west.  Skagit County had received my mother, my brother and I after her marriage ended before my fourth birthday. We lived on the beach and tromped through muddy sand. We lived at the lake in a drafty cabin just up the driveway from my first best friend. We lived in small town LaConner where I walked to kindergarten and feasted on raspberries in my mothers garden. My life grounded in the saltwater beaches and evergreen forests of this land.  It became the place that has always felt like home to me.  Marriages, first my mother's second and later my first, led me away from this place.  I was away most of a decade before I came back the first time.  When I left again I made sure to come back often. Maybe that's why I never rooted in Atlanta d...

Eight months later, I'm thinking of him as much as ever. As much as when he was here, as much as just after he left.  I walk by Subway, his favorite meal out. I remember the covid months when there was a "Now Hiring" sign in the window and I hoped it would be his first job.   I pass the frozen pizza case at Costco, or the pallet of apple juice. I pause, internally reaching to load my cart with his favorites.  We go out for a walk and I pass the church parking lot where I took him for his first driving lesson. I remember how he grinned and chuckled when I suggested it would be better not to run into the lone light pole in the middle of the empty lot. I captured that grin, the last photo I have of pure authentic joy.  I see kids on their way to the high school and wish he was with them. The career tech building where he went for the program he loved is on the way to the water. I hoped it would save him.  The two lane road where he practiced lane changes, agai...

I have wonderful clients who often say affirming things to me.  Recently one said, "Karen is my model for patience."  It startled me. Patience is not a trait I think of related to myself, and yet I can see why she sees it.  She's known me as a consultant, a facilitator, a holder of space. In that role, patience is required, so it is a thing that I do. More specifically, it is a thing that I have learned to do, a skill I can put on like a part of a uniform to do the work that I do. It is not an innate part of my personality. I wasn't born patient. I arrived in the world passionate, demanding, insistent and stubborn, determined that the truth be told, that action follow truth, that the right thing be done.  Over years, through painful lessons, I came to understand that the right thing isn't always the best thing, that truth is elusive and chameleon. Truth is individual and joint at the same time. I discovered that caring for people is far more about hearing them and...

 I am a thinker, a knower of things, a problem solver, a writer. When feelings arrive and threaten to overcome me, I turn them into words, I create frames of thought, I form action plans. But today there are no more words, no new frames, nothing to do, nothing to say. All that remains is to feel.  Sad.  Deeply, utterly, unbearably sad. 

 I don't want to think about the day he died. I don't want to hear the pain in his voice when he said, "It's just so hard." I don't want to feel my palms beating against his door as the alarm sounded and nothing moved on the other side, as I began to know and yet still hoped. I don't want to see the line of blood from the corner of his lips. I don't want to remember his death, though I do every day.  I want to remember his life.   So today, I will tell you a story of his life, a moment I would have forgotten but for my compulsive picture taking and a photo that lives on a bulletin board at the bottom of the stairs where I see it every day. I love it because it is such a natural picture.  He didn't know I was taking it. His smile is pure authenticity.  We were at an arboretum with the grandparents and cousins. The cousins, as usual, were inseparable, having a fabulous time.  Grandpa was along for the ride, and frequently would find a bench on which ...

I went back out into the world for the first time.  It's different to be with people in person. There are hugs and small talk and unplanned conversations.  You run into people you've known for years but never met. I lost count of how many people said to me, "Congratulations . . . and condolences." And the people who didn't know but stumbled into the subject so that the easiest thing for me to say was, "I lost my son in February and got married in April." And the easiest thing wasn't easy. Joy and grief don't cancel each other out. They coexist in the strangest of contradictions.  Sometimes feeling one strongly makes me less aware of the other for a time, but only for a time. Then it comes back, often stronger than before. Being in rooms full of strangers and friends is different.  It numbs the feelings. I hold my professionalism, I tell my stories and teach my lessons. I tuck the emotions safely away, not in hiding, just not expressed. I expected...