Mourning, Grieving, and Being Hopeful

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

--Thomas Paine

We all experience grief and stress in very personal ways.

I can recall the death of my Mother’s father, and remember a song that was playing on the radio as I drove home from high school the morning I heard the news. An insipid song by Julian Lennon, but in my moment of grief, the notes resonated and brought me to tears. When I think about the death of my wife’s Grandpa Jack, I remember seeing Johnny Cash’s video for his cover of the song, “Hurt”, and bursting into sobs while watching it for the first time. Whenever I catch a little bit of it, I feel the echo of that loss, even now, years later.

So, for me, grief manifests itself most powerfully during music. Sometimes, mourning is melancholy, the Blues. Sometimes, it is the great, sweeping, epic wordless poetry of staggering heartache.

My son has been struggling with self-doubt and conflict for a long time, more than a year it turns out. I did not know how much. He found it too difficult to bring his doubts to me directly, and one of his coping mechanisms turns out to have been the use of drugs. As his anxiety reached a crescendo over the Christmas break, he overdosed on a collection of different hallucinogens, resulting in an episode of substance-induced psychosis and a brief voluntary admission to a mental health facility.

In those last two sentences are worlds of complexity that stump me. I write for a living. I mean, really, I write complex contracts for the government, contracts that get reviewed by lawyers and muckity-mucks, and almost never need to be edited for content or clarity. I’m really good at writing. And I have no idea where to start explaining what happened to my son, what is happening now.

I want to warn kids who are thinking about using drugs that of the hundred reasons NOT to, one should be . . . using them

Might

Make

You

Psychotic. I have made the bitter observation that my son has turned himself into an After School Special Punchline.

I want to give an impassioned, scripture-referenced, historically relevant defense of the church and faith. An apologia of whatever unpleasant or bizarre things that make you doubt the reality of God.

I want to reassure whoever is reading this, that no matter how you’ve behaved, no matter what mistake you made, what horrible thing you’ve done, or seen, or said, or experienced, that there is hope for peace, for calm, for happiness. Don’t quit, don’t give up, don’t quit.

But with my son's story, I just don’t know where to start. For now, there’s a moment from last month that I keep thinking about.

He was not in the hospital long. He’s enrolled at a local school, has moved in with an aunt and uncle. He was only in the Mental Health Unit for four days, long enough to get a prescription for anti-psychotic meds. Clean of the drugs he had been taking (per his self-report anyway; one very real consequence of lying about drug use is, you know . . . people stop taking your word about your drug use). He’s medicated to help manage the trailing effects of the psychosis (even though he doesn’t think his symptoms are drug-induced psychosis”, but rather heightened perception of the true nature of the universe). He is seeing a psychologist to talk about the anxiety. A psychiatrist to manage the medication.

He is still struggling with doubt about religion, doubt about my beliefs. That is probably a generous way of framing it; he has declared in calm, polite terms that he no longer believes in God, thinks that religious behavior by intelligent people is the result of a group delusion (to be sure, earnest, good-hearted people who are experiencing cognitive dissonance). But since then, he’s told me in calm, polite terms that he thinks God (or something) is trying to tell him something important, or that he’s been warned of an impending disaster. Sometimes he says he’s afraid he might be crazy. Sometimes he says with great fervor that the things he saw and experienced during his overdose have profound meaning, and he must explain it to me. That he understands God and reality better than me, better than anyone else. It has not been consistent. It has been a mess.

But consistently, he has told me that he doesn’t believe what I have taught him. I think he is still struggling to form a coherent self-image that is based on something besides his parents. I feel sympathy for that process, and really wish he could talk himself into not being so stressed about it.

Through this all, my mind keeps drifting back to a moment a few days after his overdose, before he self-admitted to the mental health unit. He was struggling with very disorganized thoughts, delusions. During his overdose, his behavior was bizarre, unpleasant, scarily non-lucid. He was clearly, obviously, not “himself.” At the time, we didn’t know what was wrong. He presented as scattered, his conversations tangential, often spiraling into nonsensical meaninglessness. He was obsessed with numbers, and images, patterns, certain he knew the meaning of them (and never able to use words to convey that meaning).

I was afraid the overdose had done permanent damage to his brain (or at least to his personality). I teetered on the edge of fear that my son was gone forever. After the drugs wore off, he never came back to his normal state, just gradually reached an equilibrium of bizarre behavior. We would listen to him ramble until we were exhausted, and then ask him to go lie down in his bedroom.

It was a Wednesday morning. I had an appointment at the Vaccine Research Center for my Malaria trial and brought my son with me. His behavior after the overdose was so erratic we didn’t want him to be left alone anywhere. He never manifested symptoms of violence or paranoia, just profoundly disordered thinking (I’ve learned to talk like I am quoting the DSM-IV article about psychosis. Thinnest. Silver lining. Ever). He was waiting with me in the room where they put volunteers after their vaccination.

The movie Rango was on the TV in the waiting room, it was about 2/3s over. Very soon after we turned it on, we watched the main character, a very inexpressive gecko, walking in defeat away from his opponent, leaving the town to be destroyed by the bad guys. Though Rango’s face had no range of emotion, his eyes just two holes, his posture was one of defeat, head down, feet dragging through the sand.

The lonely playing of the guitar as Rango walked across the screen echoed how desolate I felt. I sat, watching my son’s face as he stared rapturously, stupidly, vacantly at the screen, muttering to himself, grinning and talking. I had seen the movie before, so I wasn’t watching it. It was my son, my confused, hurt, damaged son that filled my heart while the music playing in the background.

This is the image I recall when I hear the song play. That moment when I started grieving for the loss of my son, and my fear crystallized. His childhood brought to a stupid end by his careless, flailing use of self-destructive drugs to escape the stress of parental expectation (clean living, honesty, church mission, temple…).

When I think back to that moment, and I hear the music playing again, I feel a great swell of sorrow grip my throat, paralyzing me. He says he cannot believe in the things I say are true. Tells me that all along, he has just been pretending to keep me happy. In part blames me, saying the stress of my expectation made him rebel, but also reassures me there is nothing I could have done to change his course.

So much of the common ground of our relationship seems to have fluttered away from me, like torn shreds of paper carried by an unexpected gust of wind off of cliff. Dust swept from my grasping hands. Sometimes, I feel like my eyes are held tightly shut in denial of the loss, and I am afraid to look because I don’t know what is going to be left.

I knew, my whole adult life I was certain, that it would be hard when my children grew up. I knew they’d become separate from me, and that such a separation could be hard to process. I’d seen other parents having difficulty letting go, parents trying to protect their children in perpetual adolescence. Our collective Western literature and media are overflowing of examples of that story. But I foresaw adult, healthy relationships forming instead, and I looked forward to that.

So I thought it would be different for me. I thought the pain I would feel would be the melancholy of nostalgia, a wishing for simpler times, for just one more bike ride. I’ve never felt like a victim of nostalgia, I’ve always been grateful for growth, change and progress, always able to find the joy in the present moment.

I thought that I would understand and accept it. I thought some aspect of my relationship would mature, maintain, that we would become friends, peers.

This gap that is between us now is alien to me. It is not something I ever considered, and so I feel panic instead.

It’s the same panic I felt when once I stepped off of a bus in a part of town I didn’t recognize. And realized I had just gotten off of the wrong bus, a bus I took by accident. And was now in a part of town where everyone spoke a language I do not. An earthquake has ruined the landscape of my relationship, and there are no landmarks left to tell me where to go next.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about how hard it is watching adolescent children make mistakes. One of my sisters-by-marriage questioned my claim that it was harder than the hurts of raising smaller children.

This thing that has happened with my son is what I was trying to explain, is what I was afraid would happen. This is the hardship I was trying to articulate (without being too specific about who I was talking about – at the time, there was still the hope on my part that he was done with drugs). The grief, the abject sorrow, is more than anything I have ever felt, worse than anything I have ever imagined. I would never claim that my hardships were somehow “more” than someone else’s, just that this hurts me more than anything else.

It hurts more than any sleepless night, more than any tantrum frustration, more than any child’s illness, more than any hurt I could imagine my kids suffering. Because he is choosing this, he is walking headfirst into it. And I cannot stop him. I cannot suffer it for him. I cannot fix it. I know I am being melodramatic with my talk of destruction and grieving, but that’s my way of mourning. He is still talking to us, even if he is living with a helpful family member and not at home. I know there is hope, I know he wants to have a good relationship with us.

I can do nothing except watch, and pray, and love him anyway, though I feel my heart breaking over and over again. Who knew that we had such a capacity to grieve and continue living?


Liner note; I found out the song playing during the scene described in Rango is not actually on the Rango soundtrack. It is from the soundtrack to, “The Kingdom”, composed by Danny Elfman, from the credits.