Here and now

Sam’s tragic death on Mothers’ Day 2014 was from teen curiosity with drug experimentation that ended with the drug dealers who made and then sold a synthetic drug, 25i-NBOMe, in lieu of what was to be Acid for the teens to avoid detection from random school drug testing.  The death of a child is a traumatic event that can have long-term effects on the lives of parents.  It has for me and for my husband Ed.  The ending of a marriage is never an easy path to take and the decisions involved are innumerable and unexplainable except to the parties involved and even then maybe only to one and not the other.  

Seeing where my marriage is now, it isn’t as difficult compared to the day that Sam died.  That doesn’t mean after losing Sam it’s easy.  It means it is all varying degrees of pain every day.  Sixteen months after Sam’s death, I am now truly on my own with Sam’s teen brother, Nick.  I no longer live in the house that Sam made the tune to remember the address “Fourteen-O-Four, fourteen-O-four…”  A house that before Sam died, I could not really have cared whether I lived in another year or not and then after his death at the age of 16, a house that I thought I would never be able to leave.  It involves what do not even seem like choices as now I live in a world that just is and go from there.

Here and now, I live with Nick, now 16, in an out-of-the-way every day life, in a secluded smaller neighborhood with similar cheerful, chatty, and complimentary neighbors; on a street that in another language means “heaven’s view.”  When I look out my back yard or rest in the lounge chair on the back patio, I look up to the sky and see layers upon layers of clouds that remind me how close I truly am to heaven, and Sam.  The past two weeks I have slept in my new “heaven’s view” place and I have slept through the night and awoken like a “normal” person in the morning; no longer awakening in the middle of the night for hours of restlessness and wondering; overcome by tears and torrid thoughts.  The search for peace continues… hope continues… love for Sam continues…

I know now there’s no question that a marriage can end after the death of a child.  The shattering experience changes everyone in an instant and in total.  Just like Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and all could not put back together again.  

The loss of a child is the hardest thing a parent, and a couple, can go through.  It is really hard.  Oh, so hard. #muchlovetosam #missyousammy