Monster Imagination

I didn’t know that today my “new” work in mental health counseling would provide me a mirror as I sat in session reflecting upon the fear being presented to me of facing a monster.  I was just sitting there with my mind as someone spoke and their voice hummed a sorrowful sound that reminded me of my own presence in another place; in a time where I felt much the same as the sorrow sounded today. 

I had gone to court in my loved one’s loss that summer of 205..  I was a victim.  My son Sam had died from a young man making a synthetic drug while on house arrest and selling it to a younger man, age 19, that sold it to my sweet 16 son looking for Acid to avoid detection on a high school random drug test. A drug screening process that was defunct in reality as I found out; the school didn’t test enough students to have a random sample.  My sweet Sam with a GPA over 4.0 made decisions that weekend based upon bad information.  He and his friends, from that weekend, thought that Acid would go through their system before they were back at school on Monday.  They weren’t sold Acid though.  It was bad-  

It was August 2014, I sat in the courtroom faced with the monster that robbed me for reasons I did not know.  I first noticed he wasn’t any taller than me when he stood wearing his orange, loosely hung, jump suit.  He didn't appear to me as someone to fear facing.   He had dark hair with a military style crew cut and looked still young; in his mid-twenties.  

As I watched the monster sitting in the jury section of the courtroom in shackles and chains, he was pale as though the life within himself had escaped.  His mother addressed the judge pleading for his mercy.  She told of how when he was just nine, he found her lifeless in the bathroom when she tried to take her own life.  How he went from one school to another after his parents were divorced and he didn't “fit in.”  By the time he was a teen, he “fit in” to a gang.  I knew he had a tear drop tattoo under one of his eyes to signify a rite of passage.  It seemed meant to show strength yet was still just a mark on his skin. 

In the decade that followed him, there was a girlfriend and babies meshed with drugs, guns, and crime; then more crime.  Mother’s Day eve 2014, his world of hurt was cast upon my son, me, my family. A monster?  Not what I had imagined. The loss of my Sam; unimaginable #muchlovetosam