Death – Terrified No More: A Look at Addiction and Loss

I read a page from a book, title unknown, that was posted yesterday in a group that I belong to on Facebook, and it really resonated with how I’m coming to understand life and death. I am going to quote each paragraph of the page, beginning with a quote by Frederick Buechner, and respond with my personal experience as it relates to knowing Blake, from the Otherside, and knowing myself in the before and after.

“Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us – and through them we come to understand ourselves – in new ways, too.”
Frederick Buechner

Growing up, I was exposed to religious beliefs that were harsh, instilling fear and finality. I turned my back to those beliefs on the day I graduated from high school, leaving my home and losing most of my support system. While I physically walked away, the impact of the exposure stayed with me and still impacts me to this day, although I can say that it does not control my thoughts or behaviors as it once did. In my upbringing, this quote would have been considered ridiculous. In fact, it would not have even been considered. Dead was dead. The end. Well, until the Second Coming, but that’s not what this is about.

That mostly stuck. I have lost some people throughout my life. I lost my maternal grandmother when Blake was a baby, but we were not particularly close due to my mother’s abandonment of me. We lost Thom’s mother to cancer when I was 9 weeks pregnant with Lucas. I lost an older friend who worked down the hall from me, who came to watch out for me. I lost my paternal grandparents, my grandpa to heart failure and later my grandma, after a long battle with Alzheimers. I lost my brother to addiction. All of these deaths were somewhat understandable. Most of them occurred after a life well lived. I experienced some sadness, but I didn’t question what happened to them or look for them after the loss.

Losing a child is different. The pain can sometimes be excruciating; there is guilt; there is questioning; there is sorrow, for what is gone and what will never be. For me there is also an awakening and a new sense of being present. I understand a depth of duality in my own human existence that I’ve never been truly aware of. I’ve read about the soul and the ego and listened to podcasts on those topics, but because of Blake’s travel to the Otherside, my understanding is evolving.

“This delicate dance with the souls of the dead is something we don’t begin to understand right away. We think the immediate relationship is ended, though we know we will continue to remember, and to grieve.”

This takes me back to the first days, even to the days sitting at Blake’s bedside in the hospital. I felt the absence of Blake’s soul before he was declared dead. Those machines could not prevent his soul’s departure. The night before he left, I invited him to visit from the Otherside. I believed it was possible. I had to. But I didn’t know. Those two words that he said during our last conversation, that are tattooed around my wrist with infinity signs separating them, ‘faith’ and ‘love’ have proven constant reminders to stay open to the possibility. And I’m learning, because he’s teaching me, showing me, that it’s not just a possibility.

I don’t remember the sequence, but I believe I know, or rather, my soul knows. Sometime during Blake’s hospital stay, I’ll venture to say it was after his soul departed, I started receiving inspirational quotes from an app called ‘Shine.’ I don’t recall subscribing to this app, and I had never before received these motivations. I thought it was odd, and even considered if Blake might be sending me messages. These messages continued, consistently for awhile. I still receive them on occasion, but not like during those first days and months. Here’s a screenshot of one of the messages:

“But as we dwell in memory on our experiences with the one who is physically gone, his or her psychic presence, rather than being confined to the the body we knew and loved, seems somehow to expand and surround us with its gentle understanding, its compassion and love.”

I snapped the screenshot above after I accepted that these messages were intended for me, after birds visited, seeming to hang out, and after seeing his orb dance in the moonlight. His psychic presence is astounding, expanding my understanding and experience of unconditional love, cracking open my sense of the reality of what is, and filling it with magick. I get to experience the purity of him, the unblemished, unscarred him, the him that has no fear – only love and joy.

In experiencing him this way, I’m understanding that this exists in me too, that this is my soul, that my soul knows, truly knows. There are things that Blake said before he left that indicated a knowing. I believe he said these things intuitively. He acted on the message he received from his soul, with or without intention.

Because of him, I want to be more in touch with myself – not the self that is deluged and corrupted with information that keeps me distracted and confused, but the self that knows already, the self that sees beauty and love and that just is. It really is amazing, isn’t it?

“So we enter upon different kinds of conversations, often exchanges without words. We seem to arrive at a mutual understanding and appreciation for the goodness and the difficulty we were in each other’s life. We’re able to smile benevolently at all that flurry and to relish, instead, this deep love and peace.”

I think about him and feel him everyday. I’m listening better now, to this angel child of mine, than I likely ever did when he was my earth child. I listen to my intuition, my knowing. Just last night, I put on the movie Finding Forrester, a movie I’ve been thinking about for some time, since before Sean Connery’s passing. I’ve watched this movie numerous times. I scrolled through all the movies and thought about instead watching one of the Christmas movies, since we just decorated our tree. I told myself, soul to brain, ‘No, there’s some reason I’ve been thinking about this movie. This is the one I’m supposed to watch.’ And I watched through a new lens, and listened, and heard. I know I watched this movie with Blake, when he was here and last night. He told me this:

There was deep love between Blake and I here, unconditional love as I then understood it. I know he has peace now, and for that I’m grateful. I do wish he could have found it here. I think that William Forrester, through his friendship with Jamal, found peace after experiencing the consequences of anguish from losing his brother. I think Blake wants me to be tuned in to his brother, to help him in whatever way I can, to have peace from the loss of him.

Any difficulty that Blake brought to my life was through the disease that afflicted his mind. His soul though, overshadowed at times by addiction, remained out of its reach.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be at true peace with Blake’s departure. The idea of that is incomprehensible. I am, however, grateful to feel the gentle and beautiful rhythm of the earth mom and angel child dance.

I was driving back home after dropping our nephew off for a visit with his parents at a rundown motel in the middle of Reno. Blake, who was eleven years old at the time, was sitting in the backseat right behind me. He was really quiet, so I peered into the rear view mirror to see if he was sleeping. Tears were silently streaming down his face. “What’s wrong, Blake?” I asked. “Mom, what happens when you die?”

The question would have stopped me in my tracks if I was not driving on the highway. I didn’t know where the question came from. I only assumed that Blake was deeply impacted by the living conditions that his cousin would be staying in overnight with his parents. I tried my best to answer the question to the satisfaction of an eleven-year-old, trying to remember if I asked or even considered such profound questions at his age.

I think Blake was always aware of my half-brother Steve’s drug use, or at least he was aware of the outcomes. When Blake was an infant, Steve lived with us for awhile. I’m sure Blake didn’t have a conscious memory of that. Steve fell from the roof of a two-story apartment building, which resulted in his being helicoptered from Incline Village to Reno when Blake was two or three years old. I took Blake with me to visit my brother at the hospital. I’m pretty sure that image was stored in his conscious memory. We saw Steve from time to time after that, but never on a regular basis. Blake likely heard whispers of Steve’s stays in jail and other unsavory situations. In 2000, Steve’s girlfriend was pregnant. In mid-October, I took a gift for our new nephew and cousin to the hospital, but before that, there were reports made to Child Protective Services about the mother’s drug abuse.

Much of the chattering that happens in a home falls on unintended ears. I remember. When I was a kid, hushed voices meant ‘listen harder.’

Our nephew/cousin, Derek (name changed to protect his identity), came to live with us when he was 15-months-old. He hardly knew us and had never been to our home. At the time, we lived in an 1100-square foot home just north of Reno. Blake and Lucas were sharing a bedroom, so we converted the office into a bedroom for Derek. This began an almost 2 year period of transporting Derek to visitations with his grandma every weekend, coordinating visitation with his parents when they were not in active addiction, hearings at court, doctor appointments, finding affordable daycare, and periodically showing up at the welfare office to certify that we were still Derek’s legal guardians.

And then one day, I received a letter from the State of Nevada informing me that I needed to prove our family’s income at our next recertification meeting. I called the welfare office immediately to question why I needed to show our income, as we were Derek’s legal guardians, not his parents. It was explained that the State of Nevada decided to determine dependent benefits based on the income of the guardians, regardless of parenthood. With that decision, we could not continue with the guardianship. The monthly benefit only provided childcare for Derek, and we could not afford to pay for his childcare out of our pockets.

Almost immediately, I was making arrangements to transition Derek’s custody to his maternal grandmother. While this decision was not in his best interest, it was a decision I had to make. We continued to be involved in Derek’s life, exercising weekend visitation until we moved from Reno in August of 2005.

On Thanksgiving Day of 2006, I got a phone call from my brother. Derek had been living with his adult sister who was due to give birth to her second child at any moment. Their mother had recently been arrested and was in jail. My brother asked me to drive to Reno to get Derek and bring him to my home to live. If I did not do this, Derek would be placed in the custody of the State of Nevada.

I left my home Saturday morning, arriving in Reno the same afternoon. I picked Derek up, along with two garbage bags filled with his clothing, the same afternoon. After spending the night at a friend’s home, I drove Derek to the jail to see his mother, and to have her grant me written and notarized permission to take him to Oregon, enroll him in school, and obtain medical care for him as necessary. We headed to Bend, Oregon that afternoon.

With Derek’s mom in prison, and his maternal grandmother in Eugene, we were able to settle into a fairly uninterrupted routine. Of course, this routine was peppered with difficult behaviors that were outcomes of Derek’s traumatic history. In first grade, Derek was observed by the school psychologist who believed Derek was exhibiting symptoms of PTSD. We were starting to wrap resources around him when his mother was nearing the end of her prison sentence. Somehow, she was able to call him, and insisted on calling him almost nightly. She was not accepting of my concerns that her call frequency was upsetting our schedule, which was negatively impacting Derek and me and the rest of the house.

While his mother was in prison, we believed that obtaining legal guardianship would not be necessary. The State of Nevada then released her to Oregon for post-prison supervision in 2008 because she had family here. I felt we had come to an agreement about slowly transitioning Derek back into her physical custody. We welcomed her into our home for what was to be her first visitation. Right away, she told me that she was taking Derek back to Springfield with her that day. With no warning, Derek was uprooted, without saying goodbye to his friends, his school, his cousins,… I was absolutely livid, feeling manipulated and taken advantage of. She and her aunt and uncle, wo drove her to our home, took Derek and put him in their vehicle. When I suggested that she at least take Derek’s belongings with her, she came back in the house. She expressed that I seemed awfully stressed with taking care of Derek, and that my stress was not good for him. I think my exact response to her was, “Parenting is often stressful. The only difference between you and me is that I don’t stick a needle in my arm when I get stressed.”

Ouch! I’m not proud of that moment, but in that moment I meant what I said. It was judgmental, meant to shame, and it definitely was not necessary. Regardless of my feelings about the situation, our nephew/cousin’s well-being was at risk. We’ve seen him briefly only a couple of times since then. During winter break of 2011, I was able to go and get him from his sister’s home (she had also moved to Springfield) and bring him to our home for a visit.

In the meantime, my half-brother, Derek’s dad, lost his fight with the monster of addiction. The date was December 27, 2010. Derek was ten years old. Blake was 19.

I can’t say how much this course of events impacted Blake’s life, but I venture to guess that it impacted him deeply. Over the years, he stayed in contact with Derek through Facebook and talked with him on the phone. He tried to mentor Derek when he felt that Derek was making unhealthy choices, even trying to convince him to enter into treatment in Los Angeles.

I think that Blake sensed death was lurking on that day eight years before addiction claimed my brother. I wonder if it was curiosity – wondering what could be so great that you would live in such conditions and not take care of your child – that enticed Blake. Blake’s biological father also did not take care of him. Blake always sought to understand. That curiosity and that understanding possibly cost him his life.

Now he can answer the question he asked me when he was eleven. One thing I remember telling him is that the person lives on in the memories of those who love them. I know that there will not be a day that passes that I don’t feel the loss of him. Some days it will be just the loss, but most days, it will be accompanied by gratefulness for his living. I feel he is at peace. I feel his presence. I’ve met with an intuitive healer/angel guide, and I believe he is in a better place. I know life was hard for him for so long. I know he’s watching out for me. I see orbs often, when I never saw them before he passed. I know it’s him showing me that he is okay. The bravest, most intentional, and most painful act of love that I have ever expressed was letting him go. With faith and with love, I let go of his physical form, knowing that I would hold him in my heart forever. With faith and with love, I have to go on, knowing that I have a guardian angel that is with me for the rest of my days.

Tag: Death

Dancing With My Angel

“What Happens When You Die?”