4 years ago my
youngest cub Matthew passed from this world.
He was 24 years old. It was Feb
18th 2009.
He fell on Sunday
January 18th 2009 and chose to leave this world exactly four weeks
later, the same date and time he fell.
I have joined the
crowd of parents who grieve the passing of their children. While my grief is not as raw as those first
few years January and February are still challenging weeks to get through. Will I eventually “get over” the challenge of
these weeks? No, those who have journeyed
with grief know you don’t get over it.
You learn to adapt, to try to live as much as possible “at peace” with
these emotions that tumbled so uninvited into my life with that early Sunday
morning phone call.
Grief is a unique
journey for each of us. Yes, there are
signposts, those stages of grief that friends wonder
about because it is easier to react when they know “what stage we are in”! Yet my experience is that the stages are as
helpful as a “pocket in a singlet”. They
do not prepare you for the dementing, excruciatingly painful journey that
begins when you realise your child is passing from this world and you have
“that discussion” with the Dr’s where it is agreed medical treatment will
switch to palliative care and in the coming days you sit by his bed and listen
to his breathing become coarser, more laboured and the silence between each
breath grows longer and longer and still you wait as his body gradually
surrenders to death.
In “The Anthem”
Leonard Cohen sings
“There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”
In grief everything is
cracked, everything is broken and as for light getting in? There is only darkness, days where you sit
and stare because the mind cannot formulate coherent thoughts.
I was graced in those
days to have a wise counsellor who did not help me through the stages but
simply encouraged me to hang on because in time grief would metamorphise from
something which threatened to consume and destroy my life to something which
lived within me because my soul could live with the pain.
Yes, there is a crack
in everything and the light is getting in.
There is pain and I can now live with that pain. I watch other fathers and their sons and my
heart hurts and I remember my son’s laughter and the light comes in. Life has become a journey of both/and. These next few weeks will be a challenge and
a time to remember. As challenging as
this time may be I choose to also honour the gift of Matthew’s life.
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