When Mommas Cry
The Dark Side of Yearning, Grief After the Loss of a Child
By: CYNTHIA SNAPP
When Mommas Cry
The Dark Side of Yearning, Grief After the Loss of a Child by Cynthia Snapp
2012 by Cynthia Snapp
Published by Cynthia Snapp at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition
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Dedicated to:
My husband, Dicky, you are the true image of Prince Charming. You held my hand, spoke vows of marriage and never wavered. My children who like life itself gave me purpose. The challenges siblings face as a family endures the monumental transformation after the loss of a child are heroic in nature. I want to take this opportunity to recognize my children and the strength they have exhibited and their remarkable ability to keep their brother alive within their hearts.
To my special friends who through their own experience of the loss of a child have contributed precious thoughts and writings.
To the departed children whose lives made it possible to bring encouragement, hope, resolve, resilience and empowerment to those who suffer from the loss of a loved one.
Introduction
My thought is if you are viewing or have purchased this book you or a very close family member or friend has experienced the loss of a child. First and foremost I want to tell you how very sorry I am that you have been drafted to this club. No one I know would ever volunteer for this journey. You may not understand my choice of words referring to this as a club. Unfortunately, I don't have a better word to use and this is how you will find my story. This is not your normal 5-stages of grief and find closure book. This is not written for the timid. I will bare my soul and pain without apology or permission.
The purpose of my writing is I believe it may help give me strength, second I want to share symptoms and stages of grief many are not willing to share because it's a dark, lonely place and third if you are annoyed with punctuation errors and literary techniques you may not be comfortable with my writing. My choice of technique is simple, I write from the heart without the interference of an editor re-arranging my music. My proofreader called it a free flowing style. This is not a novel looking for book critics. If you are focused on my grammar, you have already missed the message. This is my journey, about loss, and I will dance to the music of my grief, my way. It is the single most important message I want you to hear. This is your journey. There is no right or wrong way. There is simply your way. Your child is as unique to you as your fingerprints and DNA. There is no assembly line, manufactured coping mechanism. No one size fits all. I am a simple person but not an ignorant one. I have a tendency to let my emotions speak for me. Much of my story will be driven by that emotion and like driving a car, backseat drivers are irritating. This journey has revealed places within my soul I did not know existed before losing my son.
My husband and I lost our youngest son at the age of 22 from a motorcycle accident. He was travelling on a rural, windy road lined with trees and he miscalculated a curve. He hit a tree and was thrown from the motorcycle. It was a small tree. Medications and machines would stabilize him and allow him to stay with us for seventeen hours. He never regained consciousness. We held constant vigil in the trauma unit as hundreds of his friends gathered around him. Acting as a personal security guard, I escorted his friends in and out of the trauma unit throughout the seventeen hours. Our son, Richard considered his friends and family his greatest possessions, so it was without a second thought I made every effort to allow his friends the time both of them needed.
A word of warning before you read this book. It may be too soon. Our son crossed over in June 2006, that was 5 1/2 years ago. It would take Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential candidate John Edwards ten years to release her book, Saving Graces after the loss of her son. I must be honest I have not read it but there are many books out there dealing with the subject of grief. The loss of a child comes as a left hook in life that I call a Trap Door Transition. The loss of a child is not in the family planner, not on the household project list and turns the family upside down. It is out of the given order of life. It is the unexpected.
I can only write from personal experience and perspective. I was born and raised in the United States and for the most part support the traditional Christian belief but believe we have a lot to learn from the Native American traditions and Eastern beliefs. I believe the Universe is much larger than one religion or belief system. In the Scriptures we are told, "My ways are not your ways". I can't relate to the struggles of families living in India and Kenya. The grief suffered by those parents losing children to malnutrition, disease and starvation on a daily basis cannot be compared to my grief. I would have to think those parents knew they were shadowed by death on a daily basis and I imagine their hearts were broken when they were unable to withstand deaths grip a day longer. The monumental battle those parents wage against death as they fight for the very lives of their children is no match for the single phone call my husband and I received on that June day. I can truly say I tip my hat to those families for the courage and resolve they exhibit.
Throughout this book, I will be sharing my personal very intimate conversations, thoughts, quotes that feed me, poems that revealed me, personal experiences and journals in snapshots of what I call Truth Matters. The Truth Matters will be marked by personal photographs of butterflies and flowers. Truth Matters are scattered randomly like salt and pepper, so when you see a photograph this is your cue to take a break from the book and follow me and my special friends on a personal journey through this challenging time of our life.
We just ask for the freedom to express our loss in our words. I don't want to be thought of as a victim, I am not a victim. I also have not lost my faith in God, as so many friends have feared. I am human, and by sharing the most intimate parts of my journey, I hope you can find strength, hope and courage. I also do not want to offend anyone and when addressing a subject like grief and the loss of a child there are a million different variables to consider. Some families lose children suddenly through tragedy others through illness and many suffer the loss through suicide. My heart goes out to each and everyone of you, and it is my hope that anyone sharing in my story understands I am not a professional writer, and I only desire to share my journey and that we are all one though we arrived here by various means.
This is not a clinical study, not an experiment. This is real life and it's not always pretty. I want to bring the struggle with grief out of the closet, and expose Truths which I believe will provide someone struggling with loss comfort in knowing they are not alone. The struggles that come physically, mentally and emotionally are and can be tremendous and while I admit most everyone experiencing a loss of this magnitude, do seek professional counseling, the counseling sessions remain private and behind closed doors. I want this to be a kind of 'in your face', this is what you might experience and if you do, you aren't alone, it's okay, it's part of the process, the healing, your growth and you will come through it. You will be battered, torn, exhausted, changed, resolute, transformed, stronger and passionate. The Truth is you won't recognize yourself anymore. I am writing this to say, it's okay, I have been there and still there.
As for the aftermath, I was like the many thousands before me experiencing the loss of a child, shortly after the accident, I looked for a way to cope. I turned to the internet and local library for information on grief, healing, loss, suicide, death, and life after death. One of the first books I read was Mitch Albom's, "Tuesdays with Morrie", a non-fiction novel chronicling his visits with his college professor, Morrie Schwartz who is suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). I specifically chose this book to find out if there was anything Morrie might share about preparing to cross over that would provide me comfort in rationalizing the sudden passing. It comes as no surprise that it is also a novel by Mitch Albom, "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" a made for TV movie adaption released in 2004 that became one of my favorite movies. All I will say about the movie is this, "if you haven't seen this movie, what are you waiting for?"
It would be a documentary on the History Channel that would provide me my biggest breakthrough. The documentary was the life of Kentucky Prophet, Edgar Cayce. Cayce's life and work are detailed by Thomas Sugrue in There is a River. My favorite worship song in 2002 was There is a River. Coincidence or fate? It's a song of healing and hope. When I saw the title of this book, three years later, during what is the darkest day of my life, I recognized it as a breadcrumb, food to nourish my soul and suddenly, I found myself knee deep in books detailing Cayce's work. Edgar Cayce was born in 1877, and is known as the Sleeping Prophet and the Father of Holistic Medicine. Once I finished There is a River, I followed it up with No Death, God's Other Door, and Beyond Death, Visions of the Other Side. I highly recommend these books to anyone struggling with loss and life after loss. No one, no writer, prophet, minister, therapist, best friend or co-worker, no one has all the answers. You can utilize all of these resources for nuggets of truth and wisdom that will feed you, and help you find direction, if it's just putting one foot in front of the other just one more day.
The irony is I spent several years before Richard's accident, completely engulfed in all things spiritual. My husband had a brush with death in 1998, a car made a left hand turn in front of him. He was on a motorcycle. While he survived, he spent the next four months completely bedridden, non-weight bearing. This means any time he had to be moved I used a manual medical hoist to lift him, he had to be turned manually, airlifted from a medical bed to a wheel chair. Non-weight bearing means the person can carry none of their own weight. It was a very long, challenging four months. Once those four months were behind us we faced the challenges of physical therapy. Eventually returning to daily routines and his job this near brush with death sent me into a tail spin searching the Scriptures, television evangelists and as many churches as I could physically travel to. I couldn't get enough. Every minister had their own interpretation and every church their own method of fulfilling the spiritual hunger. I travelled from San Diego, California to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida eventually expanding to Guatemala and El Salvador. So, I was well aware of what God's word promises me about life, death and salvation. Richard was still young enough during my spiritual journey that he was many times along for the ride attending the Brownsville Revival in Florida where tens of thousands travelled from all over the world to experience what God was doing. The irony is it would be a Kentucky Prophet who crossed over fifty years earlier to sit me down and say, "No death, there is another door".
The first organization I became familiar with was Compassionate Friends. This organization is geared to support families who have experienced the loss of a child. They have local support meetings, website resources and annual meetings. The loss of our son was an incredible strain on my job but my employers went above and beyond for us. I nominated them for an annual Compassionate Employer Award which was approved and delivered by a local Chapter Representative.
Whether you surf the internet, build an arsenal of literary works, books and poems, or join support groups or all of those choices like I did, the one and only thing I want to share is this is your journey. There is no right or wrong way. There is only "your way."