Like A Flower

Violet,
I agree with Mary on everything she says. I lost my son, Stephen, on May 27, 2010 to the darkness of suicide. He laid on the floor and put a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He blasted all of those who love him into an eternal pain. I feel like I am on the ocean being pitched back and forth during a storm. He had just become engaged to the most incredible girl. He had broken his back when he was seventeen. He should have been a paraplegic, but he walked..not very well, but he did. He was supposed to have been married a year from June 26 and to move here where I live in Arkansas…he will never make it in that way, although he is here now…just in a small wooden box awaiting his wedding day. On that day I will through him into the river that he loved to fish the waters of…sad, so sad. So much heartache left behind. I built this beautiful log house for him, my husband/his stepfather and I built it by hand out of cypress logs and rock floors and trees inside and a waterfall with fish inside and a huge cathedral like window at the top with a cross built in to protect him after I was gone…I do not know what I will do with this house now. I have two other boys, but they did not love it here as he did….so many stories to write in this place of tragedy and triumph…you have such a gift and a whole cast of characters to use…..just more thoughts and open hearts. Sorry for your loss, Mary, if you ever want to talk..let me know. I am in here every day. Connee

Violet,
I never had a daughter. The closest I came was with my son’s Stephen’s fiance, Robin. I have never had a close relationship with anyone in years like this, you know..where you text someone and they text you back….you see each other on facebook and cannot wait to say hi…what are you doing? You can laugh with them, feel their pride and accomplishments and their pain and anguish. It is so important to me. I cling to her, she was the last person to kiss my son, love my son in a way a mother understands…and his death betrayed her and crushed her. I want to make that go away…and I cannot. I want to take back his birth, somehow, to stop the terrible pain I see in this almost daughter, almost wife of my son in..but I cannot. I do not understand why he did this? Sometimes, you know, Violet…I think I know some of it…that there was pain and he felt inadequate somehow. I write everything I can remember down that anyone said to me about him during the months before his death. I write on one sheet..Bricks of Pain, and on another Bricks of Love…and I look at each brick and I add them up and I weigh the Pain vs the Love and I find the Love always out weighs the Pain, and yet, to him in his measurement, His answer was different. So something is flawed in my equation…so I go back to the board and start all over. I lost a lot of my memory of the preceding years. Things come back almost nightly. Tonite, I remember how many times I had told my ex-husband that I thought Stephen had ADD. I thought he needed to talk with someone, see someone about it, get diagnosed. He did not listen or agree..he would tell me how Stephen was so irresponsible, and how he had to help him over and over financially even though Stephen worked and did not pay to live in his father’s home. A really beautiful home. My ex talked about how over and over again he would try to get him to be responsible enough to pay his cell phone bill and his car insurance. Stephen had wrecked so many cars at the funeral I found out one of his nicknames was Crash. Well, the irony is now the father who did not believe Stephen needed help is going to therapy with his wife (the woman who broke up our marriage and who found Stephen’s body) and his new son, Stephen’s little brother, who just turned 10. I get angry because I think if he had just trusted me and had him seen Stephen would have been alive now. I always wanted Stephen to live with me ever since I moved here. My ex would not allow it. I had custody always, and would never give that up. I could have pushed it…but he always told me that he needed to be with his brothers. But, I would say, there is something that needs to be completed between Stephen and I …just let me have him for a couple of years to complete that…but in the end I would back off, because I was afraid of hurting Stephen. Now we will never complete that unfinished song we had. I had a glimmer of it when he came here to the house I had built for him and got engaged to that amazing girl, Robin on April 1…funny, in an ironic way, he said it was not an April fools joke, but, at the end of the day…it appears to have been one. So, I am very new in this suicide dance. They say for every one person that dies by suicide, there are six other people who are severely affected by it. I am now collateral damage. I will never be the same. I am not even sure if I am at all normal in the way I am grieving. I feel so oddly, most of the time, as if I were watching this all happen to someone else..that it did not happen to me, that he did not die. I know the details that were told to me…that half of his face was gone and that his head was blown out above that half..the left side was normal looking and his mouth was open, he was in his boxers, laying on the floor, and that his color was funny, that there was blood on his nightstand and that his step mom thought he had fallen and hit his head with her first step into his room…she could see the left side of his face and then she said with the second step she could see that the other side was gone..she screamed and ran out of the room….she had the phone in her hand and Robin, his fiance was the one who told her to check on him because she could not reach him on the phone.His step mom had been home for a half hour putting away groceries and she said she smelled a bad smell. She thought he had cooked something and was irritatedly looking through the trash for what it was he had cooked when the call came from Robin. That is when she went to his room and found the above scene. My eldest son, Justin, who was disabled at 5 from a head injury called to tell me in the midst of the chaos, but he could not tell me because he is hard to understand on the phone or even in person. He said Stephen shot himself…I said ” What? What are you saying to me? ” I could tell by his voice it was something awful…and it did not sound like he said Brandon, my middle son, so I said “Is it Stephen..is he dead?” And he said “Yes, Mom…I am so sorry Mom!” An animal was screaming and I realized it was my voice….the nightmare had begun..and continues..it is 3:51 a.m. and I cannot sleep at night anymore…and I cannot talk with anyone about this…so here I am.