Excerpt: Chapter 17

Gifts My Father Gave Me
Finding Joy After Tragedy

Excerpt from Chapter 17: Healing

Over the years people have asked how I'm doing. Have I gotten over Ricky's death, is it easier with each passing day? I wondered for a long time when I would get over Ricky's loss, and one day realized I would never get over it.

Every morning when I woke up my first thought was, Ricky's not here, and I was going to face the day without him. It didn't mean I'd go back to bed and hide. It didn't mean I couldn't make breakfast and talk to my family and go to the mall. It was that his absence was so present. The space he'd inhabited was there, like a shell waiting to be filled.

Then I got up one morning about seven years after he had died, and I realized that I didn't think about Ricky yesterday. Oh, my gosh, I forgot my child. How could I forget my child? Then I thought, What a relief. I can go through a day without thinking that Ricky isn't here. Because that's negative. That was my first thought, and it set the tone for the rest of the day, and made me depressed. Not thinking about Ricky for even one day was a sign that I was healing.

And there was a sign that Doug was healing, too. The day Ricky was killed, I was sick in bed, and Doug made pancakes for breakfast, Ricky's favorite. After that, Doug couldn't bring himself to make them anymore. I think they reminded him of Ricky's death. Then a year later I saw him in the kitchen making pancakes for Misty and Justin.

"Hey, you're fixing pancakes," I said, and he looked at me like I was crazy. I said, "You haven't fixed pancakes since Ricky died."

He had a surprised look in his eyes. He hadn't realized. It made him sad instantly, because remembering enslaved him. It held onto him and he could not escape. However, once he broke the chain, once he forgot for a moment that Ricky was dead, remembering no longer had power over him, and the next time he fixed pancakes, thinking about Ricky was a little easier. It didn't mean he forgot Ricky. It didn't mean he forgot the pain. It meant he was able to get up in the morning, feel better about himself, and get on with the day God gave him to enjoy.

It was a similar situation with Christmas. For the longest time, I couldn't decorate the house or the tree because it was too painful to take out the homemade Christmas ornaments that Ricky had made in school or the ones my mom bought for each grandkid every year with their names engraved on them. I couldn't bring myself to hang up only two stockings and leave Ricky's in the box.

Misty was the one who took it upon herself to try to bring us cheer. She decorated the house for several years until one Christmas I realized I was cheating Misty and Justin out of a very special holiday. So I started decorating again, and the act itself helped me in the grieving and healing process. I discovered that sometimes I had to do things that hurt even when I didn't want to because in the long run they helped.

It's now over twenty years since Ricky died, and I don't remember him much anymore. I don't remember what it was like to have him around me everyday. There were years when I didn't think about Ricky for weeks at a time. Sometimes something would trigger a thought about Ricky, but I can't create new memories of him. I only have the same memories, and what I ended up doing was dividing my life into sections like in a filing cabinet, and when no new information came about Ricky, I slid in a divider.

The more files or memories I accumulated after Ricky's death, the more space they took up, and the files of him from before his death became a smaller and smaller part of my life. After that, thinking about Ricky's death, and even his life, was not as overwhelming as it had been. Every file was there. Every memory was there, it was still him, but I was not as crushed by the memory. I hadn't gotten over his death, but things got better. Life got better. Living got better.

We had a strong support group and great friends. A lot of those friends stayed friends, and whenever I saw the old friends, my memories of them with Ricky returned and I dived back into those files. But after awhile, I made new memories with the old friends and stuck new files into the after Ricky section, and they are memories without Ricky.