Grieving Parent

Month: February 2011

  • Another Stumbling Block

    Another Stumbling Block

    After Richard’s death, one of the items I had to decide on was about cars.

    I was using a 1995 Toyota Camry as my driving to work car. Had 160,000 something miles on it. Richard had a 2004 Toyota Corolla with less than a third of the miles my Camry had.

    I needed to figure out which one to keep.

    I liked my old Camry. It was comfy and it had cruise control. But the Corolla was much newer and it got better gas mileage, but only by a few MPG’s. And no cruise control.

    The very last vision I had of Richard, I was watching out the front door, through the opening in the hedges, as he drove past our house on his way back to Lexington. I never saw him again. So there’s some emotional attachment to the Corolla.

    I started driving the Corolla to work. And the Camry just sat in the driveway. I really intended to sell it, but just never mustered the willpower to get it done. It was one of many loose ends that are still just dangling out there.

    The car sat in the driveway for a year and a half. I almost never drove it.

    Out of the blue, people started knocking on our door, wanting to know if the Camry was for sale. It didn’t have a “For Sale” sign in the window and I wasn’t advertising it anywhere. In the space of a week there were 4 people asking about it.

    The last was a young girl. She had a 3 month old baby and was pregnant again. I was at work when she showed up with her husband and her dad. Debbie gave her our phone number.

    The next morning she called and asked if I would sell her the car.

    “I probably would. I haven’t really thought about it much.”

    “What do you want for it?” she asked.

    “I have no idea what it’s worth. I hadn’t been planning to sell it,” I told her. “What would you give?”

    She made me an offer that was what I’d paid for it two years before. In the heated negotiations that followed I managed to talk her down by $500.

    So I sold my Camry.

    Before turning it over to her, I cleaned out the console and glove box of my stuff. Papers and gloves and ice scrapers and spare change that were floating around the interior.

    And that’s where the stumbling block comes in.

    In the glove box I found the receipt from the pharmacy for the last prescription I bought for Richard. The one for the generic substitute for his seizure medicine. The one that killed him.

    It wasn’t a good find.

  • Review: life after the death of my son: what I’m learning – by Dennis Apple

    Review: life after the death of my son: what I’m learning – by Dennis Apple

    Several months before his death, Richard was home for the weekend and he was looking at one of my bookcases. On one shelf he spotted a stack of books about seizures and epilepsy.

    He looked at them and asked me, “Why do you have all these?”

    “Because you have that little time bomb in your head, and I thought we should find out about it. Maybe find something that can help.” I told him.

    He just sighed and shook his head at me.

    That’s just how I am. If something interests me, or bothers me, I try to learn as much as I can about it. I buy a lot of books.

    So it should be no surprise I have a large and growing collection of books about grieving and the loss of a child.

    I just finished Dennis Apple’s life after the death of my son: what i’m learning.

    I read this book faster than any other grieving book I’ve owned… except for Good Grief, which is so small it hardly counts.

    Dennis and Buelah Apple’s son Denny died on this day in 1991. I guess this review is my tribute on the 20 year anniversary of his death.

    Dennis Apple kept journals of his experiences after the death of his son. A lot of journals. In this book he shares what he went through in those early years and expands on the lessons learned. He deals candidly with it all… from the pain, the marriage issues, and his doubts about God and religion to finding his way toward healing.

    This is Super Bowl Sunday so one of the comparisons he makes is appropriate on this day. He equates learning to deal with our grief to great athletes learning to play with pain. Play with pain. I really think that’s the goal now. I think it will always be there, so we have to learn to live with it.

    Another part of his story that really hit home for me are the issues of faith. Mr. Apple is a minister and on the pastoral staff at College Church of the Nazarene in Olathe, Kansas. His son’s death made him question God. This had to be really hard for him, as religious life was such a big part of his very core.

    There are so many feel good stories in the readings and songs at church. They tell us about how God is looking over us. That he cares for us. We’re taught that if we follow him to our best ability, he’ll be looking out for us. God has our back.

    Then our kid dies. Denny Apple sounds like he was a great kid. My son Richard wasn’t a saint, but he was a good kid and a fine young man. I was very proud of him. So how could God let something so horrible happen to such good kids?

    In all my years attending Catholic schools I was told God is up there and is all seeing and knowing. He controls everything and has a reason for everything he does. I don’t believe this anymore.

    I still believe there’s a God. I just don’t think God is watching and controlling everything that happens on earth. If he was, how could such pain be allowed?

    I’ve told people that God has a lot of explaining to do. I still feel that way.

    Mr. Apple had to deal with these same doubts at the same time as he was trying to be a minister leading others to God on a daily basis. The conflicts inside had to be overpowering.

    But he made it through all that.

    His story gives us hope. The enormity of the struggles he faced are clearly told, yet he came through it with his soul intact. Like all grieving parents he will never “get over” the loss of his son. He’s just learned to play with pain and he shows there’s hope we can too.

    I highly recommend this book.

    Life After the Death of My Son: What I’m Learning (my Amazon affiliate link)