The Fallacy of Letting Go

If you read about loss and grief, they say that eventually you reach the stage of acceptance and letting go. I don't believe it. Maybe some people do. Maybe they manage to shut the door on their feelings, or push them aside, or just get so busy with life that they ignore them, but that hasn't happened to me. The stage of anger never happened either.

I started to wonder, what would "letting go" mean, anyway? I tried to find an explanation that made sense to me. It seems, the prevailing viewpoint is, or at least was, that after some period of time, the surviving person will "get over it" and "get on with life" and behave in a "normal way," as though they have healed from the pain of loss.

But the writers that made sense to me were the ones that said that we now know that some people NEVER get over their loss, never get over their grief, but just learn to live and cope with it. That's not letting go. It's just coexisting with your grieving feelings.

Most days I'm not sad, or at least not for long, but there are always triggers that will bring tears to my eyes and the grief comes flooding back in, as though it were just dammed up behind a door and all it takes to let it out is the key to open that door. The key can be something I don't even know will happen, like seeing a car like Leif's, or seeing a news report about the death of soldiers, or remembering him playing with his nieces and nephews, or a host of other things.

If letting go means I can finally and dispose of some of his things that I haven't been able to bring myself to part with for nearly seven-and-a-half years, then perhaps I'm getting closer. After all this time, I still have his billfold intact, but I've finally come to the decision to sell his base and Kramer guitars. It's hard, because yet again, it seems like dismantling a piece of his identity, taking away something he loved and which gave him great pleasure. But, I have finally come to the point where I know that letting them sit untouched does none of us any good, and someone else could have that pleasure in playing them. So, I am now going to sell the guitars.

I don't think, though, that letting go of THINGS is the same as letting go of LEIF. I can't do that. I never will. He is still a daily part of our lives, every day. Like his dad said yesterday, we still have so many of his things, and things he gave us, that we use daily. But it's not just those that remind us of him. It's even just being in this house, remembering where he sat, what his room was like. It's a thousand memories that come back over and over, not always with sadness, but always with connection, with love.

And the lack of that, in the end, the lack of love and connectedness, was what really killed Leif, like a flower that wasn't watered, or a man who felt no one needed him.

I still have and wear the shirt Leif is wearing in this picture. At that time, in 1991, Hypercolor was all the rage. He loved it, found it fascinating. This photo was taken in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands on October 19, 1991. We were having lunch and he was playing with the shirt, making the smiley face on it and showing off the logo for his grandmother, who took the photo. The shirt is old now, well worn, and no longer has the Hypercolor properties, but I love it for the memories that I will never let go, just as I will never let me son go. I will hold him as close as I can for all my life.

False Dichotomies - Happiness versus Unhappiness

When we are growing up and learning language, we are not only learning to understand and communicate, we are being programmed, learning how to think and what words to use to think about concepts. We have to learn that to be able to use language appropriately, but if we learn it rigidly, our thoughts, too, will be trapped in rigid thinking.

Today while I was riding with Peter W. on our daily bike ride, I thought once again to myself how when I took this ride in 2006 and 2007, I was happy. I remember thinking how beautiful it was, enjoying the sunshine, the clouds, the flowers and landscaping, the lovely homes. I remember enjoying the breeze and being with Peter.

And I thought how changed that became when Leif died and other family problems intervened, how our perspective changed, our feelings differed.

Then I wondered how one gets back to that place of happiness and what happiness means. Does a level of mild depression become a habit? Does lack of happiness become habitual and defining? I think it can for some people, and they don't know how to break out of it. For those who have severe clinical depression or bipolar syndrome, or brain injuries, brain chemistry or damage betrays them and prevents normal feelings of happiness or satisfaction from returning or staying. For the rest of us, slow healing usually brings back a level of happiness or at least contentment.

But what if it doesn't? Can we consciously work to bring it back? I think we can.

We are taught that the opposite of happiness is unhappiness . . . or sadness, as though the two have no shades or states in between. We "are" either one or the other, as though our attitude and thought patterns and actions have no real effect on those emotions. We are taught that if we are happy, we cannot simultaneously be sad, but I don't think this is true.

I began to think about this and the thought patterns we cultivate in ourselves some months ago and I particularly focused on my feelings about being Leif's mother. I asked myself the question whether I was happy I was his mother, and whether his death overshadowed that happiness. The answer I came to was that I was overwhelmingly glad he was my son and that I had him in my life for 33 years, even though there were many problems during those years. I look at all the photos of his life and at one and the same time I am happy to have them, happy to see his smiling or serious, or sometimes silly face, happy for the good times we shared, happy for all we taught each other and learned from each other, happy for the family life we had; and yet I am sad for his pain, for his problems, for his death, for our loss. The two will always be inextricably mixed.

It's normal after a death to focus on the loss, for it is painful and the impact is life-changing, but it's healthier at some point to make a conscious effort to stop focusing on that loss and focus instead on life. This is not easy to do. It takes courage and determination. It's easier to stay focused on loss. It is monumental. It becomes habitual.

I also learned that happiness and unhappiness, or sadness are not exact states. They are a continuum along which many other emotions can be charted, from contentment and pleasure to annoyance and anger. There are so many more nuances to our emotions, and the other negative ones can become just as habitual if we let them. Emotions can be like any other habits in our lives.

We learned as children that somehow happiness, unhappiness, sadness all come from outside us, from external influences, and surely, everything in our lives does impact and influence those feelings, but just as surely, in many cases, we are internally influenced by how we choose to think about them, by our attitudes.

That I learned from listening to my Great Aunt Victoria wail about things in her past for years that other people wouldn't have felt were worthy of remembering, and learning to joke about situations in which we could take things with good humor or understanding, or "be like Aunt Vic" and cultivate our hurts and unhappiness. I think unhappiness can even become one's identity, or a part of it, and then it is even harder to let it go.

There are times when we are plunged into the depths of unhappiness, sadness, grief, whether from the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, or some other catastrophic change in our lives, from interpersonal problems or difficulties in work or career, and then we experience the full measure of what unhappiness means. At that time, at least for a time, attitude doesn't matter. We cannot escape it or climb out of the black hole of despair, but we can try to find other connections, other things to believe in, focus on.

With time, we can climb out of the black hole, if we choose. And perhaps this is part of the meaning of letting go. We have to let go of grief and unhappiness itself, not just the person we are grieving for. It's not a quick process. It's not easy. There is even a part of us, of me, that somehow, sometimes, feels it's wrong to be happy after such a tragic blow, that we have to pay the dues of sadness, that it's necessary to prove our love. But how long does it take to do that? When can we allow ourselves to move ahead? At some point, if we decide we want to be happy, choose to find happiness, then we have to realize just as consciously, that we have to give up the identity of unhappiness and reach for a new attitude and focus. I am trying, and I accept that I can be happy and still feel sadness.
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This photo was taken in our living room at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, when Leif was graduating from Northwood Junior High School in Highland Park, Illinois, May 1989.

There Never Is a Real Farewell

For the two years I've been writing this blog it's always been spontaneous and immediate in the sense that I never wrote the posts offline and edited and polished them. I just sat down at the computer and composed them online in the Blogger window. Sometimes they were long and sometimes just a photo with a short caption or memory. A writer friend says I should call it a journal, not a blog, though the term isn't really important.

The blog evolved from something I started to remember happy times into an honest chronicle of our grief, but it also became something more. It became the story of our lives through memories of Leif. It became a memorial to him. It became a way for me to continue to show my love for him, a place to express feelings I could not say to others except through writing.

At Leif's memorial service I gave a talk I titled "Farewell to My Gentle Giant," but in the two years since then I have learned that I have not said farewell, and I probably never will. Does any mother who loses a child? How can we let them go? I thought when I reached the end of this blog I would be ready, but I am not. I am not ready to let Leif go.

What does that mean? I know he is dead. I know he is not coming back to me no matter how hard I wish for that. I know I can't live my life pining away for him or wallowing in grief. What it means to me is that I hold him in my heart. I remember him, think of him, talk about him, and yes, talk to him. That I look at his picture, my favorite one of him, and all the others, too, and remember that he LIVED. My son lived.

There will be tears. I cry less often now and the tears are less of a torrent, but they come, and I think there will always be moments of this sadness throughout my life.

But I have also learned to go on, to keep living, and to find hours of peace and even joy.

The human heart is a versatile thing, able to love and yearn, feel sadness and joy, grief, pain, and happiness all in the space of minutes, sometimes simultaneously.

I've gone over and over our photo albums, scanned and posted hundreds of pictures of Leif, thought of hundreds of memories, written about them and my feelings, but though I am running out of things to write and pictures to
post, I am not ready to let go of either Leif or the blog. The blog has become a habit, something I look forward to writing, a creative outlet for my feelings about my son and his death. It will be hard to let it go, but it is time.

A mother should not have to write such a blog. She should not have to plan her son's memorial service. She should not have to find her son's dead, cold body. She should not have to clean up his blood and brains. She should not have to look at the gun that killed him. She should not have to call the sheriff to report his death and wait outside while they investigate. She should not have to tell his brother, his grandmother, his extended family, that he is dead. She should not have to give away his clothes and sell his motorcycle. She should not have to arrange to have his car repossessed. She should not have to say goodbye forever.

All those things I did, but I will not give him up. I will not say goodbye.

I am not alone and yet grief is always solitary. There are thousands of parents who have been forced to deal with the death of a child, but even if people try to comfort them, even if they communicate their grief, it is always lonely, always set apart.

It seems as though I should say something profound at the end of this blog, but what is there to say but that I loved my son and I always will? What else really matters at the end of a chronicle like this?

Perhaps what really matters to others, to the readers, is that they remember Leif, too, and somehow deeply take in the message that when they feel they are losing hope, to must find help. Do not take your life; it is too final. It is too damaging to those you love and who love you. Your troubles will end but there will be no possibility of a new beginning. Your loved one's misery will go on for years.

So next time I write, the last few regular posts in the next few days, it will be about my son, and then I will not let HIM go, but I will stop writing here so frequently. I don't want to just repeat myself and post the same photos again, though I know the same thoughts and memories will continue to come to me. I will miss writing here. This journal has become like a friend, and although I know it doesn't really put me in contact with Leif, sometimes it feels that way. I will miss the focus on him, a time to be "with" him, even if only in my mind.
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This photo of Leif was taken at Waikiki Beach wit Diamond Head in the background, in Honolulu, Hawaii, July 1980, on our stop in Hawaii during our long move from Germany to Japan. Leif was five-and-a-half years old.