Moving through Time with Wounds

Entering the week with some dread, I am thinking about two years ago at this same time, the end of September and the beginning of October, just before my son took his life. He was seventeen. Though we are learning to live with our loss, we miss him every day.

I think about different aspects of the person he was. This season, I have been more conscious of the distance he created between himself and everyone around him before we lost him. Even his friends were blocked out of what he was going through. In larger terms, I can see now what I didn't see then as red flags. One of the harder aspects of my own grief has to do with the fact that I should have noticed these red flags but didn't. He wasn't even talking to his friends about his depression. 

I guess the part about this that I dwell on now is not so much what I should have done, though there is a little of that. More, though, I think about my own distance from others. I am a little more aware of my own borderline tendencies. I think about my own desires to be apart, left alone. I recognize my own depression in some of what he was going through. 

If these thoughts seem important right now, it is because they are helping me to recognize my own mistakes and how to do things differently. But this is pain that doesn't just go away, and I wonder if many, many people, perhaps many teenagers, feel it also. I wonder, and I hope, that if there are others in this state, that they, that you will try to be aware of how your feelings are not to be ignored. Getting someone to talk to is important now. This is what has helped me. 

Talking to others who know what I'm going through is important.