As parents, we raise our children to the best of our ability. We teach them right from wrong. Good from evil. And we try our hardest to show them patience, acceptance, and unconditional love. We strive to turn them into productive, responsible (hopefully reasonable) adults. But sometimes….something happens and we start to question…
When we lose a child to violence, drugs, an accident…or self-inflicted desperation…is it really our fault?
I don’t have an answer for that. There are days when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were not to blame. Then the days creep by where I feel guilty. Incredibly helpless because I should have known. I should have been able to see the signs. There are signs, right? Before our children lose all hope and succumb to suicide. It makes me wonder if I really am that blind to the obvious. It makes me wonder if I really am a horrible parent. If my husband and I failed in our God-given duties. I guess I’ll never know the answers. Just like I’ll never really know what was running through my son’s mind at the time. What made him distraught and put him in so much pain that he had to react. That he had to give up and let the past 17 years just slip away.
He left us a letter that was meant to explain. To clarify his decision. Red inked capitals scrawled nearly illegibly and smudged across his sister’s ‘Hello Kitty’ stationary. But it didn’t. Not at first. Because I refused to believe those words. I refused to believe that in a world of so much happiness, my son was dying. I just couldn’t accept that in all the smiles, laughter, dates, and making captain of the basketball team….that my son was in pain. We celebrated those goods times. The achievements and the victories. We never wanted him to forget those. To forget just how great a kid he was. But then there were the defeats. The disappointments. The times we rubbed his face in the random mistakes he would create and screamed. Punished him and never let the subject drop. All those times…the good along with the bad served only to add bars to his cage. A cage we’d made for him from day one…forged from our expectations. He needed exceptional grades and perfect SAT scores. I wanted him to be a lawyer. A doctor. I’d have settled for a successful business man. My husband wanted a professional ballplayer. Our son just wanted to breathe.
I wish we would have known. If he had only came to us and tried to explain…maybe this could have been prevented. But…would we have really listened? I’d like to say “yes”. My mind doesn’t know. With all the hustle and bustle in our lives…we may have just shoved his problems aside and glanced only casually. Wrote them off as teenage phase and forgotten them. As long as he was laughing and smiling…we assumed that everything was okay…
The house is quiet now. There are no teenaged boys yelling at football games in the den or fighting over video games. No rock music blaring from his room at 3 a.m. No broken curfews. No reasons for staying up past midnight or worrying over the phone. All of those minor annoyances now missed. They were all blessings. Only we never realized…
It is amazing how fast everything changes. From graduation pictures to funeral plans…all in 24 hours… Life isn’t always fair. At least we have the memories (and enough guilt) to last for the rest of our lives…
We tried…and I feel like we failed... |
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