Good Mourning Grief

A blog about my adventures as a grief warrior

Tag: #MADD

Switching Up the Holiday Outlook

December 3, 2023 /

I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention that this month is Drunk & Drugged Driving Prevention month. Last year 40,000 loved ones perished due to someone choosing to drive impaired.  This number does not touch anywhere near the real number of those devastated; the many more hundreds of thousands effected by such loss. The dreams and plans and hopes, smashed with no chance of ever being the same again.  It happened to us. But I’m not going there. This is the Christmas season. 

The holidays are a time of hope and miracles and love and faith. I want that. I want to replace the sound of a busy mall with the crackling of a fire. I want the smells of gingerbread and mulled wine filling my home. I want my heart to feel the quiet peaceful morning before the demands of the season come rushing in to take over. I want that Hallmark truth about this season. Each year, I believe I have tried to make it special and ease the pain of Zane not being here. And each New Year, I debrief with a sigh and a shrug that next Christmas will be different.  So why do I think this pattern will ever change?  Because I need it to. That’s why.

Sometimes our grief permeates into a sadness that we become too comfortable with to change.  This season brings an excuse to hold tight to our grief.  “The holidays are the heaviest time of year for those mourning” we are told. I don’t disagree, but I am starting to think that I might be turning this ‘fact’ into an excuse. Should I not be trying harder to get along with my grief if this season is as tough as we know it to be?  When I look at the list of all things to practice easing grief, those practices go out the window with the common pressures of the oh-too-commercial of a season. Maybe I should work harder on bringing the magic of the season forward and ignoring the business side of Christmas. 

My daughter texted me, “I want Zane to run up the stairs and open his stocking with me”. She is feeling the apprehension of the season’s loud message that we are to be with the ones we love. When that is impossible, to do what we used to do before our loved ones left, we need to switch up the holiday outlook. I am going to try this. For my daughter.  For Zane.  For me.  I am going to embrace the real reason why this time of year is to be celebrated. I am going to take my grief and show it a good time.

This year I am going to focus on what can I do to celebrate, include, honor Zane over the holidays. I’m going to take a day each week to do something that brings the holidays home. With Zane.  He loved to “rock the first candy-cane of the season”. He loved taking pictures of the bright lights.  He loved snuggling in his blanket with a good book or a great show. He loved to connect with friends over a drink and bake cookies to share. He loved to build a snowman. He knew how to stop and smell the roses. I need more of that. I need more Zane in my life.

I know that being still raises our vibration, our awareness that those we love are with us.  Perhaps that is the practice I need this holiday season. Whether it eases my sadness or not, I am aware that it will never be as we want, so finding a bittersweet compromise might improve my holiday debrief in the New Year.

A Message in December

December 18, 2022 /

Zane wrote a poem for a friend who died of an overdose.  At the request of this friend’s mother, Zane read it out loud at the funeral. The title was “If you sedate, don’t expect to wake”. It was a harsh poem about addiction and the ramifications it brings.  Including death.

I’d like to start by removing the stigma of this topic. Addiction has many connotations, none of them are pretty. I have many friends, wonderful parents, good people who have lost a child to addiction.  They lost a child. They will be in pain for the rest of their life. And yet, because of the nature of their child’s death, there is a social stigma, a sideways look, and innuendos of how they failed. My mother used to say, “by the Grace of God, go I”. A line fitting for the smug person who believes that it would never happen to them.   No child declares when they grow up, they want to be an addict.  And I have never met a parent who didn’t struggle, trying to save their child.

My children have seen more friends die at a young age, than our generation did. Our family has experienced addiction on both sides. We have had friends and family members battle this disease, lose to this disease and we lost Zane to a man who was an addict and chose to drive that night. No one is untouched by addiction. CDC informs us that over 108,000 died of a drug overdose between April 2021 and April 2022. The number keeps rising. Addiction is the pandemic that continues to go ignored.   

The truth is we are all connected, and the village has a problem. Something is wrong and we all need to fix it for the sake of our children. Let’s first agree that addiction can happen to anyone. Let’s open our minds to alternate ways to healthcare besides dispensing opioids and narcotics without any assessment or follow up. Let’s open our hearts to those struggling (the addict and their family) and offer our love and prayers. Let’s open our wallets and support the organizations that are trying to find answers and those that are helping heal the broken. Let’s believe that there is an answer. And let’s become a part of that answer. For the sake of those who sedate and will not wake.

December belongs to all of us.  As we celebrate the holidays, the magic of the season and experience all the warm and fuzzies, we are reminded that it is Drunk & Drugged Driving month. I am of the belief that if we had fewer people self-medicating, we would have fewer people driving impaired. I’d like to focus on healing those in pain, rather than punishing them. We are all vulnerable.

‘Tis the Season to be MADD

November 30, 2020 /

Recently my daughter asked how do we make change or increase awareness about the way Zane was killed.  “If it was cancer”, she said, “I could be a part of a number of things to help promote, prevent and belong to…people get it.  But what do people do about drugged driving?”  Well, there is MADD and there is National Drunk & Drugged Driving Prevention Month (which happens in December) and there is Safe Driving Week…there are options.  It got me to thinking, why have I not joined one of these?  The truth is, I’m not sure which one is for me.

When the officer told us that Zane’s death was not an accident, that they were killed by a drugged driver, that it was a collision that could have been prevented, anger was the first emotion I felt. How the hell did this happen?  How did anyone not notice?  How could this man’s friends let him drive drugged?  Why would he get behind the wheel when he was high?  Why did no one see them and report them?  Where were the police?  How can something so avoidable be the reason that, not one but three people died on that road?  Oh, the insanity, the utter grief that my son was killed by a man who shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.

I felt such hate for the driver that took away so much from so many.  And then I stumbled upon a social media page of his.  It had pictures of him, of his family, his sister who is my daughter’s age.  It was the picture of his mom that I stopped scrolling and stared at her.  There she was; the mother of the man who killed my son. I thought to myself how she would be sitting in her home, planning her son’s funeral, looking through his pictures and remembering happier times.  I am sure she was a typical mother who loved her son and did her very best to ensure he was safe and healthy and happy.  And with that, the anger melted into sadness and all I felt was pain for her.  She was another mom who had just lost her son.  This was a fellow mother who will live the rest of her life without hugs and the sound of her son’s laugh.  Whose dreams of what he could have been will never come to fruition.  She was sentenced to live in the same community as I do.  It was not her fault.  The rest is just details. Messy.  Ugly.  Details.

The year my son was killed there were 4,423 drug-impaired driving charges and 4,633 deaths due to drug overdose.  On average, 4 Canadians are killed each day in alcohol/drug related motor vehicle crashes. 

My daughter is right; we need to shout this out loud.  Whether it is addiction or the victim of drugged driving, drugs are killing more of our children than any other cause.  My question is why is this?  And maybe that’s the focus we should be taking. That is the cause I want to join.

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