Tuesday's Trust - How We Grieve When Our Precious Child is Still Alive…

Tuesday's Trust

How We Grieve When Our Precious Child is Still Alive…

So often the people we love are in trouble much earlier than we may realize, and it’s when they are plummeting that our grief actually begins. As they are still alive, just like emotional hostages, we are forced to watch them decline and slowly destroy themselves. We feel impotent, helpless. In our book, we describe watching our children drown while we stand at the edge of the pool, our feet embedded in quicksand. And then, once they died, the experience was vaguely familiar, as though we had been watching it unfold as bystanders...

~written by grieving mothers in the book, Griefland

How do you put words on the unfathomable? How do you share what you have lived even while you were dying? It defies words. Only tears can communicate. 

Our daughter was on a downward spiral on a fast train to nowhere, only it seemed to have the speed of the mighty jet. We encouraged her to graduate from high school early so that she could get a new start, which she graciously did. She would be starting college early while her friends completed the final courses of their senior year, as she had enough credits to graduate early.  

I remember going to her Freshman Orientation a few days before her first college semester. The parents went to a series of meetings during the day while the newly Freshman students would be attending their own series of meetings. Then we would come together for some of the meetings. The day then culminated that night into a very special dinner in which the three of us, mother-father-and-daughter would dine with one of the professors amidst inspirational talks and singing. The poignancy of the moment was revealed when the singers came out with their inspirational song. Despite the public setting, tears flowed down my face as I recognized the grace of the moment and the inspirational song revealed this opportunity provided for my daughter to turn her life around. The tears flowed and flowed. No one said a word about them. What was to be said? Some things are better left unspoken. 

And, for that first semester as she would join her brother in this school, this very strong Christian university which had given him a second chance at life to which he had readily responded, our daughter also responded well to the opportunity. Upon sending in her course-work and her Scholastic Achievement Test scores, she learned that she had qualified not only for the Hope Scholarship just as her brother had, but that she would also be awarded the prized Presidential scholarship from the university itself. Her grades that first semester were wonderful; her new friendships blossomed; her relationship with her brother deepened as he felt he had his old sister, his real sister back. She was herself. She was humbled. She was happy. She laughed. She cried. She was authentic. Her lively sense of humor drew many people to her. She was even invited to join the school's female rugby team. She was getting involved and was thriving. Until the next semester when she didn't… 

Thus the first paragraph of this post, written by other mothers watching disaster form all around them even as they felt they were losing their very lively, bright, quick-witted children who seemed to have the world by the tail, right before their eyes as they watched them begin to suddenly plummet into the destructive depths of the netherworld, resonated with my devastating journey with my child. We were all "losing" our children before we lost them, and we could not seem to stop the madness, Even though we would try, with all of our hearts, but it was ultimately to no avail as we would watch their self-destructive course to its final culmination, to their demise. 

The only thing holding us together is that it is Not over. Not final. God has the final word. And His word is more powerful than all the evil forces put together. But we must wait to see it. And that is where trust comes in, That is where we are called to see with the eyes of faith, and know that God is good. Only He can redeem the time that the locusts have eaten. And He will. And He has. And our baby girl is with Him, once again thriving, and happy, and fulfilled, but this time for all eternity…

Picture, thanks to ~In Memory of Lost Loved Ones
Quote, from http://www.griefland.com/category/about-the-book/

Thursday's Therapy - Our Children Don't Deserve This!

Thursday's Therapy

Our Children Don't Deserve This!

Katie Granju, the writer of this article, is a Grieving Mother friend of mind who lives a few miles from me here in Knoxville, yet whom I met online along with many of the other precious grieving mothers I now know. Today, Huffington Post featured Katie's article about the devastating war with drugs that many of our own children, including hers, have gotten caught up in and have had to battle. Many of us are losing our beautiful young children, barely adults to these underground movements of which most of us parents were fairly oblivious before it became too late for our child. 

Just this week, I met through my blog a beautiful soul who commented on my blog that despite a healthy normal home in which she raised her darling child, she lost her beautiful daughter to a heroine overdose soon after going together to purchase her daughter's wedding gown. Another precious mother and father in a town not far from here just lost their beautiful daughter in a similar way, yet now the developing story, like Henry's, is involving much deeper, darker crimes than we even know are going on, perpetrated on these precious young people. Thank you for your love and support for all these grieving families.

Katie Allison Granju

Blogger, MamaPundit

Death By Prescription Drugs: How Dare You Say My Son "Deserved" It

Posted: 09/03/2012 2:44 pm

Shadow Conventions 2012 , Henry Granju , Henry Granju Death , Henry Granju Drugs ,Henry's Fund , Katie Allison Granju , Prescription Drug Addiction , Shadow Conventions 2012 , Teen And Prescription Drugs , Teen Drug Use , Parents News

Our nation is in the midst of a public health emergency the likes of which we have not seen since the first decade of AIDS' spread across America. And much like the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the victims of the current crisis are both vilified and ignored, the families of the victims are shamed into silence, and the public at large doesn't know enough to protect itself.

I am speaking of drug overdose, which is now killing tens of thousands of Americans annually, while leaving many thousands more mentally and physically disabled for the rest of their lives. The vast majority of drug overdose deaths are the result of two types of highly addictive, and highly profitable, prescription drugs: opiates and benzodiazapenes. In 2010, one of the more than 25, 000 Americans who died as the result of drug overdose was someone I adored with all my heart: my 18-year-old firstborn, my son Henry.

Before I learned that Henry was addicted to pills, I simply had no clue that the problem of pill addiction and overdose was quietly yet savagely ripping apart the East Tennessee community in which we make our home. Yes, I'd seen the media coverage of "hillbilly heroin," but the threat of such a thing seemed remote and disconnected from my own family's "normal" life. And really, there was no way I could have known what a very serious threat pills posed to my teenage boy. That's because even though an astounding 150 to 200 people a year die of drug overdose every year in our small, southern city, it's as if these people have simply disappeared.

Individual overdose deaths are not reported in the newspaper. Obituaries do not list overdose as a cause of death. Local law enforcement never arrests the dealers behind the overdoses. The local medical examiner routinely seems to rubberstamp the cause of virtually all overdose deaths as "accidental," thus making it easy for the criminal justice system to pretend that no crime occurred. And in my adopted hometown, which I've come to love over the years, the shame and stigma that still exists around losing a child or spouse to drug overdose leads most families to keep their loved one's actual cause of death a big secret.

Given this perfect storm of invisibility that exists around overdose deaths, how could I have known that a teenager living in our county is more likely to die of a pill overdose than from a car accident or a gunshot wound. Shockingly, on the day my son suffered his deadly overdose, another teenager - a beautiful girl named Amber Blizard - also fell victim to illegally diverted prescription pills. That's right; TWO teenagers suffered fatal drug overdoses on the same day in the same small city, and yet no one seemed to consider this remarkable. Not the law enforcement officials who didn't treat the sites of either teen's overdose as a crime scenes. Not the local media that never noticed the fact that two kids were killed in the same way on the same day.

What if two teens had been shot or stabbed to death on the same day? Or two 18-year-olds from two different local high schools or college freshman classes had died in car wrecks on the same day? Even if both teenagers bore some responsibility for the accidents that took their lives - perhaps by speeding or driving under the influence - their deaths would have been noted by our community. But drug overdose victims are treated like they never existed, or deserved to exist.

I learned after my son died that our state's criminal statutes, as well as federal criminal laws both unequivocally define drug distribution resulting in the death of someone else as homicide. In fact, under federal law, there are more severe penalties for adults over 21 whose drug dealing causes the death of someone under the age of 21, as was the case for my son, and in many other adolescent OD fatalities.

There is a disconnect, though, between what the law says, and how it is applied. The law doesn't care whether the person who died of the overdose was struggling with addiction him or herself. But in practice, victims who are addicts get a lesser form of justice. After my son died, a local assistant DA told me that I needed to understand that my teenager was "an unattractive victim" due to his addiction to pills, as if that were a reasonable excuse for ignoring the fact that the dealers behind the drugs that killed Henry would remain free in our community to provide drugs to some other at-risk kid.

Similarly, the law doesn't have a category for victims who somehow "asked for it." If a teenage boy asked an adult to shoot him in the head, for instance, even offered the adult money to do it, would that absolve the adult who fired the fatal shot from criminal responsibility? Of course not. Yet just as in the early days of the spread of AIDS, the victims of overdose are far too often treated as disposable and invisible, because so many believe that they have only themselves to blame for their own deaths.

As long as we continue acting as if overdose victims are not real people who are worthy of equal interest by the criminal justice system, public health authorities, and the media, the numbers of the dead will continue to rise. It was only after Americans' attitudes toward AIDS victims began to shift from blame to compassion that we were finally able to come together in a unified national effort to fight the monster that had already been allowed to devour an entire generation of young gay men. Similarly, until we stop acting as if the tens of thousands of Americans currently dying each year of overdose are unworthy, invisible and disposable, this new monster - the one that took my beloved child from me before he had even had the chance to cast his first vote as an American citizen - will continue to roam our neighborhoods and snatch our children.

My son did not want to be addicted to pills, and he did not want to die before starting his freshman year of college. He certainly did not want to see any other kids hurt and suffer as he did from opiate addiction. In his memory, I now speak out often and loudly to let other parents know what I did not until it was too late, which is that kids are dying all around us, every single day. Until we stop acting as if it isn't happening, or telling ourselves that it could never happen in our own families, the band will continue to play on.

PLEASE LEARN MORE ABOUT HENRY LOUIS GRANJU'S LEGACY OF LOVE AND HOPE FOR YOUNG ADDICTS BY BECOMING A FRIEND OF HENRY'S FUND ON FACEBOOK:www.facebook.com/henrysfund