The Portal: Portal-ity Thoughts

I wrote this post a few months ago thinking I would submit it.  I didn't.  Today I found it, read it, started tweaking it, and now I'm not so sure I should post it at all.  Hopefully, it will speak to someone who has lost a child or was disappointed by life. John died overnight.  One moment we were a mostly happy family, and the next morning he was dead.  He was 24 years old, tall, dark and handsome.  He was funny and outgoing, and he genuinely cared about people, He was also an addict.  I hate that term, but I’ll use it here, so you understand.  I would normally refer to it as substance use disorder, or that he died from fentanyl poisoning, but the fact remained that John was very addicted to opioids.  Which turned into a heroin addiction and then to fentanyl poisoning.  The drug of the season.  The mass murderer of our children.   He was in the Army, 3,250 miles away from home, and was ...

Triggers in grief become a part of your "new normal", as if there is anything normal, now, about living without your child.  Triggers are going to happen, and we expect them...for the most part. Some of them make sense, some of them do not. Some can take moments to recover from, some can take hours.  I had a scare with my dog this week. I won't go into the details, but for a minute, I thought she might be hurt. My adrenaline spiked and fear rose up inside me to a place I haven't visited for a while. When I had the situation under control, I sat down, and I sobbed. Uncontrollably. I could not stop. For hours. My stomach shook, tears fell. I could not get ahold of myself. I asked for prayer.  Yes, I love my dog and wouldn't want anything terrible to happen to her. But it was John's loss that was triggered.  She was with him when he died.  She laid beside him.  She was there when he took his last breath.  He wasn't alone because...