The Cold Light of Truth

September 2013- A Troubled Mind and Heart

With death, "new" things end by definition. There are no new conversations or experiences- that is something my mind circles back to a lot. I've heard lots of times from family and friends who learned new and often disappointing things about a loved one after they passed; financial folly, infidelity, hidden history, or the not-so-favorable character flaws coming to light as the process of settling affairs happens. For my lost son, I didn't anticipate there would be new things discovered. The adversarial relationship his father had chosen to have with me precluded my being involved in the settling of his affairs. I knew about his friends mostly through Logan talking about them; we had run into them a few times while out and about and had plans to start inviting them along on our escapades as they were getting older and able to drive themselves, but it hadn't happened yet.I saw his life as a volume in the story of my life which was completed, bound, closed, and published.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with the detective in charge of Logan's case. I needed to KNOW both the good and the disappointing. So many questions circle in my head about the day he died and the weeks leading up to it. I know what the news reports say and what Logan's step mom told us about what happened but it gives me a kaleidoscope view. It does not lead to answering the "whys." In the course of the conversation, I got some of the most niggling questions answered. The detective said my son was a very troubled young man and it was one of the saddest cases he had ever worked on. He was extremely kind and had obviously worked hard on Logan's case. He and another detective both had kids Logan's age so it hit especially close to home for them. It was obvious from what Logan's friends and teachers said that he was a well-liked kid who everyone thought had a lot of promise and was on the path to a bright future.
I had originally called about getting a copy of the letter Logan had left with his school counselor before he left the school and walked to the end of his life at the train tracks. The detective and I talked about some of the contents of the letter, much of which I already knew about just from the process of deduction and how well I knew my son.

One pressing question I had answered was that I know what he was wearing. It may be morbid but I have had a movie in my head of how it happened for almost six months. It must be part of how my brain needs to process information: I need to "see" things to understand them. Part of that mental movie was a hope he was wearing something he loved that day and to understand the process he went through to make the decision to take his own life. To hear he was wearing an Air Force shirt my mom gave him for his birthday made me feel oddly comforted but also that he had prepared for it by wearing what he wanted to be remembered in.
Logan had kept a journal for a number of years. I knew about it, had even read parts of it when he brought it along on visits. I wasn't trying to just be invasive of his privacy but wanted to compare what he was telling me of his home situation with what his diary said. They painted the same picture of a kid who loved when his dad showed him attention but felt he wasn't fully accepted at home. He felt abandoned by his dad's taking him away from me and then going away for months and even years at a time for work to be left with his step mom and her family. He wasn't allowed to tell me when his dad was gone for long periods of time for fear I would try to get custody back. His heart was wounded by the rejection he felt by his dad's family- he talked about it a lot. I will never know if it was reality that they actively rejected him or his perception of it- from most of what I saw, they appeared to be supportive and did all the things families are supposed to do to support one another. He didn't feel they truly felt that way, though.Logan felt like he didn't have either of his parents there for him like he needed; me because of circumstances and his dad because of choices. When his dad came back from Afghanistan, he was distant and removed. Logan said they never reconnected and their relationship was a shadow of what it had been. There was abuse and a double standard in the household where Logan felt he wasn't valued the same as his dad's other two children. Several of his friends made comments via social media about how unhappy Logan's home environment was in the days after he died.

The detective told me Logan made the decision to commit suicide for two main reasons: the first was that he felt like he was a disappointment and couldn't do anything right. I tried so hard to show him my unconditional love and support but it wasn't enough to offset the way he felt from other adults in his daily life. He had told us many times there was no adult in California he felt he could trust. He had gotten in minor trouble a few times since the beginning of sophomore year and we had talked about how he needed to keep himself out of any trouble to achieve his dreams of entering the Air Force Academy. He understood it was important to make wise choices now for his future. Two days before he died, he got in trouble for bullying at school with calling a girl a name in class. He was disciplined at school and at home and for Logan it was too much. It solidified his feelings of failure. We all struggle with feelings of inadequacy at times; it is a normal teenage process. Logan wasn't able to overcome the self-doubt- it overtook him. He felt alone and unwanted.

The second reason was something I didn't know, something he had kept hidden. Logan had started talking when he was 10 about a person who appeared in a lot of his dreams. He named him Milton and said he sounded like Morgan Freeman but didn't look like him. Logan said he was like a train conductor in his dreams, telling him where to go and what to do. He talked about Milton off and on for several years and it seemed to be an innocuous presence in his dream life.
About a year before he died, I asked him if the man was still in his dreams. Logan had been having some pretty violent dreams from the age of 14 and I was hoping to help him learn to control his dreams because some were pretty graphic and upsetting. I truly thought they were because of the kinds of movies and video games he was around. He played a lot of assassin-type games and liked horror movies. Many of his dreams were direct reflections of those kinds of games and movies. Logan said the man was sometimes still in dreams but had started encouraging Logan to act violently in the dreams. He even had dreams about killing people and in the dreams he had no remorse for what he was doing. I was, understandably, concerned-- it seemed like he was feeling out of control in his life and was taking control in his dreams. He had a lot of bitterness and anger and always associated it with people he felt had wronged him. We talked about trying to tell the man that he didn't want to hurt people when he made the suggestions in the dreams.
The second reason he gave in his letter was because he couldn't live with the person he had become. The voice of the "man," Milton, was something he had started hearing outside of sleep. It was becoming part of his waking life. The voice was telling Logan to hurt people and feeding his feelings of anger and injustice. Logan had started becoming really angry when he felt something was unjust or someone disappointed him. As far as I know, Logan didn't tell anyone that the voice had transitioned to his conscious life. Logan would have known the voice wasn't real and there was something wrong with him. I truly think he was afraid of the rejection by being labeled with a mental illness. He ended his life before the voice would compel him to hurt someone and he couldn't resist.

It is so frustrating to know that with counseling and medication Logan could have been helped. I admire that he was noble and didn't want to hurt others. I admired Logan in life for his perspective and will continue to admire my son in death as well for being a wise beyond his years and having a tender heart. He made a hard choice that was more selfless than you would expect from someone his age. Logan had a strong sense of responsibility and felt people relied on him to do the right thing- sometimes that was hard for him. A new layer of grief has been added by the knowledge that he needed help and didn't reach out because of stigma and fear of rejection. I wish he had had the courage to say something instead of assuming more responsibility than a 16-year-old kid should take. I wish he had had the courage to say something to me and let me take the responsibility of action as his mother. He would never have gone down that dark path alone- together we would have found the light.

There is a harsh reality of knowing the stigma of mental illness shadows my son's memory. I made the decision soon after he died that I had to be transparent with both the expected and unexpected if his death was going to have meaning and good come from it, so I am laying it bare in the hope it will bring discussion forward about something as stigmatized as mental illness. We should be helping the helpless, not stigmatizing them. If someone sees themself in how Logan felt or in someone they know, GET HELP. Don't ignore it or sweep it aside. Mental illness is more than being "different." It is not a choice, much like no one would choose to get cancer. It should be looked at just like an illness anywhere else in the body that should be treated and understood.

Un-Mother's Day

 

Logan digging for marine fossils at Somis, CA 

Mother's Day weekend 2010

 Logan's selfie when I took over digging so he could catch & name bugs and lizards.

I’m bitter today. I’ve been anxiously anticipating how I would have to maturely handle my first Mother’s Day as a post-mother. I will always have been his mom, but in order to not be trapped in my grief I have to accept and incorporate into my identity that I am not anymore.  Instead of following every instinct that says I should run away from my feelings, I am dealing with them head-on today because I don't want to be defined by my loss.

Some of this below is going to be surprising to people- but it is all naked, raw truth. If anything, I've underplayed how challenging it was to maintain my relationship with Logan.

Logan and I didn’t spend that many Mother’s Days together and I was usually denied getting to talk to him on this day by his dad (one of his simple pleasures in life was making mine miserable.) Mother’s Day has been a bitter holiday for me for many years. In 2010, I did get to spend Mother’s Day weekend with him and we had a wonderful time. We dug for fossils with the Ventura Gem and Mineral Society at Somis, went to the Port Hueneme Maritime Museum, went ghost hunting at a purported haunted stream but ended up with a bucket of frogs instead, and visited Mission San Gabriel. It was a pretty typical range of activities for a weekend for us with the added bonus of Mother's Day together.

I’m at the point in the process of grieving that I have to examine who I’m going to be because I had structured and planned my life around making Logan my priority. Mother’s Day is a reminder of the feelings I have that I “set my star” on something that will not be. It is also a searingly painful reminder of my feelings of having failed to do what we do as moms- protect our children and keep them safe. I know I couldn’t have physically prevented him from stepping in front of that train that day. My sense of failure comes from all of the moments leading up to that day where I gave him my best and it wasn’t enough to save him.

I planned our visits so carefully to make sure we were “connected” and that I was both someone he felt he could talk to and someone he knew would give him a carefully-thought and honest response.  It was a hard role to balance at times, but it was deeply important to me that I was a resource for him. Logan and I had deep conversations about our innermost thoughts all of the time. I knew things no one else did about his true heart.

I have run the snipplets in my memory of our last weekend together hundreds of times, looking for something I missed that should have clued me in to his inner turmoil (I would’ve made so much more effort to remember things better if I had know at the time these would be our “lasts.”) The sad thing I have to admit is I didn’t miss them—I heard his frustration and sadness. I failed to understand where his mind was going with the feelings he was having. I didn’t draw the connection that his inner conflicts had become unbearable and he was being sucked into a vortex of despair.

He told me during heart-to-hearts in the last several weekends we had together how he didn’t "care about people" and there were only a few people he did feel anything for. One of those was his girlfriend and he was animated when he talked about her- it was his first time truly feeling romantic love that was more than a crush.  I was so excited to hear his deep caring for her and see he was making mature decisions about the relationship. I didn't believe he really didn't care about people- he was irritated by how people continued to disappoint him and talked about his frustrations with his family and friends. We talked about him feeling disconnected and I never made a connection that his feelings had sucked the hope out of him. 

 I tried to give him coping skills and offer solutions many times when he talked about how unhappy he was at home. He felt a great sense of responsibility for his siblings and towards his friends. He hated the living situation, his home environment, and that his dad didn’t spend enough quality time with just him. To be fair, his dad had two other children whereas Logan never had to share me. He felt he was never accepted as an equal member of the family by his stepmom and her family. He felt rejected for things completely out of his control.

At 13 and 14, he had talked seriously about running away several times (even doing research on his own to find shelters where he could stay) and I was able to talk him out of it rationally. He had told all of us multiple times over the last two years he felt he had something to do there in California and that once it was done he would be able to come live with us. It was a very strange thing for a kid to say, but I took it as wisdom beyond his years.

One of the last conversations we had was about his plans for the future. Logan had decided he wanted to be a fighter pilot at 9 and was going to the Air Force Academy to get there. His plan was to do well in football and keep going with his AP classes so he could get into the Academy. We discussed how essential it was to keep his GPA as high as possible in challenging Advanced or AP classes, do well in extracurricular activities, and most importantly to make wise choices to avoid getting in trouble. This is what he told me of graduating high school: on the day of his graduation, he knew his dad and stepmom would have a big party. He planned to stand up at it to speak and tell them they got no credit for his success and he didn’t want to see them again. From that conversation, I understood he felt very alone and needed out of that environment. I thought I saw a grit and resolve to follow through on his plans for the future, not that this would be one of the last things he ever told me.

His dad and I had no relationship in trying to work together for Logan; almost every encounter with him was adversarial, so I couldn’t just approach him to try and get Logan help. His dad tried to cut me out of Logan’s life at every turn and gave me less than the minimum he was supposed to. Sometimes we fought back but it inevitably resulted in trouble for us with little results. Any time I made a request it resulted in hostility and making things more difficult for my child. 

In September, Logan asked to spend more time with me and his dad not only denied the request but then took some of our scheduled time away as a punishment for asking. This was the most recent in a long string of attempts to alienate me, which included moving Logan and changing their phone numbers multiple times without telling me. Logan and I made a plan: who he would need to talk to and let them know what was going on at home so we could start the process of trying to get custody back.

Because he was so insightful and smart, I allocated coping skills to him he didn’t actually possess. I’m guilty of what many parents do: we magnify how amazing our kids are in our mind. This can be great for pushing kids to succeed and building their self-esteem. But for a kid who is struggling with depression it is dangerous. For my son, it was deadly. 

Tattooed Memories

 Logan meets George Washington, Marching Thru History 2009 

Doing is life. Memories are associated with experiences-- therefore, the more experiences you have the more goes in your memory cache. For twelve years, I traveled to see Logan with a full itinerary to create memory opportunities. I had an agenda: make our time together meaningful and purposeful to keep me present in his life. Because of it, my own memories of the past sixteen years are filled primarily with what we did together.
If I didn't have all of these memories of Logan, I would have nothing to hold on to now. They remind me he was real and I feel linked to him because our experiences together are permanently etched on my heart, as the finality of death has a way of tricking you to feel your mind is confused about them having really been in your life.
I did things I would never have done if I were planning it for myself. It was important to always find new and enriching experiences for my time with my son. I created a booklet of sorts. It grew to ten pages of fun things for us to go do within a few hours of his home in California. It took a lot of time to build over the years but planning our fun was one of my favorite things. I didn't do it to be cool or a good parent-- I did it because he deserved no less from me than my best. But being a cool mom was definitely a fringe benefit.
Logan knew me in ways no else does because of the experiences we had together. I lost someone who really got me. As he grew older and expressed interest in different subjects or areas I added subjects and things he didn't like so much fell off the list. We had a similar list for his trips to Washington.
There were many times I was sad to take different activities off the list as they became too much for "kids" or something I had grown to love became not as exciting anymore for him. I was sad when he outgrew wanting to wade in streams and catch bugs and small animals to study. I was pretty heartbroken when he decided rockhounding was "a lot of work" when we could go buy the rocks or see them at a rock show. I laughed but felt bittersweet when he didn't want to go to historical museums as often because his know-it-all mom often knew more than the tour guide and he came to also know more than they did as well. I was genuinely disappointed when he didn't want to go ghost hunting every month- it was a time I had looked forward to that we spent together without any distractions from the outside world.
His dad said to Logan more than once (according to Logan) that he didn't know how I could have found so much for us to do. His friends thought I was the coolest mom ever when he went back an reported what he had gotten to do during his time with me. That admittedly made me inordinately happy- my love and dedication to Logan was being reflected to others by his sharing our fun with others. I felt more a part of his life that way. I was happy to be touching his heart.
I got a card in the mail from a friend I've had since I was 13 years old recently. She had been going on an extended work trip to Southern California a few years ago and stopped in Tacoma on her way down from Alaska. I gave her a copy of my precious list to give her stuff to do there off the beaten path. She had recently re-found the list and cared enough to let me know that what I had done for my son MATTERED. I cried for hours when I read the card and in each tear was a precious memory of my son from that list. Her card reminded me of how valuable my memories are in providing a connection to my son.
I tried so hard to show Logan love and how deep my commitment was to his well-being. When he ended his own life, I had an identity crisis on several levels. One of the hardest continuing conflicts is the nagging feeling that all of the good experiences I gave him weren't enough to let him see how much life is worth living for the adventure it offers. I gave Logan my best self and it is so hard to not feel that my best wasn't good enough to save him.
I miss our memory-making opportunities. We had hundreds of wonderful times together; our goal was to do at least one new thing from the list every single visit. I have a hard time pulling myself to do new things because I don't have him to plan them for. Guilt is a constant companion; I have new life experiences and he never will. I have gotten past the feeling I am outright betraying his memory by making new memories, but I resent getting there. I resent making a new life for myself and feel so much bitterness towards what I know has to happen as time marches relentlessly on.
I haven't looked at the list since he died. It sits in a purple folder that used to go in my carryon with every trip. At some point, I will go through it and I hope I can focus on the things we DID on the list and not all of the things that remained to be saved for "another trip."
This summer was supposed to be the year we took him to Painted Hills in Oregon and to see Henry the Bear in Mitchell. I am punished with thoughts of things we had yet to do all of the time and don't see that changing.The "somedays" that will never be are one of the hardest things to accept.

A Pre-Owned Life with Frayed Laces

Logan in his Moon Shoes

Maybe I need a pair of these to help me walk this road

I feel Logan's absence like a physical void when I am out doing things that remind me I'm alive. I am somehow betraying his memory when I do something he would have enjoyed. I have split-second excitement at times when I have a thought of getting to tell him what adventure I've been up to. I see things or read things and think about how much he would love to do or see it. When my impulsive thought catches up with my rational mind, I can actually hear an iron door slam shut sometimes. I realize it doesn't matter if he would love it or enjoy it or not. He doesn't enjoy or love anything anymore.

I miss being ignorant of what a true broken heart feels like. In the first few months after Logan died, I knew whenever I reached out there would be someone there to help me and offer me support. I am pragmatic; I knew over time it would fade as people went back to their lives. I made the mistake of thinking I could somehow go back to mine as well; it would be changed, of course, but would be mine. That life is gone. I made all of my adult decisions based on being his parent and because of it have an adult life very different from what I would have chosen for just myself.  I don't have a life I want to go back to because my life reminds me in every way that it is incomplete without him.

I am angry. I am angry at him for giving up and not letting us help him. I am angry at myself for all of the things that the burden of hindsight makes so obvious. I get angry at how he is always there in the back of my thoughts and I can't escape feeling sad. I'm angry at how much I miss him. I am angry that when we were together I was challenged to be my best and I don't know how to do that without him to do it for. The list of how I'm angry with the world would fill a swimming pool. Real anger isn't red- it is black. It sucks all light and hope into its inky depths. I am scared of the black.

When my sister and I decided we needed to DO something to have Logan's death not be just another sad statistic, I hoped it would repel that darkness. I had a lot of support and encouragement from friends and people I barely knew. It was an amazing feeling to have so much care and love showered on us. Almost smothering at times, but not in a bad way. It made the first few months bearable. I would have broken inside without it. I was careful to not over-use people in the aftermath, somehow thinking I could hold their caring for me in reserve until a later time when I needed it.

Maybe I should have been stronger and done more right after he died to get things moving and the momentum pushing forward. I was torn; everything I did in building the foundation both hurt and made me feel more okay at the same time. Everyone was so supportive-- cheering me on and saying how awesome it was that we were taking our grief and loss and making good from it. Now I'm in a place where the work makes me feel like I may have a purpose to live and much of the support system has moved to their lives. I am finally strong enough to not burst into tears and cry ten times a day so I can make smart, productive decisions.

Until you have a traumatic loss like I've had you don't "get" the moment-by-moment pervasiveness of soul-tearing grief. So I understand people moving forward with their lives and their problems when I am still lost. I feel alone in a crowd of shadows. I didn't get that myself until it happened to me. The scary thing is loss can happen to anyone, at any time.

People tell me every time I talk about what happened that they couldn't imagine how I feel or what they would do. I don't want or need them to- NO ONE should have to. That's the point; no one should ever have to live with this kind of pain and we need to help one another. Just show the care and consideration you would want someone to show you if you had to walk the road I do. That's all. I'm not sure what is okay and what isn't okay for me to be. I need to know what to be now and help to figure that out.

I am trying to live a life that doesn't quite fit. I feel like I've been given someone else's shoes that looks sort of like some I used to own and told to go wherever I want... but the shoes think we're going somewhere else that the old owner used to go. So I will trip, I will fall. I will take wrong paths, I will start and stop again. But I will break these shoes in and eventually the path they tread will be mine.