Ohhhh the agony of the loss - compounded by "if only" or "what if" -
You are much too hard on yourself!
Your love is all he knew; not "mistakes," not failure to protect him.
I've run this treadmill with my sister (murdered at 18) -
Could we not have saved her?
Surely these untimely deaths are not inexorable, inevitable, unstoppable, right?
(We blame ourselves. As if we had the power to redirect the course of events.)
The question is, how do we discern - how are we to intuit, anticipate, intervene -
You trusted authorities. Who were we to question trained medical doctors?
Come to find out, they're glorified plumbers.
Multiple-choice, check the box, try this, then try that...
True healers with genuine scientific curiosity seem to be missing from the medical field.
The schools!
Oh, the damage our wonderful, idyllic schools have done.
I don't want to call "good" students conformists -
But my own little K-12 community school was just wonderful - if you "fit in"
We had suicides, h.s. dropouts, "failures" - all swept under the rug.
Oh what a Pandora's box you open with every poem, every post: so much to unpack from a small number of words. You have such a gift for conveying much with little.
I cannot even begin to say how heartwrenching this is.
And I love @myjob taking up poetry too - and the insight that even if we say "I could never," most mothers, called to do the unthinkable, will do the unthinkable.
My heart aches for you. To see your own son fail to thrive, and slowly die - that is the cruelest torment.
It is not the natural order of things.
By now he should be a father, carrying on the family line.
The legacy of your Aunt Jane must live on in all the nieces and nephews and their offspring.
It's epigenetics - not that I can explain or summarize.
Oh I do feel your pain!!!
And I wish you peace and joy and new Happy Memories at Lake Owasco.