Dear Richard & Cecelia,
When first I read of your loss, all I could say was: "I have no words."
As you won't know me, I'll introduce myself: I joined the ST family 9/15/09 after seeing the "rider lost" post on Pashnit. My life has been changed since then by all that was involved in the search and the grief that has followed. It's a long story, but, briefly, I met the family, I went to the service in Denver, and I've been contemplating "it all" ever since. I lost my dad to suicide in '74, so my experience is sort of the opposite of yours in many ways.
In your wonderful outpouring of grief and celebration of a life well lived, you said:
"I am sure as we start to slow down, it will hit us, it is inevitable, but we still have a very close family and two young children that we need to help raise. Again I take solace in the fact that we had lots of good times, while at the same time feeling sorry for those that were fairly new in his life, as they have lost their chance to do the same."
Your beautiful words and pictures touched my heart deeply. I'm almost 70, and my dad died 35 years ago. I've learned some things I wish I had known when he died:
From the novel Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch I learned about the timing of grief and about time. She wrote:
"There is no timetable for grief... Grief isn't a train you catch at the station. Grief has its own time, and grief's time is beyond time, and time itself... isn't very important. It's the English who think time is a straight line which can be divided up and labeled and parceled out in an orderly fashion, but time isn't like that, time is a circle, time goes round and round like a wheel, and that's why one hears echoes of the past continually--it's because the past is present; you don't have to look back down the straight line, you just look across the circle, and there are the echoes of the past and the vision of the future, and they're all present, all now, all forever... as I grew up, other people would talk to me about him, and I thought, Why do they do this, what makes them speak now after so many years, and then suddenly I realized it was because of me, I was the echo for these people, and for them the past wasn't lost far away down the straight line after all but coming back towards them in a curve. It was as if he was still alive, for when they looked at me they saw him, and when I understood this, when I understood he was present in me, then I knew him... and at last, years after his death, I was able to grieve."
I'm a sculptor. I made a small piece a year or so after dad died. It was an angry and bitter piece of the old man in a fetal position, carved of stone, encapsulated in an egg shaped piece of Teak. Its title was "The Old Man Seeks a Soft Warm Place to Die." I was also an art teacher teaching my first art students; I brought my works for them to see on the first day. I was explaining that art exists for its own sake, art exists to affect the viewer, and that art exists to change the artist. The last of the three I had not experienced. Two youngsters in two different classes held the piece, and they both said they saw "a baby in a mommy's belly." My first grandson Michael had just been born. My art changed me; my bitter piece became for me exactly as described by the above author's words. My Old Man became both Michael and dad. Time, for me, became circular. I now see my dad in those of us who live on. Those two children and my art healed me.
May the ride grief takes you on lead to healing, I'll carry your family and Kevin in my heart,
Rod House
A parent shouldn't have to bear the sadness of losing a child.
