Brian’s Story
Next month will be 3 years since the death of my son Brian who was only 19 years old. I still feel this strongly about how it feels to lose a child. For me, it doesn’t get any easier. I just learn to live with the pain. Brian was a high honor student who in his senior year started smoking pot. We didn’t know because he never showed any signs of using drugs. One year later while attending college to become a Meteorologist, he was abusing Xanax and pain meds. That’s when we really began to see a change in him. He became withdrawn and was sleeping a lot. Brian went to detox and we celebrated him being clean for 6 months. I really believed he was clean, but little did we know that Brian had moved on to Heroin. On Sept. 5, 2009 my son was found slumped over in his dad’s van one block from our home. He had died of an accidental Heroin overdose. I wrote this (below) 13 months after Brian died.
What It Is Like To Lose A Child
by Lorraine Delia Watcke on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 4:30pm
Losing a child is like having your chest torn open and having your heart ripped from your body with nothing to numb the pain.
Then you are left with a gaping, throbbing wound that bleeds constantly day after day.
The bleeding never ends, it goes on for days, months, years.
Sometimes infection sets in and the pain intensifies until you don’t think you can stand it anymore.
All of a sudden, although the bleeding continues, the infection leaves, but only for a short time, lurking there in the open wound, only to surface again.
Maybe next week, or maybe tomorrow, you just never know when.
You try everything to heal the wound but it will not heal.
It is stubborn and persistent.
So you go on day after day, month after month, year after year with this gaping hole in your chest where your heart used to be.
You try to fill it with other things, but nothing can fill the void.
Nothing can numb the pain, nothing can stop the bleeding.
Nothing.
