I Had A Bad Day

Five years ago today, I experienced the worst day of my life. It was just after noon when the police knocked on my front door. Sad to say, I wasn’t surprised to see a police officer.

I had been waiting for this day for years, dreading it really.

The police officer told me my son was dead.

They told me he’d killed himself. I thought I was ready, but I wasn’t.

I felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut.

I felt like a small child who’d lost their parents in a mall.

I asked him what I was supposed to do. It was the time of COVID. And there were no funerals. He said he was really sorry, but he didn’t know.

I got all the information from him. As soon as he left, I drove to my wife’s work to tell her the bad news. Of course, she was devastated. Hearing the grief in my wife’s voice and seeing the despair on her face was more than I could handle.

We spent the evening making phone calls, letting people know, and generally ruining the lives of many people who love us and loved him.

Because he wasn’t married anymore, his next of kin were his mother and his biological father. The funeral home needed their releases to collect the body and do what needed to be done. I ended up having to pay to track down his birth father so that he could sign the paperwork to get the ball rolling.

The man never called, showed up, or sent flowers. He completely abdicated his responsibility and rights as a father. I don’t hate many people in this world. In fact, I try not to hate anybody, but I hate him.

A couple of days later, a bunch of his friends from his sober living days before he went off the wagon. Had a wake for him. I couldn’t go. The idea made me want to vomit. I sat in the house crying while my wife and my children went to say goodbye to my son.

A couple of days after that, the funeral home said we could come in and see him before he was cremated. The experience was awful. I entered the white room to see him and say my own goodbye, and I didn’t see a person. I just saw a thing that looked like my son. I saw nothing more than an empty shell.

My son really was gone.

The last five years have been hard. My sleep schedule. My eating, my blood sugar, my ability to create have all been destroyed by my depression over the Loss of my son.

I’m hoping now that I’ve been able to get a lot of it out through therapy and writing my short story about losing him, that I can finally move forward.

I’ll never move on. You never move on to something like this. You never get over it. Hopefully eventually. I’ll be able to move forward.

Maybe I can finally say goodbye.

I am proud that I got to be your father.

I love you, boy, and I miss you more than you can possibly know.