John 14:27
My peace I leave with you, I give to you; not as the world gives do I give it to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
Grief and Loss often gives us a new perspective we had not had before. My mother and father now live within a few miles from me in a memory care facility. Both with a different diagnosis but I am blessed that they both still know me and can communicate with me. My mother’s ability to communicate is a challenge but she is there. She has been on and off hospice for three years. With this in mind, it is such a blessing to have the gift of Goodbye. I am able to process the slow goodbye preparing for it as opposed to the unexpected loss of no goodbye.
Joey’s suicide was sudden and while I am not sure how much comfort a goodbye would have been, it’s always something I wished I had. In that regard, I will not take for granted the opportunity for the goodbye I am having with my parents. The challenge, though, is that my mind can reason with my parents' story as most of us expect that our parents will pass before we do. The same cannot be said for our children. Reasoning with having to bury a child is a struggle that requires surrender.
It’s a bit of a pendulum really for me to have Joey with no goodbye and that same year parents diagnosed with the longest goodbye. It also is not lost on me that I have parents who have a cognitive diagnosis which involves the brain and a son who had depression which involves the mind.
I’m able to see how the mind can be altered by illness in my father’s story especially. This, in turn, gives me a window into how a mind like Joey’s could be altered by depression to the point where he no longer wanted to stay in this life with the pain. It’s very hard to reason with a suicide since it’s simply against our basic human instinct to survive. But again, it’s also hard to reason with an elderly person who starts to make unsafe choices that they see as perfectly safe.
I experienced a few of these with my father. There was January of 2022, my father lived in Oregon in an apartment with my mother separate in a facility. He was struggling but was able to function and was insistent he was still okay to drive. This was starting to be questionable and I can recall a phone call I got here in Minnesota that month. It was the receptionist at his apartment and she gave me a phone number to a service station 2 hours away in Washington. There was a confused man there and it was my dad. I called the number and a sweet woman named Jackie answered. She told me that God put my dad in her path for a reason. He had walked in with about $3000.00 in cash and said he was in California and would pay anyone who could tell him where this cabin was he was trying to make it to. This woman quickly could see he was in distress and talked to him eventually seeing his license and getting his address. She called the apartment who called me. There wasn’t really any family close enough to deal with this at the time. I thought about what solutions we could come up with, one was I just hire an uber to drive him back and leave his car there. Jackie told me that she was willing to drive his car with him in the passenger's seat the two hours back to his apartment if I was okay with that. She had her friend follow them so she could be brought back.
I then moved him to Minnesota in March of 2022 after driving was taken away. He was living in an assisted living/independent apartment here and started to unravel. I came home from church one Sunday evening to my daughter in the driveway letting me know that grandpa was here. He had walked out of his place past a fire station and a police station about 2 miles then hitchhiked on a busier road. Yet again, a good samaritan stopped to pick him up and started up a conversation with him. He was telling her he needed to be taken to his house and gave her his previous California address. She asked if he knew anyone in Minnesota. She then googled us and showed him a picture of our house which he recognized and dropped him off at our house.
Both of these cases were scary and I can recall trying to reason with him expressing to him how unsafe this was but he was simply not cognitively aware enough to comprehend any sort of danger. His altered mind had a very false truth.
Depression and Anxiety and the deceptive toll it can have on someone like Joey altered his mind. It was a sickness that drove him to suicide. Therefore, my experience with my father has helped me understand what a toll depression took on Joey’s mind and altered his frame of thinking.
Goodbye’s are not easy, said or unsaid in this life but I cling to the hope of Heaven which makes my “goodbye for now” comforting.
