Snakes & Ladders

As I continue to navigate my life bearing my grief I have noticed that there are unforeseen trap doors.
You’d think I’d know the terrain of my loss by now but there is so much unidentified trauma.
I walk a life of concealed unexploded trauma-landmines that can, and do, bring me to my knees in an instant.

These past weeks, without warning… I tripped on two.

The first was detonated by the decision to leave our iPhones in the kitchen and not by our bedsides as we sleep.
A great idea you’d think, but what if someone needs to reach me?
As I lay down, the flood of memories, in the form of terror, engulf me as I remember how we couldn’t reach people to tell them that Luke was dead. It was the people who needed to know before the news hit Facebook.

The repeated calls that were met with voicemail.
NO! NO! answer the fucking phone! I couldn’t leave this vile news on a voicemail.
The desperation in my heart, the urgency in my chest, the anxiety of not knowing how much longer I will be able to perform the act of a phone call before I slip away into another dimension, was upon me once more.
The untethered helter-skelter of it spirals and drops me through an infinite mine shaft as my blood rushes and my mind boils almost two thousand days later.
This is trauma.

I spend my life with people suffering grief so fresh you can taste it and I take the ride they lead me on calmly.
I speak of my loss and trauma constantly and recount my experience to many with smiles and tears whilst anchored in clarity.
So what brings this maelstrom within me?

It’s not the memory of the ‘facts’, that causes this..
It’s the unannounced, unexpected memory of my emotions that does.

It’s not the active memory
It’s the involuntary emotional memory that wreaks havoc within me, the unforeseen exposure to the emotional trauma that sends me down the snake and back to square one.

The second snake (this month) on my board of life was when I heard that the house, which we had built, where Luke and George grew up, was now enrobed in the climbing rose, from David Austin Roses, that is named after Mortimer Sackler.

Mortimer Sackler made his fortune in the creation and, now demonstrably, fraudulent marketing of OxyContin.
He’s one of the guys behind the crime of the century that is widely accepted, both in courts and out, to have created the US opioid crisis.
He and his family manipulated the impudent FDA and the American medical consensus and convinced us all that their opioids were not addictive (though they knew they were) and just fine to use widely and freely for any pain (though they knew they were not) … because ‘pain is pain’ .. cancer pain, chronic back pain, wisdom teeth pain, period pain, and so flooded our streets with OxyContin
He and his family, made over $10 billion, killed over 750,000 Americans and one of them was my boy, Luke.

And now Luke’s childhood home is literally smothered in the rose named after that genocidal fuck-head!

I reel.
I clench my fists and draw blood on my palms.
A scream so primal, strains my jaw and shatters my vocal chords till all I can taste is blood.
I am off down that chute, that snake.

Of course, it is just a rose.
A rose so beautiful that I would have planted it myself.
Of course, it’s not my house anymore.
Of course, he didn’t actually kill Luke.

But this news leaves me feeling so violated.
I can find no peace in the injustice..
in the irony.

My snake takes me back to so much of my life when I could see injustices, when my insistences were futile:
Why do the teachers not see the absurdity of this accusation? as my child-mind wants to shout “check the fucking register, I was elsewhere’”
Why do others not see Luke is in danger?
Why don’t they hear me as I scream in my soul?
Why would you not Google Mortimer Sackler before you plant that fucking rose?
Why doesn’t everyone know who he is?
Why do David Austin still grant him this honor after all my letters?

No, there’s no end to the examples in this spiral.
No, there’s no logic to be found.
But this is where I went.

I wonder… is trauma not just one thing?
Not just one moment?
Is it made up of lots of moments?

Is it the emotion itself, that is traumatizing? The unforeseen hazard?

As I move forward across the board of my life, square by square, will I always find new snakes that bring me to my knees? Invisible snakes that aren’t lying in the facts of my life, but instead, in the emotions?
Clearly the answer is… yes.

And so, what of that?
What do I do with that?

“Whenever Jake is sick” a dear friend once told me “ it always results in a massive growth spurt”
I remembered her words as I witnessed this phenomenon years later in my own boys.
Their fevers would break and when they awoke, their tiny toes would be cramped in their now undersized onesies.
As if the very thing that causes growth had made them sick or the very thing that healed them made them grow.

I am now applying this observation to my emotional growth as I navigate my trauma in the loss of Luke and all that went in the lead up to that shattering moment.

I will let myself to reel and rage, my body contorted and restricted, my throat sore, my voice hoarse.
But soon, I will find a way forward, expanded and grown as I allow, examine and metabolize these emotions .

Maybe, one day, I will have exploded all my emotional landmines, and there will be peace.

But for now, I will accept that there are snakes of unfinished business, unfinished traumas …how could there not be?
They may set me back, for a while,
but as they do, I too, will grow,
and somehow emerge stronger, ready for a ladder.