child loss

blogging a – z challenge – “n”

/ Kade's mom / 3 Comments

N

Never say never.

It’s been three and a half years since Kade died. In that time I could have easily said, “I’ll never smile again. I’ll never laugh again. I’ll never feel good again. I’ll never do this. I’ll never do that.” And I probably have said those things, or thought them.

But…you never know…

When I go to play trivia at a local brewery tasting room with friends and family….it’s fun. When I see Asher playing at the park with his dear friends, the girls I’ve nannied for almost two years…I smile. When I have a great date night with my husband, and we reminisce and renew our bond…I’m invigorated.

I’m not saying that life is what it was Before—it’s not. But I do cringe when I see or hear my fellow bereaved making blanket statements about the rest of their lives.

I liked something my husband said on a recent exceptional date night. He said he was proud of me for doing the things I’ve done in the wake of Kade’s death. I told him, honestly, I don’t know why I do anything. I don’t know why I have any will to live…I just do.

He wondered if it might be because Kade wouldn’t want me to give up, or wither into nothingness. It sounds so cliché, over-said, and trite: but when I thought about it, it’s true that Kade wouldn’t want me (or anyone) to waste a lifetime. Or a day.

I remember a time when I didn’t go out and do a lot of fun stuff. Kade noticed and said, “I remember when you used to go out and dress up for parties. Why don’t you do that kind of thing anymore?” He was remembering an annual party I used to go to where friends and I picked a theme and dressed accordingly. And he was right, I didn’t do that sort of thing anymore.

I remember the essence of what that kid was telling me:

“Get out there and live, for Pete’s sake.”

blogging a – z challenge – “m”

/ Kade's mom / 1 Comment

M
Mountain is the first word that came to mind with M. Kade was a Colorado Mountain Boy. He was “cold blooded”—He hated the heat. He skied, hiked fourteeners, camped, fished, kayaked, and whitewater rafted.

One of his friends from Boy Scouts, Mitch, told me about a camping trip where they summited a fourteener. They laid out under the stars and talked into the night.

Kade had a big place in his heart for Buena Vista, where his dad lived. And Monarch Ski Area, where his dad worked. And Georgetown, where his dad lived before. And Loveland Ski Area, where his Riefenberg family worked. And Evergreen, where his grandparents lived.

When the funeral director told me about memorial gardens on top of a mountain in the foothills of Denver, I knew that was the place for Kade’s ashes and stone. Not that any memorial gardens should be the place for him.

I miss my Colorado Mountain Boy.

blogging a – z challenge – “l”

/ Kade's mom / 2 Comments

L

How about a little levity with this post?

I was going to choose laughter, but levity is such a pretty word. One of my favorites. And…it’s the name of one of my favorite beers (Levity Amber Ale) from one of my favorite brewing companies (Odell Brewing Company) from one of my favorite towns (Fort Collins, CO, where I went to college).

lev·i·ty   ˈlevədē/   noun
humor or frivolity, especially the treatment of a serious matter with humor or in a manner lacking due respect
Early on in grief I don’t believe I laughed much. Reason number hundred and eleven that it’s good to have a great grief therapist: She gave me the assignment of watching funny movies. She suggested I balance tears with laughter. I loved that. My husband and I got on a kick of watching all the funny movies we could. We would catch some at the theater when they came out. We’d watch them at home. We watched lots of stand-up on Netflix. These laughter dates were so refreshing.

I do them to this day. Before Kade died, I didn’t think about scheduling time to laugh. It sounds absurd. Now it’s part of my self-care. Going to see a funny show with girlfriends—sometimes the more irreverent the better—is an investment in my healing. Its importance has been elevated.

Intense grief work follows great loss: the grief and loss books and even movies, the groups and gatherings, and the journaling. Peppering in some hilarity is pretty much essential; to me, anyway.

blogging a – z – “k”

/ Kade's mom / 6 Comments

K

Was there any question of what I would write about for the letter K?

Kade. Today I’ll write about his name. To quote the movie Forrest Gump, “The most beautiful name in the whole wide world.”

I learned that some bereaved moms, to hear their child’s name, tell their barista the name of their child. That way when their drink is ready they can hear the music of his or her name called. I haven’t tried that yet, but I think I might to see how it goes…

But seriously…Kade is the best name ever. It’s short, monosyllabic, unique (especially in 1993), and strong. It’s my favorite name.

We found it in a baby name book. We narrowed it down to Kade and Calvin for a boy. Kade’s dad had a huge Calvin and Hobbes collection—as did Kade later. Because we (Jenny and Jon) both grew up with common names, we wanted an uncommon one for our baby. And because our last name was Riefenberg we wanted short and sweet.

EXCEPT if he would have been a girl. The girl names we picked out were Savannah and Sierra. I couldn’t resist those ultra-feminine, romantic-sounding names, even if Savannah Riefenberg would have been a doozy to write.

We decided on Kade on the way to the hospital. I was in labor and the conversation went something like this:

Me: Do we have the guts to go with that one we like, “Kade?;” that Gaelic one that means Of the wetlands? Or is “Kade” too weird?

Jon: Yeah, let’s go with it. It’s different but let’s do it.

His middle name took us a couple more days to decide. When Jon’s mom was trying name combinations out loud in the hospital, we liked the sound of Kade with her maiden name.

Kade Tyson it was.

I know of two people named after Kade. Both girls.

A girlfriend of mine whose daughter was Kade’s first little best friend, loved the name Kade (and loved the boy Kade). She said if she had a boy she would name him Kade. Well, five girls later…she named a daughter Kadie. That’s counts, right?

And just a few weeks ago, Kade’s friend, Tyler, and his girlfriend named their baby Olivia Kadence. Choosing a name is so precious and personal. I love that they honored Tyler’s buddy gone too soon in this way.

I do hope that there are more odes to Kade, that remember him and carry on his lively spirit.

Plus of course…it is the most beautiful name in the whole wide world.

blogging a – z challenge – “i”

/ Kade's mom / 8 Comments

I

Today’s word is insensitivity. Something happened yesterday that made today’s I-word easy to come up with.

Sometimes to wake up I grab my phone and check e-mail and/or Facebook before I get out of bed. I had a rude awakening when I came across this meme in my newsfeed:

of course im a good mother

Ugh. It hit me like a slap in the face. My breath caught involuntarily. My cheeks got hot. I couldn’t look away for a moment. What was I reading? And on my friend’s newsfeed who has been a support to me after losing Kade? And who has already “liked” it, but another friend who has supported me?

I typed a comment: a bitter, “Ouch.”

Then I immediately removed my comment, and privately messaged my friend instead. I told her how it made me feel to see, and that I know she didn’t mean it to be hurtful. But could she please remove it? She apologized and deleted it.

I contacted the Facebook page from where she shared the meme. I explained my situation, who might see it, how it could hit them as it did me, and asked them to remove it. I got a kind response back saying that they would.

I looked up SomeECards.com, the company name on the meme and e-mailed them the same request. I got a very terse reply, but they did supposedly remove it from their stock.

This incident made me think of another similar situation.

My friend, Paula, a bereaved mom who has a company called Crazy Good Grief, and I took our little boys to the Morrison Natural History Museum. On a little walking tour of fossilized sites we were behind a mom with a few kids. She yelled to them to catch up. Then said, “No big deal–if we lose one we got extras!…” something like that. She thought she was pretty hilarious because she repeated it. 

No…neither Paula nor I said anything to her. We were both dumbstruck with how that happened right in front of us, given our situations, and just had words between us like, “If they only had a clue.”

blogging a – z challenge – “f”

/ Kade's mom / 9 Comments

F

I explained the blogging A-Z Challenge, what a blog is in general, and my blog to my five-and-a-half-year-old in the simplest terms possible today. I asked him what my letter “f” word should be. He said, “fish.” So here goes.

Kade was a fisherman. His dad lived in a mountain town and there literally was a babbling brook in their back yard. When I’ve been up there I’ve seen lawn chairs set up creek-side. He was probably in his glory to be able to walk a few paces and go fishing all the weekends he spent up there.

My favorite fishing story of Kade is when he was ten or eleven and my step-dad (and I believe my brother) took him ice fishing in Michigan.

Have you ever seen a pike? They’re ug-ly. Long scary snout-looking head filled with sharp teeth. No wonder Kade wanted to catch one.

Here is how I remember it (I’m sure Marv and Andy have a better recollection because they were actually there):

Kade talked and talked about how he was going to catch a pike. Marv prepared him that you don’t always get any fish, much less the type you want to catch. But the glorious moment arrived, and Kade caught and reeled in…a pike! He hollered, “I caught a pike! I caught a pike!”

Later he casually sauntered around the other fishing holes to strike up conversation. He tried to look and sound nonchalant.

“Having any luck? I caught a pike.”

“I know. I heard.”

He helped Marv clean it (probably totally enamored with that process), Grandma fried it up, and we all had a little piece of Kade’s pike with breakfast.

blogging a – z challenge – “e”

/ Kade's mom / 8 Comments

E

To save time deliberating what word to use for the daily letter, I’m trying to go with one of the first words, if not the first, that comes to mind. Today I thought, Enough! Yes, with the exclamation point.

Enough!

Sometimes I’m just sick of grieving. After a song on the radio that hits me particularly hard, or a different trigger, sometimes I just get sick and tired of the whole thing.

Enough.

Who’s in charge here? Hasn’t there been enough? I haven’t seen Kade in 3.5 years. Who thinks it’s OK for a mom to go that long without seeing her child? I’m tired of memorializing. Remembering. Honoring. Grief groups. Grief reading. Grief counseling. Coping. Healing. Sadness. Tears. Enough.

I’ve felt this way a handful of times. It’s like anger…not spirited energizing anger, but exasperated defeated anger. Have you ever felt just sick and tired of something? That has gone on entirely too long? That you know won’t stop any time soon? The frustrated feeling of Enough! elicits as many tears as its precipitating wave of anguish. It’s doubly exhausting.

But tears, even the exasperated, defeated, angry, salty kind, give way to relief. One can’t stay in the pit of Enough!, or for that matter a griefburst (hence the word “burst” in it) for long. That feeling, like all of ‘em do, gives way to another after a bit.

My engineer husband must be rubbing off on me. Here’s my attempt to describe this mathematically, though it’s cyclical and I don’t know how to type in a circle:

Griefburst > Enough! > Exhaustion > Solitude > Rest > Look, my 5-year-old did something hilarious > Laughter = A bit of blessed homeostasis > Adele’s “When We Were Young” comes on the radio

blogging a – z challenge – “d”

/ Kade's mom / 13 Comments

D

Dream

I chose “dream” because I had a dream about Kade that I woke up from this morning. It wasn’t a wonderful dream where I felt as if his spirit was visiting me, that family and friends of his have described having (I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that). It wasn’t a great dream where I felt as if was getting to lay eyes on him. It was kind of a bad dream where it involved his death and me lamenting it. So, I suppose, a reflection of real life.

In the dream Kade had to go away. Like to juvenile detention, or to jail, or something. He had to go away someplace, and for some reason, he died where he could not come back, instead of simply going to jail where he could come back. And I was lamenting my part in it.

“Why didn’t he choose jail?!–he could have come back! Why did he choose dying?! That was so stupid! Why didn’t we think this through?! Why didn’t I think to talk him out of the death option before it was too late?!” These are not necessarily the words I was saying, but the feelings I was having. Yeah, pretty awful.

But as I’ve mentioned before…anything that brings me closer to Kade is somehow strangely comforting. I dreamed about him = I haven’t forgotten him. More frightening than mourning his death, or even my part in it in a dream, is forgetting him.

I’ve had a handful of Kade dreams since he died. I keep a dream journal next to my bed so I can write them down because they are so fleeting. Some have been sad but some have been really comforting.

I’ll briefly describe my favorite:

I didn’t have my dream journal because I was traveling, so I voice-recorded it on my phone. The night before, I had been especially missing Kade before going to bed. It was a definite low. When I woke the next morning, I recalled the dream. I was having a conversation with my healthy-looking smiling boy. (So healthy, in fact, he looked a little fuller in the face, and had a beauty mark on his face that he didn’t have in life–strange). Kade looked so content. And it came to me after a little while that my vantage point talking with him in the dream was the exact spot I was sitting where I was missing him so acutely the night before.

blogging a – z challenge – “b”

/ Kade's mom / 9 Comments

B

If my “A” word yesterday was Asher, then my “B” word today is Brian!

Brian is my ever-so-patient husband. My husband of eight and a half years, who signed up to be a step-dad. He wanted to date a woman with a kid, because he wanted to be a father that much.

Who does that?

And five years after marriage…what he didn’t sign up for was to become a bereaved step-dad. To be married to a bereaved mom. Can you say, How fast can I run and how far will my legs carry me? He sure didn’t sign up to have his spunky wife turn traumatically bereaved, forever changed. None of us signed up for this shit.

I love Brian for going along with my cockamamie ideas.

After receiving a 10-page letter from a dear friend after Kade died: I need to go see my old friend, a second mommy to Kade when he was little, who I’ve known since we met in Lamaze class as young mommies. ‘Kade and Chloe’ were each other’s first best friends. Oh yeah, she lives in Hawaii–that’s alright, right?

I want to have a pizza birthday party for Kade’s birthday…and invite all of his friends.

For the anniversary of his death I want to go whitewater rafting on ‘his river’…and invite all of his friends.

Let’s have family pictures taken…holding a blown-up picture of Kade, of course.

I want to order memorial wristbands…bandannas…t-shirts…

I want to go to this healing retreat. And this retreat for traumatic bereavement. And this national conference for the loss of a child.

I’m joining a writer’s group because I’m writing a book about Kade.

I not only need the memorial space for Kade’s stone…but those adjacent so that the flat rock I sit on when I visit him will always be mine to sit on.

I want to go to graduate school for counseling. I need to have a career that may bring good from what has happened, rather than a job.

I could go on and on. As a technical and engineer-type-person he may not be the most touchy-feely in the emotions department—I realized early on I would need vast networks of various outside teams for that—he does what he can. If I’m willing to tell him exactly when and for what duration I need a hug, by darn, he delivers. Drawing a diagram helps…

He tries, and he has a wide breadth of patience. Those are two characteristics that are priceless in this new normal that neither of us…that nobody ever…signed up for.

blogging a – z challenge – “a”

/ Kade's mom / 8 Comments

A2Z-BADGE [2016]

I learned about the Blogging From A to Z Challenge from A.J., a girl in my writer’s group. Today, April first, the project of blogging each day in the month of April (except Sundays), for each letter of the alphabet, begins!

The letter A. Well, the first “A” word that comes to mind is the name of my youngest son, Asher. He is five years old and at kindergarten this morning. Today’s post will be about my little Asher…and will touch on how his big brother’s death has…or hasn’t…affected him.

Asher was only 22 months old when Kade died. When I wrote about the day that Kade died, I noted that Toddler Asher was…quiet…during all of the chaotic goings-on. I won’t write about that day at length here, but he was calm, as if he knew something grave and life-changing was happening. He didn’t make a fuss, as if the Older Wiser Asher within was telling Toddler Asher that this was bigger than a tantrum. This was bigger than fear. This was bigger than chaos and hyperventilating and oxygen masks and strangers taking care of him at the pool because mama couldn’t right then.

I am a big proponent of being open about grief. Of letting the bygone days of shame and secrecy associated with loss, be way bygone. The societal tides are changing, and I’ve had great mentors to learn from. I agree with the thinking that “being strong” for the children is a bunch of bunk, and if my kid sees me cry because I miss my other kid who died, it’s not going to harm him. He’s going to witness true human emotions (not all of them all of the time of course), and furthermore learn that tears give way to laughter, laughter gives way to frustration, frustration gives way to sadness, and on and on and on. Emotions ebb and flow and what favor am I paying Asher if I paste on a cheery smile 24 hours a day? Let’s just say my toddler/preschooler and I have spent some afternoons on the couch with Cheetos, tissues, and TV. And conversely, we’ve spent some afternoons at the museum learning about dinosaurs. Life, and mood, is rich and varied.

I’ve learned that as Asher grows and changes developmentally, his dealing with his brother’s death…a large impactful loss in his immediate family…will affect him differently. Today, my very verbal five-and-a-half-year-old is hot and cold on the topic of “Big brother Kade.” Some days he mentions his big brother with affection. Other times he simply wants to leave him out of what we are doing. A succinct “No” was the answer to my question, “Shall we include Kade when we make up nicknames for our family for Dr. Seuss week at school?” OK, then.

But a couple weeks later when I started drawing on the sand on our Mexico vacation, Asher said, “Let’s write Kade’s name.” Then he nestled the smooth rock and brain coral he had collected inside the heart.