Five Years Missing Elliot

Lessons in Hanging On and Letting Go

Greetings, dear caring community. I am jumping into the Substack. Thank you for being there.

Five years ago, on the fifth sundrenched day of August, I lost my oldest son and my son Ian’s older brother, Elliot Everett Wright, at age 26 in a single-vehicle motorcycle tragedy that is still shrouded in questions and mysteries.

On this fifth day of the fifth year, August aches.

A couple of months after Elliot’s death, I visited a Medium, one of several, and she heard him say, “It’s best to leave the deed unexplored.” I am not sure what that means or if it helps me much, but I suspect s/he is right, because after all the searching, both tangible and spiritual, the questions remain as traumatic as the answers.

Grief is insidious, ubiquitous and sticky.

And now, five years later on this darkest August day, I am still incredulous. I keep hoping to wake up from the nightmare that is a mother’s worst reality. The baseline awareness never goes away. It lingers like the pervasive stench that takes up indelible residence in the fabric of every cigarette smoker’s home.

The intensity and scope change slightly—day to day, moment to moment and week to week. In fact, grief’s constant evolution reminds me Pokémon, the Japanese collectible card game Elliot so adored and mastered. For example, Charmander evolves into Charmeleon and then morphs into Charizard. Or is it Karma Chameleon? But Charizard always had a special significance.

Oh, Elliot is laughing at me now. I can almost hear him.

I never understood that game, but he did. He was a true Pokémon aficionado. The point is that regardless of the form du jour, it is all grief to me. Cringe. Elliot would be making his signature smirk face. But like the elusive Pokémon, some of the evolutions often take on distinctive and increasing levels of power as they progress. And some just fade into extinction.

August’s grief is a simmering cauldron.

The Texas heat is a persistent catalyst—close and heavy. But paradoxically, grief is not really a feeling at all. It’s more of a place, a place you inhabit. To be in grief—a complex matrix of emotions that entangle, infiltrate and haunt you. But now, five years in, I am not even sure the term “grief” is adequate. After the death of a child, I think we need a new word altogether that describes a different mode of existence after losing the being who grew under your own heart for nine months. Etymologically, It originates from the Proto-Indo-European root gwerə-, meaning "heavy."

That’s close. It’s not just emotional, psychological and spiritual weight. It’s dense, substantive and physical heft. It changes your entire body and soul from the inside out and how you experience the world. I’m inspired by John Koenig’s brilliant The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in which he makes up words to convey specific esoteric meanings.

How about metamournphasis?

That’s a possibility. The definition: The continuous transformation of a being in response to unthinkable loss and learning how to carry the permanent sorrow along with the possibility of joy. Grief is a double-edged sword. It both obscures and amplifies the stubborn presence of loss—intertwined and embedded in the sinew of every muscle—like a toxic relationship.

Grief keeps your psyche hooked, as its stain will always be part of your addled nervous system. This place called grief changes every cell, every membrane, every nerve and every molecule—your past, your present and your future. Your very identity. Ever-present, it also can isolate you from friends, family and yourself, as well as the community you need most to heal.

You can lose yourself entirely along the way, too, in a kind of co-dependent tango with your own sorrow.

Being gentle with yourself sometimes feels like enabling the dysfunction of the grief relationship. You give too much and too often find yourself reassuring others you are OK, taking care of their discomfort to diminish the awkwardness they feel. That is messed up. Because you are far from OK. There is that fragile “outside” version of you that you don each day like a freshly pressed button-down shirt. And then there is the wailing “inside” version of you—the “you” known only to your bed pillow, your shower, your dogs or the steering wheel of your car. These two yous are a prickly pair.

You may even try to run away or distract yourself, but grief is undaunted, unphased and unwavering. Wherever you go, there you are, and grief is, too. Yes, I am different now after five years, better able to function most days. However, grief will always be part of me because Elliot is a part of me. And grief will always be a layer between me and the raw edge of everything, as I wrote in a poem in memory of Elliot.

Whether a thin, hyaline veil or a rugged stone wall, it can be murky black sometimes and at others, a sparkling translucence, a thin place. The light is the grace, the awful glimmer of grief.

That is what illuminates the glistening old, the gleaming memories of a lifetime that will never die.

My Precarious Boy

I need to find a way

to breathe in

this stolid space.

Sleepless nights melt

into heavy days —

sometimes made light

Persistence of memory

absorbs the absent

and

precarious now

where

saline tears debride

my forever wound

over and over —

A shadow heart,

cast against the raw

edge of everything —

contained yet

always

missing

you

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