For six years, Deborah carried this alone.
Not entirely by choice. Just by circumstance, by distance, by the particular kind of grief that comes when your child dies as an adult with his own family, his own home, his own life four hundred miles away. The grief that sometimes gets treated as secondary. The grief that nobody quite knows what to do with.
Matthew was Deborah’s only son, born with powder blue eyes so big and beautiful that the year E.T. came out, people started calling him that. He grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, became a tractor man through and through, and opened his own business, Cotton Tractor Repair, servicing three counties. He married Erin, had two boys, and was the kind of dad who made their breakfast, took them to school, and had them at the shop every day playing with toy tools. He waved to absolutely everyone when he drove through town. He called his mother Mommy well into adulthood and signed every card that way.
He died on July 26th, 2020, three days before his 38th birthday, in an ATV accident on a country road. As he was being loaded into a helicopter, he said a few words. They were these: tell mom and dad I love them.
What followed were six years of complicated grief. She was never told the full details of what happened to Matthew — people wanted to protect her, and she understood that, even as she ached to know. She was largely left out of his funeral arrangements, the particular pain of a mother who lived far away. She buried her ex-husband six months later. She flew back a year after Matthew’s death to help care for her grandsons when Erin was seriously injured in a car accident. Through all of it, she put herself in the backseat. Through all of it, she kept going.
And through all of it, she carried Bear. A stuffed Rottweiler dressed in Matthew’s t-shirt and bandana, named for the big gentle dog Matthew kept at his shop. Bear has been to Ireland and Scotland. Wherever Deborah goes, Bear goes.
Six years in, her grandsons are doing well. And for the first time, Deborah says she is giving herself permission to do her own grief work. She found this podcast two months ago, listened to over a hundred episodes, and found people who understood what she was carrying.
She found her tribe.
And she is finally ready to be in it.
Recent Comments