Writings from My First Year

This page is under construction. I have just started it today, March 13, 2001. Hopefully I will finish it in a week or so. I'm not going to post it until it's finished or at least has a good start. I recently came across a notebook where I had written some of my thoughts and feelings during that first awful year after Kelly's death. It is very, very personal and I never thought I'd share it. If you have never suffered the loss of a child you will probably think I had gone gone crazy. It is now over 14 years since Kelly died. Reading through this notebook opened old wounds. They go deep. I'm afraid of opening up myself like this in such a public way but recently something happened in my life that makes me feel I should do this. Some friends we have in town lost their 18 year old son in a car accident. Strangely he was born just over a week after Kelly. They would have been the same age. Yet she died shortly before turning 4 and he died shortly after turning 18. Both should be here going to senior proms and graduating high school and planning to go off to college. I feel his parents' pain and it has brought back so many memories. I remember the depth of my despair back then and how hopeless I felt at times. I thought if I shared some of my feelings from then and at what a low point in my life I was at, that other newly bereaved parents could see how you can get through the death of a child and can go on and truly enjoy life again someday. Now don't get me wrong. You never get over the death of your child but you do learn how to live again. Someone once told me that you can relate it to losing your arm. You learn how to go on and get by without your arm but there is never a day that you don't miss it and wish you still had it. (Oh, how us parents would gladly give up an arm for our child's life!). As soon as I get my writings typed out I will make a link to them.

UPDATE

It's August 11, 2003 and I just finished typing my diary. It took me almost 2 and a half years. Some days I would start to type it and soon found out that things I thought were long gone had just been buried and they came bubbling to the surface and I would get overwhelmed and could not continue. Sometimes the days I was writing about seemed a lifetime ago and maybe like they happened to another person and not me. Other days it felt as though they happened yesterday and the pain was so fresh and real and overpowering. Sometimes I'd struggle trying to type it for weeks at a time, stopping numerous times to cry and fall apart and grieve all over again and then months and months would go by and I'd just avoid this whole thing all together.

I also had a very tough struggle with whether or not to change or leave out some of the stuff I wrote. When I wrote this stuff it was a way for me to release some powerful feelings I had. You go through a lot of stages in grief and some of them are not very nice. Parents battle with a range of emotions and anger is a big one. There is anger turned inward that manifests itself as guilt and I had a TON of that. I blamed myself in so many ways for my daughter's death. I did not have trouble expressing this out loud to others during this time though so I don't think it was a feeling that came out that strong in my writing. Besides blaming myself I also needed to blame others. Someone must have been at fault! My child was dead and that was not suppose to happen so somebody somewhere must be to blame. Bereaved people often need to find blame or direct their anger somewhere. I did place blame in places that I didn't write about here. I blamed the first doctor for not taking it seriously enough. I blamed different doctors at South Shore and Children's Hospital. I blamed the nurse that left Kelly alone to pull her central IV line while she filling in the next nurse. That's really when Kelly started going downhill. Iblamed her kidney doctor for going on vacation in the middle of it. At times I blamed innocent family members. At the time we were told it HUS was from a summer virus. The symptoms of which her cousins had. Years later we learned it was really caused by E Coli 0157H7 which you can get from certain foods, most notably hamburger. Later on I blamed the US government for not protecting our food supply carefully enough. Obviously now I understand how irrational all that is and I don't blame anyone. (Except now that the government knows about these problems in food I would hold them accountable for things happening today. For more info and to help in this protection please visit: http://www.SafeTables.org ) Kelly's death was just lousy luck and shit happens.

In my diary I occasionally felt anger at some innocent family members for things they said or did. At first I cut all those statements out as I would never want to hurt these people. But I struggled and struggled with this idea. I finally decided that I am writing this to help other bereaved parents and that some of them will be feeling similar emotions and it is all a NORMAL part of grieving and parents need to understand this. I suffered greatly from guilt for the feelings I felt toward others and it all spiraled into making me feel even more horrible than I already felt. Hopefully my family will never stumble across this site but if they do I truly hope they know that no harm was intended and I apologize for my bad feelings and that I hope they can forgive me for thinking them. I love them all very much. I could not have gotten through that terrible period in my life if not for the overall wonderful support of my family. My sisters were usually there for me. My sister, Lorraine, in particular was a life saver. She has always been there for me my whole life and never lets me down and is the best sister a person could ever ask for. She said and did numerous wonderful helpful things to me but of course I happened to write down and remember one innocent remark that she obviously didn't even mean how I took it. I wanted to cut all these things out because they are not how I feel at all now but I'm sharing this to help the newly bereaved and feel it's important to admit I felt these things at the time. Also this diary only touches the surface of things I was feeling. Most days I was too depressed and tired to even write so long periods go by with no writing. Lots of others things happened that just didn't happen near times that I wrote. Lots of good things happened and there were many instances of people being wonderful but I didn't write about those things as I mostly used writing to help relieve my frustrations and anger and sadness.

I happened to finally complete writing this diary here after visiting my brother-in-law, Billy, in the hospital last week. He was happily living his life with his great wife, Mary and his 3 little girls when he suddeny had a seizure at work one day. It turned out he had a brain tumor and it was cancerous and he has spent the last few months fighting it for all he's worth. Bernie and I went to see him last Tuesday at Mass General Hospital in Boston. Right from the start as we drove into the parking garage I began getting flashbacks to the parking garage at Children's and looking for a parking spot in there, often having to go all the way to the roof. As we got to the ICU floor he was on and had to call the nurses' office from the visitor's lounge I was overwhelmed and barraged with thousands of memories and flashes in my head of the ICU at Children's when Kelly was there. I could picture the 3 waiting rooms they had there and all kinds of things that happened in each of them. I remembered the first night when another little boy was brought in late after being hit by a car and how I laid in the dark listening to his parents call relatives from the phone. The dad just said the boy had a bunch of internal injuries but the mom would list each and every one in detail - and there were a lot of them! I remembered standing in those rooms hearing my daughter screaming and crying down the hall and her desperate begging to me to come save her and I couldn't. I remembered the "bad" room where doctors always seemed to call in relatives to tell them bad news and our time in there with them. I remembered lying awake almost all night that last night waiting for the footsteps that would come tell me my child was dying and my false hope when they didn't come. The feelings were so strong that I literally thought I was going to explode. It's been almost 17 years and I thought the feelings were long gone yet here they were about to devour me. It terrified me and I started pinching myself hard and forcing back tears that I knew could blossum into uncontrolled crying if not crushed immediately. I managed to get under control and we were allowed to visit Billy. During Billy's visit doesn't the damn nurse start talking about all the machines around Billy and how as he gets better the machines will start disappearing. The exact words we were told all those years ago!!!!! And they did not come true. And they aren't coming true in this case either. That night and the next few days I relived a lot of those days 17 years ago. I figured since the wound was already opened that now would be a good time to finish this and I did.

Overall I would consider my life a very happy one. I have a fantastic husband who I truly love and have 3 other wonderful kids besides Kelly. While some periods of my life have been very sad and difficult I have found great happiness. I love my life. I find joy in every day (well most days! ;o) For a while after Kelly died I never thought I'd be happy again but I was wrong. I am happy. I want other bereaved parents to know this. Read my story and realize that even though life is unbearable after the death of your child that it does get better again. I takes time and hope (which I named my 4th child after - Colleen Hope Doherty). In some ways my life is better than it would have been had I not gone through this horrible tragedy because simple things mean so much to me now. I don't take most days for granted and I think I appreciate some ordinary things most people don't think twice about. Of course that does not mean I wouldn't go back and change things if I could!! Of course I would. I'd rather be ignorant but since it's too late for that then I'll make the best of it. I gladly welcome e-mail from anyone. Write to skydiver6@comcast.net

ONTO A BEREAVED MOTHER'S FIRST YEAR