Whispers from Heaven

Dedicated to the children and the parents that grieve them
“Whispers from Heaven” took me a long time to write because it was more about a process then writing a book and getting it done. You will see as you read how my writings changed. I feel I am a better writing now then I was in my beginning writings. I have learned a lot more about how to write, just by doing it. I left my beginning writings as I wrote them because I feel I will it will be more honest to the process of grief and people will be-able to relate to my pain and if they are a grieving parent reading my book they can feel validated in their process. I saved it to the end because I wanted to have a better perspective from which to write. If I had tried to write this in the beginning it would have been filled with a lot more pain and anger and I wouldn’t have had the understanding that the passage of time would have brought me. The only words I could have written at that time would have been words like; “I just want him back! I don’t care about the bigger picture I want my son back! It would have been words coming from my flesh crying out and it would have had no way to be satisfied except to become angry. In the beginning of the grieving process it is very much a raw pain. It is gut wrenching and you feel like you cannot breath. It is the kind of pain that makes you want to crawl in a bottle of booze. It is the kind of pain that makes you stay in bed and never want to come out. It is the kind of pain that unfortunately causes some parent’s to op to end their pain and I totally understand their choice. I thought of it too! But for me when I thought of it, I would hear Ryan’s little voice say, “ No! No! Mommy you can’t do that, you always taught me how to fight for my life, now you must fight for yours.”
So as I write this dedication of course the first thought that comes to my mind is the children. Our children. For without them there would have been no need to write this book. I wish that were true, oh god I wish that were true. As I write I see our children in my head. I see them all laughing and playing. I see that great look of wonderment in their eyes as they look at the world around them. I see their characters and the wisdom they carry as if they were not children at all but old wise sages who came here to be our teachers. I think children who die young are really old souls come to teach us lessons. That’s just my opinion. This book is first dedicated to them, for they paid the ultimate price. It was, after all their lives that were cut short. I want to thank each and every child for being the blessing they were in our lives. I want to tell them, thank you for showing us the parents what true courage is. Thank you for giving us the strength to go on after your deaths. I know for me I felt Ryan there on those days when I thought I couldn’t take another breath in this world without him. Those days when it was so bad I thought I would die from the sheer pain of it. The word thank you just doesn’t seem like enough. There has to be another word to express my gratefulness to them. My next thought is of the parents that have to grieve their child. This is where this dedication becomes personal and shuts out the rest of the world. It is here where we separate ourselves from the rest of the world where grief is concerned. Those that are grieving their children will understand what I am saying. There is no grief like the grief over losing your child. Nothing comes close to this kind of grief. It is here where I reach out with all my heart and say. I understand your pain. I feel it everyday and will until the day they put me in the ground. I wrote this book for us. I wrote it with the idea that I wanted the world to have an understanding that we are lucky to still be here on earth after putting our children in the ground and that, there is no getting over this kind of grief. It is more about learning to allow grief to walk next to you so you are not walking in it. That takes a lot of time and it is only in our time and not in the world’s understanding of our timetable, that we make that choice. I wanted most of all to help them understand how so many of the things they say to us the grieving parent, are very painful. I wanted to be a voice for those of us that can’t put it to words but need to express it. My son Ryan opened up this door for me in my writing. It was through his death that brought me to such a deep level in my writing. His death gave me the freedom to write from that very raw place. It was the pain of that place and of his death that unearthed the realness and rawness in my writing. It was his gift to me, to help me survive his death. He knew I wouldn’t be able to make it unless somehow I could honor his death and not let it be in vain. He is not only my hero; he was and still is my greatest teacher. You as a grieving parent will understand what I am going to say next. When our children died apart of us died too. I know for me I feel like a whole new person. I often wonder where Liz went. I feel like a stranger in a new world. I fight for my sanity or I should say the sanity in it. It is a strange thing to describe. I know all my parts are here. I know my mind is, because it feels so confused and I know my heart is because it is broken and as far as my soul goes it feels bruised. The thing I had the hardest time with is feeling connected to this new person. As I go on and go further down the road I never wanted to go, I realize this is how it is going to be. I just need to get comfortable with this feeling. That is the hard part for us as grieving parents. This book is really about change and choices. The change happened the second our children died. The choices will happen as we process down the road back to life. It is in this writing that I can truly be myself and let down my guard. It is with you, those of us who have lost our children to death that I can be the old me again. I can return to the place that feels familiar, the place that has Ryan in it. Where I can share about him and not make anyone feel un-comfortable by doing so. This book is in total dedication to our children and to us the grieving parent who will have to find the courage and strength to go on without them.
May God bless you in your efforts to stay alive in a world without your child. This book is for you. It is for us, the grieving parent. It is a place you can come to, to see the words that could never totally describe the pain. It is a place to come to, to find validation and fellowship in a club no one wanted to join. It is the place to come to when you want to hear the language only you can understand. Most of my book was written in the first few years when the pain was what I was living on. It was that pain that helped to move from one day to the next. It was that pain, that made Ryan real to me and kept him close. I have now come to a different place and understanding of that pain. I have come to a place where I have learned how to let it go and still have Ryan close to me. I have kept the pain of losing Ryan in this book to allow us as grieving parents to keep it real and to validate each other. But the most important reason I wrote this book is this; I wanted to let others like myself see that you can survive the death of your child and not only survive the death but do it with the joy of living again. There will be many days when the wave of grief will engulf you and you feel like it is the beginning again or it feels that it just happen yesterday. I hope when you read this and the rest of my book, that you realize you are not alone. You are alone in your grief for your child yes, but you are not alone in the experience. We are in this together.