Firstly I’m writing off the cuff so please forgive me if I make sentence or spelling errors. This is a live look at what I’m going through right now.
My son died on Sunday, April 30, 2023 from alcoholic cirrhosis. He was only 31 and was an incredibly good person but he was an long time alcoholic. The longest he went without a drink was one month which was the month he initially went into the hospital then stayed with us for a week but then the hepatic encephalopathy started and he had to go back to the hospital where he spent his final week and a half of his life. I watched him go wishing it were me. I wanted to donate part of my liver but he didn’t have the three months of sobriety required for a transplant. Not to mention his kidneys started to suffer badly and in the end the rest of his organs failed. He didn’t want to die he said but his alcoholism fought against him getting himself better. We knew he had a problem and even confronted him about it but he said that he was “working on it” and we just took it at face value. Now of course I wish we had intervened into his life more. He lived alone in an apartment in Seattle and worked. He was a high functioning alcoholic and by the time we (and he) knew he was REALLY sick it was too late. I can’t get over sitting next to him in the hospital bed watching my boy, my sun, struggle in pain. Even with the morphine they gave to ease it. His last day I watched his yellow skin move with each breath work harder and harder, feeling helpless and then his last few gasps. I will be haunted by that playing over and over in my head when I’m in the shower, or when I wake up in the morning, or just before going to sleep, and anytime my mind wanders to that dark place. I miss him so much he was everything I wished I had been at his age. Smart, beautiful, vibrant, traveled, hard working, fun, funny. I am so grief stricken. I can’t imagine my life without my son who was the source of so much of my happiness. No matter how hard life got whenever he was near I felt as if all was good again. I was whole again. I am no longer whole and I’m not sure how long I can go on without him. When he died the hospital gave us as long as we needed with his body but I started to see the changes to his face I needed to leave because to me THAT wasn’t the man I wanted to remember and so we left. And that was it: no referrals to counselling or resources for us to figure out what to do next. This entire journey we have been the ones figuring out where to go and what to do. The grief councillors in my area are all booked up or not taking any more clients and so I’m left alone to figure out what to do next.
EDIT: I eventually found a grief councillor and have been seeing her for the last couple of years but I still find myself wanting to wake up from this and see him walk through the door.
Forever the sun: for the love of a son 
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