Four Years of Missing Our Joe

On March 6, 2022, our lives were forever changed with a phone call telling us our oldest son, Joe, and his wife, had been in a severe car accident in blizzard conditions in rural Colorado on I-70. Michelle was being transported to a local rural hospital with injuries. Joe didn’t make it. That was THE pivotal moment in my life. Afterwards, I would begin to think of my life as BEFORE the accident and AFTER. I had gone through a cancer diagnosis a few years prior to this and I had kind of done the same…before cancer and after. However, this changed us in ways I never could understand unless I had gone through it myself. Grief is not something that ever goes away. It is with you forever.

I mentally can’t handle going through how horrible it has been. How much guilt I have…not with Joe’s death, but how I am the shell of the person I once was. No one in Montana knows the bubbly person I used to be. That person died with Joe. Do I smile and laugh? Of course. But I can look at photos of myself grinning from ear to ear before the accident and see radiant joy. Pictures since then…you can see that the smile doesn’t quite meet my eyes. There is a sadness there that will never quite be gone. I feel awful for our remaining kids – as I just am exhausted with grief, and I want so badly to be a part of their lives but I know things have changed since their brother died. I am riding a fine line of trying not to be a helicopter parent to two adult kids and making sure they know how proud I am of them and how much I love them. My fear for their safety when they are travelling is pegged in the red zone…but they are adults and I have to try and step back and realize that without getting eyerolls. When you know the immense pain of losing a child, the idea of losing another is crippling. I have been told by my other grieving moms that this is normal…but it doesn’t help the feeling go away, knowing it is normal.

We went to Kansas City for the anniversary of Joe’s death. (I hate the word anniversary as it invokes something happy – put have yet to come up with a better word….commemoration maybe) We sent out texts and Facebook messages to his friends…the people we felt Joe considered family. We did this two years ago and had about 30 people. This year there were about 15 of us. None of his Army guys came as they are getting ready to deploy…God speed and my prayers are with you all! None of the fire department guys came. That was a hard one to swallow, but his guys were on shift that day and as would go in spring in the Midwest, we were under a tornado watch then warning. The folks closest to Joe were there and that was such a blessing. We met his best friend’s son, who has Joseph as his middle name. I got to hold this little man knowing that my Joe would have been over the moon to hear about, meet, and spoil rotten. I got to hug my daughter-in-law, after 10 months of not seeing her. Best of all, we got to talk about Joe freely. We swapped stories and laughed. I have told a few people that this day was a lot like walking out onto a frozen pond where someone has fallen through and you want to save them. You crawl out on your belly, distributing your weight as evenly as possible to make sure you don’t fall through as well. Having all of those people there allowed us to share our grief. It wasn’t like a huge boulder on our shoulders, but we all distributed the grief and we each had a little lighter load. It was really good.

I try to be very honest about my feelings. I have stage IV cancer and I am pretty much done beating around the bush and being polite about things. I was really disappointed in a lot of people that were close to me that did not reach out to me on this day. Several people did…and many weren’t the people I would consider family or tight friends. My child died. It is a loss that cannot even be fathomable to most people, and for that, I am immensely thankful. I wouldn’t want anyone to go through this pain. However, there are days that are really hard. The commemoration of his death is one of the biggies. If by chance you are thinking, “Cyndi, it has been 4 years. You need to get over it, ” you can unfriend me in all ways because you just don’t get it – and again, I am so happy you don’t. Most of our family members did not reach out or acknowledge the day, and that not only disappoints me, but really saddens me. Each year, it is another life lesson on who I consider a part of my tribe, and that number is small. How long will I grieve for my son? For as long as I love him…which is forever. If this was Lily or Tim, would it be the same? Absolutely. I am missing a piece of my soul that I will never get back until I die. So if you know someone who has lost a child….or a close family member, please just keep this in mind.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about this hard day, but this morning, Rich and I were called to a motor vehicle accident of a teenage boy who lost control of his car in snowy weather. Everyone was fine. The visual when the mom arrived and hugged her son close, both of them crying, was a lot to take in. Joe was in a bad car accident when he was about 17 and I was that mom. I totally got it. But then 10 years later, I was that mom who was brought to her knees by the loss of that same son. This woman this morning, went to shake my hand and thank me. I held her hand fiercely as her son sniffled in the passenger seat, visibly shaken and her eyes filled with tears. She told me that they were all just scared. I squeezed her hand and I told her I understood, that I had been there. I wanted to hug them both tight and say, “This is a second chance – please don’t waste it!” But of course I did not. I gave her and her son a smile and I said, “I am so glad he is alright,” and directed traffic on the highway so they could be on their way. The whole time I was out there on that call, I was wearing Joe’s structure gloves, They make me feel that much closer to him.

The pictures from March 6th… We stopped at Loess Hills Bird Sanctuary. We had met up with Joe and Michelle there once about the same time of year….when there were 700,000 snow geese stopping over. I remember that Joe found a snake (only Joe would find a snake), and he also finally warmed up to Tallinn, our dog, because his dogs weren’t with us. My Tallinn can be a real jerk around other dogs…nipping at their heels and ears and herding them…you know, the stuff that he is BRED to do. Joe didn’t like my dog because he was a pain in the tush around his dogs, but this was the first time Joe spent time with Tallinn as the only dog there. It meant the world to me when he told me that he could now see why I liked this dog so much. As we were driving to the restaurant, the storm clouds were gathering (again, spring in the Midwest) and there was a ray of light shining through. That has always been a sign in this mama’s heart, that her son is saying hello from heaven. Then Joe’s memorial shirt, worn by his parents and his sister, Lily…and the sign for our area in the restaurant.