Stumbling Through Grief: A Personal Journey

By Laurie J Lagemann

I WROTE THESE PAGES of stories, poems, and journal entries
over a two-and-a-half-year period after my son died from a
pulmonary embolism, just hours prior to his release to home from the
hospital. The different shifts of topics represent the different stages of
my life experience, along with other poems and journal entries from his
friends and family that are unedited to represent their own expressions of
grief regarding my son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483654041

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Laurie J Lagemann, MS.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013910925

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4836-5406-5

                Softcover        978-1-4836-5405-8

                eBook              978-1-4836-5404-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/06/2014

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

A Guided Tour

Chapter 2

Writings to, from, and about Erik

Chapter 3

Poems from Grief’s Inspiration

Chapter 4

Some Journal Entries to Erik

Chapter 5

Erik’s Life Left-Behinds:

His True Nature

Chapter 6

Erik’s Heroic Struggles

Chapter 7

The Medium

Chapter 8

An Ending Note to Everyone

DEDICATION

TO MY SON, ERIK MARTIN HILDEBRAND

JUNE 6, 1990-MAY 7, 2010

A Mother’s Prayer

Please help me to find the way to reveal

Some tangible sense that you’re with me to heal.

Namaste, my sweet,

Mom

CHAPTER 1

A Guided Tour

A Guided Tour

I WROTE THESE PAGES of stories, poems, and journal entries over a two-and-a-half-year period after my son died from a pulmonary embolism, just hours prior to his release to home from the hospital. The different shifts of topics represent the different stages of my life experience, along with other poems and journal entries from his friends and family that are unedited to represent their own expressions of grief regarding my son.

Northwest Medical Center of Tucson, Arizona, is jointly responsible—as is Cottonwood Treatment Center—for his untimely death after just nineteen years of living. But that is not what this book is about. I simply mentioned it because it helps me to know that, despite their negligence, it is clear to me now that it was his time to leave, as I will share at the end of the book.

I thought I would die. The pain was so unbearable when I saw his lifeless body from the doorway. Then I held him, begging him to come back into his body after the hospital staff had pronounced the time of death.

I had been witness to the staff attempting to revive him for several minutes when they asked me to leave to an area forty feet down the hall, to keep me from emoting in front of the other patients.

Erik died not twelve minutes later. It was made known to me then that a new experimental drug had just been administered, but would have taken another fifteen minutes to have an effect. I screamed at the doctor on call, Why did you wait so long?!? You haven’t gotten a heartbeat in fourteen minutes, and you are just now administering, through IV, a drug that could have helped earlier?

It is what it is, however, and he didn’t come back into his body as I could feel his still-warm body turn cold.

It simply was his time. I have come to understand this after much grieving and searching for answers. It doesn’t take away the pain, but it makes my living bearable in honor of his memory.

There is never a day that I don’t think of him and say Hey you, whatup? at his doorway. Then I tell him I love him as if he were in the room. It makes me feel connected to him somehow.

I tear up just a bit and then think of all the silly, loving moments we have spent together, and the tears abate quicker as time goes on.

When we travel through this life with some sort of profound grief (such as mine), it is as though we must travel through a fog of going through the motions of life without a way to come through. We (I) have come to the understanding that life and death are but partners of the lifespan we travel.

I have come to see that death just is, and no one is responsible for the leaving of a soul from this plane—no matter how we struggle with the why or think somehow we, or someone else, caused it.

I have simply come to an epiphany that death is and was destined to be, and yet the love and the power of memories are essential to recovering in our lives. Love is all that’s left to succor those of us left behind by a loved one, and not what could have been, then, only then, can we begin to heal. My experience has been that when we surrender to what we can accept, remember the one who is