The Day I Stopped Believing

My son Warren Jr. has been dead 12 years. I’m not embarrassed to say I miss him everyday. At 9 ½ months old his pancreas stopped working. At that time he was diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic and required two shots of insulin a day. As a young mother my mind scrambled trying to grab hold of what I had just been told. My ex-husband reacted in a way I never understood. He grew angry and would eventually accuse me as being the reason our son required insulin to keep him alive. Of course that was painful. It hurt to have my husband say something like that as angry as he could. My heart broke each time he said it to me. That kind of behavior was another reason I wanted to divorce him; eventually I would leave him. My ex used to beat me all the time, and being fed up, I left him with our two children. But this post isn’t about my ex nor the violent abuse I endured. This story is about surviving the death of a child.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of my son. He was a funny young man and if you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t know he was diabetic. He wasn’t over weight as a matter of fact he played basketball daily. He touched so many lives and that became evident at the funeral. It was standing room only at the church and after many years I can look back and smile at the effect he had on so many people. That made me proud. But no matter how I look at it, the day my son died was the saddest day of my life.

We had planned to go shopping that next day but that never happened. Warren Jr. died at 2:18am on April 28^th. The sun set on his life.

I try not to be the woman that talks about the death of her child all the time. As a matter of fact the only thing that has changed about me is that I lost a significant part of me. A part that used to define my personality.

I used to think it was just sadness. Sadness that lived in the hole left by my child dying. I stopped dreaming or even planning to do things.  You see my son and I had plans but that never happened. His death impacted me in such a way that I’ve become agnostic. Yeah a new word I learned today that describes my relationship with God. I have hope but I don’t believe God will make my life better. For 12 years I’ve changed jobs like I change shoes. And just today I realized why success evades me. I stopped believing when they closed the casket with my sons’ body in there. I felt like I was living an episode of The Twilight Zone. I kept thinking I was going to wake up and everything would go back to being normal.  Normal never returned, I’ve been waiting 12 years.

I’m writing this because writing has always been cathartic for me. Maybe after 12 years my life will come back to me. Maybe I’ll find happiness. I am thankful and grateful for the love of my daughter and son in law. They are the best blessing I know of. I needed to write this so I will be able to look back and say, ‘look how far you’ve come.’ Tonight I’m going to believe.  I have to or else my broken heart will kill me. I know my son wouldn’t want that. I don’t want it. I just want to be happy again; I want to believe again.