11. UNDERSTAND THE SIX NEEDS OF MOURNING

Need #3: Remember the person who died.

• To heal, parents need to actively remember the child who died and commemorate the life that was lived. (Alan D. Wolfelt, PhD, HEALING A PARENT’S GRIEVING HEART: 100 PRACTICAL IDEAS AFTER YOUR CHILD DIES, 2005)

Thursday, October 16, was Joseph’s birthday. He would have turned 34 years old. 

Joseph liked to bake blondies, butterscotch brownies. I still wear a white zippered hoodie that belonged to him, when it is chilly in the house. I still have a signed cast from one time he broke a bone in his hand. He did that a few times…punching the floor, punching a wall…and hitting a beam, punching a heavy sandbag.

I still call his bedroom “Joseph’s room”, except for the few times my grandchildren (actual and “adopted”) lived in it. I still make the bed with his comforter. I just switched it up from the blue one he used as an adult to the Harry Potter one he used as a kid. He introduced me to Harry Potter. I still have books Three through Seven. We had taken the first and second ones out of the library, so I don’t own those; although, I keep looking at used book sales hoping to pick them up. I own all of the movies related to those books – some on VHS, some on DVD. I have done a marathon, watching them when I was home sick. I bought an old TV with a built-in VHS player at Goodwill for $8.99. I have other movies and shows on VHS as well.

As I write this, I am looking at school photos of all of my kids that are hanging in my living room. For the eldest, there is a photo of her shaking hands with the Dean at her college graduation. For the middle two, there are high school graduation photos; although, they have both also graduated from community college. Number three will graduate with her Bachelors next spring; and, her daughter will graduate from high school. For Joseph there is a photo from his junior year in high school. He didn’t graduate. I was tired of going to high school, for my kids. At the end of his junior year, Joseph didn’t have enough credits to move on to his senior year. I signed him out. I was done. He aced the test for his GED. He was extremely bright. That wasn’t the problem. Last year, for the tenth anniversary of his death, I reached out to the community college he had been attending. Although he hadn’t graduated, he had enough credits to do so. I was able to reach someone who followed up for me and the college issued an honorary Associates degree for him.

One summer, as a kid, he attended a computer camp at the community college. When I went to pick him up one day, the teacher came up to me and told me that he had been teaching the kids how to program their computers to play a musical scale. Joseph wrote a program to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. 

Joseph liked cinnamon-dusted apple cider donuts from Delicious Orchards, a farm market in our area. One time, when he was living with his sister, I picked some up and dropped them off for him. I don’t go there often, but when I do, I still want to pick them up for him.