Healing Grief?

I bristle when people use that word. Healing. They say it like it means I should be “all better” now, like the cut on my hand that scarred over and moves just like before. That’s not what this is. That’s not what surviving your child’s suicide looks like.

I think of a race car driver. He was winning races, dominating the track, living at full throttle. Then he slams into the wall at 180 mph. The wreckage is catastrophic. When the smoke clears, he’s alive—barely—but he’s lost both arms, both legs. He breathes through tubes, takes nutrition through tubes. The docs patch him up as best they can, but there’s no fixing what’s been destroyed.

Is he “healed”? The medical team might say yes. He’s stable. His vitals are steady. He’s surviving.

But he’ll never race again. He’ll never feel the steering wheel in his hands or work the pedals with his feet. He’ll never experience the rush of taking a curve at speed or the satisfaction of crossing the finish line first. That version of him, who lived for the track, died in the crash.

This is what I am now. I can have moments of joy, brief glimpses of something that might look like happiness to an observer. But nothing in my life is the same. The person I was before June 9th died with Caleb. What remains is someone fundamentally different, someone who can do very little of what the previous version of me could do.

There is no returning to that previous version of me. The “normies” don’t understand this. They want healing to mean restoration, a return to factory settings. They want me to race again.

But I can’t even hold the wheel.

So yes, I suppose I am “healed” in the way that broken bones eventually mend, often crooked, always weaker at the break point, never quite the same. I’m alive. I’m breathing without tubes, eating without assistance. The doctors can’t make anything better from here.

This is survival, not healing. This is learning to exist in a body and a life that will never work the way they did before. It’s accepting that some crashes are so devastating that you don’t get to be who you were before.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe acknowledging the permanence of this transformation, rather than chasing some impossible return to the starting line, is the only honest way forward. I just wish the “normies” could accept that I’m forever changed.