Read About Our Family

Support

Books/Videos

Newsletter

When A Child Dies

Why Butterflies? (Click)

We had experienced some very difficult times during our 30 years as parents, but nothing as devastating as what lay ahead of us. It never occurred to us that any of our children might die, but on March 19, 1996, Wade died in his sleep at the age of 23 (The results of the autopsy said, “cause of death unknown”). My first thought was that others might assume that we would feel relieved to not have to take care of him and deal with his outbursts any longer, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. His death left a huge hole in our family and in our lives, that will never be filled. We had all invested a great deal of ourselves into taking care of and helping Wade. We took comfort in feeling that we had done everything we could to help him . It has been a little over five years now, and we are learning to deal with the pain and the loss (it gets easier with time). We have also learned from the bereaved parents we’ve met through The Compassionate Friends, that this will never go away and we will never “get over it”. No one can really know how it feels to lose a child, unless they have experienced it themselves. In the summer of 2000, Court and I became the chapter leaders of our Compassionate Friend’s Chapter. Helping others deal with their loss has been good therapy for us.

Everyone grieves differently and we have each had to find our own way through the valley of sorrow. It's been important to give each other the space they have needed to work through the grieving process in their own way. Court still spends a lot of time at the cemetery and has read many books about grief.

I was concerned as to how Doug would react, what he was feeling and how aware he was of our feelings. A few weeks after Wade died, his doctor asked him how our family was doing. Doug told him, "Right now, there is more sadness than happiness in our home." That pretty much said it all. I couldn't have said it any better myself.

When Wade died we felt as though our hearts had been ripped out. It was the worst pain we had ever experienced. I really thought that my face would never be capable of smiling again. We were extremely thankful for our religous teaching and our faith. Even with that, I wasn't sure how we would get through this and I wondered repeatedly how people who don't have strong religous convictions to fall back on, survive losing a child (or spouse).

Court and I needed to put a headstone on Wade's grave that represented who he was how special he is to us. We found an artist who could etch anything we asked him to, on the India black stone. Wade had received a high school letterman jacket for his participation in Special Olympic's swimming. We had never taken his picture wearing the jacket (he didn't wear it often, because he wanted to keep it clean). I never occured to us that he wouldn't always be here. We took some of Wade's photos and his jacket to the artist. The picture of Wade on his headstone is the only one we have of him in his letterman jacket.

The front of Wade's headstone

The back of Wade's headstone.

We had been planning to build a new house for sometme and I threw myself into planning and designing our dream house. I was thankful to have something positive to focus my attention on.

At my request, Robin wrote a poem for the Compassionate Freinds newsletter. It expresses a lot of our feelings. Click here to read Robin's Poem