Finding Self Part 2: Trauma

It was Mother’s Day morning, May 11, 2014.  My husband and I were preparing for a day’s activities and the doorbell rang.  Sam was to be home any time from spending the night at a long-time friend’s house down the street. When the front door was opened, it wasn’t Sam arriving home as I thought it was going to be. Instead, it was devastation.  Sam, sixteen, was dead. 

In the days following Sam’s death, we learned Sam and two of his basketball friends took the chance of their lives. They tried what they thought was LSD or Acid and would pass quickly through their system avoiding detection from random drug testing that they were subject to as athletes. Later, I learned instead of LSD or Acid, dangerous enough, Sam was unknowingly the victim of a deadly synthetic drug called 25I-NBOMe.  Three boys took it.  Sam did not wake up.

I experienced complicated grief; running the mood race between major depressive disorder and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).  My sadness:  waking up every morning realizing my first born is gone and further heightened by his physical belongings that seemingly still remain.  My flashbacks:  random thoughts once considered joyful memories, visioning Sam’s death, recalling a lengthy visitation, funeral and my boy in a coffin, a song that held meaning playing in my car, at a store, anywhere.  There are more descriptions of the saddening despair and the physical pain of a broken heart and pandering presence to not even exist.