I lost my Son Cody and my HAMB family needs to hear my thoughts

I'm sorry for your loss. I'm in pain just reading your words and can't imagine the feeling of losing my son (21) in such an unexpected manner. My prayers will be there for you and your family in the coming months. If it's of any comfort, God had more important work for him right now.

 

Glenn,
I'm a very sorry for the loss of your son. I am only 25 years old, but I lost my sister when I was 18. I saw how much it tore up my parents inside, and how much it still does to this day. Its hard for me to still comprehend that she is no longer here, at least in physical form. She was my best friend, my partner in crime, my inspiration, and everyone's "sunshine"! If it were not for her words of inspiration before she left this world, "No matter what happens, never give up!" I would have thrown in the towel the day she died...All I know is the best way to cope in times like these is to keep the memories and the love alive. Look at pictures, watch funny old home videos, laugh about stupid stuff you used to do..but most importantly talk about how you're feeling inside whenever you feel you're bursting at the seams. That is the only thing that will help slowly heal the wound you've just been dealt. Its hard to do but it has helped me endlessly for the past 7 years in the process of healing. Like JeffreyJames said..Build the hot rod you had planned on building, it will be the best therapy you could ask for, and I am sure your son will be right by your side through the build!~Take care my friend and my prayers and thoughts are with you and your family~Mojodaddy

 

Sorry for your loss, Just know that 1000's of people out here are sending you their love and prayers.
chuck

 

To read this thread, and all the caring that is shared. I am saddened by the loss, to all whom Cody touched in his life. If you are moved, to build a project, or even a simple task, for others...I hope you will find respite in carrying it through. His spirit will always be a part of your days and among all who knew him. Thank you for reminding us.

 

This the most eloquent, heart-wrenching post I have ever read on the HAMB. I met Glenn at the HAMB Drags and shared an all too brief conversation. I instantly picked up on his enthusiastic and sincere nature.

Glenn, words cannot describe the sheer agony you are enduring. Your courageous and inspiring post is the first of many steps in the healing process. Please believe that we ALL share your tragic loss.

 

You have all of my familys thoughts and prayers. I am so sorry it breaks my heart to hear this. We lost our 32 week old son two years ago...My heart goes out to your family...take care.

 

I too lost 2 sons and it never goes away! God Bless you and my wife and I will pray for you, thats all we have. Inspector Mopar

 

May God give you and your family the strength to make through this difficult time.

God Bless...Frank

 

May God bless you and give you strength. My heart goes out to you and your family.

 

Oh man! That is VERY sad news! My prayers go out to you and your family.

 

There aren't adequate enough words to express how I feel for you and your family right now. "Sorry" and "condolences" just don't cut it. There needs to be something stronger, something deeper.

Rest assured that you and yours will be in my thoughts and prayers.

~Will

 

Jesus. I wish there was something I could say that would help in any way. My thoughts and prayers are with you and yours.

 

I'm sorry to hear that. my condolences....

 

Glen im sorry for your losses

 

I am so sorry for your lost. We're family here on the HAMB and will support you and your family during your difficult time.
God Speed

 

I can only say I am sorry to hear about your terrible loss. Please be well and know that he will always SHINE on in your heart. Yours truly, Jaysin

 

Im very sorry for your loss. You and your family are in my thoughts & prayers.

 

sorry to hear this the gambino famliy and crew sends there condolences and prayers

 

Glenn, you and your family have all my thoughts and prayers in this time, I am so sorry for your loss. You love your son and he loves you, it is obvious in your post, and it brought a tear to my eye. God bless.

 

I'm sorry to hear about this....my condolences from my family to yours....Littleman

 

I'm so sorry for your loss, my prayers to your family.

 

Glenn,

I'm so sorry to hear of the passing of your son. My prayers are with you and your entire family. God Speed Cody.

Rocky Pirrone

 

I cannot even imagine the time you are going thru right now, My thoughts and prayers go out to you and your family.

Rudy

 

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss. My prayers are with you.

-Rich

 

I'm very sorry for your loss..........no words, lump in my throat.........sorry.

 

The whole HAMB brotherhood is here to help if we can. Just reach out.

Your letter took courage to post and reveal your breaking hearts to the world, but I think that's a good first step. Keep your family intact, and close, and weather the storm.

My son and I rarely speak, but your post made me drop him a line and tell him I love him, in spite of that which keeps us apart.

 

The biggest fear of my life. Prayers are sent to your son,you and your family. -stick

 

Here's something I read and liked that I hope will help. I apologize for the length:

What Tragedy Can Teach ("What Happy People Know", Dan Baker)

I haven’t always been able to find joy in times of sorrow. Like all sons, I should have learned more from my father than I did.

Instead, I learned to be positive and optimistic the only way that I think you can learn it- the hard way. Ironically, you can’t learn optimism when things always go right. That only teaches complacency.

Complacency is a house of cards, because if life teaches us anything, it’s that problems and loss are inevitable. Happiness isn’t the art of building a trouble-free life. It’s the art of responding well when trouble strikes.

My own heartbreak struck early. I was young and in love, a doctor of psychology on the way up, just starting a family, and feeling more or less invulnerable. Then my world fell apart.

I was having the happiest day of my life. My second son was born, and he was soft and tiny and adorable. I saw the family resemblance, and it was like discovering gold. I saw his whole life stretching ahead of him- his infancy, his toddler years, childhood, college, beyond- and it made my own life seem so much happier and more connected to the world. When I held little Ryan, he felt like love incarnate in my arms. And then the doctor said, "Something’s not right."

My feet got cold and I could feel my heart kick against my chest as the doctor began to try to stimulate Ryan’s breathing.

A little later, as Ryan wiggled fitfully in an incubator behind a thick wall of glass, the doctor told me in a tight voice that Ryan appeared to have hyaline membrane syndrome, a failure of the lung’s alveolar sacs. The hospital wasn’t equipped to deal with it, so Ryan was loaded into an ambulance to take him to the larger city of Lincoln, Nebraska.

The memory of that ambulance, red lights flashing in the black night, is burned into my brain.

We did everything we could, including praying, of course, but little Ryan died.

Because my wife was still in the hospital recovering from the C-section birth, I had to attend to the details of death by myself- looking in the Yellow Pages for a funeral home, selecting a plot that was somehow appropriate, picking out a tiny casket, and buying a headstone and trying to think of what to say on it. What can you say?

Take my word for it: Your worst memories will never fade.

I bottomed out on grief. Even now, as sick as my heart is with the loss of my dad, I know that nothing can touch the despair that tortured me then. I was inconsolable, afraid to start each day and even more afraid of the endless future, totally impotent to rescue my emotions from a feeling of sinking, sinking, sinking.

I asked God, "Why me?" and every time I seemed to get an answer, I argued against it. No, we hadn’t scheduled the delivery too early. No, it hadn’t been my fault that the small hospital couldn’t help him. No, it wasn’t genetic. No, I hadn’t done something so evil that I deserved this. I wrestled with God- but that’s a fight you never win.

Because my life continued, whether I liked it or not, I tried to piece my world back together. But as most people do- even young psychologists who are supposed to know better- I tried to find my world again by using coping mechanisms that did more harm than good. At the time, they seemed reasonable, even courageous. I’ve learned since then, though, that the coping mechanisms I was using just make the prison walls of grief and fear stronger. These days, I even have a pejorative name for these maladaptive coping mechanisms: the Dirty Ds. As I struggled to survive emotionally, I demanded that my fate be altered, even though no alteration could possibly suffice. When not enough happened, I devalued my efforts to recover, and sank deeper into helplessness. I began to demean myself and think that I somehow deserved this tragedy, through some weakness I wasn’t wise enough to recognize. Instead of trying to learn from my loss, I discarded it lessons. I saw it as pain, and nothing else. And as failure piled upon failure, I desperately doubled all of my ill-conceived efforts, thinking that if I could just dump more of my heart and soul into this agony, I’d find a way out.

It didn’t happen. The Dirty Ds will betray you every time. It’s astonishing that they’re so popular.

Then one day, when I couldn’t stand the onslaught of even one more moment of morbid thoughts, I pretended for a few seconds, or maybe a minute or two, that Ryan was still with us, and I let myself love him a I had when I’d first held him in my arms.

For that short time, the darkness lifted. The oasis of denial was comfort.

But, I wondered, was it really the denial that had done it? In my head, I knew all too well that my son was dead. So without the pretense, I again let myself focus on my love for him. And the respite from the pain returned.
Over time- a long time- I found that when I actively allowed myself to summon all my love for Ryan, I actually felt better- strange surprise- instead of worse.

I also found that I could love Ryan very much despite the fact that he would never love me back- never know me. I realized that my love for him (and not his for me) was the legacy he’d left, and that no one could ever take it away. Except for me. And I refused to let go. The love was too powerful and too sweet. It was the one thing that was greater than the pain.

Every day, through tears at first, I set aside time to let myself rest in the tranquility of my love for my little boy. Gradually, the love I experienced began to grace me with more than just a vacation from pain. It also gave me the emotional power to forgive, and to stop torturing myself with the question, Why me? In an emotional holocaust like this, you can blame anybody and everybody- the doctors who should have known more, the ambulance driver who could have driven faster, the taxpayers who refused to build a bigger hospital. Myself. Fate. God.

But I forgave. I let go of my somehow comforting companionship with anger.

When I did this, I discovered that my anger was mostly just a substitute emotion for a much deeper pain that was even harder to handle. The deeper pain was fear- fear of having to live out the rest of my tarnished life with my son gone, and with fate and God against me.

The more I forgave, the more I came to my senses and realized that even though Ryan was gone, neither God nor anyone else had ever been against me, and that my fate was far from sealed.

The forgiveness blessed me with inner security and gave me an unexpected sense of personal power. I began to stop feeling as if my emotions depended mostly upon the actions of others and upon destiny itself. Life could batter me, but it couldn’t make me hate anyone- not even myself.

I slowly gained strength, as one might after a battle with a terrible disease, and I became more able to reach out and help other people- my grieving family, my clients, my friends- and I got another shock. Giving of myself, even when I still felt I had to hoard my strength, brought in more vitality than it gave out. The more I emptied myself of my energy and my love for others, the more I felt myself begin to fill up again with life and hope.

There was more of the world outside of me, I found, than in.
And then one ordinary morning, with no fanfare, as is so often the case when real change occurs, I knew that there was new knowledge in me. It was the kind of liberating, no-illusions knowledge that only suffering can bring. I knew that my love for Ryan was mine forever, locked into my heart, immortal. I knew that no event could ever again devastate me so completely. I knew that life was precious and ephemeral, and that from here on, I would treasure my first son, Brett, even more than I had before. And I learned that if I focused on giving love to Ryan, my family, my friends, and my clients, I could be whole in my soul once more.

These lessons were of tremendous value to me. But I knew, even on that first morning, that I could never have learned them without suffering.

So on that otherwise ordinary day, I became an optimist. I learned what optimism really is: It’s knowing that the more painful the event, the more profound the lesson.

There are so many lessons in this life that we just don’t want to learn- lessons about how dangerous life can be and how vulnerable we all are. You can’t just tell someone these things and expect him to become wise. Wisdom only comes the hard way. But when it comes, it can keep you from suffering even greater tragedies in the future, including the greatest tragedy of all, which is to waltz through life unaware, unconnected, and unfulfilled.

I had learned that no event, no matter how painful or destructive, is all bad.

I had learned optimism.

It was time for me to try to teach it.

****
Thanks,
Kurt

 

I have a one month old son. He's only been around for a short time and I have an incredible amount of love for him. I cannot comprehend multiplying those feelings over a 25 year period. Stay strong. Our prayers are with you.

 

I'm so sorry to hear this.
God grants strength to those who seek it.
May your son rest in peace.