Surviving the Death of a Child by Homicide: Dr. Richard Dew

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Surviving the Death of a Child by Homicide
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Dr. Richard Dew
July 14, 2005

G: Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Our show today is on a very difficult topic. The murder of a child. Now I’ve had a child die in an automobile accident, but I’ve never had a child murdered, but my father was Chief of Police while I was growing up in my small town and then he became United States Marshall of Utah. So I have met murderers. I’ve attended trials. One of the things I never did was follow a bereaved family, and I believe that talking to families of those who have been subjected to this most heinous crime, one of a human being taking the life of another, is a rare privilege. To hear how in the worst of circumstances it’s possible to find hope, forgiveness, and even healing. According to FBI statistics, over 18,000 people are murdered every year. The majority of the victims are male as are 90% of the offenders. When someone you love has been murdered or killed by a drunk or reckless driver or medical malpractice, it is an understatement to say that your life has been changed. My friends tell me that their anger, pain, and even desire for revenge are often deep. While my son died in minutes, as did the driver of the car, families of murdered children can be subjected to years of uncertainty and hassle with the legal system. Each of us is unique and special as are our stories, relationships, and responses to loss. Healing the Grieving Heart is about nourishing the heart and removing the blocks that slow the miracle of renewal. Have hope. My guests and I are here to tell you that the heart can heal even after the tragic death of a child, even to homicide. You may think you will never be able to function again, but you will survive, live, and even thrive. We did it and so can you. You can love, open your heart, and be happy again. Please join us on our show by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742 or emailing me at gchorsley@aol.com with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. On the show today, I’m very honored to have my very special guest, Dr. Richard Dew. Dr. Dew is a physician, poet, author of Brad. We Hardly Knew You, Rachel’s Cry, and his latest book and novel titled Tunnel of Light. Dr. Dew is from Knoxville, Tennessee, and he’s here today as Brad’s dad, to share his journey of survival after Brad’s murder. Good morning, Dr. Dew, and welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. Can I call you Richard?
B: That’ll be fine.
G: Now I understand that in 1992 your son Brad was murdered. Could you tell our listeners about him and about how he died?
R: Brad was a very outstanding kid. He had just finished his junior year at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He had been selected an all-conference linebacker and just been selected to Phi Beta Kappa. He decided to stay there and work for the summer and early in the morning of June 7 he was returning home from work. There were two young men who for reasons known only to them had decided they were going to murder the next person who came down the street. They did not know Brad. There was no previous connection. Unfortunately that next person was Brad. They chased him through the streets of Jackson taking turns shooting at him until finally he was killed instantly by a single shot. He was 21 years old.
G: And tell us, how did you find out about his death?
R: That was probably the most insensitive thing that happened during the time. 1 got a phone call from the local police department. I was on call at the hospital that night. And they said is this Dr. Dew? I said, yes, expecting it to be a call from a patient or the hospital. They said well this is the Oliver Springs Police Department. You need to call the Jackson, Mississippi, Police Department concerning a fatal accident involving Brad Dew.
G: And then you had to tell your wife.
R: Yeah. I had to tell my wife and the usual things after the death of a child.
G: Did you call her or see her?
R: She was asleep in the other room. When I’m on call so I don’t wake her up. So I got as many details as I could. This was 4:30 in the morning and so then I had to go wake her up and tell her that Brad had been killed.
G: Wow, what a thing for both of you. So could you talk a little bit more about how did things go after that? You went down and identified the body.
R: Yeah, we were fortunate in that the justice system worked fine for us. They fouled up right at first. We were told Brad was killed in a car wreck and that’s what we had told all of our friends until 4:30 that afternoon.
G: Oh, my goodness, that’s what they told you on the phone?
R: Yeah. Well, they thought he had. He had nm into a house going 80 miles an hour. He was driving his truck, yeah. So then we got a phone call that afternoon from some of his friends who had gone down to get his possessions out of his truck at the impound yard and said Dr. Dew, something’s wrong. This car is full of bullet holes. And so I called back and then they discovered, they did an autopsy and found out he actually had been shot rather than died in a car wreck. But, beyond that, the police department worked fine. They solved the crime in less than two weeks which was totally unwitnessed. And we had a real positive relationship.
G: How did they go about doing that?
R: Well, one of the people who had killed him murdered someone else six days later and had been wounded in a gunfight, really. And when they were investigating that murder, they found out that these two fellows had been bragging around town about killing my son and so that they led them to them.
G: Now thinking he died in an automobile accident and then finding out he was murdered, was there any disconnect in that for you?
R: Well, there was a disconnect once we knew he was dead. And so it did cause further problems because you immediately start wondering well, why, what happened, and we had no answers for two weeks. But I think that however your child dies, as most children die suddenly of either an accident or by suicide or by homicide, and so you kind of go on automatic pilot immediately. You’re stunned. I walked around in a daze for probably 10 days.
G: And you’re a person who had been with families who had dying children.
R: That and I was a physician in Viet Nam with the Marines and I’ve seen a lot of young men die but they weren’t my young man.
G: Isn’t that the truth. I worked as a psychiatric nursing consultant and taught at the University of Rochester and I worked with a lot of families on the surgical service and I always would say to them, well, I think I can give you some help but I don’t know exactly what you’re going through. And wow, when it happens to you.
R: It’s totally different.
G: You see yourself doing what you’ve talked about. That you can’t stop doing it.
R: But again, as I say, I was on pretty much automatic pilot for awhile there.
G: How long did it take you to go back to work?
R: I went back to work about two weeks later. I was concerned because I was preoccupied and so I had my partners review all my charts for three months really to be sure I wasn’t doing any dumb things medically. And I had a rule that I did not want my patients mentioning Brad’s name because I would break down.
G: Oh, that’s interesting. Now we talk about whether or not people should talk about the child’s name or whatever, but in some circumstances, it may be a good idea not to talk about him.
R: Oh, I loved to talk about him as soon as I got out of the office but I really could not handle people’s medical problem while I was having them console me.
G: I think one of the things that we’re going to get on a little later which I think is very interesting, the way you’ve compartmentalized to be able to deal with your own grief and give yourself that permission to do that. Can you tell us a little bit more about how the boys got arrested? Did you meet them? How did the trial go?
R: They were arrested and really never left jail after that. It took about a year to get to the trials. They were about two months apart. They were both convicted of first-degree murder. And I was being very noble. I was going to say please don’t give them the death penalty and then found out in Mississippi that first degree murder means that you come up for parole in ten years and so for the last four years, we’ve been going down every 18 months for parole hearings now.
G: How is that for you?
R: It was bad, the first one. After that it’s just something you do. And what I tell people when I’m talking to other parents whose children have been murdered is you really have to almost become slightly schizophrenic. You deal with the justice system when you have to deal with it. I call it putting it in a pigeonhole. I pigeonhole it until something comes up I have to do. I take it out. I do it and then I put it back in the pigeonhole and don’t let it dominate my whole life.
G: Is your wife able to do that?
R: Probably not as well. She doesn’t talk about it very much. But it’s much more trying on her when we have to go back for these hearings.
G: You sat through both trials.
R: Yes.
G: Did you go to all the sessions? Yes. We sat through both of them and that’s tough mainly because the defense attorneys try to make their people look as good as they can and try to find reasons for the unthinkable.
G: Now do you feel like too much focus was placed on the perpetrator and not enough on the family’s loss?
R: Not in our case. There have been cases of people I know who have had this but in our case, I thought that the district attorney, they told us everything they were going to do. And since this was such a senseless crime, you worry about is there going to be a technicality or something like that, but it did not happen here. So in our case, no, it was not a problem.
G: Now you talk about the legal system being quicksand – struggling with quicksand.
R: I think that a lot of times, for many parents it is because they get so tied up in it that they put their grief on hold and they don’t really deal with their grief. They’re so tied up. They get into the victim’s rights movement and I didn’t do that purposely because I felt like with my personality, I would become like a dog with a bone and I wouldn’t turn loose of it. And I’ve seen parents who’ve done that and five, six years later, they’re still just these very, very angry people and every injustice just makes them more angry, and I didn’t want to be like that.
G: So, they’re in jail, and you go down there what, once a year?
R: No, every 18 months.
G: There were two of them. Do you have any difference in thinking about the two? Have you ever talked to them?
R: I have talked briefly with one. The thing that bothered me most is it would have helped me more than anything if I’d have gotten just a note or at any point, I’m really sorry I did this, but to this day, we haven’t heard so much as a sorry about that.
G: I know my friend’s husband was killed by a driver and the kid finally got a hold of my friend years later and said I want to tell you I’m sorry. My lawyers would not let me do that. And he finally said I have decided to do it. I don’t care.
R: That may be the case here. I give a lot of talks and I talk to churches and the first question they always ask me, have you forgiven these people? And to the extent that I don’t ruminate on it, I don’t wish them ill, I guess maybe I have. I think probably the most honest way of saying is I don’t hate them any more.
G: Well, we’re coming up on a break now so please stay tuned to hear more from bereaved parent, Dr. Richard Dew, on how he’s dealt with the murder of his son, Brad. When we get back, Dr. Dew, I would like to just run over some of the points about the legal system, what people go through. And then I’d like to move on to talking more about how it’s been for your family and the ways that you cope with the loss of your child.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria, and my guest today is Dr. Richard Dew, whose son Brad was murdered in 1992. Dr. Dew is a physician, poet, author of Brad. We Hardly Knew You, Rachel’s Cry, and The Tunnel of Light, a story of love and loss. If you would like to join our show with comments for me or Dr. Dew, please call our toll-free number at 1-866-369-3742 or if you would like to email me, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. In order to get Richard’s books, you can go to www.dewbooks.com. Is that right Dr. Dew?
R: Yes. It’s D-e-w, a lot of people don’t know how to spell it.
G: Before break, we were discussing your son Brad’s murder and how he was driving his truck down the street, for listeners who haven’t tuned in yet, and he was shot by two guys who just went out to kill the next person they saw. Two perpetrators are in prison right now and you go yearly to make sure they stay there?
R: We go every 18 months. It sort of staggers so it winds up about once a year.
G: Because life in prison is only 10 years in Mississippi. Dr. Dew, Richard and I, have decided we don’t want to dwell too long on the legal system on this show, but I did want to read you what families go through. On the internet, there’s a Bereaved Survivors of Homicide, incorporated, and it’s put out by the Orange County Sheriff’s office and Bereaved Survivors of Homicide of the State of Florida. It just has a run down for people and what they might expect and I was amazed at the list. The apprehension and arrest of the accused, bail bonds, state attorney investigation, impact statement, deposition, arraignment, pre-trial intervention, pre-trial conference, the trial, pre-sentencing investigation, and now Rich was at the trial and now goes to the parole hearings. Quite a process, I would say. Richard, how do families get through that and how did you?
R: You just do. People say I don’t know how you survive, I don’t know what I’d do if my child was killed. Well, you don’t have any choice, you just do what has to be done.
G: Do families keep going? Will you keep going every 18 months?
R: Yeah. That’s just one of those things. In a way, I would like to stop doing that but on the other hand, it would almost seem like we were being unloyal to Brad.
G: Can you divide it up with family members or is it really necessary for the parents to be there?
R: It’s really better for the parents, it just has more impact.
G: Did they have you make an impact statement?
R: I made one at the trial and then you can make a statement to the parole board each time.
G: Did you have somebody support you when you were doing that to word it and were there people that were kind of with you?
R: We did our own. We did not ask for anyone to tell us what to say. We just wrote our own impact statements and were able to deliver those. The most helpful person in a situation like this is most of us have a victim’s rights advocate. Their job is to help you. She went to all the trials with us. She told us what was coming up and she relayed questions back and forth to the district attorney when we didn’t want to bother them. One of the things I think parents have to be careful about is not being a pest. If you are, then they just turn you off and you have no voice at all. So we worked through the victim’s rights advocate. We had a very good one. One of the people in her office, her son had been murdered shortly before so they were pretty sensitized to it.
G: And when you say, talk about being a pest and sensitized, I understand that one of the problems can be that they are so overwhelmed with crime that sometimes they become a little insensitive in the legal system.
R: And the thing I think that we have to remember is that when someone is murdered, it is not a crime against us, it’s a crime against the state. And so they are interested in getting their job done, trying to get a conviction. The same things we’re interested in but that they are overwhelmed.
G: And for them, it’s a business.
R: They just don’t have time to talk to you. It’s like many doctors who say they don’t have time to talk.
G: Could you talk to us a little bit about what you see as the points that are different about the death of children from other causes as opposed to murder because I know that in my experience there’s a huge amount of anger connected with murder.
R: I think the thing that is first and foremost is that it’s intentional~ If someone is in an auto accident which we know they happen. It hurts when it happens. There’s an illness. But in this case someone we knew nothing about decided that our child did not deserve to live and proceeded to kill him. That’s hard to incorporate into any belief system. And we think that life is sacred and this violates one of our basic premises of life. In these cases we were never with our children and we always worry. There are two things that parents worry most about in a violent death: were they frightened and did they hurt? We don’t know so we spend a lot of time replaying imaginary scenarios in our heads. I think those are the two major things that are different. And then if you get involved, the media can be a real problem sometimes because if you notice after the trial, they always want to know if you’re going to have closure.
G: As someone said closures are for bank accounts not for the ride.
R: But the media is a two-edged sword like the justice system. If you are logical and can think it out, you can use the media for your benefit too. We did that and we were very pleased with our media coverage.
G: That’s good because I think the media does get a tougher act sometimes.
R: The other things you mentioned that are different and are tough is at the trial where you hear what wonderful people the murderers were and then they somehow try to twist it around where your child deserved to die.
G: Right. And when he was just driving down the street. It’s pretty harmless.
R: Just entering the evidence. The first time I almost came unglued is when they held up his shirt with a big bloody spot on the back of it.
G: How about that two weeks when you were waiting for them to be caught?
R: I was crazy during that time. I was calling the FBI and everybody. I did a lot of silly things, I guess. It’s just I was caught up in did they catch who did this? And fortunately, it went quickly for us. One of the real hard things for some parents are one that they never get caught. They never know who did it and why.
G: And there are a fair amount of those.
R: There are. And then the other thing is when they do get caught and they get off or they get off with just a slap on the wrist. That’s hard for a lot of people. It would have been hard for me, too.
G: And also people who don’t have a body.
R: I think it would be really tough not to ever know where they are.
G: Now you must have seen some of that in Viet Nam, too.
R: Yeah. But we usually had something to ship home.
G: So those are our really difficult issues to deal with. How about the stress on your marriage?
R: It can be a real stress and I think the loss of a child just generically is. It’s not particularly that they were murdered. And I think it’s because people grieve differently. I found it easy to talk. I needed to talk. I talked to anybody who wanted to listen and a lot of people who didn’t want to listen. I just talked.
G: The interesting thing is how you did compartmentalize it. When you’re at work, you didn’t want your patients to talk about it.
R: My wife needed to be by herself for three years. She left every Thursday morning and went to a little cottage up in the Smoky Mountains and stayed until Sunday night by herself. She needed to get away by herself and do her grieving that way.
G: That’s really very sensitive of you to understand that because there are a lot of people who would think that was not functional. She wasn’t working through it.
R: It was frustrating but she needed to do it that way and as soon as I was able to get myself together within about six months, I started giving talks about what they could do to help people going through this situation.
G: I actually went to the schools and did talks about accidents and things like that and how to deal with it because you so want people to engage around it. How about rage and desire for revenge?
R: I read about that and I see a lot of it in parents whose children were murdered and just somehow that never happened to me. I tried to work up a good rage and really other than some irrational things, crawling around trying to solve the crime myself that first ten days, it was almost like I was watching myself go through all this and just observing from the outside. I have yet to really become really enraged.
G: It’s time for us to go on break and when we get back let’s start there a little bit and talk about rage for just a minute more. But we’re coming up on break and please stay tuned. I’m Dr. Gloria and my guest today is Dr. Richard Dew and our topic is surviving the death of a child by homicide. Please join our show by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742 or email me with questions or comments at gchorsley@aol.com. Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria and my guest today is Dr. Richard Dew, whose son Brad was murdered in 1992. Dr. Dew is a physician, poet, author of Brad. We Hardly Knew You, Rachel’s Cry, and his latest book and novel titled Tunnel of Light, a story of love and loss. Our topic for this show is surviving the death of a child by homicide. If you would like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. If you would like to participate in the show today, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742. You can get all of Dr. Dew’s books by going on www.dewbooks.com. Well, Richard, before we had the break, we were talking about rage and you were saying that you didn’t have any rage but I know I’ve seen a lot of rage with people who have been involved with homicide or suicide. Have you seen that?
R: Oh, yes. As I said I think I was the weird exception.
G: How about your wife?
R: I’m sure she did but she does it very quietly.
G: We were talking about relationships and marriage and you were saying she went up to the cabin and spent time and you spent time apart. How was your personal life and your sexual life at that time?
R: I think ours was like most people who have lost children for any reason. Just in talking with hundreds of parents at Compassionate Friends and groups that I talk to, there seems to be almost a universal loss of interest in sex particularly by the wife, and this can be really stressful because us guys, if you ever listen to a group of men standing around talking, they talk about sports, the weather and politics. But they don’t really have any real intimate relationships for the most part outside of their wife. And then when sexual intimacy is the one area of intimacy that they have and when that’s gone, I think there’s a general feeling that I didn’t only lose my child, I lost my wife also.
G: Also, I don’t know, I’m not a guy, but I think it’s somewhat empowering for men, too. I mean, you’ve lost power with having a child go and then as you say losing this relationship.
R: That’s the one place that I think most men feel they don’t have to put up a front. If they can just share and be a person. If you can’t do that, where do you go to have any intimacy?
G: I found that from a woman’s point view, sex is almost like your first laugh or something. It’s really a release where you actually let yourself not think about anything but sex. So it’s difficult.
R: That’s what prompted me to write the novel. I’d heard so many people with this problem and this deals with how this couple works their way through that among other problems.
G: Oh what a wonderful way to deal with this in a novel. So if people are thinking about this, they certainly want to get your novel from dewbooks.com and the Tunnel of Light is the name of it and I believe it’s about a doctor whose son is killed by a drunk-driver.
R: His daughter is killed by a drunk driver. Their only child.
G: That’s great. Could you talk a little bit about people needing to tell their story because I think that’s an important aspect of the Compassionate Friends. I know you said that you have taught there and gone there.
R: My feeling on that, for me and I think for most people. Just somehow incorporating that into your mind and your life that this has happened is too much to swallow at one bite. You have to do it a little bit at a time. I call it playing your tape. I think every time you play your tape you accept a teeny bit more of it. And I think each of us has a set number of times we have to tell our story before we can really accept the totality of it. And it takes a long time coming for a lot of people. I have a friend in our Compassionate Friends chapter. His son also was murdered. He said when Tommy was murdered that he would buttonhole people in the airport, anywhere, and tell them every detail. And it took him from 45 minutes to an hour. He says now he only tells his story when asked and can do it in three minutes.
G: Well, there are a couple of aspects of that story you’re telling me now that are great. One of them is that you are actually with another man whose child was murdered and you’re talking about it which is kind of an amazing thing.
R: He sort of took me under his wing right afterwards and one of the odd things is, what do you do when you’re both working? You go out to lunch. I didn’t like to go out to lunch because I didn’t like to cry in a restaurant. So he said fine let’s stop and get some sandwiches and we’ll go down and sit by the lake and eat. So we ate lunch by the lake quite a few times.
G: That’s a wonderful story. How would you suggest that people go about finding people to connect with? I know that one of the things that you talked about a little bit is going to these victim’s rights things all the time or being with murderers of people. I know you can go on email and people are very angry and they’re talking about the legal system and how to maneuver it and how to deal with it and the rage there. But if you want to, and on this show, I want to say one thing. People have a right to their rage and we’re not trying to tell you here that you shouldn’t have it or you should give it up or whatever. I think what we’re doing here to day is trying to talk about a different direction when you’re ready to take care of yourself.
R: You have to deal with this, no problem. But if you become so obsessed with it, then what happens instead of pigeonholing the justice system, you pigeonhole your grief and you never really move on with that. I purposely avoided all of these victim’s rights group. I never went to a meeting. I did not look at parents of murdered children. I went to Compassionate Friends. This was a group of people who were just like I was. Their children were dead and they were coping with it. I wanted to learn how they were doing that. And this is where I met Tom. Tom was a fellow whose son was killed. I met him at a Compassionate Friends meeting and I think that’s one place to hook up with people that you can talk to and you usually will find someone that pretty much is on your wave length and then you sort of go out and do things on your own with them. To me that’s the best resource you have.
G: Didn’t you tell me it was kind of amazing, too, you went to a meeting once and you said we’re not going to talk about the legal system at all and see what happens.
R: This is at the national conference where so many of the workshops had generated into just bitch sessions about the justice system. There were ten of us who got together one evening for a sharing session and we said, okay, we’re going to talk about anything but if you say one word about the courts, we’ll cut you off and there were lots of long silences for that meeting but we all did much better having done that and that’s sort of what I’ve patterned my workshops after since then. Given the fact that our children are dead or murdered, how can we go ahead and go about our healing and do our grief work ourselves?
G: Let’s talk about the next conference after our next break but right now I would love you to read a couple of your poems for us. Your poetry and creativity are so wonderful.
R: Okay, I’ll be glad to. This is odd. I’d never written a poem before Brad was killed and the first one I wrote, I was thinking about how suddenly our children die. How quickly a perfectly happy life can crumble like in seconds.
The title is “An Ordinary Day.”
It was just another day.
No one special came.
Nothing unusual happened.
The evening was the same.
Just an ordinary day.
Then the telephone rang.
From that moment on forever, everything has changed.
The other one that I usually close any talks I give with. Early on I made a decision that if some meaning was going to come from Brad’s life and basically I said I was going to live my life as a memorial to him and this poem is entitled “Memorial.” The first line is the inscription on his tombstone.
He lives on in those his life touched.
Bronze words set upon a stone sound so simple.
But imply much more.
Whatever you would have done,
Will never be.
Yet perhaps you are a kinsman of him
Who gave Johnny his first pouch of apple seeds and
Caused a continent to blossom.
Now, I plant seeds.
From the love we gave and received,
Memories of the life we shared,
Have come seeds of kindness, tolerance, and peace.
Given by you to me.
I will plant and gently tend them in the hard, rocky places.
The dry places.
And as I do, each seed I plant
Will be a remembrance of you.
G: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Lovely. Have you found that Brad’s death has changed your practice or the way you relate to people?
R: Oh, yes. I was a hard charging, Type A, perfectionist personality who sort of made everybody else be perfect and came to be known as a jerk particularly around the hospital. And the last sharp word I ever said to a nurse was on June 6, 1992. In an instant, it becomes so apparent what’s important, what’s not important, and what your priorities really are and all these things that I had been getting ulcers about for so long weren’t important. So they don’t bother me anymore.
G: And how did you do that?
R: I don’t know. It just happened. I would go in and some lab work is not on the chart. And I used to just blow a fuse. But I’d go in, the lab work is not on the chart, I would say could you get the lab work please? I don’t know what happened but it’s just after your child dies, what’s important? How important are all these minor problems we have compared to that?
G: It puts things in perspective.
R: It does. It really does.
G: It’s time for our break and if you’d like to send me an email about this show or upcoming shows, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. Please stay tuned for more comments and advice from our guest, Richard Dew, and to hear more about next week’s topic. And Dr. Dew, when we come back, Richard, I would like to bring up anything that you would like to talk about before the show closes. If we’ve missed any information. Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria. My guest today is Dr. Richard Dew, physician, poet, author of Brad. We Hardly Knew You, Rachel’s Cry, and the Tunnel of Light, a story of love and loss. Our topic on our show today is surviving the death of a child by homicide. If you would like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, my email is gchorsley@aol.com. If you would like to get Dr. Dew’s books, it is www.dewbooks.com. Well, Richard before we end this show, is there anything we haven’t covered yet that you’d like to talk about?
R: Just maybe sum up a few things for our people whose children were murdered. I tell people a lot of times that the road to healing does not lie through the courtroom, that’s just a necessary detour. I think people really need to do what has to be done with the justice system. Don’t become so obsessed with it that they ignore their own grief or healing. I have a personal thing, is try not to become a permanent fixture. A lot of people do that. If you need counseling, get counseling. The place I found most helpful was the Compassionate Friends. I went to a chapter meeting and have been going for the last 14 years. I don’t need to go now. I go now to try to pay back what I got earlier. In time, I think you’ll find that you’ll be able to focus much more on your child’s life than their death. And I think we need to find ways to honor and bring meaning to that life. I think there’s several ways you can do it. The simplest one is as I said, working with Compassionate Friends. We hear a lot about people who say and do the wrong things. They don’t do that out of meanness. They just don’t know what to say. Many people can speak. I give talks telling people this is what you need to do. This is what you don’t do. Talk to medical students, talk to nurses, talk to churches. If you can write, write books. Everybody can’t write a book but most people can talk to their local church group or their local circle of friends about what you need during this healing period. The other thing a lot of people found is just to write a journal. Don’t write it for publication, just write it for yourself. Writing down what you’re feeling a lot of times will give you a good benchmark. Come back later on and see what progress you have made. I want to impose one more poem on you if you don’t mind. This one is because when you lose a child, you just think about what you lost. But I think we need to remember what we had and given the choice, would you have your child or not have it all? I wrote a little poem called “Would you?”
To love is to risk
And with risk may come loss
Loss is full of pain
In full knowledge of this, would I want to go back and do it all over again?
That we ever had you was a gift undeserved, unexpected, and unearned
An answer to prayers for sweetness and wholeness
For which we had yearned
The time that we shared
Is the spring of my life
But I expected summer and fall
Still, if forced to choose
I’d take springtime alone
Than to never have known you at all.
G: That’s a beautiful poem. Now I want to tell our listeners if they want to experience more of Richard Dew, they can do it at the national conference in Dearborn, Michigan, next July. I assume you will probably be presenting there?
R: Most likely.
G: In order to find out more about that conference, you can go on the Compassionate Friends website and I’ll give it to you at the end of the show. Richard, I would like you to tell our listeners how it would be for them to go to a Compassionate Friends meeting. Would they have to talk? How is it for a man and how would they get there? How would that happen?
R: The best way to find out where the nearest chapter to you is just go to the Compassionate Friends website where you can locate a chapter or just call them. They’ll tell you where the nearest chapter is. Going to support group. I had referred people to them forever but I was not a support group person and then I found out, I’m not doing real well. Even for me who knew what they were all about. It was scary. But when you go, you don’t have to say a word. My wife did not say anything for the first two years we went but afterwards she would meet with a lady or two and they became friends. They would have lunch and she got a lot out of just seeing that many of the weird things she was doing, a lot of these other people were doing also. So normally what we do at a meeting, we introduce ourselves, tell what happened to our child, and then people just bring up problems that they’re having. Eventually someone is going to bring up a problem that you’re having. You’ll see how they dealt with it. You might find that you can do the same thing.
G: Do you have any rituals or special events that help you to remember Brad?
R: On Christmas Eve, we take a votive candle that bums for 12 hours and light it in the cemetery. On the day he died, we never could figure out what you do on the day your child died. We live up in the mountains and Brad used to always be on me because he said, you say you’re going to do things but then you get busy at work and don’t do them. Why don’t you do the fun things you say you want to do? And there’s a big mountain here called Mount Lecont, and we’ve been saying for 25 years we’re going to climb it. So the third year on the anniversary of his death, I said we’re going to climb the mountain. So we went up one side of the mountain and down the other. Fifteen miles.
G: You guys were in good shape.
R: The thing was you get tired enough you don’t have time to be too sad and when I got to the top I could just hear Brad saying, “way to go, Dad.” So now every year my job is to find the hardest hike in the Smoky Mountains we haven’t done and we do it.
G: Now, who does it? You and your wife?
R: Just the two of us.
G: And how about your other children. You have other children?
R: I have one son.
G: How has he dealt with it?
R: I don’t know. That’s been a real problem for us because Greg for 8 or 9 years whenever we’d mention Brad’s name, he’d say I don’t want to talk about that. He would not talk to us. Now, he will occasionally mention Brad’s name. We can talk about Brad and he doesn’t immediately change the subject but he has never talked to us in any depth at all so he’s done some counseling on his own but I really don’t know what all he’s done and he’s managed.
G: How old was he when Brad was killed?
R: He was 22. He was a year-and-a-half older than Brad.
G: Yeah, that’s interesting, because I have three daughters and one of them doesn’t talk about it.
R: I think the worst thing we can do is to try and make them talk about it because when we’re doing that, 1 don’t think it helps them. Maybe it’ll make us be more comfortable but we’re not doing it for their benefit.
G: I think that’s an important point here. Everything is not rosy glow, jolly golly, and people still don’t deal with it. Some people do, some people don’t. The important thing, I think, and the message I get from you is you’ve got to find time to take care of yourself. Pat Loder, who is the head of Compassionate Friends, made the comment that grief is a selfish activity and you’ve got to take the time.
R: At some point you do. Yes. And you don’t start trying to help everybody early on. Early on, you’ve got to take care of yourself, it was a year, year-and-a-half before I really started giving talks and started writing the poems. I put little lines down that I might want to use later but I couldn’t do anything for about a year-and-a-half except just concentrate on how do I get my head back together.
G: So now it’s been 13 years for you, right? What would you say, the first year was tough? How about the second?
R: The second year was pretty tough, but I started sleeping better and I could start looking to the future a little bit. And in about two years, I think I was pretty much back to whatever my new normal was.
G: Good point. New normal.
R: People want you to be back to normal. That’s like you used to be. That’s not ever going to happen. But I think particularly in violent and sudden deaths, it takes a lot longer. There’s a fellow named Matt who wrote a book that was excellent about this and did some good research and he found that most women just from the loss of a child, it takes about three to four years before they really get back to some good level of functioning. I know my wife, it was about six years before she really started getting her old sparkle back and laughed. But the thing I think that you need to carry on, though, is even though it takes a long time, we’re happy. We have a good life. We’re happy with it. We would like for it to have been a little different, but we have a lot of good memories. We have made as much good come out of this as we possibly could.
G: Well, thank you. That’s a wonderful note to end on. It’s time to close our show and I want to thank Dr. Richard Dew for being on the show and talking about the difficult aspects of murder of a child and the hope and renewal and we hope you will tell your friends about this show and that you will also get a copy of Dr. Dew’s book. Thank you for being on, Richard, it was an honor to have you on the show and I love knowing you.
R: It was my pleasure.
G: Please tune in again next week to hear Dr. David Daniels, clinical professor, Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University, my friend, my teacher, and author of The Essential Enneagram: A Nine-Point Personality Typing System. Dr. Daniels is a bereaved parent and he will discuss styles and how styles of grieving differ. This show is archived on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria. Please tune in again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal and support. Remember, you need not walk alone.