May 10, 2007 Getting Through Mother’s Day - Debra Reagan

MAY 10, 2007 – GETTING THROUGH MOTHER’S DAY:  DEBRA REAGAN.  For Debra Reagan, a Research Specialist at the University of Tennessee, being a “good mother” was always foremost in her life.  Why then had her youngest son, Clint, had so many problems?  Her question was answered when Clint received the dual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and a drug addiction.  With this diagnosis, Debra felt a hope for cure but then her life was changed forever when on August 6, 2005, Clint died, at the age of 20 from an accidental overdose and bronchial pneumonia.  Getting through that First Mother’s Day was pure agony.  Debra has written about that day in her essay, “Mother’s Day Trail Message.”  The essay can be found on www.thegriefblog.com.  Debra, her husband of 25 years, and her 2 sons live in Eastern Tennessee.
Debra Reagan:  He livened up a room just by walking into it and if he gave you a hug, you knew you had been hugged by him, but I think the trail message gave me –was the beginning of giving me permission to forgive myself. 
Debra Reagan:  That I wasn’t able to fix everything for him because we had been through a lot of turbulent times with the bipolar disorder and the drug addiction, and we’ve had some good times but we’ve had some tough times, too, and I think you know as a mom, you just, you put this burden on yourself that you’re going to fix everything for your family and particularly your children so I went through a lot of the should haves and the regrets and the guilt early on and like I said, I believe the trail message was really the beginning.  Of course, as you know and you talk on your show, it comes and goes like waves and it’s up and down so it’s not just been one straight upward line but I feel like that was one of the beginnings.
Debra Reagan:  Each day is a hard day, but I found that, Heidi mentioned earlier and I have heard it at our meetings and in other situations, heard it said before and I believe it to be very true, the anticipation of a day coming up I think is greater than once the day actually gets there.
Debra Reagan:  speaking from my own situation, that it’s more a frame of mind.  That once I began to be able to forgive myself for the self-imposed regrets of not doing everything perfectly all the time and being the perfect mother on Mother’s Day.  Someone proposed the idea that one day we might get to the point where we would see that we had received a gift from Clint’s death and of course at first I just couldn’t see that happening at all but then gradually I can see that.  I can see that one of the gifts I have received is that I have a much deeper and wider scope of relationships now with people, much deeper and like I said the span of relationships is so much wider and particularly with other mothers, we just have a real network now.
Debra Reagan:  Different people do it in different ways.  Some people, it’s just a smile.  Some people, it may just be a good morning every morning, and I learned to just – that was, I guess, one thing, too.  I learned that if I tried to focus on the negative things, maybe if somebody hadn’t done something for me or they hadn’t mentioned Clint’s name or I felt like they should do this or that, which I went there for awhile.  But it took so – it created such a negative energy and drained what little energy I had left that I found and it may have even been one of your shows that got me started on this path that I had to just accept whatever people had to offer me.
Debra Reagan:  They were giving to me what they wanted to.  I had to just accept it for what they had to offer and the more positive I started trying to look at things, the more energy then I began to grow inside – that I could feel growing inside me, and so I tried to just take more of what was offered in the way it was offered.
Debra Reagan:  I can tell that I’m going forward but then in a heartbeat I can be right back into the very depth of that heavy grief over anything and at first, that was very discouraging because I thought, I just don’t think I have the energy to pull myself back from this again, you know, and then I began to learn that even though I could go to that same depth, I didn’t have to stay there quite as long as I had been initially.
Deborah (caller):  When you’re further along than your friend, it gives you a chance to reflect back on what has worked for you and what hadn’t worked for you and so if you reach out, you end up reaching in.
Deborah (caller):  Because it is your Mother’s Day, I think you need to remember that it’s getting you through it, but also, and I think it does help to have other children because you do have to keep a certain part of it the same but yet if you can control one little part of it, you feel better and it doesn’t even have to be something that’s really big.  But one of the things that bothered me the first year in particular was that I was afraid that I was going to lose the memory.  I absolute drove myself nuts trying to remember exactly what we’ve done the year before and what I’ve realized as time goes on, the more relaxed and the more I just get out there in the world, the more memories that just come through me.  More like I’m a conduit and it feels really good and that was a real big fear that I had was that I would forget something.
Debra Reagan:  I’ve come to learn now that a lot of that, I think, was just my thinking that I’ve grown to learn that most people just feel compassion for us and that they do just want to give us a hug or if not a physical hug, just an emotional hug, and that I’m sure there might be a few people who might wonder or think about the way he died, but what also helped me a lot, I learned about the Library of Life through your show.
Debra Reagan:  Clint was so much more than just the way he died, and along with the talk earlier about the stigma and the site, the Library of Life site gave me a chance to write down my thoughts and to share our family history and the Clint we knew with folks who maybe didn’t know him as well and it helped me to put my thoughts together and so other people could see that he was more than his addiction and the bipolar and that these kids are so much more than that.  Clint has a generous heart and he was very compassionate to himself and very creative but this was just a battle that was greater than he was.