Father, Partner, Architect, Music enthousiast, Avid reader, Idiot
continueing
Two weeks have passed. I feel strange. I have no concentration whatsoever. I just pass away the days by staring at a book, a Tv or a monitor.
We do have a lot of good conversations and I have made high quality prints of two photo's of Gerard and put them in a nice frame in the livingroom.
The person that broke into Gerard's room stole everything. So there will be no material memento's. kitten stated that she did not know if it would have softened the pain. I only responded with "we will never know now".
I was so very angry about this. But then again, that was a day that everything went wrong. My bike broke down. I had a shitty conversation with one of Gerard's mentors (a dead fish has more emotions then that guy). Everytime I dared step outside it rained cats and dogs. You name, it went wrong that day.
The crying is mostly over, but the pain seems to have settled. I guess it will be something I will have to learn how to live with.
depressed, unfair
Yesterday was one of the hardest days in my life I think. I cannot remember a day being so depressed or so angry at life. It all started with a phone call telling me that somebody broke into Gerard's dorm room and stole some stuff. It is not the stuff missing allthough if the thief buys drugs from it, I hope he has the baddest OD one can imagine and I hope it will last and hurt for a long long time.
I raised Gerard till he was 9. Then fate threw me a triple double curve and I was not able anymore. He and his brothers were raised in fosterhomes. Not the fosterhomes from hell as you see in the movies (start hating hollywood again). But with loving people who had hearts big enough to take care of them. Their mother has a mental illness and was just not able to raise them.
We found eachother again three years ago and we started building up a relation again. That went slowly but steady. I had to learn that he was not 9 anymore, but a young man with his own thoughts and opinions. Imagine me having a conversation about sex with my son while I was still working on the 'he is not 9 anymore'
young people
Yesterday was the cremation of Gerard. And after that I just had no energy to write at all. After crying my eyes out during the ceremony and after (more on that below), it took all the will power I had for the two hour drive back. At home I just collapsed. There was nothing left of me it seemed.
Both kitten and I were stumped, empty, and completely shattered by grief. We were either crying together of one of us was consoling the other. Live really is so unfair.
The ceremony preceding the cremation was organised by his friends. All young people, all around 17, 18 years of age. If ever anybody says anything bad about 'the youth of nowadays' will have to answer to me. They came and stayed with him during the last hours of his life. And yesterday they gave him a farewell that I will always remember and cherish. Their music, their words, their way of life. They had used his favourite music, pictures and photo's taken with him as their clan and make a CD from it and passed those out to all people there.
After the cremation most of them did not want to be in the room with the dreaded coffee and sandwiches. It was a beatiful sunny day and we sat outside and talked about Gerard, his plans, his wild ideas, how many backfired and more importantly how many became a big success.
Those people showed me more of my Son that I could imagine. As a dad I cannot express how proud I am of Gerard and what he has accomplished as a person, a social being.
To those young people I can only say that they have made a dad proud. And if they ever read this, my house will always be open to you all. I cherish, respect and salute the proud way that you all stand in life
Believe system
An event like Gerard's death will allways bring your believe system into play. Not only with dealing with the completely unfair feeling of it. Let's face it nobody expects a 17 year old to die. But more specifically with what happens with Gerard?
With this I do not mean the body. I mean Gerard the person, the soul, the energy, the light. There are so many ways this has been described. Personally I have not found a decent word yet to describe how I see it. Soul is (for me) too related to the christianity and more specifically the roman catholic system in which I was raised. I never felt home there and for me there were too many discrepancies between the old and the new testament. The Da Vinci code from Dan Brown put a lot of my 'worries' into perspective. It was written with a lot of history (true history) as base. I checked the internet and various sources while reading it and found most information he presented there from acclaimed institutes like universities.
So Soul is out I cannot work with a word like that. The light is too fluffy for me. Again this is mainly because of all the hype we have seen in the last decade or so about people having near death experiences and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and such. Do not get me wrong. I am not saying these people are wrong (I am also not saying these people are right). For me the media hype and Hollywood have soiled the value of the word and, even worse, the value of the experience.
Which leaves energy. Which for me fits. When a person is a live we can measure the electricity going thru the brain of that person. Electricity is energy. Gerard was pronounced braindead after all the tests that could be done, were done. There was no more energy in his brain. 6 hours later his body gave up.
So what happened to the energy that was Gerard? My father died when I was Gerard's age. It shook my world and I was devestated that I could not find relief in church or in prayer. I could not find relief, period. I think I was not mature enough yet to understand that I would never find relief there. Over the years my thought processes changed and I read a lot about how other religions dealt with death. After meeting kitten and with kitten meeting other people who did not walk the normal path of life and society my believe system changed without me knowing it in my heart.
So where is the energy? I believe that we belong to the energy of the earth and the universe. We are part of that energy. And so every now and then small parts of that vast repository of energy gets split off and goes to live inside a body. During that period inside the body, the energy changes and learns. When the body stops functioning, the energy returns to that vast repository. sharing the experiences seen and learned. And after a while that energy will once again embark on that journey in a body.
Gerard is not gone. He is, once again, all around us. You can see him when you look at a tree, a flower, a cat or an insect. He is part of the soil and part of the sun. He shines at night in the moonlight.
And sometimes he will visit us.
Music again
Music has always been a very important part of my life. My taste in music (if a taste it can be called) has always been very wide ranging from classical to some heavy metal.
Gerard loved music too. Our music tastes met in some areas and we could talk for hours about it. He tended to go for the faster songs (and the pretty singers he once told me he loved destiny's child with the sound muted). Not just ramstein, although I think every self respecting boy is into ramstein. Mike (my 6 yro son from my second marriage) has two CD's too and he loves jumping up and down on the bed while listening to it. I have had to repair that bed several times already.
I took Gerard once to a BB King concert. He was 8 then. He totally went ballistic when Magic Frankie who was first starting totally going nuts on his guitar. That guy knows how to play.
At the moment Magic Frankie is playing together with Kaz Lux "I have got the blues". It is so how I feel. So maybe I should not play songs like this but at the same time it brings back memories of a boy dancing like a madman.
respect
One would expect that when a child dies, the parents, even if divorced, would show respect towards eachother.
I have been married with Gerard's mother for 8 years and our parting will never win any beauty prices. Too much had happened. It's been 12 years since we last spoke.
When we saw eachother again last tuesday in the hospital I felt nothing of the old the feelings we had, the good feelings during the beginning of the marriage or the bad ones at the end of it. She was just somebody from the past. I felt for her because of the pain of a losing a child. It was our child, there had been a time we felt enough for eachother to be married and have our children born into our household.
Picture my suprise when the letter announcing Gerard's cremation arrived this morning. She had requested to arrange the cremation and the letter as a way of dealing with the loss and the grief. Naturally I agreed. We all have our way of dealing with a loss like this.
When the letter arrived there was no mention of me at all. I was not named. My existence as person and as a father was not there at all. And strangely enough when I saw it my second reaction was that I was not suprised. My first reaction was utter sadness and pain in seeing the letter and again being forced to accept that Gerard died. I would have expected at least some respect for my feelings. Apparently I am still too trusting and naieve.
The cremation is the day after tomorrow and I only have 1 thing in mind. Say goodbye to my son. Nothing else really matters at that moment.
music
while I am writing this I am listening to triumvirat. Gerard hated that music with a vengeance. It was too 'not him'. Years ago I gave him a CD of Magic Frankie and the Blues disease he played that for years.
continue.......?
Three days ago my son died
What is there to say after a sentence like that? To tell you the truth I have no idea. All those standard words that are used to describe how one feels when this happens apply. And yet they are not enough to describe what goes on in my head. empty and completely filled is maybe the best thing to say.
I felt I needed some way to work with the grief and the pain. I cry when I can but it does not feel like it is enough. Does that sound strange? The main page of my website is changed and I think that page will stay there for a long time. Gerard was 17 it is such a crazy, unfair age to die. He was a good lad, honest, wild and full of plans and things to do.
People should die when they are 140 in their sleep or on a nice sunny day sitting on a bench in nature and they should just drift away in a sleeplike, dreamlike state that easily goes into not being there anymore.
I think I will try to use this blog to get to grips with Gerard's death. I will write here what I feel I cannot write on the other two websites as I don't feel it belongs there
I don't even know if I will make link public