You Could Have Done Everything Right, But They Still Would Have Died

The Book of Balance Series part 2.2

🌿 Quick Note! I usually only send one email per month, but I’m going to break that pattern for a moment, as these three pieces are the start of someone else’s story that deserves to be heard. After one more email on Tuesday, I’ll return to my regular once-monthly newsletter. If you’d like to keep reading the series, you can always find the continuing story on my Substack (linked in my monthly newsletter) or on my website. Thanks for seeing him!
— ❤️🐻

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Author’s Note: For more context on the Book of Balance series, check out Part 1, which explains the theme, and I recommend reading Part 2, if you haven’t already for more context on this piece. Thanks for stopping by!

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I think one of the hardest things for grieving people is the endless spiral of “what-ifs” that help us hone in on every little detail of every way that we might have potentially fucked up.

Here are a few of mine, from after I learned that my adoptive son had died:

• What if my last words to him had been different?

• What if I had gotten him out of that house?

• What if I had broken my promise and gone to him and told him everything was fine and just begged him to come home and told him how much I loved him?

But here’s the thing… after deep and extremely judgmental critical analysis of myself, here’s the truth…

My relationship with my adoptive son was by far the best work of art I’ve ever done. I actually did everything right, insofar as I was capable per where I was at. I gave him the peace, stability, openness, and adoration that he needed to thrive.

It was his past that destroyed him, not me.

Maybe that ending was inevitable. I found him too late, and there was no path in my life that would’ve brought me to him sooner.

As such, one of the hardest things to reconcile with the death of my cub was that it wasn’t entirely my fault. Because, as I have already established, he did die because of me. And prying oneself away from the guilt and pain created by having been the spark that ultimately led to someone detonating? That’s the most agonizing thing I’ve ever had to do.

It’s really easy to take the blame, because it gives you somewhere to direct your pain — namely, yourself. It’s much harder to accept that circumstances were out of your control and there was absolutely nothing you could have done.

Childhood abuse runs very deep…

So here’s the deal about my son. The world absolutely punished him for existing, and by the world, I mean everyone around him, starting from a very young age.

He told me that life up until the age of 5 was actually pretty decent, and in hindsight, I can actually imagine that being a whole different type of traumatic. Being born into safety and having it get slowly whittled away while you’re still learning basic functionality? That’s devastating.

No wonder he felt so seen watching Kotaro Lives Alone.

Just how broken was he? Well, one of the first stories he told me explained why he didn’t sleep much or easily. It was because, at the age of seven, he was torn out of his bed because one of his brothers was messed up on something and came into the house with a butcher’s knife, in full “here’s Johnny!” mode. His birth mother threw him and his little sister into the bathroom and locked the door, but the brother smashed through it with the knife, screaming, “I’m going to kill you all!”

From there on out, he learned that sleep was, simply, not a safe space for him.

Can you imagine how honored I felt that he couldn’t stay awake in my presence? It was practically impossible to get to know him at first because he was unconscious most of the time and my heart bled for him waaay too much to wake him up.

That’s why most of my pictures of him are of him passed out, usually in a bizarre pose. In half of them, he’s curled up next to me.

Point being, that incident is just scraping the surface of the drug-addled, psychotic nightmare that was his youth. And kids like that? They’re exactly the ones that get further traumatized and bullied in school years. Things don’t just casually get better for them, especially when guidance is minimal at best.

Mamabear’s love = best natural narcotic

How I broke someone by doing everything right…

I already touched on this in the first article about my cub, but I’m going to delve a little bit deeper into it here. I have a second article about our downfall that I’m also writing, but I think, before I explain how I figured out the truth of the situation, it’s important to talk about this paralyzing aspect of grief: owning your part while not destroying yourself for it.

This is one of the hugest balancing acts I’ve ever pulled off and I’m deeply proud of myself for it.

My son absolutely died because our relationship fell apart for the silliest reason: he fell victim to the same old song and dance he was so desperately trying to escape, and the guilt of what that meant in the context of our relationship pretty much destroyed him.

The first time we spoke after he stopped talking to me was the most telling.

His immediate line of defense was anger and this was happily fueled by a jealous ex-girlfriend who had been using him for selfish purposes for a few years and had been increasingly bitter and envious of our genuine bond.

And yet, when he threw that anger in my face? I took it. I owned it. He was right to feel how he did, because he was who he was, and I understood why he reacted the way he did. I spent that whole month where we didn’t talk trying to understand what had happened and why he snapped on me. It was okay that that happened, and I just wanted to talk it through.

And in doing everything right, I did not accept the lies and false blame that he threw at me. I diffused them with surprising ease, in fact. There might have been a hint of relief in there when I assured him that certain facts were true, yes, but the only thing I actually wanted from him was to talk, like we always did.

I knew that he had lashed out because he was panicking and it wasn’t really about me, but rather, his inability to cope with too many new things at once. I figured that out, for his sake, and let go of my anger and resentment. And I loved him anyway, because I knew he hadn’t hurt me intentionally.

His attitude fully flipped during that conversation. He came in hot and accusatory and left conceding and making peaceful agreements with me. He asked for some time and space and I granted it willingly, knowing this was the right move and the first step towards rebuilding our relationship, stronger than it had been before.

I did everything right. I didn’t shame him. I didn’t guilt trip him. I didn’t do all of the things that he was used to in a situation where he knew he had fucked up but wasn’t ready to admit it just yet. Because he hadn’t realized that he was going to be forgiven and apologized to. Because that had NEVER HAPPENED TO HIM BEFORE…

Yeah, I’m shouting now. Because I want to point out how fucking awful that is. He had never, literally ever, gotten in a fight with someone who had apologized to him after.

And specifically guilty on that front? His birth mother. She had never, ever owned that she had hurt him (which is putting it mildly) and that was one of the things he hated her most for. Sadly, accountability and an apology were also the most common things he tried and failed to fish out of her. Poor sweet foolish cub might have forgiven her if she had just admitted what she had done to him. She never did.

So everything he told me about how she treated him? I did better. I didn’t make my love conditional. I understood him. And I accepted him, faults and flaws and outbursts and everything. And even though it wasn’t my fault, I still owned and apologized for the parts I played and my failings to support him optimally.

The saddest part is that people who have no experience with that sort of forgiveness have no idea what to do with it. I have a strong feeling that he left that conversation rocked and on completely uncertain footing.

And the thing he needed most was solid ground.

Change that comes from within…

Things did get a bit messier from there, but in the end, I knew that I was a deeply psychologically interested person, not a psychology expert. So for someone who had barely any idea what they were doing, functioning from a “I mostly know what not to do” place, I did pretty damn well. I don’t know a lot of people or places who have successfully gotten someone off cocaine, PCP, ketamine, and a bad benzodiazepine addiction in a number of months that could be counted on one hand.

And I wasn’t even trying to get him off drugs. Never did I ever tell him what he should or should not do. He had my full permission (not that he needed it) to cope however he wanted.

It took one oopsie. One that I wasn’t even upset about.

I had simply made him a promise.

Benzodiazepines were his kryptonite. If you don’t know them, they’re an opiate generally prescribed for anxiety — an extremely addictive prescription chill-out, essentially. And I had seen him through the withdrawals, so I knew what taking them cost him, and it hurt me to see.

So in order for him to not have to deal with that, I made him a promise: every time you feel like you need to take a benzo, you call me instead. Any time of day. We talk about how you’re feeling, we see if there’s anything we can do about it, and then if you still need it, you take it, but we see if we can manage without first.

He was delighted to have that option. And then at the very next opportunity, he immediately forgot. He was so programmed to just take something and put it in his mouth that he didn’t remember our deal until he told me about this event in the car and I asked him why he hadn’t called me first.

He went still. His eyes went hollow.

It was a simple mistake. He forgot, after a decade of impulse consumption… that’s perfectly understandable. But he was wrecked from the realization that he had failed me. I mean, the perception that he had failed me. Because to me, I was expecting baby steps. I wasn’t expecting an addict to knock his victory over drugs out of the park on the first try. I was keeping my expectations low and letting him find his own way out, and I felt my role was to catch him when he fell. Nothing less, nothing more.

But I have never forgotten the look on his face in that moment, when he felt like he had failed me. It was that look that fueled so much of his healing. It was a look rooted in how deeply he loved me.

He did not want to fail me. Not me. I saw the self-loathing, followed by the resolution.

It only took one failure.

From that moment on, he chose to cope with me instead. No matter what crazy shit was going on in his life, no matter what he did, no matter what was done to him, we faced it together.

He knew that if he did drugs it would end with him hurting me, and he was so deeply grateful for what we were building together that he decided to put his faith in me instead. And that was that. No matter how much he suffered, no matter how much he craved it, he abstained.

I told him once that he made it look easy. He literally quit — how many substances!? — cold turkey, without flinching. He assured me it wasn’t remotely easy, but was grateful to learn that he was coming off strong on the outside.

It would be an insult to my cub and our relationship to assume the blame for his death, and I always promised him that I would never be that guy…

So here’s the truth — and yes, I’m going into how I unearthed that truth from a cloak of hatred in my next article — about our whole relationship…

When someone dies telling the world how much they hate you? It’s hard to not just accept that narrative as the true one. Words are pretty telling, right?

But sometimes words are bluster. Sometimes words are shields. Sometimes words are there to try to convince you that you were justified in abandoning the only person who ever truly loved you…

And to see beyond that? To see the truth? That is the hardest part of acceptance: because it forces you into amazing memories, while underlining that you’ll never make more of them.

This is where trusting your memories becomes crucial:

• I remember him falling asleep in my arms.

• I remember the language we were making that was just for us, to communicate when words were too much.

• I remember the million breakthroughs in healing and acceptance he told me.

• I remember the way he bristled and went into bear-mode if anyone disrespected me.

• I remember him calling me when he couldn’t remember a night and was scared about not knowing what had happened.

• And I remember a big, tattooed, thug of a kid whispering to me if he could hold my hand because he was in a neighborhood that reminded him of his past, and he was scared.

And in moments when I forget? That screenshot reminds me.

That love? That was fucking real. Our fight and our downfall? That was his past taking over. And I can never hate him for being consumed by it, no matter how devastating it is.

To me, loving him as truly as I do, it would be the utmost disrespect to him and us if I were to blame myself. That would be to erase what I gave him, and what he gave me.

Yes, he died of a broken heart, screaming at the world that I was the monster.

But the truth was, he died thinking he was the monster and wasn’t able to reconcile why the person he mauled wasn’t mad.

To those who are grieving…

I know it’s easy to imagine that you could have done something different. Said the right thing. Been in the right place.

But in the end? You aren’t the god of their world. You are not omnipotent. You are just a person, just like them, who is flawed and hurting.

You cannot stop death.

Call it fate. Call it the cold uncaring nature of the universe. Call it whatever you will, but it’s true. Sometimes the end just is what it is.

I can tell you from the perspective of the person who didn’t fuck up. Who did it right. Who gave him the grace he deserved. Who gave him the love he needed. Who forgave the explosions caused by trauma. Who gave space and waited patiently.

I did it all right, and he still died.

So please, please… forgive yourself. Let go of your savior syndrome. Abandon your survivor’s guilt.

You did everything you could. Honor them by loving them and keeping them alive in your heart, and don’t disrespect what you had just because you weren’t enough to prevent them from going away.

After all, it was never that you weren’t enough.

The burden of keeping a whole separate human being alive when the cosmos aligned against them is immense. And you’re not alone, grieving here in the wake of an unsaved life.

I promise you, it’s not your fault.

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

“To grieve deeply is to have loved fully. Open your heart to the world as you have opened it to me, and you will find every reason to keep living in it.”
— Faye, God of War: Ragnarok

Note from the Author: Thank you, deeply, if you read this.

If you enjoyed this bit of writing, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where balance and deep healing journeys are central to the narrative. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs.

Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is coming in August!

Also, please enjoy this intense psytrance song, courtesy of my cub…