My Son Died Because of Me, And It Was Entirely Not My Fault
Part 2 of the Book of Balance series
Author’s Note: For more context on the Book of Balance series, I recommend you read Part 1, which explains the theme
I have a weird habit of living life on what my partner and I like to refer to as Nightmare Mode. In gaming terms, you often have the following:
Easy/beginner mode [occasionally preceded these days by a “story only” mode]
Medium/casual mode
Hard mode
Nightmare/Hell/[whatever, they get creative] mode
God mode [or legendary or whatever, but highest tier difficulty — a tier reserved for people whose lives are like my son’s]
So today, as the next installment of the Book of Balance series, I’m going to talk about the worst thing that ever happened to me. I’m going to delve into this, accepting my choice to live my life in Nightmare Mode.
I’m going to tell you why my adoptive son died, how it was absolutely because of me, and why it’s in no way my fault.
Trigger warning: overdose, substance abuse
Wait… what? Oh yes, this is still the Book of Balance…
I have a theme going, right?
One of the hardest parts of grief is that you have to start holding waaay too many incompatible dualities in one very small space. You have to start accepting truths that you don’t want to believe.
It’s gutting.
But the reason I sit so beautifully with my grief after a mere… it’s going to be 2 years in July since he died… is because I forced myself to find the balance between all of the polarized things I was feeling. Guilt for having failed him, anger at him for having given up, joy that he’s finally at peace, devastation that he left me…
I let go of any judgment of myself. I was going to feel whatever I felt, fair or not, because I was feeling it. And then I was gonna work through it as best as I could. I was going to understand what happened. And I was going to forgive it and keep on loving him.
It didn’t just happen passively. It was the fiercest decision I’ve ever made.
A little background on me and my son…
I met my bear cub back in November 2022 and we fell immediately in love. He was a traumatized, abused 23-year-old from a terrible home, with more drug addictions than Charlie Sheen and a temper like a wildfire. I had, in recent months, decided that I would rather find a kid who needed me than make my own, for the sake of trying something different than the norm. It’s kinda my schtick.
I challenged the universe and it decided to play ball.
From November 2022 until July 2023, I witnessed the most beautiful, magical thing that I’ll likely ever witness:
I got to see someone blossom under the power of my love.
When you love too much, what do you do with it?
For all of my life, I’ve been accused of loving too much. I’ve scared away friends and boyfriends with it. I’m somehow too dedicated, too loyal, too loving.
I didn’t know what to do with all this love. People couldn’t handle it.
Well, he could.
…sort of.
He wanted it. That was clear. He thrived under it. Our heart chakras blew open and the energy exchange between us was unreal. I would have done anything to help him thrive, anything to see him succeed with his dreams, anything within my power to heal the deep, gutting wounds in his beautiful soul.
And he validated my ability to love. Absorbed it thirstily, like someone finding water in the desert. He had never been loved before. Literally never. Not really, not truly.
All it took was an open ear and heart that would not judge him for what the world had made of him.
To see the beautiful kid inside that stiff outer shell, trying so hard to be more than what was done to him.
What a radiant beacon he was to me, listening so aptly, crawling closer and closer, like a kicked puppy adopted by a loving family, slowly coming out and showing his joy and vibrance.
He told me everything about him. Everything. Weird shit. Funny shit. Bizarre sex stories. Even more bizarre drug stories. Stuff that no normal person would ever tell their fucking mom. He told me all of it.
Including the gutting stuff. The stories that explained his temper, his rage, his fear, and his shame. The horrible indoctrination that made him reactive, paranoid, and polarized between feelings.
He told me everything, so when everything broke, I had the power to understand why.
When a heart is ruled by fear, it breaks hard…
For the better part of a year, I witnessed the closest thing I could call to a miracle. It was the power of Love, creating something pure and true and more beautiful than you can imagine.
It also created conflict.
We had both been hurt a lot. The love was there, but the trust was conflicting. We both wanted to believe, but had limited capacities to do so.
I believed he was real. I held him in my arms and felt true inner peace in a way that I would wager only mothers who have recently given birth understand. That feeling of your brain going quiet, your world shutting down, because everything you need is right here, in this moment. You are exactly where you are meant to be, doing what you need to do.
I felt that, but with a massive 24-year-old, covered in tattoos and scars, that I had known for mere weeks.
It was the first night he fell asleep in my arms.
I knew that he was worth it and my love wasn’t too much. It was exactly what someone like him needed. I felt it deep in my soul.
Sadly, he did not.
He did not know that nothing he did could have ever chased me away. He did not know that I would have stood by him through anything.
I believed. He didn’t. And so he sabotaged it.
I had to face my darkest hours full-frontal to find the truth…
As a writer, it has always been important to me to understand the human condition. Psychology explains a lot of motivations, after all, which makes for good character writing. So when I found out my cub had died, I began to explore the time before and after our fight.
Remember Nightmare Mode? In this situation, it meant delving into my memories and extracting every word of every interaction. Every word of hate, every effort to make me believe he was a monster, every attempt to chase me away… I looked them dead in the eye and asked, “What caused you?”
It wasn’t difficult to remember those conversations that disappeared when he blocked me. I was hard-wired to remembering every detail about him. Some part of me always feared that I’d lose him somehow, so I memorized every moment, just in case.
This attention to detail meant that I started to be able to see mutually traumatic moments with deep clarity.
I also developed a sort of lie detector. I knew the deeper truth of him that hid beneath the surface. He told me things he had never told anyone before. I knew the truth of his heart and who he really was under the scars and the walls and the anger. Even now, I can feel his hand guiding my choice of adjectives and emotions. He won’t let me misrepresent him or myself.
I’ve been able to tell, very clearly, when my feelings were wrong. When I was being too hard on myself, or even too hard on him. That soft balance, that understanding, was not in the polarized fears, but the subtle space in between them where reality is what it is.
To protect oneself against nothing…
I know that my cub loved me. I felt it, the open flow of energy between us, shaky and scraggly and scary as it was. I felt his heart chakra trying desperately to get in sync with mine… and failing.
When he snapped on me… it wasn’t because of something I did or said wrong, as easy as it would be to blame myself. The reality is, we were talking like we always did when we were having conflict, to which we were no stranger. We were searching for our feelings. We were finding our sync.
But that day, he didn’t want to sync up.
He was looking for a reason to be mad. Not consciously, but I see it so clearly now. He was scared. Things had been going too good for him. He wasn’t used to feeling this good for so long. He wasn’t used to healing. It was starting to be overwhelming. Too much change, too fast. He needed to breathe but didn’t know how.
So he did the only thing he knew how to do.
Protect himself.
Protect himself from the thing that was making him feel strange and different and too happy…
Protect himself from Love.
Fuck… that hurts so badly. I loved him too much? This poor kid had such a painful life that I accidentally loved him too hard? Too purely? You can break someone with love!?
I can promise you, that one’s been a tough pill to swallow. How did I love someone to death? He may as well have overdosed on love, for what happened next…
The slow and painful downfall…
For one month, he held onto his rage and used it to protect himself. Then he opened up to me and I proved to him, in that moment, that I was, in fact, real. I didn’t judge him. I just wanted to figure things out… like we always did. I disarmed every hateful thing his jealous ex accused me of, showing her true colors the moment the conflict started. I reminded him of what we had by telling him it was okay, I wasn’t mad, I just wanted to talk.
Same as always.
If only I had been the asshole he hoped I was.
From that moment on, he had to reconcile something terrible…
He just fucked me up and devastated me emotionally for a month because his trauma got triggered. Again. Only this time, it hurt the person who had helped him the most. His beloved mamabear. The only one who had ever cared for him in a world that told him he was nothing.
It’s pretty hard to come back from that guilt. I’m a guilty person. My guilt for failing him is immense. So I can only imagine how guilty he must have felt after realizing that our fight had been over absolutely nothing.
I promised to give him space to sort himself out and we parted on good terms.
Then a few days later, he unthinkingly shared some lyrics online that referred, quite negatively, to someone with my name. I had to break my promise of giving space to ask what that was all about because it hurt pretty fucking bad right after we made peace.
He was genuinely appalled and sorry. He realized that he hurt me again, without even trying this time. Just by existing.
He vanished for 10 minutes.
He came back someone else.
It was the slurred, incoherent, angry voice I recognized from earlier in our relationship, from before he gave up all those substances, though it had never been this bad…
He spiraled so hard, so fast. Could I have saved him if I had been meaner, somehow? I don’t think so. I think I did everything right. Too right.
If I had proved myself false, that my love was conditional, that would have been the proof that he was right to push me away. I would not be that. I refused to be the one who proved him right about himself. I wanted him to know that I loved him no matter what. I was his fucking mamabear and he was my cub and I would do anything for him. Including forgiving him for lashing out in fear. It was the easiest thing in the world for me to forgive.
What I could not have foreseen was that forgiveness would shatter him.
His father (the good parent) died from heroin abuse. How bad must he have felt, that he went so far to numb the pain as to cross a line he had always stayed far away from? For all the drugs in the world that he had used and abused, he didn’t shoot up.
But after hurting me, again? He ended up in rehab. For the first time in his life, he got so out of control that someone had to intervene.
Our final encounter…
In February 2023, I ended up at a rave that he was playing at. I thought he might be attending, not performing, and I was looking for a reason to bump into him.
I had been going insane. I made him mom-promises that I was actively breaking by giving him space. I was torn between my fears and promises that meant more than my life. I needed a confrontation one way or the other for my own survival.
When we eventually bumped into one another, unsurprisingly, he was hostile. Of course, I may have secretly hoped that he’d be happy to see me, but the reality was that he did not like to be surprised. He handled surprises extremely poorly, and it was particularly bad to rock the boat on a night he was performing.
I knew that body language. I’d heard those words used against others. And he had always told me exactly what he meant when he was “that guy,” so when he tried to throw the same defenses at me, the scary bear wasn’t so scary. I knew in my heart, he wouldn’t hurt me. He was hurting and afraid and protecting himself from this unexpected encounter and his inability to deal with it.
The sad reality was, I knew he’d do anything — literally anything, without care for me whatsoever — to get the situation to stop. I was the horrible reminder of the worst of him, coming at him right before he was playing as the final act of an important night.
I was ready to give up. To miserably walk away and accept that my cub was gone and that he hated me…
But my friend would not accept it.
Sometimes you need to let go of the reins and let someone else save you…
My friend, Sipsi, is a social worker who works in group homes that kids like mine lived in. He knows what their lives are like and how hopeless their futures seem. Many of them are still in grade school and already have drug problems.
He had seen our relationship and had been inspired by it. We were proof that there was hope for the kids he looked after.
He refused to accept that my cub hated me. That was absolutely not a narrative that he could live with. And he refused to leave the venue before he knew the truth.
He went, unflinching, to talk to my raging, seething, furious cub. That was possibly the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.
One of my favorite memories of our time together was of a road trip the three of us had taken to see Ember Falls, my favorite band. He and Sipsi were acquainted from that night. Sipsi had a reason to approach him. To my surprise, my kid accepted the greeting quite easily.
So they went outside for a smoke.
5 minutes passed. I was nervous.
10 minutes passed. I’m trying not to fantasize.
15 minutes passed. I’m getting a bit concerned.
20 minutes… I’m genuinely wondering if my cub had murdered Sipsi and thrown him off the pier and was now going into hiding…
Instead, they came inside.
He said everything I dreamed he would say, down to the optimal order of fixing what was wrong. Reminded me of fond times together. Told me about his recent projects. He was warm. His energy had shifted.
After 6 months of little to no contact, he promised me that he would make things right. He hugged me, twice. I had been terrified that I’d never hug him again.
It was the type of hug I taught him. A hug that meant something, every time. A hug that said, “I love you so, so much.”
I asked if he wanted me to leave, so he’d be more comfortable performing. He said, “No, stay. We’re gonna be the best band of the night and I want you to see it.”
He wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t meant it, I know.
I know.
He tried to deny it later, the liar. I know his body language. I know his energy. I saw the hunched, hunkered, angry boy burst open and turn light as air. He put on his goofy walk that he had when he was having a good drunk (he was a surprisingly lighthearted and happy drunk most of the time). His entire energy went from dark to light in the heartbeat it takes to learn that you’re still loved after having hurt someone.
So… how does this story not have a happy ending?
I can only speculate here. I can’t tell you what it’s like to experience forgiveness, after you’ve convinced yourself that you’re the worst person on earth. And I can’t tell you what it’s like to go back to a heroin den after that high, to two people you’ve traumatized with your rage and spiraling for the past 6 months.
Addicts who didn’t believe in hope anymore.
Those addicts — one of whom once encouraged our relationship because of how deeply it benefited him — also saw our relationship fall apart, and saw him fall apart by proxy. And when he was falling apart? He was not easy to handle.
They already couldn’t handle themselves. That’s why they had turned to drugs.
There was no world in which they could handle him at his most unhinged.
When he spoke to my friend, he told him that his home had become unbearable. That both of his roommates were junkies (that was only true of one of them before), and that it was a paranoid hellscape.
I don’t know what that’s like. I don’t know what it would be like to come home to that after riding the high of forgiveness all night. For that to be your atmosphere when you’re considering how to move forward on the path to redemption. I can imagine, however, that it might drain any hope you had out of your bones.
What I do know is that he was too scared to follow the road to redemption. Or too exhausted. Or both. But either way, the work that needed doing to heal and move forward was too heavy, and drugs were much, much easier.
Three days later, he shut the metaphorical door on me and never opened it again.
Drugs were easier.
So easy, that by July 2023, he took some benzos, took a nap, and never woke up.
Our greatest fear is that we were never really loved…
He once told a particularly spiritually perceptive friend of mine, in her dream, that his perception of love was so deeply damaged that he was unable to accept the path of redemption, and was only able to pursue the path of destruction as a result.
He never believed that he deserved the love I had for him. He couldn’t believe that I was real.
I could spiral over this. I could wail and rage. I could blame myself for failing him. I could hate him for giving up and hurting me and my family.
And I have done all of those things.
But throughout it all, I also refuse to let him forget how much I love him.
He was real. He was everything.
He was pure and beautiful and did not deserve what the world did to him.
He was my bear cub, I was his mamabear. Forever and always.
His fears, his anxieties, his traumas… they broke him. Not me.
His abusive, neglectful family and his shady, selfish friends… they betrayed him. Not me.
I loved him.
I loved him the way no one else ever did. And he loved me back.
The most beautiful message he ever wrote me
So I will not dishonor him by blaming myself. It was not me who beat him or mocked him every time he bid for intimacy and connection. I was the one who made him feel safe enough that he finally started sleeping for the first time in 17 years. I got his skin to clear up. I got him off drugs.
It sounds like hubris. It sounds arrogant. But it’s also fucking true. I did do all that. And I deserve to pat myself on the back for it. I deserve to revel in the truth, that I loved someone on an epic, cosmic level.
I was the one who loved him when no one else would. I was special, in that sense.
And in turn, he branded himself into my heart, lit me ablaze, and turned me into someone who believes that Love is the beginning and ending of all things.
My son died because of me, but it was not my fault. He died because he couldn’t live with what he had done. He died because he betrayed the one person who was different. He died because he still didn’t believe that he deserved such a simple thing that all of us so deeply deserve, the thing that changes us all.
He died because he didn’t have faith in Love. But his lack of faith was not because of me.
And herein lies balance…
There are many truths in this story that seem to directly contradict one another. They are inherently conflicting.
But the truth is, many seemingly incompatible things can be true at once. Finding the reasonable balance between them is the hard part.
My son did die because of me, but it was not my fault.
I cannot say, with honesty, that I played no part in my cub’s death. Chances are, if I hadn’t met him, he’d still be alive, still struggling, still in pain. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d have gone down the same way.
…only, in that version of the story, nobody loved him. Nobody taught him what the word “compassion” means (he literally told me he didn’t understand the concept). Nobody held him and gave him the peace to sleep. Nobody gave him the clarity of sobriety.
All I do know is that, for 9 or so months, we had the most beautiful relationship that completely changed my life and who I am, from the surface down to my more spiritual core. (More on that later.)
So to thank him, all I can do is keep my heart open and let him stay in it. To face the truth of our relationship, the beautiful, magical highs and the painful, vicious lows. To absorb them all as part of who I am, breathe them in, and let myself evolve into whoever and whatever I am now that he lives on only in me.
I did this. It matters. It radiates pain. It bleeds love. It was real. It is a part of me. I accept all of it, from the rawest pain to the most fiery joy…
That was Love, at its finest.
I hope to keep sharing our tales. Thanks for listening.
Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻
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!
