I wasn't ready to say good-bye

Grant County Journal

I Wasn’t Ready to Say Good-bye

Written by Janet Warren

June 28^th, 2012

My world changed on April 24^th.  My son, Jeffrey Alexander Meacham, age 15, ended his life with a bullet. He would have been 16 on June 22^nd.   He lived with his father in Colorado during the school year but came to Ephrata most of the summer and other school breaks.  About a year ago he decided he wanted to live with Mike and me for his junior and senior years of high school so he could do the Running Start program at Big Bend.  His father figured out a way he could do the same thing at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs, so my hopes were dashed once again.

Jeffrey was in Ephrata just three weeks before he died.  My last glimpse of him was at the Spokane Airport.  I had forgotten my purse so I couldn’t get a gate pass to wait with him until his plane boarded as I usually did.  He hugged me and told me he loved me before he ascended the ramp into security.  I watched as he shed a few tears when he thought I wasn’t looking.  I wanted to run up the ramp, take him in my arms, and beg him to stay with me.  But I’ve always wanted what was best for Jeffrey, and I thought it was his choice to stay in Colorado. 

Jeffrey had two lives that I knew about.  The first one was in Colorado Springs where he was born and remained in the family home after his father and I divorced. He was a brilliant student, taking advanced placement and honor classes.  I checked his grades the day before he died—as usual straight A and A+ work.  One of his teachers sent me his last assignment he had written for an English class.  It was an 8-page, well-thought out, well-written paper that he turned in on the morning of the day he died.  He was active in our church, faithfully attending an early-morning seminary class, even the morning of that fateful day.  He had no addictions—the toxicology report came back completely negative. 

Jeffrey’s second life was here in Ephrata.  He loved his stepfather and had a strong bond with him.  He had a special friend here, Nick Quist.  Those two would take up where they left off every time they were together.  Jeffrey could be a typical teenager in Ephrata and take a rest from his first life.  I liked to think he recharged his batteries here.

Jeffrey obviously had a third life that no one knew about.  He never spoke of it to anyone—somewhere deep inside that brilliant mind of his he lived in pain.  There is no outside reason that Jeffrey died; it is in his third life that those answers remain vaulted.  One of the things I read in a grief book has taken on special significance:  “I have since learned grief is not about answers; but learning to live with the questions.”  So many questions.

On the one-month anniversary of Jeffrey’s death, May 24^th, my close friend Pam George passed away in Colorado Springs from a massive heart attack.  She was 57 years old and didn’t even know she had the advanced heart disease the autopsy showed.  Pam was Jeffrey’s protector.  She always called me with news of Jeffrey.  She called when he gave a talk in church, or if she heard him say something to her son Spencer that she thought I should know about.  About six months ago Pam told me that she thought Jeffrey was really well-adjusted.  He seemed happy.  He loved his computer classes at school, he never missed his early-morning seminary class.  She hadn’t always felt this way, and I knew Pam always told me the truth, so I tried to get over my sadness that Jeffrey wasn’t going to come to Ephrata for his last two years of high school. 

At Jeffrey’s funeral, Pam told me in her no-nonsense way, “When I die, the first thing I am going to do is find Jeffrey and ask him ‘What in the world possessed you to end your life?”” Then she died.  And I have no doubt the first thing her spirit did was find Jeffrey.  In fact a small piece of my broken heart is comforted knowing Pam is with my son in the spirit world.  But Pam left behind a husband and four children who are suffering just as I am.  Spencer, who loved my son Jeffrey, came home to find his mother on the floor and tried to resuscitate her. He has experienced more in the last two months than any 16-year-old should have to go through. (Read The Bench Babies written by the mother of Bench Baby #3 at www.chocolatecreamcenters.blogspot.com for a beautiful story of friendship between three boys and their mothers.  It was posted April 28, you’ll have to click on Older Posts a couple of times. Spencer was Bench Baby #1, and Jeffrey was #2).

One of the most helpful stories about grief comes from a keynote speaker at a Compassionate Friends conference.  Steven Kalas writes that when you lose a child, grieving is a lifelong experience. “You don’t get over it.  Getting over it is an inappropriate goal.  An unreasonable hope.  The loss of a child changes you.  It changes your marriage.  It changes the way birds sing.  It changes the way the sun rises and sets.  You are forever different…the goal is not to get over it.  The goal is to get on with it.”  He goes on to liken profound grief to a stage play where the stagehands push a huge grand piano into the middle of the set.  The piano changes everything.  You keep bumping into it, and it blocks your ability to interact with other players.  The entire play must be rewritten around it.

“But over time, the piano is pushed to stage left.  Then to upper stage left.  You are the playwright, and slowly, surely, you begin to find the impetus and wherewithal to stop reacting to the intrusive piano.  Instead, you engage it.  Instead of writing every scene around the piano, you begin to write the piano into each scene, into the story of your life…eventually you learn to play that piano.  Your grief becomes an intimate treasure, though the spaces between the grief lengthen.  You no longer need to play the piano every day, or even every month.  But, later, when you’re 84, staring out your kitchen window on a random Tuesday morning, you welcome the sigh, the tears, the wistful pain that moves through your heart and reminds you that your child’s life mattered.  You wipe the dust off the piano and sit down to play.”

I love you Jeff.  I love you Pam.  I have a strong belief of an afterlife and look forward to the day when I will see you again which is what keeps me going.  Until then, I will try to stop bumping into that piano and learn how to play it.

Both obituaries can be viewed at dignitymemorial.com