One Angry Mother

Written by craig

 After well over three decades in the mental health field, I'm rarely left speechless by the stories my clients tell me. Still, a few days ago that grieving soul in my office was radiating such an intensity of pain that my words failed me. 

She was in her forties, one of the many who came from an impoverished country to New York in hopes of providing better for her family.This is exactly what she did.

She worked hard and long, raised her boys, scrimped and saved for their college, sacrificed everything for their future. Then her job site closed and her husband left her because he didn't want to be financially responsible for the accumulating debts. It was at this point that I met her for the first time as she asked for help with the depression that had swept down as her world began collapsing.

Then, a few days ago, I got a call from the front desk telling me she was here but problems with her insurance were complicating the visit. As soon as we got somewhere more private, there was an explosion of tears, anger. loss, grief . . . The emotional heat was radiating from her with an intensity that seared one's mind to the core. Before she even said the words, I knew there was only one thing that could possibly have triggered this display.

She had lost a son.

He was back from college awhile, twenty years old and working as a security guard. On his way home, he stopped by a MacDonald's for a burger and paused to break up a fight between a couple of teenagers. Unfortunately, this particular squabble was gang-related. They followed him home, confronted him, and shot him dead by the gate to his mother's yard. 

Now, she can't stop crying. Every day, she passes by the gate where neighbors who had adored her son had left candles, pictures, flowers . . . She keeps picking these things up, trying to get rid of the reminders of the loss, but she just can't seem to stop this spontaneous outpouring of love that keeps regenerating in front of the home where she raised her now-dead child . . .

. . . and I just sat there, unable to speak, feeling the tears well up in my own eyes.

The words failed me then, because I knew that her pain would be with her until the day she died and nothing anybody said, did, thought, or prayed would ever change this one immutable fact. I have never, ever, seen a parent fully recover from the loss of a child. It just doesn't happen.

At least three other women on my caseload have also lost children to such violence. How do we stop this tragedy from playing itself out over and over and over again? In this current situation, if someone were to simply kill the shooter, then we would have two grieving mothers and the size of the problem would suddenly have doubled.

I have an idea, not one I can share yet, but what if we could get to the shooter before the violence, before the gang . . . It would have to be cheap enough to be done on a large scale, and the pain, the anger of the mothers who had lost everything would become the fuel that drove it. No one I know of has done it yet.

Oh, and it would follow the key principle of Mom Zen:

"The best solution is the one where everybody wins."