A Poem of Regret: That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back

A Poem Of Regret: That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back

ABOUT THIS POST: Originally Published in 2015 when I first started this blog as “My Forever Son, My Beloved Dylan: The Unwanted Effect of Living Backwards After Suicide,” this poem of regret has evolved through the years. My focus now is about dealing with the regret, longing, and guilt a parent feels after losing a child to suicide. I have been a writer, an author, and a poet nearly all my life, but it took my grieving the loss of my son over a span of several years before I could give voice to poetic form again.

To read more poems about losing a child to suicide: Find Hope Here: Poems About Losing a Child to Suicide. Guilt, regret, and longing are key emotions that make suicide grief different for parents who lose a child to suicide.

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That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back: A Poem of Regret After Losing a Child to Suicide

That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back  

Should've, would've, could've, 
If I'd only come to see, 
That might I future forward live
To see all eternity.

That I might know when and where somehow, 
And here and now then see,
To erase the dark and stay the day
To bring back you to me.

If only and what if now child,
And why couldn't I just see,
To hold you close forever
Rewind time, just you and me.

That darkness might not permeate
My heart now--and yours then,
That all of love could sweep time back
To bring back you again. 

©Beth Brown, 2021
That All of Time Could Sweep Love Back, The Agony of Guilt in Grief

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Coping with Regret After Suicide Loss

That all of love could sweep time back to bring back you again

Beth Brown, My Forever Son, That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back

Stuck in Surreal Space

In the strangest of ways, it is always June 25th, 2012. Or sometime before that.

All the way back to March 1992 and up to June 2012. I suppose to some effect, my life is lived backwards. And I am in this surreal space of not yet knowing who I am without Dylan and yet finding myself three years into this journey of being here–as is, as now.

Sometimes, I feel like a character in a book where I’m moving, breathing, responding, doing things according to a chapter, genre, and story I didn’t choose. One I would never even read, let alone choose to live in.

Losing Myself When I Lost My Son

I am no longer who I was before losing Dylan. I lost who I was when my son died by suicide. And yet at 3 years out from his memorial date, 3 years out of a grief so dark I wasn’t sure I would live to tell, I am finding slivers of what I used to do, who I used to be.

Searching for My Identity

I find this search for my identity overwhelming as the mother of a 20-year-old son who died by suicide. 18-24 year-olds search for their identity. My son should be searching for his identity. I should be advancing forward in my life, residing in a stable place where I know who and what I am.

One of the ways I am working to retrieve even a semblance of who I was is by writing poems about losing my son to suicide. I Find Hope Here: Poems of Love, Loss, and Losing a Child.

Suicide Changes Everything

How do I go on? Who am I now that I am without my son? Dylan will never age forward past 20. (19 years old plus 3 months.) Still so much a teenager. Still growing. Changing. Learning. Living.

Oh that love could sweep time back.

Dylan was a constant part of my life. I feel his absence. All of my life as I knew it has been stripped away. What do I do now? Somehow, I am still here, living forward but remembering backwards.

I Just Want My Life Back

I just want my life back. My cobalt blue and school-bus yellow painted kitchen. Pizza night where his friends would come over, play video games, and crash in the living room. Hearing Dylan play piano. Listening to his band rehearse downstairs (bi-level house) while I cooked dinner upstairs.

At 3 years out from his memorial date, I now have passages of time where I can rest easy, relax into my friends’ and family’s company, just be here now and completely in the moment. Watch a movie until the end. Read more than just a few pages of a book. Just focus on steeping Irish Breakfast tea in my dragonfly mug.

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Coping with Guilt After Suicide Loss

Reliving that Day

I say this, and yet still sometimes my days echo nothing but the reliving the day of Dylan’s death. On these days, I awaken deeply disturbed, oftentimes in tears.

I don’t want to get up on these days. I just lie there in bed, turn sideways, bury my head and face deeply into my pillow and just let the tears come. Anymore, they’re oftentimes quiet, whimpering sobs, quiet, resolved tears. Tears that reflect the cold truth that Dylan died. But tears still–and always–that pour forth the depths of my love for my son.

After 3 Years, Relief from Constant Sorrow

Thank God it isn’t always like this every day. When Dylan died by suicide 3 years ago, it was like this every day. My days were drowned in sorrow. Constant sorrow.

In the Beginning, The Agony of Acute Grief

I never found relief until falling asleep, and then I would dream about Dylan, his beautiful face, my boy through the years, seemingly normal, then the abrupt interruption mid-dream of the horrific reality that he was either (1) going to die, upon which I awaken abruptly, startled, terrified, coming to, and in a millisecond, realize Oh My God! Dylan is dead. Or (2) that Dylan is dead, in which case I awaken horrified, sleepless, sad, and desperate.

Dreaming in Nightmares

Sometimes now I have a third version of this dream: I dream Dylan is in danger. My heart quickens. Fear rises. I scream “DYLAN!” and it’s always, always too late. Dylan dies because I couldn’t save him.

Learning to Carry Ache and Love Together

But my struggle to survive my son’s suicide is lessening its grip. Suicide research shows that Suicide is Not a Choice: Surviving Your Child’s Suicide. I’ve heard in grief groups that grief is life a muscle. You don’t have the muscle to carry the heavy weight of the enormous grief of losing your child to suicide in the beginning, but as time goes on, you gain muscle to carry the weight. Time doesn’t heal grief, but time has enabled me to learn to carry both ache and love for my son.

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That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back

Memorial Date, Year 3

It is June, a perilous month for me. On June 25th, it will be 3 years since Dylan died, and for the past 2 years, I’ve not even wanted to live to see June come. How to begin to explain the heartbreak, the heart shattering, the draining of my lifeblood, bones, body, mind, my everything, in the wake of losing my only child, Dylan.

There Are No Words

Some people have said this to me, “there are no words.” They are right–there are no words, only keening, agonizing brutal tidal-wave emotional upheaval, and hellish days and nights. It’s hard to know what to say to parents who lose a child to suicide.

Still Standing

And so it is June 9th, and I am still standing. Moving, actually, moving. Staying busy. Connected. Reaching out to others. Calling friends intentionally to talk about their lives and interests, sometimes mentioning where I am. Calling a few close friends/family who have endured my acute grief and still stand by my side, knowing that while things appear “better,” more peaceful, perhaps, that this is a nightmarish month for me and that echoes of Dylan’s death are easily triggered.

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Support Groups

Tonight I am headed to a support group for bereaved parents. It took me almost three years of grieving to find them, but I discovered them last month because I was reading a library book about losing a child and The Compassionate Friends (TCF) was mentioned
by the author as a resource for bereaved parents.

Finding Support Groups: Online and In Person

In-Person Grief Group

And tonight I will take Dylan’s picture to my bereaved parents group and two huge half-sheet pans full of decadent chocolate brownies to share. I like that we do this as a way of remembering our children at the The Compassionate Friends’ meetings. And I will say a few words about my son.

You’d think this be easy, as these days, his memories of his growing-up-years come pouring forth regularly. But even when there is joy in the remembering, there is the insidious sad, sad ache of knowing everything I say about Dylan will evoke a sense of the bittersweet.

To find more support groups and resources: Help, Hope, and Healing After Suicide Loss.

Online Support Group: Parents of Suicides

The best support I have found is the online Parents of Suicides’ group. Everybody there is a parent who lost a child to suicide.

Information About the Parents of Suicides Internet Community

Parents of Suicides is an international e-mail group and part of the POS (parents of suicides) – FFOS (friends and families of suicides) Internet Community established on October 9, 1998. The group is managed and moderated by volunteers, mothers and fathers in the group who give their time and hearts to help.

The mission of POS (parents of suicide) is to offer understanding, support, information and hope to bereaved parents. (This group is exclusively for birth parents or parents who legally adopted their children.)

Send an email to Karyl Chastain Beal at arlynsmom@cs.com to ask for an application to join POS.

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Memorial Date: June 25th

And it is June, and the 25th is coming. His memorial day. A day I wish had never happened in a month I’m not sure I’ll ever sit easy with again.

I Want to Believe

I Want to Believe I can return to a normal life: I want so much to share current photos of Dylan, to talk about his having graduated from college, digital media degree in hand, his having landed a first career job. I want to share pictures of possibility, of hope, of a future, his and mine, filled with infinite dreaming and Hallmark cards clicking off the seasons, rites of passage, and years: birthdays, Christmas, celebrations, congratulations.

I want a normal life, or at least one that resembles so many others’ lives. I want to post pictures on Facebook of my son, I want to tell my friends excitedly, “Dylan’s coming home for Christmas!” I want, I ache, I need.

That All of Love Could Sweep Time Back to Bring Back You Again: A Poem of Regret

But truth be told, this is my normal now. I am Beth, Dylan’s Mom, and my son died by suicide only three months after he had turned 20 years old. My life has changed, who I am has changed, but my love for Dylan only deepens. I miss him more with each day that passes.

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Read Related Posts

https://myforeverson.com/2021/11/26/suicide-changes-everything-struggling-to-survive-grief-after-losing-my-son-to-suicide/

Self-Blame and Guilt-I Couldn’t Save My Son

I Want to Believe

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Bury My Heart: Poems About Losing A Child to Suicide

ABOUT THE BOOK: Bury My Heart: Poems About Losing Child to Suicide is a collection of poems in five sections: A Deep Sorrow; Earth, Sky, Moon, Stars; Why?; In Losing You, I Lost Me Too; and That My Love Be With You Always.

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