The Brokenhearted Boy

June 25, 2025
   I have been going through some very deep healing.  My heart stopped beating, I was revived in the ER and my subsequent recovery time has brought up many unexpected layers of the body-mind-emotional connections and interplay.  Most people don't know that my mother, a very dear and loved-by-all woman, died suddenly from a heart failure when she was only in her early 40's.  This was an extremely hard thing on me, as an 8 year old boy, who was so in love with my mom at the time. She was the "Sun" that I revolved around. Her sudden and drastic

 disappearance was overwhelming and that overwhelm took me a long time to get over and regain some semblance of normalcy.  Today,  I thought all the pain, anguish and grief I had gone through was long over...but as I have been healing my own physical heart... my "emotional heart", the core and center of my emotional body or energy field, has come knocking and asking for its own special, unique and mysterious, unpredictable type of healing.  

Here is a short essay that is my first faltering steps to venture into this deeper layer of myself and my personal healing journey.   I wrote it just a few hours ago, right after waking.                                                    
 
I’ve heard that my mom and dad were trying to have kids and not having an easy time.  I think my mom had a miscarriage and was really feeling distraught and then I came along as a very welcomed surprise.  I was her first born and her baby boy.  No wonder I felt so loved and had such a close relationship with my mom.  I remember feeling like she was such a wonderful person and I was so proud to have her as my mom.  It seemed that everyone else felt the same way about her.  She was just loved and adored by everybody.  
I loved my Dad too and I was proud of him and happy to have him as my dad.  But there was a definite difference between how I felt about him and how I felt about my mom.  I simply felt closer and more connected to my mom.   She was much more loving and kind to me and we had a different, deeper kind of bond.   She would stand up for me and protect me when my dad would lose his temper and get mad at me. He could get so mad he would seem scary and dangerous.  I was scared of my Dad.  He was fine most of the time, but on some kind of regular basis he would just get taken over by his anger and often it got blamed on me and aimed at me.  I remember several times in particular of my mom literally coming to my physical defense when my dad was raging at me.  
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I remember going place with my mom.  I don’t  remember her driving but we would take the city bus and go places in town.   I remember my mom being in the kitchen a lot and making me sandwiches, with baloney and white bread. She cooked good stuff too but I remember those sandwiches, with fried baloney.  I remember the softness of her voice and lots of hugs and encouragement and praise from her. 
These last few days since I have been at home, recovering,  I have been waking up in the morning and noticing how heavy and weighed down I feel. I'm still waking up feeling like "I've been run over by a truck".   Today,  I remembered feeling that feeling a long time ago.  
It was very much how I felt during the horrible days and weeks right after my mom died.   

She died when I was 8 years old.  Suddenly and unexpectedly.   We were all happy and going out to dinner.  My Dad got in the car in the driver’s seat.  Me and my sister Becky were already in the back seat.  It was a very fun and exciting thing because we didn’t go out to eat at restaurants very often.  My mom was the last to get in the car and when she did, she slid into the passenger side of the front bench seat (this was before bucket seats) she slid over toward my Dad and said his name: “Oh, Roy.”  Then she slumped against him.  She had passed out.  My dad was panicky.  He was sliding her out of the car and yelling at me: “Steve, go get some help! Go get the neighbors!”  
I bolted out of the car and ran to the next door neighbors, our closest friends, the Parker family.  I dashed in their front door and they were all sitting right there in their living room, watching the TV.  I screamed “Sunny fainted and my dad needs some help!”.   
They all jumped up at once and the next thing I know we were all in the driveway of my house.  My dad had taken my mom into the side door of the house and laid her on the bed in the extra bedroom.   He was screaming at Mrs. Parker to “Keep the kids out there!”  I wanted to go into the house to see my mom but Mrs Parker grabbed me and held on to me tight.  Seems like the ambulance arrived pretty quickly because I don’t remember being out there very long.  I saw them carrying my mom out to the ambulance and she had a strange pale blueish color in her face.  My Dad got in the ambulance with her and they took off.  And that was the last time I saw my mom.  
It seemed like a swirling mish mash for several days after that.  Somehow I was taken to my cousins house on the other side of town.  I guess Becky was too.  I don’t remember how I got there or how long I was there.  I remember then being at my Aunt Grace's house.  I am not sure how or when I got there.  It had been at least 3 days since mom had ‘fainted’ and everyone was being hush hush.  I only heard muted mumblings and whispers behind my back.

Then my Dad finally appeared and did what I know must have been very hard for him.  He was changed.  The wind was out of his sails.  He was no doubt in a storm of grief and confusion himself.   He took me out into the backyard so it would just be the tow of us together. He told me that “mom had gone to heaven to be with the angels”. 

I don’t remember what I said.  I think I just went silent.  I think I was trying to not make it any harder than it was on him. I wish I could recall more details.  I only remember the feeling of being empty and hollow, like I had cracked and split open and my insides just drained out of me.   Everything fell to the ground.  Nothing made any sense.  
How could my mom be gone? Forever?  How could it be that  I would never see her again?  That  didn’t seem real. Everything had gone into a surreal, un-processable, unbelievable, unacceptable, incomprehensible state of confusion.   
I felt as though some kind of horrific tsunami or tornado had blown through my world and destroyed everything, but somehow left me standing.   
People would talk to me, but I had nothing to say.  I would hear myself mouthing something polite but I wasn’t even really there.   I was walking around in a bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from.  The nightmare kept going on and on and on.   
I remember going back to school and all the other kids just kind of made a wide circle around me.  No one knew what to say or how to interact with me.   I would overhear among them: “His mom died”.  Followed by the feeling that none of them had any idea how to even imagine such a thing.  It seemed to be inconceivable to them and to me.  I became an anomaly. 

Night time was the worst.   I would get into bed and how could I think about anything else?  After a short while I would begin weeping.  I would cry and cry... and I couldn’t stop crying.  My dad would come in to console me but he never stayed very long.  I think it was so painful for him too.  Every time I would cry, I am sure it just ripped open the wound he was dealing with.   

I don’t remember how or what was going on with my sister during this time.  She was only 3 years old.  She may have been staying with one of my aunts.  I don’t even know.  I was so wiped out and disoriented.   

How nice it would have been if I had had an adult who knew how to talk to me and help me back then.  But it seemed like all the adults around me were also going through a similar kind of shock and devastation. 
  
That’s what it felt like.  Devastation.  Life as I knew it was over and would never be the same.
All that was left was just to survive. To keep facing one painful day after the next. 
I would cry myself to sleep every night.  Then wake up in the middle of the night, waking up from a dreamworld that seemed more normal and at peace than the “real world” and I would wake up from the dream and then have the crushing realization that “Oh, God…I am back in this world…my mom died… how can I make this all stop?  There was no more joy or happiness, just pain and hurt.   I don’t even want to be here anymore.   Why would God take my mother from me when she was so young?
Noting felt good or made any sense.  I got used to having a knot in my stomach all the time and always feeling so, so heavy, like I had a giant ton of bricks laid upon my shoulders. 

So here I am feeling some very similar feelings again.  Have these feelings been there all along, just covered over with some dirt I kicked on top of them? 
 
IF I could go back in time, as the adult I am now, and speak to that very hurt, very confused, very disoriented little boy of 8 years old- what would I say to him?
Son- I am so so sorry about your mom leaving so suddenly.  She didn’t have time to talk to you and tell you anything.  She didn’t have a chance to prepare you and say any final words of goodbye.... nothing.  Just poof, gone.   And no one around you was at all prepared for this.  It shocked everyone to their core.  Everyone is stunned and almost muted by the magnitude of this emotional and psychological earthquake.  Its left everyone you know in a state of stupor and suspended animation.  So you have no one to turn to…no one to rely on for clarity and strength.   
There ARE some ways out of this- They all require you to believe in yourself and your own worth.  You are called to find a sense of value and meaning in yourself without any reliance or reference to your mom.  I know she has been your bright and shining star and your guiding light since you were born.  But the unavoidable fact is, now she has gone. We can’t and don’t really need to know exactly where she has gone or exactly why she left the way she did.  Your mind wants to figure that out, but it can’t.  That is information we may get one day, but not now.  Not anytime soon.  Right now all that we know for sure is that you are still here and so what is the best choice of how to move forward from here?   
The old familiar reality of having your mom ever present… that reality is gone.  It won’t be coming back.  But how much of the good feelings you had in that reality are still possible here and now, just coming from within you.  How much were you the source of your good feelings inside, no matter how much it may have seemed that it was all tied to your mom being here?  
Can you reach through the pain, deeper than the pain, and find a source, a well, of love and peace and contentment and satisfaction that is inside of you still- maybe covered over by the pain and confusion but still there like some glowing embers of a fire covered over by a tarp? 

These are my very rudimentary and initial first attempts to free myself as much as I can now from a burden I may have been carrying my whole life without knowing it.  
Please pray for me to have the strength to keep going and to heal myself as much as possible.
​Thank you.​