This – or a variation of this – is the question I keep getting asked in the almost month since my young adult son, Blake, came home from his second hospitalization. Blake was hospitalized with severe depression after a recent spike in his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and related intrusive thoughts. He made a plan to end his life, and he’d planned to carry it out. Yet, that is not where the story begins, nor is his release from the hospital where it ends. They are pieces in a long journey.
I can’t speak for my son and what it is like to be him. I can, however, speak as a mom who has watched her child suffer for a very long time. There have been twists and turns on this road over time and lots of things have contributed to where we are now as a family. The bottom line is that my son came to the point a while back where he decided that this world was not for him. He’s been clear about that with us. He lost hope somewhere along the line that he would ever feel better. And we have been living with this as a family for some time. His hospitalizations did not represent a sudden departure from the life we lived with him. They were just the most obvious signs to the outside world. To many, I guess it appeared we had a sudden crisis along the road and that the hospitalizations were about addressing that. Maybe they were. But they didn’t “fix” a problem; they just kept my son safe for a period of time. Maybe they even reinforced his view of himself as a failure.
So now people ask me, “Are things better?” or “Is he feeling better?” I understand that they care and that they are being kind. And I feel like I disappoint with my answer. Bluntly, the answer is, “No.” That’s not what I answer, though.
“It’s going to be a journey,” is what I say. That’s the truth. Simple. Pure. I don’t know what direction my son is going to go in. It kinda kills me as a mom to move through life knowing that my child, who I love dearly, believes that each day he is here is torture. But, this is not the end of the journey. Not now. I don’t know where it leads, only that it is.