NOT in the slow lane, YET 

The blog is about living life after 70 with joy, resilience, and purpose. NOT in the slow lane, YET is a source of positive, helpful advice encouraging people to set and achieve goals and find joy in life. The blog will cover personal experiences, thoughts, and concerns. Topics of blogs will include health, retirement, fashion, travel, and living in continuing care retirement communities. The blogs will be short and appear at least once a month on my website www.nadineblock.com or by email if you choose.

Healing a hole in the heart: Love and loss of adult children

Losing adult children is one of the most traumatic experiences an older person can face.

I was sobbing when I called my mother on October 4th, 2013.  I told her that Greg, her grandson, and my youngest son (age 47)  had just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.  I blurted out what was said to me by my daughter-in-law.   He had been getting ready for a run in preparation for a triathlon.  As he was leaving, he had a seizure on the front lawn of their Atlanta home.  He was rushed to the hospital where he woke up to find he had six months to live—the diagnosis:  small-cell lung cancer metastasized to his brain.  We ended the call with both of us still sobbing.

I called my mother the next day still in shock, but calmer.  After a few words of consolation, she said, “Greg went to heaven and saw Franklin (his grandfather).  Franklin looked up from his crossword puzzle and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”  I smiled.  I  admired my 98-year-old Mom’s resilience. 

I would need her resilience.  

Over the next eleven years, Greg would die after seven years of harrowing cancer treatments, cut, burn, and poison treatments. He was also in clinical trials in Boston over the years.   His older brother Steve received the devastating and distressing diagnosis of metastasized prostate cancer and would die in May 2024. I was shocked and in deep pain. They were part of my body ripped out prematurely.  Gone.  Losing children was the most traumatic thing that happened to me in my life.  I felt guilty.  It is the wrong order.  I was supposed to go first.  It is happening to people my age because we are living longer. 

I was lost in grieving. 

I went through emotions of shock, anger, resentment, loneliness, physical and mental distress. I bristled with anger that God failed me and wondered how I failed God.  I suffered from anticipatory grief, the kind of grief that can be caused by a terminal diagnosis that is felt by people dying and their family and friends. It is unrelenting and powerful. I had intrusive thoughts of death at a family dinner, driving by a cemetery, in a nightmare, or at a church service, or wedding, when I woke at dawn.  It put a pall over everything in my life.

 Grieving doesn’t begin at death.  I grieved for eleven years before my sons’ deaths.

 When Steve told me he would die, my first words were, “Who will hold my hand when I am dying?”   He was the family member who did that. He comforted the dying.   I immediately felt guilty for my self-absorption.   I cascaded from grief, guilt for being here when they would not be, my vulnerabilities and loneliness, and the heartbreak of their families, both with still-young children. I felt alone. I wasn’t sure I could bear the pain.

My sons were fighters and refused to succumb to pessimism. 

Greg thought he would be able to treat cancer like diabetes.  He was used to busting through walls to meet goals.  Ever hopeful.  Two weeks before he died he was on a treadmill with his oxygen cannulas flying behind him.   Steven made a goal of living long enough to see his sons graduate from college and would accept horrible “Hail Mary Pass” treatments if needed. Some treatments put him in the hospital for days at a time. Surgeries and infusions left him near death.    He was able to watch one son graduate via streaming a few days before he died.  Cancer flattened him at 62 years before he could see his second son’s graduation.  

It was so hard not to let my emotions join their valiant efforts.  

A moment of hope.  The brief time when cancer wasn’t spreading.   Dashed again.  Another lab rat treatment.  More hope and more despair. Again, and again.  I tried not to take the rollercoaster ride.   How can a mother not be whip-sawed by these emotions?  I absorbed the pain of my sons trying to live, trying every available cancer treatment no matter how intrusive, looking for the next treatment to give them a couple of months, even a couple of weeks of life.   

The worry gnawed on me and stole my sleep.  I spent hours frantically trying to find cancer treatments for Greg.  I learned that my work was unnecessary and caused additional worry for him.   Greg told me he was doing fine in his searches. When they started a new treatment, he and his wife began looking for the next one.  Until there was no next one.   Steve not only understood the treatments but the research and medical language.  I stopped trying to be a doctor.  I was careful about the questions I asked and the comments I made.   I tried to keep my language and conversations positive and calm.  I sent family photos of good times together and carefully chosen jokes.  I walked a tightrope of fear that I would do something that made their terrible journeys worse.  

God wasn’t through with me yet. 

 During this same period, my second husband was diagnosed with vascular dementia.  He often fell out of his wheelchair and required many trips to the ER. The assisted living staff constantly called me to deal with his behavior:  running away, taking cabs to buy cars he wasn’t supposed to drive, and smoking in his room.   It was the only care facility of twenty I visited that would take him.  I was afraid they would kick him out.  I tried to deal with him using reason, a non-starter. I didn’t know what else to do. I was losing weight and drinking weight-gain shakes.  I developed blinding headaches.  Anxiety medications did not work.  They made me worse. They gave me facial tremors.   My background is in psychology, and I knew what I was supposed to do.  My brain knew that, but it didn’t translate messages to my heart.  I prayed. Why was God not there for me? 

Slowly, my resilience emerged. 

 It didn’t just drop from the sky or get squeezed out of my “mom” genes.  I intentionally sought peace and good health.  

I decided I must cure myself through healthy living and thinking.  

I started using controlled breathing during walking to quiet my mind.  I walked miles every day and still do.  I resumed meditation.  

I had Zoom sessions with my sons.  Covid made visits almost impossible, and they lived far from me.   Zoom helped me to hear and see them even in the end-stage ravaged with cancer.  I told them they were the most beautiful things I ever saw. 

I had a Zoom session with my four siblings every week.  We still do that.  My living son, Jeff,  and my four siblings are my main support.  

My husband died in 2021 relieving me of caregiving and providing him peace and an end to suffering.  

I searched for positive meaning.

I allow anger and sadness to enter my mind briefly, but not for long.  I take a controlled breathing walk, meet with friends, shop online, or paint.  I do whatever it takes to break my depressed mood.

I keep busy with our senior community life.  I serve as an elected resident council member.   I chair the art committee. I write. I paint with oil mostly from travel memories and my style is often semi-abstract landscapes.  This keeps my thoughts and actions positive.  

I began to see how lucky I was to have these wonderful children.  I am proud of their lives. Theirs were not long lives but they were well-lived.

Their obituaries were a joy to read.   They were philanthropic, caring, and respected in their communities.  Among newspaper articles about them:

“Greg Block, 54, an entrepreneur who gave back, dies”. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 20, 2020, and

“Former Belvedere Councilmember Steve Block was active community volunteer,” The Ark, May 22, 2024. 

I visualize them in the sky with their angels on my morning walk. The sky looks different from the grey days of their illness.  It is bright with bands of yellow, orange, and red.   My beloved sons wave and give me their beautiful smiles. They are surrounded by light.  Their angels put their arms around them and turn them back into the clouds.  They run through the heavens, throw balls and barbs at one another, see if they can wrestle the other to the ground as they did as teens, laugh a lot, and look out for one another. When the time comes, I will meet them on the other side of the river and laugh at their antics again.  I smile and keep walking.

Grieving is a process. 

I sometimes see one of their photos on my iPhone. I can’t look at them…anger surges through me, a vengeful anger without a focus.   

I know this will go away.  

I know there will be good days and bad days.  I know I will find peace…in time.  

Have you lost an adult child?  What was your grieving experience?  What would you tell someone who is grieving for a lost child? You can contact me at:

https://www.nadineblock.com/?page_id=37     My website is www.nadineblock.com

Do you want to know more about controlled breathing for stress relief?

Deep breathing, or breathing with your diaphragm, can help you to manage stress.

“Reducing Stress Through Deep Breathing”   

Johns Hopkins Medicine

“Breath control helps quell errant stress response”      

Harvard Medical School Health letters              July 6, 2020