blogs

I have often thought that as horrific as our experience was, if you had to lose a child, our situation was as good as it gets. There was no shame associated with Ryan’s death – no drugs or alcohol were involved; he wasn’t doing anything wrong; it wasn’t a suicide; he wasn’t at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. No one else was injured or killed because of his actions. He didn’t go missing for days, weeks or years causing us to be sick with worry wondering where he was and what had happened to him. He didn’t suffer. He wasn’t murdered nor did he die violently. We didn’t have to make decisions to end life support. We didn’t have to have bake sales or car washes to raise the money to bury him. We were abundantly loved and supported by friends and family. Ryan was lauded and honored posthumously in every way imaginable. Yet there is no word strong enough to describe the horror of it. But even under my crushing grief, I had the wherewithal to realize many others have it much worse. Did I dare say we were “blessed”?

I was so afraid of Ryan being forgotten. Even though dozens of his friends reassured me he would never be forgotten, I saw their lives moving forward without him. I knew his memory would fade as time marched on. I knew in three short years there would be no students at Modesto High who had gone to school with him. I knew his friends would go to college, make new friends, expand their lives and he would become their “friend who died in 2007”. I was obsessed with keeping his memory alive.

While sitting in a boring meeting one day, I had an idea for some kind of “Ryan’s reading tree” that we could gift to the library since Ryan was a regular library patron. He loved to read and one of his last acts in Modesto was volunteering at the library’s Harry Potter event. My simple idea for a tree of some sort took root with Ron and Susan Cassidy, a good friend and children’s librarian. Before I knew it, we were making plans to erect a magnificent steel art tree in the children’s department of the downtown library. I confessed to Ron that I didn’t have the energy to raise $80,000 - especially after our friends had been so generous in endowing a scholarship in Ryan’s name. Ron, drowning in his own grief and at a loss of what to do with the sad waking hours of each day, latched onto the project and assured me he would do the work and he did. We used insurance money from Ryan’s death to match the donations from friends and family and the donations started flowing in. The “tree project” gave us, especially Ron, something to do for Ryan that spring and summer. Miraculously by summer’s end, just as the recession was becoming serious, all the money needed for Ryan’s Reading Tree was raised. The tree was dedicated to our sweet boy a few months later and now stands proudly in the middle of the children’s section of the library.