Bath Salts - Boyfriend's Passing

[Stacyines]

Progressing.

[dave s]

Stacyinnes really bath salts!!!!!! no damnit...I deal with this everyday.....no wonder this happened, I am so sorry......my first thoughts are....the stress of med school, nursing school are so intense....to be perfect...in every way. And then add a substance.....so incredibly sorry about this all...for you and his family.....Thinking of you...Dave RN

[HAP]

Dear Stacyines,

If you are on Facebook, set up a separate page where you can post information about this. Post your story there. Also post links to news articles about the subject there. Have google set up news alerts for you so you can get stuff posted and linked quickly.

You might also check to see if there are groups already working on this and volunteer some time with them. Certainly you could talk to someone at Narcotics Anonymous. I would think this would be right up their alley.

If no one is working on this, you could set up a website dedicated to this thing. Visit walkingwithjane.org to see the site I set up to go after the cancer that took my wife to see what that can look like.That will cost some money though--and for now Facebook would give you plenty of exposure. When you get the FB page done, drop me a line and I will post a link on the FB page I have for my wife. There are a lot of guidance counselors and the like who visit that location. We average about 16,000 views per month.

Talk to the people at both your school and his about talking to students there. Also talk to your school newspaper about doing a story on this. Talk to the one at his school as well. Then talk to the local professional press in both locations.

I applaud your wanting to do something like this. But please keep in mind that you need to take care of you at the same time. Just because fighting the thing that took him from you makes you feel good does not mean you are healed. Keep seeing the counselor, keep going to group, keep reading and writing here. Get yourself into as healthy an eating, sleeping, cleaning and exercising routine as you can. Will you slip sometimes? Yes, I do all the time--my living room looks like a bomb hit it tonight because I got too busy to keep it neat this week. But keep trying to stick with things that are good for you.

Avoid non-prescribed drugs and alcohol. They will only dull the pain and keep you from dealing with the things you need to deal with. There are going to be times when you feel better--but there are also going to be times you feel awful. Those waves of grief are normal. You are not going backward when they hit--though it really does feel otherwise at the time. Be patient with yourself and live second by second if you have to. Gradually you will feel more in control of your life, but it is not going to happen with anywhere near the speed it does on television. Be patient with yourself--and be patient with those around you. Unless they have experienced this kind of loss they have no idea what you are going through no matter how many times they say they do. This is not like breaking up with someone--the thing my brother tried to claim gave him the expertise to tell me what I should do and how I should feel.

Cry when you need to cry. Laugh when you need to laugh. That last sounds peculiar, I know. Art Buchwald, a satirist who stopped writing before you were born, asked the columnist Walt Lippman--he died before you were born--after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, "Will we ever laugh again?" Lippman's response was: "No. We will laugh again--but we'll never be young again." Laughter is as necessary to the healing process as tears.

I wish--we all wish--we could take this burden away from you. But you have now experienced something that will set you apart from most of your peers. The death of someone as close as your boyfriend seems to have been to you is an experience that is going to change you. It is going to make you more mature than your years. You have seen death--and in seeing it you have seen how fragile and ephemeral life is. That knowledge is a powerful force in our lives. It can either strengthen us or weaken us. And none of us knows for certain which way it will take us. But we can influence that direction. You have already made two decisions that will shape this experience for you and help to determine which of those two paths your experience will take you on.

There are four things you can do from here: First, you can become a follower of life--one who has a belief in life and follows it as a religion. Second, you can become a follower of death--and become one who sees death the way others see life and follow it. Third, you can become one who is merely passing through life to death. The one you love is gone and you are just hanging around waiting for death so you can join him. The vast majority of people fall into one of these three categories long before anyone they know or care about has died. But one in ten truly lives. He does not hide from death, nor does he seek it or wait for it. Instead she lives in each moment. She smells the rain, rejoices in the snow on the sidewalk, truly listens to the songs of the birds, and weeps and laughs when the spirit moves her. And because she is concerned with living--not following life but truly living it--death ceases to be an issue--the tiger can find no place to put its claws--the rhinoceros no place to put its horn.

My wife and I chose to live. Death came for her. It made neither of us happy. But we fought for her life with everything we had between us. We fought dirty. We tried to load the dice. But we also knew that death is part of life--and we lived her death like we had lived everything in life--with passion, with laughter, with tears and with the kind of love songs are written of.

It were profanation of that love for me to stop living because she is no longer here. I will not follow life, nor death, nor merely pass through life to death. I will live with all the passion I can muster. I will look for the hummingbirds, walk beneath the sun and the rain and enjoy both equally, laugh when the world is at play, and weep when it descends into madness.

But above all, I will keep that love in the world.

I hope that you will do so as well.

I hope that you all will do so as well.

Peace,

Harry

[kayc]

Thank you for opening up to us and sharing with us about what took your BF's life. You would think someone in the medical profession would know better, but it just goes to show that anyone can be prey to this. Avoid anything you haven't consulted a doctor about and even then, question your doctor, they don't always prescribe right either. Always check out medication on line before taking, don't assume your doctor has checked what all drugs you are taking and side effects. I had a doctor prescribe valium for me above my protests. I took it two days and it didn't help and when I researched it and learned just how addictive it is and how long it takes to break the addiction, I researched alternative drugs, went back to my doctor and told him what I wanted. It has worked great for me ever since. We have to assume some degree of responsibility for our own health. By the same token, don't take yourself off of something without consulting your doctor, particularly antidepressants. Normally they want to do so gradually and monitor it.

You really can't accept the fallout for this, this was his decision.