Proof of Love

I was digging around through my desk drawer, cussing a blue streak at my utter lack of organization as I sorted through piles of post-it notes, envelopes and loose paper, when I came across this little poem I wrote while my teenage son was in rehab.  I wrote it after he overdosed and almost died.  My group leader at Daytop Rehab had already lost his own son to heroin, and I'd become obsessed with the very real possibility of my own kid dying.  He'd already come very close.  So I wrote it out of me, being a firm believer in Woody Allen's line "I don't get angry.  I grow a tumor instead."  This is my way of preventing a tumor!

Proof of Love

by

Rebecca O'Donnell

What sad remembrance

Clouds my soul

When I think of my son?

Me, a split-pea mentality

Silly and smiling

A pod full of good memories

Hiding the truth from myself

Just a vacant vegetable

Of ridiculous rhyme

He, lost and alone,

Ate himself with rocks

And cactus and hydro

A child needs proof of love

All I offered was empty sockets

Limbs, womb, seed now gone forever

Torn away by its own misery

And self indulgence

Without my boy, all is grey

Summer has gone

And winter holds sway

We all have these dark and terrible moments.  When you're being torn apart by your own shit storm, find some way to purge the misery before you start beating yourself or cutting, something I also did.  Remember Annette Bening in American Beauty, when she slaps herself?  That was me.  Art is a great release.  Whether you can draw or write well or not, art is still a great way to get it out before it consumes you.  Writing, drawing, sculpting, mechanics, cooking, gardening; anything can be an art.  Lose yourself in creating something.  It's like antiseptic and a bandage on a cut.  Create and heal when you're suffering, my friends.  Create and begin to heal.

Love, R