Railroadthewriter

When a loved one dies, whether suddenly or expectedly, we, the survivors, are thrust into a period of busyness. Phone calls to be made, visitors to acknowledge, plans to finalize, services to attend, friends and family to comfort, lists to keep up and paperwork to fill out- slide shows and videos to be made…

If you have experienced human loss, you know the drill.

We put on a good face but at best we are merely in survival mode, stunned and numb and sleepwalking through this phase. At worst we are completely broken and unable to function at all. Either way, we must lean heavily on close friends and family to comfort and guide us through the next week or two so all the details can be worked out, nothing missed and no one left out. It is a grueling and anxiety filled epoch where grief often must get shelved for sake of duty.

Then suddenly, it all goes quiet.

The phone stops ringing. Check-in texts disappear. The letters and sympathy cards stop coming. Friends and family go back to their normal lives (as they should) and the survivor is left alone in the silence that follows.

After my son, Clayton, died and we were finished with his memorial service two weeks later, I felt the lights go out in my soul just as starkly as they did in the auditorium that night. One minute I am surrounded by hundreds of supporters, then suddenly, in the quiet back at home, each tick of the clock seemed as loud as Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”, reminding me of death and my own fleeting life. But strangely, as the fullness of my grief set in, it also robbing me of any real concept of time. The first three months that followed are a complete blur. That was the first silence and most people experience this is some form.

As I write this it has been, according to the calendar, one year and eight months since Clayton died. During that first silence I am not really sure what I did, what I said or who I said it to. All I really remember is that my mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia but could still walk and talk and care for herself, suddenly began to shut down and to show signs of advanced Alzheimer’s disease. I found my son dead on the night of Saturday, March 8, 2025 from a fentanyl overdose. On Sunday, March 9th, although the house was full of family, my Mother refused to get out of bed or even turn on the bedroom light. This was quickly followed by incontinence, inability to speak clearly and the inability to walk. We were afraid she had a stroke but it seems she had internalized her own grief and it accelerated her dementia. Soon afterwards, we had to call in Hospice to help my 89 year old father care for his 84 year old bride. She was placed on a hospital bed in our living room which she never again left. This was my second silence and it lasted a year and a half. Mom passed away on August 3, 2026. Her passing was actually my fourth silence, once the busyness of death had been completed yet again.

Now let me tell you about my third silence. My unexpected journey into the deepest, darkest epoch of grief and depression of my life. If you thought it couldn’t get worse, just hang on.

My other son, Caleb (officially my ex-stepson, now mine by mutual agreement) called me sometime in May of 2025 and asked if I wanted to fly out to Tacoma, Washington and drive cross country for two weeks back to Georgia. I remember simply saying, “Hell YES!” I felt a little spark of life…

For those who don’t know, my Father had asked me to move back home in December of 2023 to help him take care of their home and 30 acres. He was feeling his age and was unable to keep things up. Plus, with Mom’s dementia diagnosis, he needed to keep a closer eye on her. As it would happen, on January 14, 2024, Dad fell and broke to ball off his right femur which required him to have partial hip replacement surgery on his 88th birthday, January 15th, which took him several months to recover. Then, to top things off, I was forced to close the Drop-N-Shop Thrift Store – which I had been running since March of 2011- in December of 2024. This explains why I was able to say yes to a two week, practically spur of the moment cross country trip. I really needed it. I had been dealing with a lot!

Moving on…
Caleb is in the Army and had re-upped to finish out his 20. After spending 6 years in Alaska stationed at Fort Wainwright (including nearly a year in Baghdad, Iraq in 2020), he was being reassigned to El Paso, Texas. Quite a difference, right? In the process he was given a month’s leave to visit family and then to get settled. He decided to ship all his belongings to El Paso and ship his truck to Tacoma and drive home in mid June.
He met me at the airport in Seattle in a rental on a Saturday and told me his truck should arrive on Monday.
Perfect. I had prepared a two week trip itinerary and I was truly excited to get on the road. We could take our sweet time because there were a lot of places to visit and interesting things to see. I had never been past Texas and had never seen the Rocky Mountains!
But the weather in Washington was beautiful for June. Not at all what I expected. Mild temperatures and abundant sun was the exact opposite of their weather reputation. Turns out, that was a blessing on top of a major setback.
Caleb’s truck was delayed by 7 days! So, the first week of our journey was limited to Tacoma, southwest Washington and the Olympia Peninsula. We reset and had a great time visiting Mt. Rainier, the Ho Rainforest and just taking in the Pacific Ocean and all that Tacoma had to offer two boys from Georgia. You know, Bass Pro Shop, a southern cooking restaurant, an award winning southern BBQ restaurant and so on. We put a lot of miles on that rental!

But this blog is about the silence that follows, so hang with me.

I mentioned before that I was pretty much an emotional wreck in the three months that followed Clayton’s death and had lost any real sense of time. I felt I needed to deal with some of these issues before flying out to Washington so that I might be helpful to Caleb in dealing with his own grief and to not be just a blubbering hinderance. So I booked a cabin at FDR State Park here in Georgia a couple of hours away from my home. There, in quiet isolation, I prayed, fasted, hiked, journaled, read my Bible and two books by C. S. Lewis: A Grief Observed and The Problem of Pain. Both of these were very helpful to me in dealing with my grief and at the end of 5 days, I felt I was ready to be present and helpful to Caleb. That completed stage 1 of the third silence (isolation). There are two stages to go.

Stage two ended up being avoidance. Without badgering him, I tried breaching the subject of Clayton’s death a few times with Caleb. One time he simply said, “I don’t want to cry, so I’m not going to talk about it.” Thus we didn’t really talk too deeply about anything the whole trip. I would occasionally bring up Clayton and good memories we had about travel and music and such, but the dam refused to break. I could sense the anguish and tension but Caleb would not relent.
By the time his truck arrived and we began our trek back to Georgia, time- now suddenly and oppressively present once again- was short and we were now in a hurry. The journey home consisted mainly of 8-12 hours a day driving to the next Holiday Inn Express. We made a couple of planned stops but we couldn’t really relax. So there I sat in the passenger seat most of the trip taking pictures out the window, listening to Caleb’s song list (turned up really loud) and crying (although I pretended to be looking at something interesting out the window). Caleb just gripped the wheel tightly and stared straight ahead.
Don’t get me wrong, we made some special memories like seeing the Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, eating ribs in St. Louis and visiting The Ark in Kentucky, but all that was somewhat diminished compared to watching Caleb suffer deep down and not being able to help him out. I resolved to just be present for him and wait it out.

Finally, we arrived back in Georgia, safe and sound. He dropped me off late at night, we said goodbye and he went to stay with his mother. Almost immediately I sank into a deep, dark depression that made up stage 3 of this third silence. I didn’t want to go to sleep at night because I didn’t feel like I had accomplished enough and I was again very aware of my own mortality. But then I didn’t want to get up in the morning because I was simply tired of living. Not necessarily wanting to die, but running out of reasons to live, I begged God to make it make sense. And I begged God to save Caleb from his own addiction. What I had seen truly disturbed me and I was consumed with fear of losing another child in a similar way.

And don’t forget about Mom there in the living room on a hospital bed, helpless and wasting away. My second silence.

So, to sum up the 3 stages of my third silence: 1) Isolation. 2) Avoidance and 3) Deep, dark depression. This is where I was when I began to put my hands to something constructive: The Cabin Out in the Woods! (see my blog entry “From the Cabin”) I turned an old 10×16 shed into my office/man cave where I could write, study, produce teaching videos and run my NFP, Understand Up! International Ministries, Inc. I finished the inside to resemble a rustic cabin, wired it up, ran electricity for all our modern needs (including a backup solar generator and coffee maker) and filled it with books and equipment. I have all my camping equipment stored in one of the lofts so I could spend several days out here if needed.
Each day, I now pray, “Lord, since you woke me up today and didn’t take me home in my sleep, please make me useful to your Kingdom and the people around me.”

This blog is one tool God has since put into my hands and I hope what I have built with these words has been as useful to you as they have been for me.
I continue to reach out and talk with Caleb and he finally admitted he was angry with Clayton for dying. That’s not the whole story, but it’s a start. He and his mother and his sister are all dealing with the silence that followed the death of Clayton in their own ways (just as each of you and millions of others are doing) and I am resolved to be present for them. So let us all continue to remember our friends and family who are grieving the loss of a loved one, no matter how long it takes. Just a text, a phone call or a visit can mean the world. I’m not asking you to invest in a two week cross country trip, but just being present and willing to listen is a huge light shining into our darkness.

The silence that follows is a reality but it is not the end. We, the survivors, must trust that God still has a use for us each day He wakes us. So let us put our hand to the plow and press on. No longer just in the busyness of death, but in the usefulness of living. We are farther along today than we were yesterday and tomorrow is truly starting to look up.
Did you hear that?