Providence

Thanks to Dave Carr, I created a personalized card that I use to send hand-written notes to people.  Dave is a huge advocate of doing this, it gives a personal touch to anything we do, and is so much more intimate than e-mails or texts.  My personalized card has Snickers on the front, with that huge smile on his face, and inside it says, “Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that the journey is just as important, and oftentimes just as much fun, as the destination.”  Yesterday, Patrick achieved a destination, he graduated from Oglethorpe University, Summa Cum Laude, he had one A- in his time there, the rest A’s.  I have to say though, in this case, while the journey was important, it definitely wasn’t fun.

Let me take you back three years ago to 2013 and when all hell broke loose for Patrick and the rest of the family as well.  Patrick had just gone back for his second semester of his sophomore year at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.  Patrick loved Grove City, it was a relatively small school, very strict religiously, and had very solid academics.  In January, we started getting some distressing calls.  Just a few weeks earlier, he had seemed very happy, but that had changed dramatically.  As the weeks went by, he was plummeting.  Each conversation was getting deeper and deeper into depression.  I finally told him, if he wanted to come home, just come home.  He then said the words that no parent ever wants to hear.  He said, “you won’t be disappointed in me?”  If there’s one thing in life I’ve learned as a parent, don’t ever tell your children or lead them to believe you are ever disappointed in them.  I told him no, I could never be disappointed in him. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t come home soon enough, and we got a call from the counselor on campus that Patrick was planning to commit suicide, and he wanted to admit him to a local psychiatric hospital.  This was our first experience with a psychiatric hospital, and we learned a lot, particularly patience.  Imagine yourself as a parent, and your child is five or six states away, and he/she is in a psychiatric hospital that you’ve never seen, and you can only talk to him or her once a day?  We patiently would wait for that time each evening, when we would get 10-15 minutes on the phone with Patrick, and try to decipher what the hell was going on.  As soon as we were able, Laurel and Kelly got a flight up to Pennsylvania to see Patrick in the hospital, which gave us a whole lot of comfort.  We were eventually able to secure Patrick’s release from the psychiatric hospital, and we were able to bring him home.

One of the most painful parts of all of this was withdrawing Patrick from Grove City.  When we got Patrick released from the psychiatric hospital, we also packed all of his stuff up from his dorm.  I will say that packing up his dorm room was one of the most painful separations I’ve witnessed in my life.  Patrick began believing he was gay, and once that became apparent at Grove City, he was rejected immediately.  Grove City holds itself out as a very caring, Christian environment, but that doesn’t apply to those that are different.  I will have to say this was also one of the most critical junctions in dealing with Patrick’s issues.  He was ready for us to reject him also, but Laurel and I both told him, just as God never started loving you, our love for you has no beginning or end.  We will love you always, no matter what.  That appeared to provide a great deal of relief to Patrick.

When we brought Patrick home, we had some significant adjustments to make.  We hid all of the knives in the house, or anything else that we believed he could hurt himself with.  Laurel spent many nights sleeping in the spare bed in Patrick’s room to make sure that he didn’t hurt himself.   But the pain for all of us was just beginning.  Shortly after Patrick came home, Patrick revealed the one night at dinner what had led him to want to commit suicide.  He revealed that his private music teacher from his middle school and high school years had sexually abused him.  For me, this was one of the greatest nightmares a parent can face.  We are given children to protect and raise, and we had failed at this.  It was devastating.  As a side note, we pursued many different angles with the police and the district attorney’s office.  We learned a lot about how little our government officials can or will do about issues like this, I guess, unless it provides major headlines like the situation at Penn State.

While I wish I could say that when Patrick came home, everything worked out happily ever after, and we all went back to normal, it wasn’t that simple.  The one night Patrick “disappeared” and Laurel thought a saw was missing.  I frantically drove down the road, no idea where I was going, but I was looking for Patrick.  The next thing I know, there he is walking down the road toward me.  As I pulled up, he said, “What?”, and I said get in the car.  I told him you can’t just go for a walk without telling us anything with the state you’re in. 

Patrick eventually went back into a local psychiatric hospital.  It was a disaster, the hospital was awful, and to a certain extent, that may have been a turning point for all of us.  Two bits of humor from this.  When we were checking him in late on a Sunday night at the hospital, he started stuttering.  I found out later that this can be a side-effect of anti-depressant medications.  I didn’t say anything, but I was livid.  Patrick has a beautiful singing voice, and all I could think was, “OK, we’ve put up with a lot, but by God, you will not stutter.”  The second thing was when we went to visit him after a few days, we found out how bad the place was.  I didn’t realize at the time how bad it was, and how much Patrick wanted out, and I asked the innocent question, “How do you like it here?”  He replied, “I f-f-f-f-fucking hate it!”  I guess you could call that gallows humor. 

Eventually, Patrick progressed, he climbed out of the depths, through various counselors and medication, he emerged from the depths of hell.  He was able to go back to school, to Oglethorpe University, and that was mainly because we wanted to keep him close by.  Patrick determined he wasn’t gay, the abuse made him assume he was, but he found out he wasn’t.  He has fallen far away from God, unfortunately.  He is angry at God for letting this happen, he is angry because the abuser is a “self-proclaiming” good Christian, who leads the worship music at his church.  Grove City College proclaims to be a good Christian college, but rejected him because he thought he was gay.  Through all of this, Patrick has soured on God and religion.

We still had some rocky moments along the way.  Patrick still has his moments, he can dip into depression at times, and at times, he can plummet into depression.  Unfortunately, the one time happened to be when he was an ocean away.  In the summer of 2014, Patrick wanted to go on a study abroad trip to Germany.  We of course had trepidation, but we finally thought it would be good for him, and he seemed to be so much better.  It all started off well, but then, he started plummeting again.  We would have discussions with him on the Skype, that was the only way we could talk to him, and he was definitely falling deeper.  At one point, he made the comment, “I probably won’t kill myself here, because I know it would be difficult for you to repatriate the body.”  Of course, that was our number one concern.  The worst experience was the one Sunday when we had scheduled a time to Skype with him.  No Patrick.  We waited, and waited.  As time wore on, I grew angrier and angrier.  I felt so helpless, I couldn’t figure out anything I could do to find out is he alive, where is he?  Thankfully, Laurel is much more resourceful than me.  She started looking up the various friends Patrick had made in Germany in the program on Facebook, and she started messaging all of them to see if they had seen Patrick.  One had, and she went down to Patrick’s apartment.  He had fallen asleep and missed our call.  We could start breathing again.

We now face a new chapter in our lives, in Patrick’s life.  He has finished college, and he now is headed to graduate school.  He was accepted to Rhode Island College, and he received a fellowship, so he first year at least is paid for.  The question that Laurel and I have struggled with for many months now is do you let him go?  We know what happened when he was at Grove City, we know what happened when he was in Germany, how will this be different?  Again, he will be many states away, what will we do if he plummets again?  Our daughter Kelly has even questioned us, questioned our judgment on this.  My dear friend from WIKA, Brent Shadix, also asked me about it.  We don’t know the answer, but we finally came to the conclusion, at some point, he is going to have to live his life.  Patrick has to be able to go where he wants to go or needs to go to follow his dreams or pursuits, and if that takes him away from us, we have to have faith that it will work out.  Are we scared?  Beyond imagination.  We’re scared to death for him to be so far away, knowing his history and his present.  We think about it, we pray about it all the time. 

I know this will sound crazy, but then again, I often find divine intervention in crazier places.  Last week, when I was at church, the pastor was doing a sermon on the Prodigal Son, which is one of my favorite parables.  As I listened intently to the sermon, the following line came crashing down upon me.  “I realize I have always believed there is a great Providence that, so to speak, waits ahead of us.”  You see, Rhode Island College is in Providence.  Maybe this is the Providence that Patrick needs to finally step out of the depths of hell once and for all.  Maybe this is the Providence that will help Patrick heal and to become better finally.  Maybe this is the Providence that God is calling Patrick to so that they can reconcile, and Patrick can finally forgive God for what happened to him.