Chapter 9: Living Day by Day

The first months after Normie’s death were very difficult.  I lived hour to hour.  Life is was not the same and I was trying to move on.  Creating this book has helped me deal with reality.

I hide the pain I go through; I wait until I’m alone.  Then I go by Normie’s pictures and tell him how much I miss him.  I have a good cry.  Then I do what I have to do to get through the rest of the day.  I don’t plan long range things like I used to, because things never get done.  There are some programs I watch or songs I hear that remind me of Normie.  It hurts so much when I run into some of the friends that were involved.  They just look away and pretend like I’m not there.  One day I ran into Normie’s best friend’s mom in a store. It was Saturday February 24^th1996.  I was standing at the meat counter, her eyes met mine and we looked straight at each other.  She then turned and walked away.  That really hurt, I felt like my son had died all over again.  She brought back many memories of what happened that awful night.  I tried to help her son deal with the loss of his best friend.  I tried to get her to help her son do the right thing.  How do you deal with the running into other families?

A dear friend of ours passed away this year.  I had to attend the wake and funeral which was so hard for me.  As I entered the funeral home it was like I saw my son in the casket in place of our friend.  With any funeral I attend since my son died I have the same reaction.  I wish this wouldn’t happen to me but it does.  It is something I have to handle. It will take me a good week to recover from the flood of emotions that overcome me when someone else dies.  I had pictures of Normie on my walls but when he was killed I took them down.  I could not look at them at first.  It took some time before I was able to put them back up.  This bothered me so much because it was like I abandoned him when he needed me.

I put his pictures back up, but I know this will never bring him back.  It is once again like he is all around me.  I sometimes smell his cologne.  I feel Normie has guided me to do this book for others to understand this doesn’t go away.  You live with this pain morning, noon and night.  It is ever present!  I know the people who did this do not have a conscience otherwise this would have been solved.  Since these people didn’t come forward, I think it will be in God’s hands now.  I hope they live with the pain everyday like I do.  I will keep raising the reward money and writing to Unsolved Mysteries until something happens.  If nothing happens then maybe God has a different plan for the guilty.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of Normie and what we are all missing.  Would he have gotten married and had children?  This emptiness will always be there.  I just try and cope with it and I say a prayer everyday.  This is the prayer that helps me get through each day.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

When relatives or friends of ours die, I choose my words carefully.  When people pay there condolences they do not understand that some words hurt when said the wrong way:

1. “They’re in a better place.”
2. “You have another to take care of.”
3. “You have to get on with your life.”
4. “At least she or he isn’t suffering.”
5. “I know how you feel.”
6. “At least you had him for 18 years.”
7. “God never gives you more than you can handle.”

Those were some of the words that hurt me.  I felt the only words that comforted me were: “What can I do to help?”  All I needed was a hug and tell me you would be there for me.  The state of mind your in doesn’t make any sense.  I so hate to be alone at times.  I do things to keep myself busy.  I have family come over for dinner when I am feeling down.

Mothers have a deep closeness with their children.  They raise and protect them and then someone comes along with a gun and takes that all away.  Someone once told me God never gives you more than you can handle.  Well there are days when it is just unbearable, which I feel sometimes I won’t make it through the day.  Its like you are in a glass bubble and you’re standing still and nothing else matters at the time. We plan our lives and someone comes along and destroys everything we built.  We live in a private Hell.  This is an everyday struggle to keep your life from falling apart.

You do go on with your life, but you put your feelings in a different place.  This is a constant battle of trying to survive the loss of a son, daughter or brother that was once in our lives and now they are gone.  This is what I mean when I say you’re in a private Hell.  So you grieve when you know one is around.  I hope one day everything will come out about what happened to my son. Then maybe I could deal with his death.

What keeps me going is when I look at my Richie and see that he has grown into a great young man.  I know he has a good head on his shoulders even though he buys everything in sight.  I see he lives everyday to the fullest. He doesn’t want to miss anything.  My greatest fear is losing Richie in the same way.  How do you shake these feelings? It has been six years and I still have them.

I do wish parents who lost their loved ones to a violent death would get involved in doing the quilt that I talked about in my story. We need to let others know we are not giving up on our family members because they deserved to be remembered in a special way.  I like to have a Memorial Service once a year.  The quilt displayed will remind the killers they are not getting away with murder.  Our family members meant the world to us and they will not be forgotten in any way. We want the people who killed them to remember what they took away from us.  What we have to go through everyday of our lives.  I hope this quilt and Memorial will ease a little of our pain we live with.