© 2022 Susan Underwood. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/01/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-5273-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-5272-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020907779

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Contents

Acknowledgment

Chapter 1     Susie

Chapter 2     Becoming Susan

Chapter 3     Running Away

Chapter 4     Becoming Mom

Chapter 5     Going Home

Chapter 6     Denver

Chapter 7     Love of My Life

Chapter 8     Real Love

Chapter 9     The Glue

Chapter 10   The Move

Chapter 11   Richardson

Chapter 12   Terrance’s Essence

Chapter 13   Life is Good

Chapter 14   The Losses Begin

Chapter 15   The Hardest Chapter

Chapter 16   On The Brink of Insanity

Chapter 17   Bob Marley’s Sons

Chapter 18   Dreaming of Terrance

Chapter 19   Gary’s birthday

Chapter 20   Social Networks

Chapter 21   Keep Moving

Chapter 22   My Cheerleaders

Chapter 23   MY MOM

Chapter 24   Darrell

Chapter 25   Angel Guides

Chapter 26   Change is The Only Constant

Chapter 27   Learning About Me

Chapter 28   Mystic

Chapter 29   Back To Colorado

Chapter 30   So what is the point?

Chapter 31   I’m Still Here

Chapter 32   Trip to Texas 2021

Acknowledgment

First and foremost, I would like to thank my husband Gary for his unwavering love and support.

I would also like to thank my children for loving me endlessly through everything. Thank you to Terrance’s friends for the love, and thank you to my birth family for standing by me.

Also want to give thanks for special friends who have loved and supported me through the years, too numerous to mention. You know who you are.

I love you Lee Smith, with everything.

I’m so thankful to journalists, and photographers who without them, Island Stage Magazine would not exist. Karen, Shelah, Beverly, Lee, Maliika, Xavier, David, Robin, Angela, Kizzy, Lloyd, Danny, Jen and Hal. I’m also thankful to artists and managers, publicists, festival and tour organizers who gave me a chance.

Thank you to the Marley family.

Thank you for believing in me.

"Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain." ~ Kahlil Gibran

I never thought I would live past forty-five years old; that’s how old I was when I lost my son Terrance. I never thought I would be diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

I never thought I would be telling you this story. I never thought that someone like me could actually help someone get through something as devastating as the loss of a child by telling MY story.

My journey has always been dramatic and even traumatic, but these last fifteen years have been truly enlightening. I have finally been introduced to my true self. What do I mean when I say that? I mean, I have finally met the part of me that I always knew existed but never really fully knew. Let me explain.

When I started writing this book, I was going through my life experiences detail by detail, many of which were very traumatizing to me. I spent several hours writing down memories only to be uncomfortable about my approach to articulating my story. I asked my Spirit guides to guide me through the night in my sleep and help me properly tell my story, so that I can be helpful and not drama-filled. After all, we all have enough drama going on in our lives. I don’t need to give you blow by blow, all of the details of my drama. I will give you the high-level me; I will give you a picture of who I am so that you can feel fully introduced to me. Feel my essence.

I’m awake. I am good. I am loved. I’ve learned to love myself. I believe that those are the things that need to be talked about. How do you find light in such darkness? Anyone who has lost a child knows the darkness I speak of.

I have always said that there is nothing in this life worse than losing your child. No matter what I’ve been through in my life, this remains MY truth, and I believe that it is also a truth that belongs to others who have experienced the same type of loss.

This book is about healing. This book is about living through a very difficult situation. It’s not just about losing a child. It’s about how to overcome some of these traumatic things that happen in our lifetimes here on Earth.

People are dealing with losing loved ones to covid. We have a global pandemic going on. We have massive wildfires burning, global warming and climate change. We have mass shootings happening all across the US. There’s a lot going on in the world. How do we navigate this reality? How do we stay positive and find peace in our hearts and souls?

I hope my story will help someone who is going through it.

1

SUSIE

I am the second to the youngest of seven children. I was born in 1962. My oldest sibling, Sandi, is seventeen years older than me. In fact, she has a daughter, my niece Shelly who is six months older than myself. It always tickled me that I was an auntie before I was even born!

My brother Steve was fifteen years older than me, and my brother Roland, (we call him Boots) was thirteen years older. These three are my half-siblings, although I never thought of them that way. They were always my big sister and my big brothers.

I have so much respect for my mom and dad and the fact that they successfully raised a blended family. Was it without its challenges and issues? Absolutely not! It is not an easy thing to do. You will hear how important their example has been to me later on in my story.

My parents met and fell in love and my mom gave birth to their first born together, Brenda. Mary was next and then me, and then our youngest sister Diann. There’s a six year difference between Brenda and I, and a three-and-a half-year difference between Mary and I. Diann and I are not even a full year apart. We’re actually the same age for six days!

I used to get upset because Mom dressed Diann and I like twins. We even had to share our birthday parties. When I look back on those days I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

My dad was a carpenter by trade and he was gone most of the time. He would be home either every weekend or every other weekend depending on where he had to travel to build a home. So it was really Mom on her own with all of us kids. I don’t ever remember Sandi living with us, but I do remember Steve and Boots babysitting us. As you can imagine with those age differences, there were a lot of dynamics. There was never a dull moment. In fact, there was a lot of drama. So much drama, I used to question whether or not this was really my family. I used to think that someone mixed me up in the hospital and gave me to the wrong people. I was a very sensitive, emotional and intuitive little girl. I was teased for that quite a bit.

Sandi got married young and left home, and had four children. My brother Boots was drafted into the army during the Vietnam War in 1967, his senior year in high school. Steve was upset because only one son could be drafted into combat, so he decided to enlist in the navy.

Meanwhile, Brenda was about thirteen- years- old. At that time, I was only seven- years- old. I felt completely invisible with everything going on and my mom worrying so much about my older siblings. I just didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. If you’re wondering about my youngest sister, well, she was the baby of the family. I felt like she got plenty of attention. Mary was eleven- years- old at the time and seemed to be pretty normal at that point- whatever normal is.

I remember I began having a recurring nightmare night after night. It was about three bears hiding under my bed waiting to scare me. They chased me down the hallway into the backyard and up the apple tree. And in my nightmare I would end up in the apple tree trying to scream at the top of my lungs, but nothing would come out. No one could hear me. Later in life, I attended a dream Gestalt session with a therapist and then it eventually made sense why I continued to have that nightmare.

One of the most upsetting things to me as a child was trying to get in bed with my mom because I was so scared after having that nightmare yet again. She wouldn’t let me. She made me go back and get in my bed. I can’t tell you how much that hurt me. I told you I was sensitive!

When my dad was home I just remember Sunday dinners before he was set to leave again for the road. Pounding his fist on the table, he would shout We will not waste one drop of food that I work so hard to provide. I can always feel Mom’s dread as my dad prepares to leave again for another week or two. I’m not sure if she complained verbally to him about it, but I could always see by the look on her face that she was not welcoming being on her own with us. I knew my mom loved us, but at the same time I could feel her worry. It made me sad.

When I was eight, I felt I had to lie to my mom to make her say the words, I love you to me. It was not something that was said in our house by either my mom or my dad. I don’t think I ever heard them say those words to each other. By the way, I didn’t tell my mom about that lie until I was twenty-two years old. But that’s another chapter.

One memory that comes up in my mind quite often is one year, when I was very young I woke up to the gift of a Thumbelina doll under the Christmas tree. Some of you might remember the little Thumbelina doll with the pull string in the back that made her wiggle like a new born baby. Yeah, that one! It was at that time when I knew that someday I would be a mommy. And I knew that I was going to be a good mommy.

There were little round photos of each one of us on the wall in Mom and Dad’s house. I used to look at them and wonder why I seemed to look so much different than all of my siblings. I am the only one who was born with a ton of dark hair and a darker complexion. The rest of my siblings had light hair or barely any hair at all. These were baby pictures by the way. I remember telling my dad I felt like I looked different, in fact that I felt different. Like I didn’t belong. My dad told me that I didn’t belong to him. I had to belong to either the milkman or the mailman. Now, imagine how this made me feel as a little girl. Of course he was joking. Or was he?

As time passed we were all getting older and my mom was still worrying about Sandi, Steve and Boots. We would get letters periodically from overseas with updates from my brothers. It was always very upsetting to our mom.

Brenda was now fourteen and dating. Her boyfriend, Sam, was either seventeen or eighteen years old at the time. We found out eventually that Brenda lied to Sam about her age and told him she was sixteen. We tease her about it to this day! By the time he found out the truth about her age he was already madly in love with her. Side note: they are still together and have been married for over fifty years)

I looked up to my big sisters. I wanted to be just like them.

I remember Boots coming home on leave and then having to go back and finish serving out his tour. Sitting on the back patio listening to him talk with his friends about some of his experiences in combat in Vietnam was absolutely horrifying. I can only imagine how my mom must have felt. Around the same time it was reported that my brother, Steve, had a nervous breakdown in Japan. When he enlisted in the navy, he was a triage nurse and the things that he saw and experienced threw him over the edge. So Steve was medically discharged and temporarily placed into a mental health facility upon his return to the US. This broke my mom’s heart.

Boots was discharged after his tour. I remember being so excited about going to the airport to pick him up. We used to be very close to him when we were small kids. He and his friends played with us in Mom and Dad’s