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Saturday May 17,2008

Some Small Signs: Part 1

by Jim Balthazor

I know there are ways our kids can communicate with us from beyond. I felt the largest part of the communications came soon after Kirk's death because of the transition that one makes from this world to the next - they still haven't gotten totally busy in the life they are leading and need to spend some time giving us small signs. Those signs may be in the smallest of things. Yet to us they seem so large. A couple of months after Kirk's death I wrote this story.

One Small Sign

On August 5, 2000, we lost our son Kirk Matthew in a car accident at the age of 17. It was very tragic and it turned our world up-side-down. He had suffered from ADHD and was having a hard time at school and with his life. Although he had many friends and got along with everyone, people in authority over the past couple years had taken their toll on his attitude.

His mother and I were trying the tough love approach and limiting his use of the car, but in the end it was his driving that killed him. From the night of his death I had been wishing that he could get a small message to us about how he was. I was hoping to dream about him at night, but since the wreck I have not had any dreams at all. I was wanting just a small sign that everything was ok.

The pain that is felt when your child is taken from you is great. How you related to them and they to you can make that pain greater. From the time Kirk could walk we did everything as a family. We like to boat and have a dock at the local lake. We became active in scouts together and spent a lot of time during the summer camping and hiking. We liked to hunt for fossils and every now and then would have to drop everything to go shark teeth hunting at a local sand pit. Baseball was an annual summer thing and up to the time Kirk was 12, I coached his teams. He was an honor roll student in the local junior high school where both his mother and I taught.

But as sometimes happens with ADHD kids as Kirk moved to high school he felt a little more freedom, but his ability to understand that with that freedom comes some responsibility, began to lose out. The last couple of years were very hard for us all. Try as we did we were not able to prevent what happened and I was desperate to get some small sign from him that everything was ok.

I got that sign in church about one month after his death. This service was extremely hard as we were taking up the gifts to the altar as a family. The music that we were singing was some of the same music that we had played at his funeral. On top of