Turning Lemons into Lemonade

On October 15, 2011 my wife, Rachel, and I lost our baby who was 5 months along in the 9 month process before being born. Our baby, Johnny, was going to be our fourth and final son. We were busy planning, getting ready, and feeling very excited for the birth of our fourth son. Our other three boys were very excited, especially our youngest because now he would have a little brother.

On October 15, 2011 Rachel and I went in for a scheduled ultrasound. The ultrasound specialist quickly discovered that Johnny was not breathing and had passed away. He sympathetically shared with us that our baby was not alive any longer. Rachel and I were stunned and shocked. This scenario was not something we were expecting or had even considered.

We went home to try and process what had just happened. We shared the information with our three boys and cried together. We felt a heavy feeling of sadness and grief and had already felt a connection to Johnny even though he was not born yet.

In the ensuing days and weeks, countless neighbors, relatives, co-workers, church friends, and others kindly offered their support and condolences. We felt deeply grateful and appreciative for how loved we were and how wonderful other people were. I will never forget how much our support group helped us.

Over the weeks and months that have passed since then, we have grieved and moved forward. Our boys still talk about ‘Baby Johnny’ and we still consider him part of our family. Every year on October 15^th, we go to the cemetery together. My wonderful wife prepares items to take with us such as balloons and flowers. We have a yearly ritual of writing a message to Johnny and attaching those messages to the helium balloons and then letting them go all at the same time. I love to look over the shoulders of my boys to see what they write. The messages have been very touching and have moved me to tears. 

I hesitated to share this information due to the personal nature of the information. However, I wanted to share this with all of our Logan River family for a few reasons. We all have difficult things we have to deal with. Our parents typically experience a lot of pain and heartache throughout the treatment and pretreatment processes. Our students typically hurt and go through a lot of tough times as well. By going through this experience, I learned a few very key principles that apply to our students and our parents:

• Trials can help us see our blessings. I was able to see how loved and supported we really were during this time.
• Difficult times can help us grow. This experience helped our family to love each other even more than we already did and helped us grow together as we leaned on each other for support.
• We have a choice when facing something difficult. Trying experiences can help us grow stronger or cause us to give up or feel sorry for ourselves. These opportunities give us a chance to learn, grow, progress, and become stronger. Our attitude and perspective can make all the difference.
• There are many good people out there. We recognized what we already knew. There are many wonderful and caring people all around us.
• We can turn lemons into lemonade. We are all sure to face difficult times in our lives. The power to choose how we are going to deal with them is a powerful concept.

I know that most of those who read this will be parents of our students. I want to extend my gratitude to you for trusting us to help you and your kids. We love what we do and are passionate about helping families to heal and our students to be able to learn important concepts like the one I wrote about in this blog post.

Matt Erickson, LCSW

Students at Logan River Academy live this very lesson as they create positive experiences out of life's challenges.