<p><em>big sigh</em>… here we go.</p>
<p>Well, I’ve only posted on this site one time before, but I’ve lurked for ages and I was quite confident that I could use it as a support system. I don’t even know if this is the right forum. this might turn into a disorganized tear-fest, but you have no idea how hard it is for me to think coherently right now, even more than a week later. </p>
<p>I have two beautiful children, both were about to enter their second year of college. We used to be very tightly knit, but my husband and I and my son had a series of falling-outs throughout the year and DD was studying abroad during the spring so we never heard much from either of them. DS went to a good school in TX. </p>
<p>The basic story is that my son (who had been a straight-laced all A’s big shot lacrosse player during high school) got heavily into alcohol and marijuana during his freshman year to the point that he would literally skip a whole week of classes sometimes (he went to a big state university where attendance was seldom taken, but even so). His grades were plummeting and he was constantly uploading pictures of himself to Facebook of him drunk, him smoking, etc, things that hurt as a mother, but i wasn’t taking a very proactive role because I wanted him to prove that he could be responsible without mommy and daddy constantly monitoring his behavior. In addition, he was always talking about smoking/drinking/anything else you can imagine with people on his wall. Mind you, we weren’t “snooping.” He was our friend on Facebook.</p>
<p>I was trying to stay out of it, but one day my husband decided enough was enough and he called DS to try to put him in some sort of order, which didn’t work obviously. After cussing DH out on the phone and telling him to get out of his life and so on, he quit calling us and quit coming home for breaks during the entire semester. This was in November. He stayed on campus during Thanksgiving and didn’t even answer the phone when we called to wish him a happy Thanksgiving, etc. He had to come home during the Christmas break and he barely spoke a word to us, and he would come in at 4 and 5 in the morning, drunk and stumbling all over the furniture, to find DH and I sitting in the living room paralyzed with worry. On the day we dropped him back off for Spring semester, he slammed the car door in our faces when it was time for us to leave. I cried and cried, wondering how my son could have turned into such a monster. Sometimes the phone would ring and I would be overjoyed, only to answer and hear my drunk son mumbling. </p>
<p>In March he ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, which naturally scared me to death, but unfortunately, neither I nor DH was surprised. He finished the year off with a low 2.3 GPA, lost all his scholarships, of which he had gotten many because he was an excellent student. He refused to come home for summer and told us that he had gotten an apartment with some friends (he did this by himself, since he had more than enough money saved up from working a well-paying job over several summers). We knew full well the kind of people he was going out with on the apartment, but we felt powerless because, after all, it was HIS money.</p>
<p>This was mid-May. He made a surprise appearance at our house with a trailer to move some furniture and get some other things. Strangely, this time he was a lot warmer and actually spoke with DH and I, but still seemed bitter and distant under the surface. He looked so different: he had a bushy beard and a big belly and almost pale yellow skin, we almost didn’t recognize him. He was sick but still our baby boy. However, he revealed to us that he had been in AA because of an MIP he had received, and we had a frank, tearful conversation about his alcohol habits and how he was ruining our lives. Thanks to the AA , he really seemed to be on the upswing. </p>
<p>deep breath…</p>
<p>Fast forward to the Saturday before last at around 3 AM. Phone rings. Hello, such and such police department, do you know DS. Yes I do tell me what’s going on with my son. </p>
<p>they found him dead at the scene. the driver, one of the kids my son was living with, was drunk and they later found cocaine in the remnants of the car. there were four passengers, including DS, the driver, one of the driver’s friends and his girlfriend. they had been driving back to DS/driver’s apartment after a party. driver reportedly got distracted and the car careered over into the other side of the road, and when driver swerved to miss the car that was oncoming, he overcorrected and flipped the car down an incline. DS was apparently ejected from the car through the passenger window and then crushed under the weight of the car, the girl, who was also on the passenger’s side, was crushed inside and they had to drag her charred body out of the car. Driver and other passenger managed to escape, though both are in the hospital right now, Driver has severe brain trauma and is unresponsive, other passenger has deep lacerations and burns all over his body and a punctured lung.</p>
<p>(that was the most painful paragraph i have EVER written in my life. It took 30 minutes to write. I can’t believe this is happening.) </p>
<p>Anyway… I don’t care to go into further detail. This is just so painful. I break down every time I walk past DS’s old room. I feel like an absolute failure as a mother and as a human being, and DH tells me he feels the same way and so does DD even though she had nothing to do with any of this. I feel like I’ll never stop crying I feel like I could have stopped all of this from happening if I had tried to pry him away from the destructive lifestyle he was living at the beginning. Maybe we should have told him we would stop funding his schooling until he got his habits under control. Maybe it was our job to educate him about alcohol. My brother died many years ago in a similar way, except he was the driver there - maybe we should have told him early on about the consequences. There are so many should-haves but none of them really matter now. I just don’t know what to do with myself, I feel criminal for not having prevented this in SOME way. </p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t know what i was hoping to accomplish by having written this thread, but even though I am still crushed and ruined and miserable, i feel like some of the weight is taken off my shoulders if anyone out there reads this. how do you stop blaming yourself? how can you EVER move on? This will haunt me every minute for the rest of my life. I really hate myself right now.</p>
<p>I can’t write any more right now. i’m just not ready to say goodbye. If your son or daughter is heading off to college in the next few weeks, hug them extra tight and remind them that a night of fun is NEVER worth the potential consequences… some of us have to learn that lesson the hard way.</p>