43. Leticia’s Lily Pads

Leticia lost her oldest son Anthony to suicide. On her ranch in the country, she’s able to find pockets of okay every day. Leticia Ochoa Adams is a speaker and author on grief, and a friend of the pod. Her book Our Lady of Hot Messes can be purchased wherever books are sold.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

I’m Nora McInerny, and it’s going to be okay.

And a heads up that today’s episode is about suicide.

It’s going to be okay is a really hard thing to believe some days.

And if you’re in the middle of something horrible, and someone tells you it’s going to be okay…and you just want to punch them right in the face? Don’t, don’t do it. That’s assault. But I understand why you would want to.

Because there are some things that just won’t ever be okay.

And losing a child is one of them.

Six years ago, Leticia Ochoa Adams lost her oldest son Anthony to suicide. And then… she kept living.

Leticia: Okay, so it’s Wednesday morning, and Wednesdays are a little hard and they have been for six years because they always remind me of Anthony. I have an alarm set for 1:51 on every Wednesday to remind me that that was the… does it reminds me but just to remind just to let you know that it’s 1:51 so that I can acknowledge that 1:51 on a Wednesday is the last time I talked to Anthony. 

And so it’s kind of crazy because as the years have gone by and the Wednesdays have come by, you know, kind of mark it off every Wednesday or whatever, everything has changed. So it started off with a waking up on a Wednesday, the week after he died and going through everything that happened the day he died and signing his death certificate. And then like, eventually, it was like Wednesday, with me working, driving to work. And then it turned into moving to the lands and being out here.

So now it is April the 11th, I think. I don’t really know. And I am in such a different place than I was the day Anthony died. When he died, we lived in a house, a two story house in the suburbs, and now I’m standing on my ranch looking at my cows making out, I think, I don’t really know what they’re doing. My cow’s supposed to have a baby, so I don’t know. She might be in labor, but. And look at it. My horses and my chicken and my rooster is about to crow. 

And I am literally the happiest that I’ve ever been. I need to go get my ducks and put them in the garden. And I’m looking at my favorite chicken just walking around. And I don’t know how I got here, like, because I remember the day that Anthony died and I thought, like, I’m never going to be able to live my life. I’m never going to be happy again. I am going to be miserable. And I somehow thought that being miserable was the way to prove that I loved Anthony or something. I don’t really know. 

And now I don’t feel that way. I feel like being happy is the way to let Anthony know that I loved him, but then that scares me to death that maybe my other kids will think like, Oh, I can also commit suicide and my mom will be fine because I’m not fine, but I’m okay. I’m not fine. And, and sometimes I’m not okay. But life is okay. I don’t know how to explain that, really, but it is, like my chickens are okay. I’m okay. I can pick up a chick. Told you, he was about to crow. I knew he was. And it will all be okay.

And I just want to tell people that sometimes when I know that they’re experiencing a tremendous loss. But I know I probably would have punched someone in the face if they had told me that because it does not feel that way when it first happens. It does not feel like everything’s going to be okay, but it will be. And maybe not overall, but like pockets of okay, pockets of okay, everything’s okay right now. 

And that’s what you hold on to and you just laugh when you’re just trying to crow it, you know? He thinks I’m a chicken, and so he wants to get me to go into the coop and I refuse. So, yeah, you just hold on to the little pockets of okay. Like you jump from one okay lilypad to the next and you just keep going forward. And I think that that’s what I do every day.

That’s what we do. One lilypad to the next. Forward. 

Thank you Leticia for sharing your story, and for helping all of us find a pocket of okay in our day. 

I hope each of you finds a lilypad to land on today. And tomorrow. And the next day.