260: When Your Only Child Dies With Phil Cohen
Phil’s 14-year-old son, Perry, and his close friend were last seen leaving the Jupiter Inlet on a 19-foot fishing boat. A storm carrying heavy rain and winds over 40 mph came out of nowhere. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to reach the boys, one of the most extensive searches in United States Coast Guard history ensued. The Coast Guard searched for their boat for seven long excruciating days. In the end, neither one of the boys was ever found.
The downfall to that was that Phil really had no experience with grief whatsoever and he suddenly felt lost. The most precious person in Phil’s life was gone with no notice, no chance to say goodbye and no real idea of what really happened. Closure was very difficult to come by in that situation. Phil’s short version of knowing lost and it's been a long journey since then.
On unknowing what truly happened and the journey of accepting the situation. Experiencing grief is a major trauma and not knowing what truly happens and how it truly happens, makes your brain work in creating a story that will help you share with other people some unexplained things that may or may not make sense. Phil’s having a hard time trying to explain to other people and at one point, he started to build a website that details the timeline of whereabouts and evidence of their location and who went with his son in trying to piece together exactly what happened. But it got to a point of information overload from a lot of sources that he just stopped.
He knew that he would never really figure it out 100%. There was no way for me to know for sure exactly what happened. As a Christian, something’s pointing towards Phil in which he heard the Lord say to him: “Patience is a weapon that forces deception to reveal itself”. His faith played a big part in terms of overcoming the situation.
For all of us who have lost children, we all have to take the time to grieve and for each one of us that may be different but at some point we have to decide if we really want to live here, you know, is this where we're going to?
Phil met so many people over the last eight years that are just absolutely stuck and cannot move forward and this is something that we will never get over, that’s always there and thinking that it doesn’t go away, but we can move forward.
Some people believe that the pain that they feel from the loss of their child is the last thing that they have that's keeping them connected to them. So they just hold on to that. But there are steps that Phil thinks that we can take to help ease those things. Ultimately, it comes down to a decision you’re going to just sit here in this recliner and let this movie play out as you constantly try to figure this out or be upset about OR you can choose to focus on things like the fact that so many people will never even have children. I've met so many people who are trying to have children and they'll never be able to and they'll never experience what it's like to be a mother or a father.
In moments like this, Phil thinks back about the 14 years that he spent with Perry and all the amazing memories that they created together. When Phil chooses to focus on things that are more positive, then his mind stays in a more positive zone. But there are still always days where Phil just finds himself in tears because he misses Perry so much and he goes back and forth through these emotions.
After losing Perry, Phil just said that in the period that followed, there were no words to describe that kind of pain. Although, yes people have lost other people and that pain is real, it's not like his pain is more or the pain as parents is more than others’. Not the best analogy but it's almost the difference between a dog bite and a bee sting. They both hurt and they are a different kind of pain. It's a different kind of motion and feeling. Phil pushed the pain down and tried to carry on as best as he could because he was afraid of appearing out of control or letting his emotions get the best of him in public.
Phil didn't know what to do at that point so he actually googled on how to grieve because he didn't know what he was supposed to do. And the only thing and the only resource that he can come across is the five stages of grief.
He felt this sense of pressure and confusion like he was doing something wrong because he was not experiencing grief like this at all. He definitely did feel some of those emotions of depression and anger and maybe a little bit of bargaining. But he recalled some days where he felt all those things in one day and they weren't really all the stages. There were also times when he felt things like fear and guilt and revenge and things that aren't associated with or mentioned in the five stages.
At the age of 52, Phil remembered growing up he felt like he was basically brainwashed to believe that real men don't cry. They don’t share their emotions with other people. They don't go seek therapy. Men tough it out. They suck it up and just move on. That's what they do as men. While it is a good strategy, for some things it will never work. Because you can never outrun the reminders, the memories. They're always going to be there and you can't insulate yourself from the pain.
Until Phil actually decided to face the pain and feel his emotions. To sit and grieve, that’s when he started to feel better. One thing that he said in the past is he doesn't think that we have ever healed from grief. The grief process is healing. So if you avoid that completely, it's going to find its way out in one way. Another analogy he often used is when you are trying to hold up a beach ball underwater and if you've ever done that and you can't do it. It's not like it's not really difficult but at some point, it's going to find its way to the surface. And sometimes the deeper we push it down, the harder and faster it comes up. He avoided it completely, not wanting to face it, not wanting to talk to anybody about it but it wasn't until he decided to actually face it. To started looking at Perry's pictures again and started going to the places that reminded me of him. Taking a more offensive approach was really when he started to actually begin to heal.
So often we can focus so much on the fact that they died and with the trauma that surrounded us, that we forget that they lived.
There was a time when Phil lost his identity. He remembers asking himself: “Well, does this mean I'm not a father anymore, now that my only child is gone?” and “How do I identify myself?”. He didn't want to continue doing the same type of work anymore and felt what went through that cold of what's the point of being alive. There were times when he felt like he didn't want to be here anymore. He reached that point where he just wanted to be with his son. And by the time he realized, that his son doesn't want to live the rest of his life curled up in a ball in a dark room crying. He knows that for a fact. We can choose how we can honor our child by the way that we would want ourselves to live. The whole purpose is right now for the last several years.
Phil did a Ted talk on grief and that came out about a year and a half ago. Ever since doing that Ted talk, he had a lot of people reach out to him and find him online or on social media or email him and just say that they want to talk to him. Mostly men who have experienced the loss of a child and and even prior to that even speaking to other people who've lost ones. People have asked him how he is even carrying on. Like, how is he even alive and functioning doing this work? And Phil started to think about what he did to you. What process did he actually take to get from the deepest levels of despair to a point where he felt like now, he was doing his purpose? Helping other people through their grief and that's something that he’s been doing for the last two years or so.
Phil doesn't have a degree in psychology. He has, what he often says, a PhD in experience, 100%. With this ability to help other people and just talk to them. Walking through it, shared some of the things that he did and just gave men a safe space to talk about what happened and to talk about things that they can do and how they can talk to other people.
After learning everything that he learned, the advice that he would give himself would be to give yourself permission to heal. As parents, our primary instinct is to protect our children and it's our number one responsibility. When you lose a child, it's so easy to succumb to self-blame and to hold yourself accountable for likely things that were way outside of your control. So, give yourself permission to heal.
You may reach out and know more about Phil by visiting his website at www.philcohen.com.
Have you felt anxiety after your child died?
The racing mind, unable to sleep, waiting for the next bad thing to happen, unable to breathe, panicky kind of anxiety, whole body riddled with anxiety?
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So that you can think clearly, feel calm in your body, and live your life without the chains of anxiety.
