For 20 years, Jamie Wehmeyer studied the concept of resilience. She taught it to others. Then her family learned it in a way they couldn’t have imagined.
Everyone has a story.
And if we just assume that someone has a story, and that we should take good care of them and be kind to them,
It would go a long way to healing a lot of wounds.
I’m Jamie Wehmeyer. Since the time I started working in the behavioral health world, I really became curious about trauma right away.
I was working with women who were in the inner city,
who were trying to recover from drugs and alcohol,
and trauma was thread through the lives of so many of those women.
So I started researching and studying trauma informed care and how we can use those practices to help people
not just recover but help people to feel good, help people to be well.
I have two boys, Jake and Zane. They are my life.
And my life changed dramatically.
My husband and I had gone to St. Louis for a family graduation.
Jake, being 17 and as some 17 year olds do,
decided that he was going to circle back around and stay at our house with no one there and bring a couple friends over.
I woke up on June 25, and for some reason rolled over and looked at Facebook,
and I saw a post on our neighborhood page that said that there had been a fatality.
And in that moment, I knew it was my son.
One of his friends had killed him.
Losing a child, and losing in child in the manner that we lost him,
I can think of nothing worse.
One of the things that I wanted to have happen was to have the lunch after his funeral at the school
because I knew that there would be a lot of kids that would be there, and I knew they would feel safe.
And I was told at that time that we could not do that because we needed to keep the grief out of the school.
I was, frankly, shocked.
I have repeatedly been disappointed by the way we’ve been treated.
I knew as a community that we were supposed to be addressing trauma informed practices.
I knew that schools were supposed to be embracing that.
My agency that I worked for was supposed to be embracing that.
I knew that work had been done, but what I found out is that not enough work had been done.
I had folks who were clearly uncomfortable with me saying Jake’s name, with having Jake’s pictures around,
with some expectations that I would walk into the place that I worked, and my grief would not walk in with me.
Some expectations around Zane’s ability to sit in a classroom in the same school that
his brother was supposed to go to, and the kid who killed him was also supposed to be in that school.
I think that they just don’t know.
But I also believe that we all have a responsibility to know and to do better.
Jake was a good, kind person. He would defend kids who, maybe, couldn’t stand up for themselves.
He would work with the kid in the classroom who nobody else wanted to work with.
I’ll never understand why I lost Jake. Never.
But if I can just be the person for somebody else in pain, if I can help them through that,
that’s a good day, that’s a good day.
And I challenge folks to be that person.
To just non-judgmentally love someone.
It doesn’t matter what our story is. It doesn’t matter.
Discuss