Her son died, and she felt alone. In her grief, she found YouTube.
Isaiah Moorefield died five years ago. His mother Rachel remembers him every day.
Her 19-year-old son was here one moment, then he was gone. It's been a rough, rocky road ever since.
"He changed everything about me. He made me want to be a better person and a mom and my life became about being a mom for him," says Moorefield, 42, of Apex, North Carolina. "And he has always been and always was a great kid, just very charismatic, very witty, extremely intelligent."
Isaiah died by suicide July 28, 2018, following struggles with Tourette's syndrome and depression. Moorefield had him when she was 17; she and her husband Steve were high school sweethearts.
"As he got older, (his) depression kept getting worse," she says. "And I thought, as well as his father, we thought that we had a handle on it. And we didn't.
"We didn't."
Grief follows us around, like a shadow: ever-present, and peters in and out depending on the time of day. But it always comes back – and one way or another it comes for everyone. It doesn't make you weak to talk or cry about it: It makes you human.
People don't want to talk about grief, but we want to change that. USA TODAY wants to hear your story; scroll to the bottom of this article to fill out a survey about how you're handling your loss.
"Grief is a universal experience," says Loree Johnson, licensed marriage and family therapist. "It's something that we all go through, and it's a natural response to the loss of not just a loved one, but of something as we knew it."
'When you lose a child, you lose part of your identity'
Rachel thinks about Isaiah all day, every day.
"When you lose a child, you lose part of your identity," she says.
Isaiah loved the outdoors: fishing and swimming in quarries in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where the Moorefield family lived at the time. He also loved being an older brother to his younger sisters, Bella and Myley – something Rachel frequently reminds her daughters: "I am constantly re-sharing memories and stories and just simple things like, 'you know, this was your brother's favorite food. Do you remember that?'"
It might be annoying to them, but "I don't have new stories to tell," she says. "But it's really important that I keep doing it. Because one, it makes me feel good. And two, I want to make sure that that's impounded into them as much as possible, how much I don't want their memory of their brother to die out at all. And so the more that I talk about him, the more I keep that fresh and alive for him. And it makes me feel like he isn't quite gone."
She's also dealt with her grief publicly by posting videos on YouTube; she has more than 40,000 subscribers. She posted her first video in February, about five months after Isaiah's death.
It has given her a virtual community that was easier for her to interact with. In person, no one knew how to help. How could they?
"We'd go into a store, and because it was suicide, and because it was the mom who lost her child, everybody would look at you," she says. "And it became increasingly harder for me to just live any sort of daily life through the grieving or inside the home, outside of the home."
In grocery stores, when the stares hit, she would feel her whole body turn hot. "Every emotion that you can possibly feel," she recalls. "I feel sadness. I feel anger. Sometimes I get a little bit bitter inside."
Talking to an online audience gave her some relief: "As I started to talk, everything just kind of poured out of me."
This doesn't surprise Amy Morin, psychotherapist and the host of a podcast: "Isolation makes grief worse. Talking about it could help people feel less alone. When people talk about the universal emotions associated with grief and loss, they normalize those things."
Parents reached out and thanked Moorefield. She realized she hit on something much bigger than herself. "I realized that there's so many people there that are grieving and hurting and they don't feel like they're allowed to talk about it," she says. "They don't feel like they're allowed to express pain and sorrow and, almost like they're stuck. The world keeps going on, and they're stuck in this place of grief that they become unreachable."
'The worst grief' – Is there one?
Grief remains a taboo topic in American culture, like politics or money at the dinner table. "We're uncomfortable with other people feeling sad," Morin says. "So there's a tendency to want to cheer people up when they're going through grief."
Grief may come in many forms, too, beyond death: "I always think about grief as a change we did not want," says David Kessler, grief expert and founder of Grief.com. "So that gives us more of a broader perspective, that you don't want your body to be changing after childbirth, probably, you maybe didn't want that job to end, maybe you don't want your best friend to move away. And so all those are forms of grief."
In that vein, it's best to try and avoid the comparison game of grief. "We often tend to compare and look for the winner," Kessler adds. "Which is the worst grief? Clearly it's this or clearly it's that. And yet, when we really talk about which is the worst loss, or the worst grief, I always remind people, it's yours."
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'I'm never going to be capable of moving on'
Everyone's grief paths veer differently. But at some point, grief integrates itself as part of you.
Moorefield worries she's alienated people with her grief, even years later. "I feel a lot of times that my presence is taxing, that I can be an emotionally taxing person to be around," she says. "That people have to be mentally prepared, or in the right emotional place to be able to allow me into their life at that time."
No one knows what to say to her; even her own dad was at a loss on the anniversary of Isaiah's death this past July.
"He didn't know if him reaching out was going to make it better or make it worse, so he didn't," she says. "He didn't reach out. And in my place, I felt that because a lot of people didn't reach out, that people were moving on with their lives, where I'm never going to be capable of moving on."
Moorefield now hopes to spread the message to kids that parents don't ever stop loving their children.
She adds: "I want to prevent as many moms as I possibly can from going through this amount of pain because it is truly indescribable."
If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, dial 988 to reach someone with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. They're available 24 hours a day and provide services in multiple languages.
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