A mother who lost her teenage son explains the grieving process after tragedy

Nancy Medford is now on a first-name basis with the people who work at the cemetery.

“That’s weird,” she said.

It’s OK. She can talk about this now. She wants to.

Nancy Medford is Drew Medford’s mother; Drew died in a one-car accident in Aug. of 2016 in Fort Worth. He was a Paschal alum who was preparing to start his freshman year at TCU, where he was to pitch for its baseball team.

Nancy Medford is now an expert in the one topic no one on the planet wants a PhD: Grieving over the death of your child.

Beginning March 7, the Drew Medford Memorial Tournament will begin at area high schools featuring 25 baseball teams playing 59 games over three days. As part of the tournament’s mission, one player from each team will receive a $1,000 college scholarship grant; since the tournament began in 2017, more than $164,000 has been awarded in scholarship money.

What Nancy has learned is that just because one life ends does not mean yours, or anyone else’s, does. That there is no way around the fact that such an event will define a person’s life, at least partially.

“I am defined by a lot of things, and this is clearly at the very top of the list,” she said in a phone interview. “There are ways to grieve, and there are ways to hide things. Some people can’t talk about it. Some people resort to alcohol, or other things. It’s messy. It’s not going to go away; it’s ‘This is what happened and now we have to learn to live with it.’”

There is one little detail about the shock and grieving process that happens so frequently, but is so often ignored: How those around you treat your grief, pain and loss. There is no online class for this one, but there is some common sense.

This isn’t the people who casually say, “Well, at least they’re in a better place.” (It’s worth repeating to never say that to a grieving person). This is the person who makes your grief their own, and then some by all but putting it on a billboard.

One of thousands of unintended consequences of social media is our ability to advertise our emotions on a wide array of topics, including the chance to sell our reactions to a loss that belongs to someone else. Normally it’s sadness, which generates a stream of sympathetic reactions, validations, and attention.

“That did happen,” Medford said. “That’s another just weird thing in this process that can happen. We had one who was carrying on and on and our pastor had to call them. People do that. They lack attention. You have to create your own broken leg to get attention.”

There is a line between well meaning, and self serving. In these situations, just stay behind it. There is no contest for the “Who feels worse over our shared friend’s pain.”

The more frequent impossible part to this is that people move on with their own lives. Their own kids. Their own families. Their own problems. Because they have to.

And it’s not fair. Because they don’t have any clue what real loss, and the all-consuming level of grief, is like. You think you have problems with your kid, at least you have the chance to see or talk to them.

Since Drew died, Nancy and a close friend have become leaders of a support group of parents who have lost children. The first part of this evolution that Nancy didn’t see coming was the amount of moms and dads out there whose kids have died.

The other part is how many threads they share in common. That how they lost their respective children may vary, but the fall out and consequences do not.

“Your friendships change. The people who were closest to you may drift off. I get that; it happens,” she said. “It doesn’t happen initially but it’s pretty normal.

“That first year, after he died, you are in such a fog because you’re trying to understand it. It’s the second year that is harder. The fog starts to lift and you start to remember more things. Now you are dealing with anniversaries, and dates on the calendar. They are hard for people to understand, me included.”

Staying busy helps. Moving around helps. A purpose helps.

Nancy and her husband of 33 years, David, are parents to adult children Adrienne, Michael, Carly and Drew. There are grandchildren in there, too. This baseball tournament was the idea of the children as way to keep Drew’s name out there, and going.

Just people saying the name “Drew Medford” aloud helps. He is gone, and he is not forgotten.

“It’s funny because I found out early on the best thing is to talk about Drew, or whomever it is, especially your child because it’s such a tragic loss,” Nancy said. “It was scary the first few times. I had to practice. Someone said, ‘How many kids do you have?’ and I had to take a deep breath and say five. You have to get used to saying it.

“But I want people to talk about him. People don’t want you to forget their child, and this tournament is a way to handle our grief.”

A type grief of which she holds a PhD.