Bereaved Father Helps Others Cope with Anxiety and Grief
Part Two
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
Tom Flanagan is the founder of Blue Skies. Through this organization, he helps people struggling with anxiety find community, connection, and effective means of support.
In Part One of this story, Flanagan speaks about the struggles of his son, Alex, who died from a fentanyl overdose in 2022. Alex suffered from General Anxiety Disorder, which drove him to substance use.
This experience made Flanagan keenly aware of his own struggles and inspired him to address the lack of resources for people coping with grief and anxiety.
Attainable Ideals
“I want to be part of the conversations where people talk about what they feel,” Flanagan explains. “At the age of 74, I find that notion enlightening, enlivening, and important. Blue Skies is a means for people to contribute to something that everyone can benefit from.”
Flanagan maintains that his outreach is a gradual, intentional effort rather than a hurried concern. “Here’s the rub,” he continues, “Let’s say a philanthropist came to us and said, ‘Here’s 20 million dollars, I hope it helps.’ I would say, ‘The money is not going to do it, and maybe it would just complicate things, because people would be attracted for the wrong reasons.’”
“I would also say, ‘If you have that money to invest, give it to the local recovery center.’ If that were the case, I am sure that whatever came our way as a result would help Blue Skies go forward.”
Getting Involved
“I have been working with East Bay Recovery Center as a client with their anxiety group and dealing with my own sense of imposter syndrome. As a high achiever, I look at myself and say, ‘Why should I be anxious?’ Which is a way of denying that I am. It is a very strange feeling.”
“The first time I went to a substance use support group; I explained that I had an addiction that I had recently learned about. The person across from me was addicted to crack cocaine and there I was saying I was addicted to pizza. I thought I was going to be laughed out of the room, but they accepted that and made it clear that they understood my struggle. I almost broke down and cried. These guys had been through hell while I had been blindsided by what I wished I had been paying attention to.”
“For a while I was trying to get audiences to show up to hear local, alternative caregivers – people who are involved in things like equine therapy, art therapy, acupuncture, and somatic medicine. That turned out to be a hard sell for an entity that nobody knows about. So, I had to do something to make Blue Skies better known.”
Poetic License
Flanagan’s penchant for reflection led him to explore poetry as a way to release emotions and reduce stress. The Blue Skies website features a Poetry for Managing Anxiety page which introduces visitors to various, step-by-step writing prompts for putting feelings into words.
“Part of promoting Blue Skies has been through poetry,” Flanagan says. “I joined the Rhode Island LitArts group. My imposter syndrome prevents me from recognizing myself as a poet, but my peers in that group are trying to convince me otherwise. I have been encouraged to publish my work, which I am considering but I haven’t done so yet. I really enjoy interacting with those people. They ask me why I am not eager to publish my poems. I tell them that I write to try to learn how I will be able to speak. I want to speak in a more poetic way.”
“I have been trained to speak in a declarative way – as a scientist. There is much more to be gained by speaking in an interrogative way and to recognize that when someone answers, they might be doing so in a poetic way so I have to be able to look for what they might be meaning behind what they are saying. Poetry is an area where mystery is currency. Once you are certain about something, it is time to start over.”
Excerpt from the poem In My Opinion by Tom Flanagan:
If we share a longing for a time when compassion, closeness, held us in long-quiet moments, then we share a grief for its absence
This grief is civic grief
It is the grief of the sense of loss or hope for a happier future
A sense of anxiety for what might come ahead
A sense of fear of what we might be capable of doing to each other
There is a darkness in the heart of mankind but there is also a light
One does not live without the other
It is folly to trust in the balance when we do not create together
A balance we cannot feel, a balance we cannot see when we take up tasks together
The task before us at the moment is to recognize that we are only heartbeats away from Sharing our civic grief compassionately
Or turning our children' s future into fires of our own rage
Alternative Support
“I have gone to a lot of groups and organizations for grief and anxiety to see how peers support one another,” Flanagan continues. “I don’t believe we will ever have enough professionally trained clinicians to serve us as a society. Peer support is critically essential and fortunately we are influenced by our peers whether they are well informed or not, whether they are well intentioned or not. The movement to have peer counseling for something that matters like anxiety or grief gets the conversation down to a level where you are not speaking abstractly, you are talking about your experience with it in a non-prescriptive way.”
“There are many grief support groups. The largest in our area is called Compassionate Friends. The people involved in that organization are those who have lost children to illness, sudden accident, or some sort of unforeseen tragedy. When I shared that I lost my son to fentanyl poisoning, they knew they could not relate to my loss because in many ways it was a history of ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ rather than a slow, grinding progression or a sudden stop. The struggle with substance use makes grief from substance-related death more complex. There’s a lot of shame and self-blame.”
“The rituals that the East Bay Recovery Center uses in its support groups begin with a meditation,” Flanagan explains. “These are done with meditative audio files which can be obtained from many different online resources. This helps settle the group so that everyone is comfortable. For more extensive meditation, however, some folks can’t do it because they can’t sit still. Instead, some choose to go for a walk, yet they may not be meditation.
Regardless, there is a ritual called the Walking Meditative Labyrinth. Unfortunately, when people think of a labyrinth, they imagine some sort of spiritual pilgrimage where you must suffer to become better. That is not what a behavioral health labyrinth is. Rather, it is a ritual of finding temporary relief from anxiety, grief, loneliness, and depression. For someone to find that relief, the labyrinth must be designed in a certain way.”
By the Numbers
“The first year after Alex died, grief was an assassin," Flanagan says. “For the first Christmas after Alex died, we got in the car and drove to Santa Fe. There is the breaking of traditions and there is the creating of traditions, and they happen together, you don’t substitute one for the other. We had to break with tradition by not trying to modify Christmas. We had to realize that it would not be the same without him, so we had to let it go. We did something else instead, something we otherwise would have never done.”
“The second year, for the holidays, I don’t remember what we did. It was something closer to home. By then, I was no longer shocked or surprised when the assassin leaped on me and stabbed me. It happened at odd times, but I was quite familiar with the feeling.”
“The third year was very disturbing,” Flanagan continues. “It was a sense of wondering to myself, ‘Am I starting to forget?’ It was then that I realized I had not dreamed of Alex once in two years. But in the car, anytime we were driving along, I could hear his voice saying, ‘Let’s go to Taco Bell.’ I would say, ‘Oh, you’re back, are you?’ That’s when I realized some of the traditions were comforts, even if they were comfortable pain. Like putting on an old pair of blue jeans after you put on too much weight.”
“From my current standpoint, anxiety and grief are not separate but grief is more sellable than anxiety when it comes to getting people involved. If you’ve lost someone, you know why you need to have a conversation – to seek support. That’s why I work with ShareWell and serve as a peer supporter on their platform. People call in from all over the country with different experiences, yet they all share the same problem, in that they don’t have anyone to talk to.”
“I want to use these ideas,” Flanagan concludes, “To ignite the compassion of a group of people who can carry the ball forward. This outlook is something we would share amongst leaders to say, ‘Is it time to do something?’ To inform the press about what civic grief means, they could use this to open the can of worms.”