Still a mother, Nana

By Travina Coleman
Phoenix Features Writer

May 10, 2008 09:07 pm

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Pam O’Connell remembers wandering alone in the cold, up and down the long driveway to her son’s apartment complex, waiting for something she has never truly found — peace.
She had received a call from his girlfriend telling her that her son had shot himself.
“It was awful,” she said. “I was in shock, I couldn’t think.”
Her son, Kelly O’Connell took his life March 2, 1999, when he was 26 years old.
In the bitter cold of the evening Pam could find no solace to her confusion and her pain. She said the minute police officer Scott Shields grabbed her and hugged her, she knew he was gone.
“They wouldn’t let me go in,” she said. “All I could do was wander around.”
Pam said she knew someone had taken her to the hospital but she couldn’t remember who.
“I still have no idea who brought me, or even what car we were in,” she said.
Pam said she had no idea her son’s depression would take away her best friend.
“Kelly got depressed after difficulties in his personal life,” she said. “I knew he needed help so I took him to my doctor. He gave Kelly medicine and told me to make sure he took it every day. So I went to his apartment every day to make sure he did. I thought he would be okay. Four days later he was dead.”
Pam remembers her son as a person full of life and promise with many loyal friends.
“Everyone loved him,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “I loved him.”
She said she never saw depression as a disease before.
“I know now how quickly depression can overtake you and make you think the things you once lived for weren’t worth it anymore,” she said. “It’s a very serious affliction.”
Mother’s Day has taken on no different meaning for Pam — she’s still a mother. But it is a day that reminds her, even after nine years, she can never hold her only son again.
“I miss him every day,” she said. “The way we would argue and his way of making up for it by bringing me Taco Bueno, or the way he would smile.”
Now the only boy left in her life is her godson Connor Keen, 14, of Kansas.
“I am his Nana,” she said. “He was 4 years old when Kelly died. I can still remember him asking me if my heart hurt. He is such a caring boy.”
Pam spends most of her days keeping busy and she said she thinks she’s going to take up the tambourine.
“I was at a function last weekend and I got on stage with one,” she said. “I played it for the first time and it was fun.”
She is also in the process of writing a book about her experience with Kelly and his life.
She has a passage posted on the Web at www.tellmeamiracle.net.
“It helps to write about it,” she said. “I will never get closure or peace, and I will never know why he did it. But if I can help someone else, it will help me.”

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