Letters to the Editor
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Honoring pain isn't going to help.
I don't really have much thought on the basics of this letter. Too little to go on. Maybe the mom is absent in some way and her son misses her. Or maybe the son is like so many of us as a teenager -- he's right about how he views the world and f**k everything in his way (seriously, meet some of these kids who are brought up anti-drug/sex/and-everything-else). So maybe the advice is spot-on.
What I disagree with is that whatever pain parents leave us with, you don't honor it. You don't pay tribute to it. You don't simply blunt it. None of those things are "knowledge." Those things add up to nothing but bitterness. Knowledge comes from the process of getting past it. Stifling it and enshrining it is completely different. You poison your life and those in it just as much with that as if you never did anything at all either through mimicking your parents or medicating yourself into a numbness about it.
Maybe the mom here needs to realize she's close to failing in some way her own parents did. She needs to work past it. Honoring the pain inflicted on her or living a self-induced numbness over it is the same thing -- it's a life built on the foundation of painful memories and nothing else.