July is Bereaved Parents Awareness month, a time for most folks to thank God, I guess, that they still have all their children living and breathing. Yes, I’m being cynical. I’m in that kind of mood. But I appreciate when those who haven’t lost children are interested to hear from those of us who have what we need, what works for us, and what doesn’t help. So here’s my personal offering of education for those interested in listening.
First, I’ve been living this nightmare since November 2013. Before then, I used to wake up each morning aware that I was one day closer to death. Yes, I had an unusual sense of my own mortality, but having been born to older parents, having been told as a young child that I better appreciate my dad since he wouldn’t be around long, and having attended many more funerals than weddings, death was always in my peripheral vision. Perhaps, that’s why I was always so terrified that my children would die. I’ve always been acutely aware that everyone does. Anyway, until Nov. 11, 2013, the first day I woke after Jess died, I always began the day rather anxious that my clock was ticking away, not that I feared death, but rather that I dreaded its arrival.
Now, I wake each day and pray for the years to pass quickly. I believe that only time will deaden the pain of loss and make it bearable for however long I must endure. Five years from now, I will have longer stretches of time when my mind isn’t possessed with thoughts of my daughter’s death. I hope to have found my all-but-lost capacity for laughter. And I no longer dread the idea of being at the end of life, no, quite the opposite. Like the runner who completes the long-distance marathon, I too will stagger emotionally if not physically exhausted across the finish line.
Time is my friend and my enemy. The more time passes, the more I can look back and see that I have healed some, that I have changed in some ways, that I no longer am as raw as I initially was. I can stand crowds now without having panic attacks. I can enjoy certain things such as eating and physical activity. My brain recall has returned to some degree, and thinking isn’t as maddening as it was when I still felt shell-shocked. These are all good things.
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But time is still my enemy too. The past haunts me. I see my babies, my little girls, and I long to hold them again. Sarah is now 28, healthy and alive, but I still long for my little blond girlie who needed her mommy but is now grown up. And that longing for both Jess and Sarah would be just as real if Jessie were still here with me. I mourn the loss of being a mom to my babies and young children. That part of my life is behind me, but it’s still an ache in my hollow heart, a heart that hasn’t yet found another meaning for being.
Time in the present means living through the minutes and hours of endless questioning if anything anyone could have done would have saved my daughter’s life. If only she hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend. If only her girlfriend had moved down like they had planned, and the two of them had gotten an apartment together. If only Jess had followed through with her plans to have her friends pick her up from the bus station that evening. If only I hadn’t been so consumed with my mother’s funeral and could have noticed how pale and tired Jess was. If only, if only, if only. There are a million challenges to her death that I’ve come up with, and not one of them will bring back my girl. I hit the replay button over and over again, and yet I still get that phone call from her dad telling me my beautiful crazy daughter is dead.
I believe that everyone who experiences the loss of a child is like a lost soul wandering endlessly through a desert, looking for an oasis or village with water, comfort, a place to find peace. We talk to each other, to those further along in the process, hoping to be given a map to quicken the journey, a potion to quench our horrible thirst for answers. I sense that if you really look at us you’ll see the deadness of sharks’ eyes, the spark of life absent if we let down the pretense. We still love passionately, if not fearfully, but the fire has gone out. I know there are those who have made it back to the land of the living, those who had to show up for their other young children, or those who are graced with the gift of acceptance of what is. I’m not there yet. I think I’m on the right road, but as Frost wrote, there are “miles to go before I sleep.”
So as you move forward in your daily living, with all your dreams, goals, complaints, and meaningful and meaningless ways of being, know that we who are bereaved live dual lives. On the outside, we can appear to fit in. It’s just the suit of clothes we’ve managed to squeeze into that creates the image of normality. But the conversation in our minds, the constant background noise of our daily living is the symphony of loss we continue to endure. Don’t ever suggest that we should “get over it,” “move on” because our children want to see us happy, or offer that we should “volunteer at something to help others so you can get your mind off your own problems.” These “caring” suggestions will fill us with rage and strengthen the sense that we are a people set apart, no longer members of normal society, perhaps no longer human. And in the end, what these suggestions really say to us is that “normal” people aren’t comfortable with our grief, with the people we’ve become, and care not so much for the end of our suffering as they do the end of their personal discomfort at watching us grieve. Harsh words, perhaps. But the truth is we are forced to wake up every day at the bottom of the hill with the huge boulder of our grief and the endless uphill trek. You can choose to journey with us, or you can turn and walk away.
So much of this is so like my journey, though the details are different. I think I am feeling more acceptance…but I also grieve so very deeply for his childhood, because it was hard, his life. It’s like we are both making pasta sauce, but I use more onions and you use more olive oil.
What I have decided so far about meaning in general is that I don’t know if there is any. If there is, we are here to love each other and learn. For me personally, I have people who need me; that’s all the meaning I can muster. I am able to enjoy things, but the grief is always just there under the surface.
I think laughter would be a great thing for you to have more of, and I hope it comes back to you.
Yes, the starting point is the same for us–we lost our darlings. But the journey is deeply personal. That’s why I believe in the idea of “one mother’s loss” because no two of us experience the same thing. We can’t. We are and were different women, mothers. Our children are all uniquely individual as are our relationships with them. How we experience life and emotions is unique as well. That’s why no one can tell us the way we’re grieving is wrong. This isn’t a test, and there’s no scoring system. I think if anything it’s simply a “pass/fail” experience. We make it through or we don’t. Or we make it through as long as we can.
Ben did have a hard life, and it would have continued to be so despite his joy and abundant love. Jess was really coming into her own, I believe, so the grief is all the more intense to feel that her life was on the upswing, and she had so much to look forward to.
I agree there are people who need us. And there are people we love. Sometimes, my pain is so great, I’m still not sure if I can do this, but I keep waking every morning and carrying on. It’s like what Sarah said the first week when I kept saying, “I can’t do this…” She’d respond, “You’re doing it, Mom.” And she was right. I just pray for time to pass quickly. I want to get to the place where the pain is less intensely sharp and is more bearable.
“You’re doing it,” as Sarah said. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like it because we’re not the person we were the day before and are still not the next day, the next week, month, year, any number of years later. Will never be. I feel I have been recreating myself since that day, and I didn’t have much of a (self-identified) self before.
My life as a human being is much more than it was before Caitlin’s death. Would I knowingly give her up for this? No! No!! NO!!! (That looks dramatic, but the thought is so horrific it’s the only way I can express it in print.) I would rather have her and no me. Yet this is what happened. Somehow I survived, “doing it” day by endless day, and here I am, more real than I ever knew possible.
I had a work friend who had childhood onset diabetes. He developed a very dark sense of humor because he knew his life was limited. I learned from him to find something, sometimes anything, to laugh at every day. It helped me get through the early days and is now a habit.
For years my only connection to Caitlin was my grief. It took so long to realize that even if I learned to be in the world, enjoy my relationships, find beauty and delight, she is still gone. Her goneness is as close as breath.
And, I am here. I live in a beautiful place. I love my children, my family, my friends, this beautiful, awful world. Reading gives me pleasure (your writings, Bernie, are particularly enjoyable because someone I know writes so well!). Being in my body, aging and yet more capable than ever. There is something to learn and explore everyday. I think of Liz’s full-body and -hearted laughter – I aspire to that.
My girl was real. She is still. I didn’t plan to have her and she changed me, changed everything I knew. I rediscover her each time she comes to mind or heart. My girl died. She is dead still. I didn’t expect that, and her death changed me and everything I knew. There is a dialogue that continues to grow our relationship. These are two mysteries that seem contradictory, that I live with, that have worked within me to make me who I am.