Category Archives: Death of a child

Pass this way…

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I expect to pass through life but once.  If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.  ~ William Penn

For the Children

Let us have a heart

For children everywhere.

A mind to think

On their behalf,

With love and sacrifice.

Hands,

To touch,

To do,

To create the evidence

Of our love

And their worth.

Paulann C. Canty, December 19, 2012

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI6SlqIUG4s&w=560&h=315]

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.  ~ Charles Dickens

I went to their resting place,…

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Carol at Carol Wiebe Wonders Out Loud, asked me not long ago if I ever wrote poetry.  I told her I did occasionally.  So Carol, here is one from a long time back.  I chose to post it now to add to the ongoing conversation about loss and grief.  Thanks for asking, Carol.  I look forward to seeing where your thoughts on shared mourning “artfully” take you.

 

Shared Mourning

Not planning to go, but
Drawn there just the same
I went to their
Resting place, and
You stayed by me.

I walked among grey stones
Under grey skies leaving my
Burden in shallow graves of
Sunken footsteps in the
Rain soaked ground, and
You walked with me.

Their stories came not in the
Rushing torrent of new grief but
Slowly, gently, quietly as a
Stream, small but sure, flows
Always toward its rest; I
Spoke with quiet grief, and
You heard me.

Silence settled softly on me,
Around me, with gentle tears
Raining down from grieving sky.
My sorrow cradled in your eyes, I
Remembered those who sleep.
You held my silence.

Shoulders touching, we sat each
Alone, yet bound by strong,
Unspoken words of grief and
Joy for those we love.
Comfort came in our shared mourning.

Gifts re-gifted, or paying it forward…

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I would like to thank Jen of step on a crack…or break your mother’s back…  for nominating GrowthLines for the 7 X 7 Link Award.  Thank you, Jen for setting a worthy standard that proves writing can contain both clarity and beauty.  That in a single sentence, writing can guide our steps and document our journey.  You remind us that we can write with both honesty and integrity.

I created the GrowthLines blog for many of the same reasons I became a therapist. I wanted to observe and understand the world.  To think about what it means to be a self, an individual.  And at the same time to acknowledge and celebrate our drive to connect to each other.  I wanted to explore the possibilities of being human when we push past all that threatens to hold us back.  I wanted to be curious and kind.  I wanted to show that we could talk about hard things, without doing it in a hard way.

I still want to do and be all those things, and more.  Thinking out loud can be risky business.  Managing words can be a little like herding cats.  They have a mind, and intent of their own.  They’re not above taking you in a direction you hadn’t planned on going.  Although it can be unsettling in the moment you’re losing control, this independent streak of words is actually one of the things I like about the process of giving our thoughts a voice, written or spoken.  If I take the risk of following the process, I usually appreciate where the words take me.  The GrowthLines blog has become a doorway to amazing people, greater self awareness, and the opportunity to be a part of something good.  Thank you for stopping by, joining the conversation, and paying it forward.

As a 7 X 7 participant, I am to:

  1. Share something about me that no one (in the blogging community) knows…
  2. Link up to 7 posts of mine that I feel worthy: 
  3. Nominate 7 bloggers for this award and inform them (with pleasure):

Something no one in the blogging community knows…

As a child, I was a dreamer.  In fact as late as college I still had a wide range of things I wanted to be “when I grew up”.  The varied options included being a professional barrel racer, an opera star, a youth worker.  In my defense, I grew up in the era of Dale Evans, singing cowgirl and advocate for children

My real reason for the uncharacteristic self disclosure?  To say thank you to the host of grown ups in my life  who encouraged me to dream big and listened to my oversized musings without throwing cold water on them.  I think they knew that the process of living would shrink my list over time, so they just listened and encouraged.  I took it for granted at the time, adults encouraging me to dream and dream big.

I sit with kids everyday.  Sometimes they tell me their dreams.  Some of them seem pretty outlandish. I try to remember to be listen carefully, without judgement, without cold water.  I hope I’m not the only adult hearing their stories.

Sometimes I sit with kids who have lost their dreams.  Too much life, too soon.  Too few listeners.  Too much cold water.  I try to listen in ways to revive the dreams.  It can be hard to breathe life into dreams when innocence is gone.  Hard, but maybe not impossible.  Be a dream listener pure and simple, to the kids in your life.  If we listen well, they may trust us to help edit the dream when the time comes.

Seven posts that I feel are worthy of revisiting…

Altered Again

Faces of Grief

I wish it was not yours to do

Just a piece of paper…

a motherless child

The language of loss

What’s in a name

One of the time intensive aspects of accepting the gracious gift of an award from a fellow blogger is discovering and deciding who to give a gift to.  These exploratory trips into to Blog Land have also become the gift that keeps on giving to me, as I find written treasures and new voices.  They speak honestly, with hope and humor, with encouragement and information.  Most of those recognized in this post are new to me.  I’m excited about having found them.  Their thoughts and experiences have touched me and made me glad I stepped into the blogging community.  I have linked to a specific post on each blog.  I hope you will explore their entire territory.

Seven bloggers I would like to nominate for the 7 X 7 award…

still counting stars

Teen Support in NYC

A Considered Life

Don’t call me Brenda

An Emigrant’s Way

Azphoenix’s Blog

Everyone Needs Therapy

Grief in hiding…

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We all grieve.  But each in our own way.  Grief as fact is universal.  Grief as experience is personal.  There are common themes, but even those are shaped by our personal touch.  Regardless of your way of grieving, it’s important to remember two things.  Loss may be an event.  Grief is a process.

What we know in theory, sometimes becomes blurry in reality.  We bring our own histories and personalities to this partnership with grief.  We are still at risk of assuming that others grieve like we grieve.  We forget that differences, like our age, or the number of times we have encountered grief, affect how we feel our grief.  Our experience in the dance of loss affects how we show our grief.

Our acquaintance with grief begins in childhood and continues through adolescence.  Friends move away.  We lose pets. Grandparents die.  Painful lessons about life and the passage of time, happening in an order we don’t like, but come to accept as life’s way.  Sometimes loss happens out of order, bringing painful lessons about time cut short.  Sometimes we are children facing the loss of a child, a peer.

I was in junior high school the first time I faced the death of a peer.  He was a year younger than me.  We didn’t go to the same school, or even live in the same town.  We weren’t best friends or extremely close. Perhaps it made a difference that we had become friends on our own.  Our parents didn’t know each other.  Our respective friends didn’t know each other.  I met him during the summer when I visited my grandparents.  We rode horses together, talking about incidentally important teenage topics.  At the end of the summer he stayed in the country, I went back to the city.  And then the news came that he had killed himself, with a shotgun, over a girl.  He left a note.  “She doesn’t love me anymore.”

I traveled the fifty miles, by myself on a Greyhound bus, to attend his funeral at the local high school. The gymnasium was filled with people from the rural community and beyond.  There were junior high and high school students.  Young people facing the loss of a peer, a death out of order.  I was there to pay my respects to a brief friendship, and perhaps to stand with other teenagers as we each found our voice of grief.

I lost and grieved other peers, all too young to die, as I finished adolescence and stepped into young adulthood.  In the years that followed I have sat with grieving children and teenagers as they found their own way through loss that came too soon, to those too young.  What should we take from young grief? Who should we be to the children and teenagers in our lives who are facing overwhelming and traumatic loss?

We’re used to learning from the wisdom of age and experience.  When children grieve we discover there are things to learn and lessons to be reminded of from the wisdom of innocence.  For the sake of the young let’s remember

  • they are not empty human-like containers who are here but devoid of feelings until they reach the magic age of majority at 18.  Our failure to recognize this means we may be insensitive to the ways their life has been disrupted.
  • not displaying emotion doesn’t mean a child isn’t feeling something.  Are we modeling a variety of ways to express feelings?  Are we respectful of their need to be with us, and to have time alone?  We may fail to acknowledge the hole left in their lives if we assume that silence means there is no hole.
  • they are not adults in smaller bodies.  They are not fully equipped to identify, feel, and express the complex range of emotions related to loss.  We may explain away their emotion by referring to their displays of grief as adolescent drama.  Defining their grief as overstated may allow us to hide our own discomfort with grief in understated ways.  Will we risk being uncomfortable to be with them in these raw moments?
  • they will accommodate us, at their own risk, if they believe we can’t handle shared grief.  If the things they need to say, the questions they need to ask “make” us cry or shut down, they will take care of us by keeping their thoughts and their questions to themselves.  We get to help them know it’s okay to cry, okay to be quiet, okay to step outside.  We get to show them how to grieve, even as grief continues to be our teacher.  It’s not our grieving that harms, but our determination to leave it the unnamed presence in our midst, and children to wrestle with it alone and in hiding.

“Sorrow makes us all children again – destroys all differences of intellect.  The wisest know nothing.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson                                    

Faces of grief

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On May 12, 1986, in the early hours before dawn, 19 students and adults from Oregon Episcopal school left the Timberline lodge to climb to the summit of Mt. Hood.  They hoped to watch the sunrise from the top of the mountain.  Six hikers turned back early while the rest continued to climb.A freak spring blizzard moved in when the hikers were about 100 feet from the summit.  A hiking guide and a student turned back in hopes of finding help.  The nine remaining climbers dug into an ice cave for shelter as the storm continued for three days.  Rescuers found the climbers late in the day on May 14. (The Seattle Times, July 25, 1986, Jack Broom and Steve Bovey.)  By the end of the day only two teenagers of the climbers rescued survived.  One made a complete recovery.  The second had both legs amputated. (AROUND THE NATION, May 19, 1986.)

About four years after the tragedy on Mt. Hood, I heard Doug Manning, author of Don’t Take My Grief Away From Me, talk about the loss of a child.  He spoke about the depths of grief for parents and the process of holding on to their child’s life to insure its meaning.  And then he talked about the lives lost, and saved on the mountain.  He had spoken at a conference in Portland shortly after the tragedy.  He talked about those who died, and about the young man, 16, who survived, thanks to the amputation of both his legs.  He spoke about a hidden face of grief when he said:

“We’re going to have a hard time letting this young man grieve the loss of his feet.  We’re going to tell him how lucky he is that he survived.  But no matter how lucky he is, he’s still going to miss his feet.”

As if the grief of death is not enough, we are faced with the grief of what was lost in surviving. Sometimes the mere fact that we survived becomes our loss, our shame.  That for no apparent reason someone died, and we did not.  We bury those losses inside, keeping them silent because they are without merit compared to someone else’s.

The loss of a home, or a job would never compare to the loss of a loved one.  But what if loss isn’t about comparison, but connection?  What if by being present for each other in all our layers of loss, we can begin to understand our relationship with grief.  What if the loss of lesser things teaches us that grief of any size is hard, and that we can survive it?  Grief has many faces.  We may find the strength and comfort of healing as we learn to see them all.

I wish it was not yours to do…

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A child’s death at any age leaves a gaping hole.  Before birth or after.  When your child is young or old. Their death separates you from all that is living.  A painful gap between the world that was taken from you, and the flat, grey world in which you find yourself. We see your pain, but we don’t know what to do with it.  It is palpable.  We want to acknowledge your loss, and maybe even apologize for the relief we feel every time we look at our own child, knowing that our heart is still whole, while yours is not.  So we walk with you, not because we know exactly how you feel, but because we don’t want you to be alone.  We find a way, however awkward, to say we’re sorry that this is now your job…

How You Rise Each Day

I wish
It were not
Yours to do.

But it is
Your pain,
And you have wrestled it
To the ground,
Rising again
And again
Until you found its heart
And forced it to join you
In celebration of him,
Your son,
John Michael.

It is a mystery to me
How you rise each day
To be reminded
That you are,
And he is not.

Perhaps because you were
His beginning,
And witness to his brief present,
Now you must become his future.
Walking where he cannot,
Breathing life into each
Precious dream
Until his footprints surround us
With all he would have been
Had he not gone so soon.

I wish
It was not
Yours to do.

But it is your grief,
And you have donned its
Black cloak of mourning
With courage,
Determined to dance again
In celebration of him,
Your son,
John Michael.

 

 

 

And dance you will.
Slowly,
At times halting,
Then with confidence
And joy,
Filling the world again
With color,
Vibrant,
Youthful
As you dance not your dance,
But his,
Your son,
John Michael.

© Paulann Condray Canty, 2011 

 

“Death comes to our dances, and if we dance at all, it must be in her forbidding presence.  But the wondrous conclusion is that we who must die, must dance, and that both are our destiny, and neither dying nor dancing is missing from the whole of life.”                                                                                                                 —-Calvin Miller

Thank you, Skip and Marsha, for living your journey of turning mourning into dancing before us.  You give us hope that having come through the dark night, we too can return to the dance.  Thank you for not hiding your pain from us.  Thank you for letting us join you in celebrating your son’s life.

In Memory of

John Michael Gore
July 27, 1984 – October 11, 2009

“a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief”

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"a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief."My grandfather died at sixty nine, after a life filled with farming, ranching, and carpentering on the side.  My great grandmother, Nora, was still living and ninety years old.  She had lost her oldest grandson, and less than two years later, her husband.  She had been a widow for thirty five years.  I was devastated by my grandfather’s death.  But, I guess I thought my great grandmother had seen so much loss and grief in her ninety years, that it was different for her.  Maybe she had gained immunity from loss.  And then she was in front of his casket, weeping and repeating, “My baby, oh, my baby”, a mantra that captured all she had lost.  In that moment I knew there was no age limit, no statute of limitations, no point at which losing your child felt less, rather than more.

John Claypool wrote Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, following the death of his ten year old daughter from acute leukemia.  He reminds us that we are all “a person of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”, for grief is ours whenever we lose something we value.  Claypool identifies loss and grief , not as isolated events, but as an integral part of our life journey.

“Learning to handle these in a healthy way–learning how to lose, so to speak–is one of life’s most important challenges.  It can hardly be begun too soon.”

He acknowledges our attempts to protect our children from grief, while pointing out that…

“as soon as a child is old enough to love something that can be lost, that one is a candidate to become ‘a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief.’  Very few get very far without experiencing loss in some way.

“The truth is–for every one of us–that there is no way to avoid the trauma of loss if we love even a little.  This is what makes the task of learning to handle grief so important.”

I think my great grandmother had spent her life “learning to lose”.  She was well acquainted with grief.  I watched her handle loss by returning to life, from my earliest memories until her own death at ninety-two.  I also watched her step into the painful presence of loss when my grandfather died.

I have not had to find life after the death of a child.  Having stood by as friends entered this dark night of the soul, I have asked myself the question a colleague of John Claypool asked.  “Those of us who have not been there wonder what it is like out there in the Darkness.  Can you tell us?”  Claypool’s response was both profound and ambiguous.  “Yes and no.”  Perhaps the path to learning to handle grief begins with the courage to start the conversation.

“The first thing I want you to know…”

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There may be no loss so out of sync as the death of a child.  And as if that monumental death alone is not enough, the death of our child brings a partnership with loss that spans our lifetime.  I heard an interview a few years ago with a mother whose young son had been killed in a bicycle accident.  She described the breadth of this loss by saying,

“When I woke up the next morning, I was surprised that I was still here.  I couldn’t imagine how I could have survived his death.  A year later, I was still surprised.  It’s been 10 years, and I still don’t understand how I’m here.”

She voices for every parent, the perpetual dance of grieving for your child while continuing to live your own life, and theirs.

My first experience with the permanent impact of a child’s death on a parent came when I was twelve years old, sitting on the bed in my Grandma’s bedroom.  She was cleaning house as I followed her from room to room.  There was a group of photographs on the wall by the door.  They were the last pictures of my Dad’s older brother, Junior, taken a week before he died at age 13.

He came home from school, saying he didn’t feel good, and in less than two days was dead from spinal meningitis.  His funeral was held at home under quarantine, with only family present.  He was something of a mystery to me, made more so by the black and white photographs that had been enlarged and hand painted in pale, transparent colors.

Grandma cleaned and I sat on her bed, staring at those pictures.  Then I said, “Grandma, tell me about Junior.”.  She opened her mouth to speak, and instead began to cry.  I have no memory of what happened after that, of what she did or didn’t say, of how I got out of the room.  I just felt the power of my question to make her cry, and the depth of her wound.  Later, after I was grown, I wondered if her tears were only tears of pain, or also tears of thanks, of relief, that someone remembered and asked about her son.  I knew my Grandma as a hard-working, caring woman, with a delightful, childlike laugh.  Somehow she had continued living, while carrying this loss just below the surface.

Doug Manning, author and speaker on grief, tells about a friend leading a group at a local funeral home, for parents who had lost a child.  An 80 year old woman was the first person to arrive.  The group facilitator asked if he could help her, assuming that she was at the funeral home for visitation.  She told him she was there for the group, but was uncertain about whether she should stay.  He asked her if she had lost a child.  She told him her story.  That her son had been stillborn at a time when people didn’t talk about grief.  That her husband and family refused to talk about the loss.  For nearly 60 years she had been grieving in silence.  She went on to say, “My husband is dead now, and it’s just me.”  The man asked what she would like for him to know about her son.  Her response…”The first thing I want you to know is his name is Tommy.”  She had never spoken his name aloud.

Maybe my Grandma was waiting, just like the 80 year old woman was waiting, for someone to ask about her child.  To join her in giving her child’s life meaning and significance, sometimes through the simple gift of speaking a name.