Category Archives: Grief

“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.

Too Soon

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Loss is an experience we all have in common.  It doesn’t remain common.  Loss becomes unique and personal, changed by the context of our individual lives, our experiences, our history, our personalities. Many of our losses are visible, public experiences. Personal loss lived out with family, friends, community.

Miscarriage is a death that, for many, is lived out in solitary, an “unrecorded” loss.  The death of a child before birth stops us in our anticipation and preparation for welcoming and celebrating a new being’s entry into our lives.  Even the term “miscarriage” sets this loss apart, like other words we attach “mis” to. That somehow we failed, missed the mark, or didn’t understand what we were supposed to do.  So this is the death that is sometimes unaddressed, and even ignored, leaving us to make our own meaning and grieve our loss silently and alone.

I checked my email before settling in to write about this particular loss, and discovered a reference to “The Dash”, a poem by Linda Ellis.  She reminds us that it is not the dates at the beginning and end of our lives that define us, but the life lived in between.  The life lived in the dash.  It hit me that the loss of miscarriage is that there is no dash.  The life was being lived in a mother’s womb, and death may have come before she even felt the moving, growing of her unborn child.

How do we share the grief of miscarriage?  Sometimes by simply acknowledging that it is a death.  The death of all you hoped and expected to experience as the parent of this child.  The death of the chance for this child to establish his or her own meaning and identity in this world, their own dash.

Too Soon

Tiny seed of love
That I have longed to hold,
While smallest bud,
Has ceased to grow.
Held gently in these hands
Too soon,
Blossom now within my heart
And comfort
As I let you go.

  © Paulann Condray Canty 

(The poem was written in 1988 to acknowledge the grief of a friend who lost her unborn child early in pregnancy)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…

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As we rapidly approach the holiday period that includes Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, I feel compelled to write about loss.  It seems odd doesn’t it, that holidays and celebration would leave me thinking about the sadness that can surround us during our “happy” times.  What a contradiction that the very happiness we feel reminds us of the changes we have endured, and the people who will not be there to join us in the next joyous occasion.

Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,… it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, …

Dickens reminds us that our joy and sorrow coexist.  So, because the period from November 1 to January 2 is a strange mix of “the best of times” and “the worst of times”,  I will think out loud about what it means to step into a single moment of mourning loss and celebrating life.  Maybe that’s what Walter Wangerin intended when he titled his book, Mourning Into Dancing.  Maybe he wanted to help us find words to describe our experience with that thing so present, and so unspoken, death.

Death comes, and we grieve.  If Dickens had written about the contradiction of grief, he might have said,

Grief is an odd thing.  Reminder of our loss and the last connection between us and the person we loved.  Our numbing and our unspeakable pain.  Our tears and our rage. Grief feels like the enemy, while absorbing our time like a best friend.  At once universal and unique.

I believe there is power in our stories.  I believe there is healing and growth in our stories of loss.  I believe there is beauty, and yes, even celebration in sharing our stories.

What’s in a name?

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The radio host was giving the latest update on the BP oil spill in the gulf.  He reviewed the numbers…of gallons of oil, dollars lost, estimates of damage, benefits owed to those affected, and the lives lost.  Then the show took an unexpected turn.  The host began to list the names of the men who died while working on the Deep Water Horizon.

He spoke about each man, painting a brief, personal portrait of his life.  He talked about wives and fiancés, children, unborn to young adults.  He told about interests and hobbies.  He gave witness to each life and the tremendous void left by each death.  I felt the weight of each loss as it spread beyond family to friends, to communities, to a nation, and to me.

I realized that in spite of the months of “late breaking news” about the BP catastrophe, I had only heard these men mentioned a handful of times since the day they died, and only as a group of 11 dead.  This was the first time I knew them individually, by name, with a life story.  I was embarrassed and ashamed by the lack of attention given to this loss.

Numbers are important.  They tell us the size of impact, whether we’re talking about the casualties of war, the rise in poverty, the dead after Katrina, or how many victims of domestic violence are housed in shelters.  Numbers tell us something must be done.  But numbers don’t speak to our heart.

Names are different than numbers.  I’ve known since April 20, 2010, that 11 workers died in the BP explosion.  But it wasn’t until I heard their names and stories that they stepped off the news page and became real.  These men who had lived, worked, loved, and died are now my loss too.

If numbers tell us something must be done, names tell us we must do something.  Names tell us that each number represents a person, a history, a story not unlike our own.  We are not separate in our moments of joy, not isolated in moments of loss. Ernest Hemingway knew it when he wrote:

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

On April 20, 2010, eleven men died while working on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  Their names are listed below.  Their loss calls us to care and to act, for their deaths are our loss too.

 

 

Jason Anderson, 35, Bay City, TX, father of two.
Aaron Dale “Bubba” Burkeen, 37, Neshoba Co, MS, survived by his wife Rhonda and two children.
Donald Clark, 48, Newellton, LA, survived by his wife Sheila, two sons, and two daughters.
Stephen Ray Curtis, 40,  Georgetown, LA, survived by his wife and two teenage children.
Gordon Jones, 28, Baton Rouge, LA, left wife, Michelle, who was three weeks from delivery of a daughter.
Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, survived by his wife Courtney, and two children.
Karl Keppinger, Jr., 38, Natchez, MS, veteran of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, father of one child.
Keith Blair Manuel, 56, Gonzales, LA, father of three daughters, avid LSU fan.
Dewey Revette, 48, State Line, MS, 29 years experience drilling.
Shane Roshto, 22, Franklin Co, MS, survived by his wife, Natalie, and a toddler son.
Adam Weise, 24, Yorktown, TX, youngest of four children, started working offshore after graduating from high school.

Altered Again

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I never met Jill Hollis.  In fact I had never heard of Jill Hollis.  That changed last Thursday.  I was in the car running errands, listening to bits and pieces of “The Story” with Dick Gordon.  I found myself in back story, not knowing where it began.  It became clear as the story continued that Jill Hollis had, for some time, struggled with some kind of disability and in the midst of that determined that she would not live a diminished life.

I sat in the car outside my next stop totally absorbed by the archived interview with this courageous woman.  As the story neared an end Dick informed his listeners that Jill Hollis had been diagnosed four years ago with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.  He spoke of the blog she created as her disease progressed.  And then he was expressing his sadness and sympathy that Jill Hollis had finished her battle two days earlier, Tuesday, August 31.  I was caught totally off guard and felt a sudden sadness that I was only now discovering this woman and her story.

Jill Hollis hovered in my thoughts for the rest of the day.  As soon as I could I went in search of her blog.  I wanted to hear her words, have a sense of her journey, and remember her.  The blog home page loaded.  The title:  Altered.  She had captured her experience in a single, clear, complete word.  I read her thoughts and her family’s in the days leading up to and following her death.  I found courage, fear, determination, growth, humanity, all expressed with unedited honesty as ALS continued to alter her.

Jill’s blog title has stayed with me, surfacing for another look from time to time.  Altered.  Aren’t we all “altered” by living?  We come here so innocent and in a very short time begin to lose that innocence to experience.  Don’t we all, like Jill, have the chance to decide we will live fully and undiminished in the face of loss and limitation.

Sally Jesse Raphael, the talk show host of 25 years ago, welcomed a mother and her 9 year son on her show.  Both had been severely burned and disfigured in a gas explosion in their home a few years before.  The son had had multiple surgeries with more to come to remove scarring and rebuild his face.  An audience member asked the mother how she had helped her son cope with the stares, comments, and questions that often came when they were in public.  The mom responded, “I’ve told him everyone has scars.  We just wear ours on the outside.”  What an insightful mom!  And she’s right.  We do all have our scars, left by the life decisions and experiences that have altered us.  Being altered scars, but it also allows us to discover our own strength and resilience.  And then, we are altered again.

I don’t know Jill Hollis, but her story has altered me.  My thoughts and prayers are with her family during their unspeakable loss as Jill has been altered again to a journey without ALS.  Thank you Jill.