bereaved parents – Words Can Express

On What Can Still Be Tended

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The past six days I spent at one of my son’s homes. The time together was priceless and I wasn’t ready to leave. I’m never ready to leave either of my sons. Even when times are good.

As I was packing to leave, my son had already left for work and my ability to hug him one more time had passed. I picked up a stuffed animal that had belonged to him as a child. A striped orange cat with camouflage shorts. The rest of his outfit was lost years ago. I held the cat to my face and inhaled deeply, as if I could smell my son as a child again through the animal. I tucked him under my arm and carried him down the stairs with my pillow. I just couldn’t put him back down. I needed him. A connection that spanned who my son was then and who he is today.

A link from when he lived with me as a small child to stretch across the miles between us now.

The drive from his house to mine is roughly two and a half hours and I generally cry at least part of the way. I can’t stop the tears. It is hard to say goodbye when I know that I have already lived through a “last one” and we aren’t guaranteed another with any of our children.

When I got home I was exhausted. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally. My face was puffy and my nose was stuffed. I cried longer than usual. I wanted to take a nap right away. I tried. My mind wouldn’t stop circling. I tried to paint. I couldn’t get anything to look the way I wanted. I finally turned on the tv for background noise and cleaned up. Did laundry. Trying to stay busy until bedtime. The house was quiet in a way that wasn’t peaceful, but empty.

Bedtime finally arrived and my mind was able to slow down and allow me to sleep. I slept deeply and for a long time. I would like to say I awoke rested but in truth I didn’t. I woke up less physically tired, though.

The sun was bright as I sat down on the couch with a cup of coffee in my favorite mug. The animals arranged themselves around me as they usually do. I felt a bit lost and wasn’t sure how to fill the day. Next to me, on the table, was a little notebook I was using to plan a new garden. I picked it up and let my eyes wander over the plans I’d been making the week before. A list of plants I wanted to add to the area. Another list of plants and seeds I already had – given to me by friends. A third page held the names of people who offered me flowers and small trees if I wanted to come dig them up. Then, I remembered it was Saturday and the farmer’s market was open.

My friend and I decided to go down to the market. What a perfect place to wander for a while. The entire side yard is a blank canvas so there is a large area to fill. There are a number of songbirds who come to the feeder so I knew I wanted to build the garden around the wildlife that visits daily, and nightly. Birds, rabbits, turkeys, possums, a skunk, and last year we had two adolescent raccoons who stopped by at dusk for nearly a week. I don’t have a preference about who eats at the feeder. Any hungry animal is welcome to partake.

There are also a handful of domestic animals, stray cats in particular, who seem to come to our house in order to feed. There is one big old scruffy gray tom cat who I see once in a while. His left ear is tipped so I know he has been fixed. I love catching a glimpse of him now and then even though I can tell he wants nothing to do with me. That’s ok. I just want him fed.

Part of the garden, the area in the back protected on three sides, is going to be a semi-permanent area for the strays in the neighborhood. A handful of insulated houses. Fresh food and water. Safety.

There was a booth at the market that had little plants for sale. One of the plants had the most beautiful green leaves. Their shape pleased me immediately. I asked about them and learned they are nasturtiums. The woman at the booth said she had two kinds. Orange and red, and just red. The flowers are edible. I bought four. Two of each color. Then I saw catnip. I had planned on getting a few plants to put in the cat shelter area so I got one plant for them and one for the two cats who live in our house, Walter and Avi. In a box next to the catnip were bulbs. A sign on the front of the box said “Tulip bulbs – fill a bag for $1”. We filled two bags and brought home roughly forty bulbs. I have no idea what colors they are but I am looking forward to finding out when they bloom next year.

Later in the day we went to a garden center and my friend purchased six fruit trees. We hadn’t planned to but I am so happy we did. Two apple, two pear, and two peach. Years are going to pass before we get fruit, I imagine, but that’s alright. They felt perfect for the pollinator section of the garden. It is easy to imagine them bursting with blooms. By next year, I hope, the branches may be able to hold the weight of a nest. In five years, fruit will fall to the ground and feed an animal. In ten years there will be shade enough to cool the yard.

A few hours after getting home from the garden center I remembered I hadn’t finished the laundry yesterday. I got off the couch, looked out the window at the fruit trees lining the fence across from the bird feeders, then went down to the basement.

Moving clothes from the washer to the dryer, I suddenly heard a loud buzzing very near my head. I looked up at the small window and saw movement. I realized there was a bumblebee that was trying desperately to get outside. She (they are all shes to me) kept hitting the glass. Her body was dirty with cobwebs. I couldn’t figure out how she had gotten down there but I knew I had to get her outside.

I ran upstairs and grabbed a cup and a piece of paper and was able to catch her easily. She was right where I’d left her. She wasn’t going to leave that window with the sunshine falling through.

She was on the wrong side of outside.

I got her outside, removed the paper from the mouth of the cup, and gently shook her onto a flowering bush. She didn’t land, though. She dropped a bit then took flight. I watched her fuzzy bottom zig-zagging across the front yard.

As I watched her disappear, I understood something familiar in her earlier desperation: my grief did not remove me from the world entirely. It placed me beside it. Life remained visible. I just could not always reach it.

Bereaved parents live life adjacent.

I walked toward the new trees again imagining future blossoms, feeling the cool shade to come. There was a small chickadee perched on the delicate branch of one of the apple trees as it gently swayed in the breeze.

I picked up the gardening notebook when I went inside. I wanted to add the plants that came home with us today. The inventory of what we have is growing longer. This isn’t just a list of what we physically have. If I read between the lines it is also a list of what remains. What is possible. What is alive. What can still be tended.

What brings me back into life.

Creating A Wall

For the first time, I’ve been asked to write about one particular aspect of child loss. How we seem to push others away. I hope I can answer the question, fully, posed to me. This is written using my own experience and those others have shared with me. I always hope those struggling with child loss will find a trained professional who is equipped with the knowledge and tools to help them.

There are so many things that bereaved parents share on this path. Yet, each of our experiences is completely different. Grief is as individual as a fingerprint. Even two people, who have lost the same person, will have their own unique journey. Yet, there are enough similarities that we can recognize where another person is. The subject I’ve been asked to write about is very important because if we don’t recognize it . . . it can destroy us.

All bereaved parents seem to have, at some point, the propensity to push others away from us. The reasons we do this are varied and complex. It’s done both knowingly and without insight. There are times when we can see that we are engaging in this behavior. When we do, we can work through our isolating tendencies with help, so we don’t add more pain to an already anguished situation. Other times, sadly, we don’t see what our actions are doing to those around us, and more importantly, to ourselves.

Over the years, since losing my child, I’ve realized that I had to identify who I was after her death. After the “dust had settled” and life around me went back to everyone else’s normal, mine didn’t. The person I was before no longer existed. Not only did I have to find myself – I had to figure out how I fit into a world that was new to me. I was not a mother to a living daughter anymore. I was the mother of a deceased daughter. An identity I didn’t want and had no idea how to wear. I railed against this change in my who I was.

Please understand: It is going to take us an extremely long time to accept and become comfortable in our new life. We DO NOT want this life we were forced into when our child died. The time it takes for a bereaved parent to come to terms with the death and find peace surrounding it will be different for everyone. Sometimes, it never happens for the person. But, it will be on our personal timetable, no one else’s, and we have to do the work. The tricky part is knowing what work we need to do. There is no “one size fits all” guide.

The simple answer to why we push people away is: vulnerability.

We don’t, as a society, know how to be vulnerable and not feel weak. Instead, we feel as if we are failing when we show emotion, somehow. Especially, men. Vulnerability leaves us open and raw. There is always the chance we will be hurt more. So, we build that wall . . . we push away our family . . . before they have the chance to cause more pain. We are putting a boundary between us and the outside world.

I did this to my twin sons. One of the first blinding insights I had the day Becca was killed was that if something happened to them, I would never survive it. At that moment, I didn’t even know if I was going to survive losing her. So, I told myself I couldn’t love them as much as I did. I had to pull back and create a safe space. I felt relieved when they went to their dad’s because to look at their horrified and tear streaked faces caused my heart to break even more. And, loving them might kill them. Forcing distance between us could keep them safe, and would certainly help me, my fractured mind rationalized. Without the insight of a calm mind I thought we needed a physical separation. Therefore, I allowed it to happen. It was an attempt to protect myself.

Pushing people away, however, happens in non physical ways, too.

Most often, I think, anger sprouts from pain. If we trace the root system backward, and underneath, we usually find it to be true. It is hard to see pain, for what it is, when you are immersed in it. Like trying to gauge the immensity of the ocean when we are at the lowest point between two waves.

When children are little, and don’t have the words to adequately express what they are feeling, they act out. I’m not sure it isn’t the same for adults who don’t have a way to communicate the mass of feelings they are carrying after their child dies.

Responsibility, which can will lead to shame and guilt, when you look behind it. If you don’t take anything away from this blog but the next sentence, then it will still be worth reading. It does not matter if we were with our child at the time of their death, or not, we do feel responsible.

The one job we have as a parent is to protect our child. Our deceased child’s age does not matter, nor does how far away from us they were in the world: wherever, whatever, however, we should have been able to see it and stop it. I was not in the car Becca was killed in. I was not the driver. I didn’t serve the driver alcohol that night. I was home. Asleep. Powerless.

Yet. If my daughter hadn’t seen me go out dancing on the weekends, maybe she wouldn’t have thought it alright to do. If she’d never seen me drink . . . maybe she wouldn’t have ended up at the bar that night. Ridiculous, right? See how easily we can twist facts until we are solely responsible for their death.

Then, sometimes we may actually hold some responsibility. How do we even start to work through that? I am close to someone who believes she owns a portion of the responsibility for her child’s death. Whether she does, or does not, her perception is what matters most. It is the heaviest of weights to believe we caused our child to die. Somehow, we have to figure out how to put it down or it will drive us into the dirt.

To feel we could have saved them, but didn’t, makes us feel powerless, now. All of this emotion has to go somewhere. Either we destroy ourselves or those around us. Usually . . . a bit of both.

The guilt that is coupled with holding responsibility can be debilitating. With the guilt comes the shame. We feel shame in failing. In being part of the circumstances that led to our child dying. We may feel shame at some of our behaviors in the months that follow a child’s death.

These three things: responsibility, guilt, and shame are braided together so tightly – they are sometimes impossible to break because of the strength in which they give to each other. I think this might be one of the hardest aspects of grief to unwind and figure out.

The next part of parental grief I want to talk about is the “others”. The outsiders. The people around us who don’t know what to say, what to do, and often don’t realize they’ve said something which lands like a punch. When this happens to us enough times . . . we don’t allow ourselves to get into situations in which pain is added to us. People say stupid things not knowing any better. Sometimes they do know better yest say it anyway. We lose some friendships. Some relationships because the chasm between us and them is just great to cross.

Seeing intact, happy families, can be unbearable for a bereaved parent’s broken heart. I would time going to the store, late at night, so there was less chance of running into any families. Anger would swell up quickly when I saw mothers and daughters together. Rage. Jealousy. I wanted my child and I would never have her again. I hated the mothers who still had their daughters. Hated. I felt rage toward everyone and everything. I didn’t know where to put the hostility. So, I just stopped being around people.

After our child’s death, after the funeral, we will run into people that we are seeing for the first time since the passing. Of course, they will pay condolences and we have to re answer questions surrounding the whole thing. It’s exhausting. Immediately, we are shoved back into the first days and we relive, and reignite, the deep burning pain. We don’t have to survive these encounters if we just hibernate and see no one.

Other people’s expectations of what grief is often wrong. It’s not neat. It doesn’t run along a straight path. Dealing with A does not lead to B, and so on. The “stages of grief” that people know and expect us to follow is unrealistic. I had a woman call me just months after Becca was killed and asked: are you done crying yet? I blew up at her. After the passing of some time and with a lot of self evaluation I have come to understand what a question like this truly does.

It made me feel like I was failing in how I was grieving. I wasn’t “getting over it” quickly enough. Was I wallowing in self pity?” What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I grieve right?? Truthfully, to this day, I feel as if I’m not far enough along. When we feel judged, whether we can verbalize it or not, we pull away. It’s easier to just be alone.

Being alone can be easier. We don’t have to fake anything for anyone. We aren’t able to understand the maelstrom of emotions that have taken over our minds, yet, we react to them anyway. Sometimes, we even create situations that will force others to leave us. In an attempt to to protect ourselves. Or, to punish ourselves when we feel responsible for our child’s life ending.

The only thing we can do, to help ourselves and others, is to identify why we are isolating and pushing others away. Identify and find the help we need to do the work in order to start truly healing. If we don’t . . . we risk the chance of never finding happiness again. Of losing relationships with those we love. Of never healing.

And, our child wouldn’t want that for us.

Standing At The Edge

The day after Becca was killed there was little left of my world. Our world. What remained wasn’t recognizable. I am fairly certain I didn’t see the extent of the damage, initially, because too much debris still hung in the air. It was probably a good thing I couldn’t. The sight would have been catastrophically overwhelming. It takes time for the brain to process the enormity of utter annihilation.

After some time, when the smoke did clear, there was devastation as far as I could see. What was once solid was now rubble. What had existed so completely was simply gone. When I lowered my gaze to the earth beneath me I could see pieces of the ground falling away. I stood on the crumbling edge of a huge crater. And, there was nothing for me to grab to steady myself. Did I really want to, though? A big part of me wanted to tumble into the chasm. But,I chose not to.

Every day, since losing my daughter, has been a variation of that first one.

Upon waking, I swing my legs over the side of the bed and place my feet on the same crumbling edge. As I sit there in the early morning light, I toe the boundary of the massive hole, wondering what I should do.

There are days when the dark swirling depths beckon to me, insistently. I’m mesmerized by the images and sounds calling to me from my life before. They are like a song drifting past my ears. If I stand transfixed for too long . . . I can feel myself slipping. Currents of air flow up from the bottom and toss my hair around me. They feel like hands pulling me down. Unless I want to spiral into the darkness, I have to move. Not just move away from the edge . . . but toward something. Instead of falling . . . I have to rise.

That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Making the conscious effort to move forward because it feels like we are leaving our child behind. I’ve had to find a way to carry Becca with me. Wherever I go. Figuring out how to do this has taken a very long time. Years. It hasn’t become second nature, yet. I still have days when I have no idea how to move in any direction at all, let alone forward. So, I search for ways to be actively working within the world I now inhabit. Doing things that keep Becca beside me.

I was talking to a friend on Sunday about life after child loss. Her boyfriend lost his son two years ago and is, understandably struggling. In the midst of his pain, though, he helped me with a project that I am working on. I know that just as Becca was with me that day . . . his son stood next to him as he built canvases for me. Did the two of them stand side by side, I wonder, arms around each other? Watching their parents come together because of their deaths? Did it bring them any peace to see us working through our pain in this way? It brought me peace. I hope it brought this man peace, too. We both carried our children through the day.

In the past year I’ve gravitated toward painting angels. Not because I am religious.But because when I picture my daughter now, she’s an angel, soaring through the universe on strong white wings. There is an obsession to connecting to and being able to visualize our children now. At least there is for me. (In truth, I ask my sons to send me pictures of their rooms, wherever they are, so I can see/know where they are . . . yeah, so there’s that) I think I try to recreate Becca over and over in the paintings I do of angels. This is how I keep her with me.

The canvases built for me are going to depict my daughter as a 12ft angel. It’s an image I feel driven to create. I’ve shed many tears for this project and it has barely started. It’s going to be healing, I hope, for both myself and my surviving children. And, others.

There is a contentment in finding your way to carry your child. Keep searching for it. I promise it’s there. And, even on the days when you don’t how to move forward . . . believe a reason to keep going will be revealed.

Tomorrow, I know I will awaken and place my feet on the same edge as I did the day before. I’ll hear the murmurings from below. A siren song. I don’t want to crash on the rocks. I have a purpose, for now. I have a way to carry my Becca with me.

Instead of being pulled down, I will let the warm air currents carry me to the skies and I’ll soar.

Maybe, I’ll see Becca!