Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child (3 page)

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Authors: Ellen Mitchell

BOOK: Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child
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The seasons changed and we resented it. Our surroundings and our lives, which had always existed in living color, became drab and gray.
Carol: “I didn’t care about anything. All the things that once seemed so important were no longer important.”
We neglected ourselves, we wore no makeup and lost all concern for personal appearance. We refused to pose for photographs. We wore the same clothing day after day. The only clothing that mattered to us was that of our dead children. We could not bring ourselves to clean the dirty laundry we found in their bedrooms. We needed to keep some vestige of their smells, their looks, their existence.
Barbara E.: “I slept with the pillow Brian died on for a short while and then put it on the chair in my bedroom. I was afraid to get it dirty and have to wash away his smell.”
Rita: “I could not wash Michael’s smell out of my life. I hugged his bed, his clothes. I kept his worn clothes in the hamper and refused to empty it.”
Maddy: “I have the pajamas Neill slept in the night before he died.”
Barbara G.: “I never wear happy colors … no reds, no yellows, no more. How did the sun come up the next day?”
Lorenza: “How dare the tulips grow?”
Ariella: “Spring hurt that first year and it still hurts, but not as much. Now I love the winter when it’s rainy and dreary.”
While we ignored most of our surroundings in that first year, we became obsessive about certain routines. Of course, family rituals we had cherished in the past that marked birthdays, anniversaries and holidays were completely torn apart and discarded. In that first year, we could not bring ourselves to even think about celebrating anything. Eventually, we found new and extremely different ways to commemorate special days, holidays and family occasions. Meanwhile, we obsessed over daily routines as a way of getting through each day.
Rita: “We ate too much. We ate too little. We spent hours trying to get order back in our lives.”
Phyllis: “We obsessed about everything. I obsessed about photographs. I told the cleaning lady not to touch any one of them.”
Rita: “I went crazy looking everywhere for pictures of Michael.”
Barbara G. : “I went around cleaning and then cleaning again. I think it was an attempt to bring some degree of control to my environment. I couldn’t control what happened to my child, but I could control my surroundings.”
A number of us felt hostility to people who grew old. It is embarrassing to admit that one of us was actually embittered that her own parents were alive and well and in their eighties. We all experienced anguish about people who we felt were less deserving of life than our children.
Rita: “When somebody elderly died, we not only didn’t care about them, we resented them. They had so much more time than my son had.”
Ariella: “I saw an old couple walking to the movies. My twenty-year-old son should have been able to go the movies.”
We grew resentful not only of the seasons, the elderly and the colors of the rainbow, but also of our religious beliefs. We are Jews and Christians, and each of us has questioned our God and asked why we have been punished in this way. In the first year, we turned to our religious
leaders and, unfortunately, a number of us found them lacking in insight, with little to offer in the way of solace. While some of us were comforted by a positive response from our religious leaders, more of us were not. We asked our clerics if they had lost a child, feeling that unless they had experienced such a loss themselves, they could not fully understand the depths of our grief.
Lorenza: “I wrote a letter to my priest and he sent me a poinsettia plant in response.”
Barbara G. : “My rabbi asked me to come back to my Torah study group. I had always been spiritual and religious, and I really believed that if I was a good person a higher being would take care of my family. I kept my end of the bargain, but that higher being did not. When the rabbi asked me to come back, he said they missed me. Missed me? None of them even called up to see if I was alive or dead. They did meet Bruce in the supermarket one day and asked if we go out to dinner or anything. He said, ‘Yes, we still eat.’ They said they’d give us a call; they never did.”
Maddy: “When Neill was alive, I always believed you don’t pray to ask for things, you pray to give thanks. After Neill died, I thought I should have said, ‘Don’t kill my child.’ That’s when my anger really began and I never lost it.”
Rita: “We all thought we did something wrong.”
Audrey: “We searched our souls. Could we have been so evil that our children were punished for what we did.”
Barbara G. : “When you were a child, your mother always told you that bad things would happen if you were bad. Why were our children punished instead of us?”
Rita: “I did have one priest tell me two words that helped. He said Michael ‘is fine.’ That helped me. And the principal of the school where I worked was a nun. She was so kind. She always remembered the anniversary of Michael’s death. Eventually, she started a bereavement group at the school, and I know she did that because of me.”
Barbara E.: “The rabbi from my temple, who’d known Brian from the time he was a little boy, came to our home to comfort us. He continued to phone us on a weekly basis. The temple started a bereavement group after that.”
At the time of our children’s deaths, some of us lost respect for the
hospital personnel with whom we came in contact. Sadly, that was sometimes true during our children’s terminal illnesses, and also in emergency rooms following their accidental deaths. It is our fervent hope that people whose job is to deal with those experiencing tragedy will learn to grasp the depth of what bereaved parents are feeling at that terrible time and act accordingly.
Maddy: “When we arrived at the hospital in New Jersey where they had taken Neill, we were told, ‘The morgue is closed for the night. Come back in the morning.’ Of course, we refused to take that for an answer, and eventually they did take us down to the morgue.”
Audrey: “I insisted on riding in the ambulance, up front with the driver. Then the ambulance driver got lost on the way to the hospital. He kept telling me, ‘Calm down, Mrs. Cohen.’ How could I calm down with my daughter dying in the back of the ambulance?”
Lorenza: “I had to take my father to the hospital on the very day of my son’s funeral. I spoke to the social worker at the hospital and told her of my grief. I was totally unable to function; I was distraught and needed help. She wasn’t even listening to me. She was on the phone. She told me she’d be back in a few minutes. That was the social worker.”
Barbara E.: “It seemed like everyone disappeared when my son died. We were left on our own to make contacts about where to turn for help. The hospital gave us no information.”
Ariella: “The nurses and doctors turned their backs on us just before Michael died. No one came to assist us.”
Carol: “Lisa’s doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge me in the hospital elevator.”
On the other hand, some of us found hospital personnel to be helpful.
Phyllis: “The social worker who met us at the hospital was kind.”
Barbara G.: “The hospital where Howie was dying was in Virginia. A nurse came and gave me information. She brought me soup. She said, ‘You have to sleep and you have to eat … . You’re going to have decisions to make.’ She meant decisions about life support, organ transplants and an autopsy. Questions were all thrown at me within minutes of one another.”
In that first year, we learned that many of our social and professional relationships would change drastically, and not necessarily for the better. Of course, the opposite was also true, and sometimes comfort and genuinely warm friendship and understanding came from quarters where we least expected it.
Barbara G. : “None of us would have known any of this if we were still in the civilian world. I have a friend who lost a child thirty-four years ago. I was her friend then, but I didn’t know what to say to her. She had to phone all her friends and tell them that what she had wasn’t catching, and that they could still come and visit her. She was one of the first people to appear at my door when my son was killed.”
Lorenza: “I would teach one class, and then run into the corner and cry and let it all out. Some of the teachers would stop by and comfort me. I owe them a lot. Then I would go and teach the next class.”
Barbara G. : “A colleague of mine would come to me at the end of each day and say, ‘Put lipstick on, you’re going home to your family. They worry about you.’”
Most people who have not experienced a devastating loss mistakenly believe they should try to distract the newly bereaved and avoid talking about their grief. For the most part, we found that the world outside—the civilian world of intact families who have never lost a child—can be a terribly unsympathetic place. Of course, we ourselves had no understanding of any of this until we suffered our own losses. And while we should have been willing to tolerate the clumsiness and thoughtlessness of others, our rage refused to allow us that grace. In general, we couldn’t even bring ourselves to inquire about the well-being of others. We just didn’t care.
Maddy: “They want to talk about what they saw at the movies, and all we want to talk about is our children and our pain.”
Carol: “They ask, ‘How are you?’ That becomes a problem.”
Phyllis: “We pick on different people at whom to direct our anger and our rage. It might be the doctor, it might be God, it might be the checkout girl at the supermarket.”
Barbara E.: “I didn’t want anybody from my previous life to come with me
into this life because my connection to them was usually through our children, and I didn’t want to hear about their children.”
Carol: “I found it painful to get together with family. It was easier to be with friends and to go places where Lisa didn’t go. If it was a family gathering or a place where she should have been, that was very hard to take.”
Ariella: “My family wouldn’t talk about Michael. It was as though he never existed. It was and remains very painful.”
Rita: “I couldn’t stand being around intact families, only fractured families. Their wholeness brought me pain. What they had was taken from me.”
Lorenza: “Some of my old friends stayed away and I can’t forgive them for that. Others became my best friends at that time. I wanted to say to them, ‘If you really love me, mention my child’s name.’”
Phyllis: “Wherever I went, I told people about Andrea’s death. It was my badge; it became my identity.”
Barbara G. : “People would say, ‘Have a good day,’ and I wanted to hit them.”
Audrey: “I would pray people wouldn’t say good morning to me. I didn’t know how to respond.”
Rita: “Physical contact like hugs seemed more appropriate than conversation.”
Our closest relationships, those with our husbands and our other children, underwent drastic changes in that first year, and those changes continue to happen, even as the years accumulate. No matter how long they have been married to one another, no two individuals grieve in the same way. With both partners so vulnerable and busy dealing with their own misery, it was difficult to lend support to one another. Marriages were stretched to the very limits. In our cases, all nine marriages survived, though we know of others that did not. Then, too, our relationships with our surviving children underwent earthshaking changes that we never would or could have foreseen in our “before” life. Both of these areas—marriage and surviving children—are discussed at length in subsequent chapters.
In that first year, we were consumed with the need to read about death. However, we all know of bereaved parents who could not muster
enough concentration to read anything at all in those early months. As for us, we read, no matter how maudlin the material we chose.
Barbara E.: “I read the obituaries every day; maybe I was looking for young people who died as Brian had died. I searched for books with unhappy endings; they seemed truer to life.”
We spent a great deal of time reading about NDEs—near-death experiences—in hopes that they’d shed some light on how our children felt in their last moments of life and how they are faring in the afterlife … if there is such a thing. We thrive on descriptions written by people who came close to dying, and who describe entering a tunnel and meeting family and friends who have already died. We need to know how our children felt in those last moments, and we need to know that they are okay.
We hold fast to the recollections of our children’s last moments on earth. From the day they died, we have searched for the true meaning of those extraordinary moments. We will continue to do so until we meet them again and have the answers we seek. Meanwhile, we read and we keep our own journals, hoping in some way that our writings will connect us to our children.

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