Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child (6 page)

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Authors: Ellen Mitchell

BOOK: Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child
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Intimacy
T
he anguish of losing a child pollutes every close relationship. It seeks to destroy our ties to our spouses, to our remaining children, to our parents, to cherished friends, to everyone close to us. Each tie is torn to shreds and brutally examined under a high-powered microscope before it can be pieced back together.
In some cases, the pieces will never again mesh and the bond will break. Those relationships that survive will be forever changed because we are changed. We are never the same people we were before the death. The person we become has to learn anew to love and live with those we loved and lived with before, or perhaps to go a separate way.
The death becomes a giant black hole in our midst.
Barbara G: “If you take a family structure and you scramble it and a child dies, there is forevermore an empty chair at the table.”
It is a wonder that in each of our cases our families have managed to hold together … and not always because of our own efforts at the outset.
Maddy: “I was emotionally, physically and psychologically raw. So much so that, as much as I wanted to comfort my husband, mother and surviving son, I wasn’t much good to anyone.”
Carol: “Lisa had been sick for a long time and my life had been wrapped up in her, so that when she died I felt that my life was empty. I tried hard to be there for everybody.”
We have weathered deep depression, hurtful arguments, separation, estrangement, anger, bewilderment, deep disappointment and suspicion of words and deeds—all in connection with those nearest to us.
We have overcome our own and our spouses’ thoughts of suicide, as well as an actual suicide attempt by one spouse and another by a surviving child. We have had to deal with a sibling turning to drugs in hopes of relieving the hurt.
The repercussions of our children’s deaths will echo forever in our lives and those of our close family members. The bitterness and the fury will diminish, but they will never completely disappear.
But the one relationship that has never faltered has been that which we had and continue to have with our deceased children. That closeness, which we probably took for granted when our children were alive, has grown to the point that they are forever with us and within us. Our dead children have become omnipresent in our lives. They are the one sure thing. Everything else surrounding us can ebb and flow, change and perhaps go, but our dead children are as much a part of us as they were when we carried them through nine months of pregnancy. We cannot, and will not, ever think of them as no longer existing.
We cannot say for certain that they are watching us from heaven, but the thought that they may be doing just that comforts us and encourages us to go on with our lives. At times, it even makes us feel a certain comedic awkwardness. No matter what is happening, our child is in the room.
Phyllis: “My son and his wife came to visit on weekends after Andrea died. They stayed in the guestroom. I said, ‘Andrea, don’t watch.’”
Most of us could not bring ourselves to have sexual relations with our husbands in the months following the deaths of our children. In some cases, we could barely be cordial with our husbands.
Barbara G.: “I was so wrapped up in my own grief that it took me months to acknowledge that my husband, too, had lost his child.”
Ariella: “Bob actually said to me one day, ‘You know I lost a child, too.’”
Lorenza: “It was painful for me to even hold my husband’s hand. The warmth of a man’s hand reminded me of the coldness of my dead son’s hands.”
Maddy: “For months I was untouchable, sleeping alone in my dead son’s bed and sleepwalking through my existence.”
Barbara E.: “My husband and I tried to console each other … an impossible and futile task. We were so wounded and devastated that we could only stand silently near each other.”
We found we were often out of sync with our husbands. Even if we wanted to be touched and physically comforted, our timing … or theirs … was off. Men and women do not grieve in the same way or at the same time.
Carol: “Having a sex life with my husband when our daughter was very ill and after her death was virtually impossible. I wanted to hold him and cry with him. He didn’t want that. It took a long time to bring intimacy back into our lives, and it was in small doses.”
Rita: “I was inconsolable. I needed to be held, to be stroked like a colicky baby. I crawled like a young child into my husband’s lap. Sometimes he was there, sometimes not. I had no desire for sex. If my husband did, I worried that Michael was watching. I was void of passion.”
Even after intimacies did resume, there was the nagging feeling not so much that our dead children were watching, but that they might see us experiencing a pleasure that they had never known or would never know again.
And there was the guilt. It permeated deep into our feelings in those early days and months and beyond. What had we done wrong? Why did
we deserve to be punished? Could we ever smile again? Would we ever again know emotional or physical joy? If we did feel pleasure, were we not guilty of forgetting our dead children?
Lorenza: “Marc was married for only three months. I cringed at the thought that I would enjoy a conjugal life that he no longer had. It was as if there was a third person in the room watching every move. What would he think? Did his parents forget him?”
Audrey: “At the beginning, I had no feelings at all and later, with the passage of time, even if I felt amorous, just thinking about Jess’s death made me feel as though I was not entitled to this pleasure. It didn’t feel right.”
It wasn’t only our sexual relationships with our husbands that underwent enormous changes; it was the way we spoke to one another, the way we worked, the way we cried, the way we looked at the sky; it was every thing in every moment of every day.
For the most part, our husbands tended to be quieter in their grief. By contrast, we were hysterical. We spoke constantly of our children, we screamed, we yelled, we fought, we cried, we refused to accept and we sunk deep into the depths of gloom. We could not grasp the gravity or complexity of our husband’s emotions, and in our weakened states, we lacked the stamina or the desire to even try.
Ariella: “Each spouse wants the other to grieve their way. Eventually, that either breaks you up or you learn to accept the differences. Even things as simple as photographs. Bob was unable at first to look at photos of Michael, while I needed to see that sweet face and kept photos everywhere. We went from holding each other tight to grieving separately. We had very little to give each other while we were each cloaked in our own despair. We were running on empty.”
Audrey: “Irv enjoys and is good at delivering jokes. It is difficult enough for me to understand how people smile. How could he want to make them laugh? I needed to recognize that this was not only a part of who he is, but also a distraction from his pain.”
Barbara G.: “I was trying so hard to be a mother to my youngest son, who was sixteen at the time, and I was going to work. I had no energy to try to understand my husband’s feelings.”
Rita: “My husband replaced his pain with anger. Anger became his drug of choice. As his anger increased so too did the space between us. Eventually, I moved out and got my own apartment.”
The estrangement did not last forever. In Rita’s case, she and her husband Tom eventually started to rebuild their lives, courting as if they were dating all over again, and after some time they reunited as a couple. However, they did not move back into the same house they had lived in before.
Rita: “We had to move from that family house. The good memories haunted me. The walls spoke of my losses and it was too much for me to live with that. The old house was cozy and filled with collected objects. My house now is modern, sparse and minimal. I need the openness and light.”
Each of us today has an intact marriage. Some of us feel our marriages have been strengthened by having endured and survived the worst that life can offer. We have made drastic changes in our patterns of living in order to remain with our spouses and remain sane. We have learned to accept what cannot be smoothed away, such as the fact that bereaved couples can disagree over something as vital as visiting their child’s grave. We know that we must accept what our partners can and cannot do, although it may differ from our own capabilities. We also realize the importance of our own needs and wants.
Audrey: “Driven by a hunger to hold on to Jess and to understand what happened, my husband and I share perhaps an even closer relationship.”
Phyllis: “Mel and I were like two frightened children holding hands. We were lost and trying to find our way out of a dark place that we inhabited. We grew to be extremely dependent on each other.”
Among the nine of us, only Maddy had divorced and remarried, long before the death of her son Neill. She and her second husband Cliff had been married since Neill was eight years old. So, while he was the devoted stepfather, he was not Neill’s blood relative. The stepfather relationship put Cliff in the position of sometimes feeling powerless, not knowing how he fit in after Neill’s death.
Maddy: “I think Cliff knew I had the greater pain and he deferred to it. In a way, we were luckier than the other couples in that Cliff was the stepparent. He
felt the grief but it was somewhat different. My former husband and I had battled over many things since we divorced in 1977. When Neill died we became friends. Instinctively, we both knew that to honor Neill and to do right by his younger brother, Phillip, we had to stop the fighting.”
However much our relationships with our husbands have been battered about by our shared tragedy, there remains the fact that it is a shared loss. Although it may have taken us awhile to look beyond our own grief, we all came to realize that our husbands are the only people on earth who held that lost child with as much loving closeness as we did and miss them as much as we do.
Barbara G.: “After many months of different grieving styles, I told Bruce that I would never leave him because only he knew and loved Howie as I did.”
People just naturally seem to acknowledge a mother’s grief more readily than a father’s grief. As a result, they often asked our husbands, “How is your wife holding up?” They would fail to ask how our husbands themselves were bearing up. The same was often true of our surviving children. Time and again they were asked, “How are your parents doing?”
Just as no one ever prepared us for losing a child, so no one ever told us how to deal with our surviving children. Only one of us, Ariella, has no other children or stepchildren. She and her husband Bob have done away with the traditions that are commonly associated with family. While those of us with surviving children have found we must carry on the celebration of holidays and birthdays and such, Ariella and Bob prefer not to be reminded of these events. They will travel over a holiday or ignore it completely if they so choose.
The rest of us spend much of our lives dealing with the issues that arise from having other children … the surviving siblings, if you will. Indeed, we cringe somewhat at using that term “surviving” children. More than one of our children has taken offense at being labeled in such a way, saying that it demeans their very existence by defining them only in relation to their dead sibling.
How we address ourselves in our relationships with our surviving children has much to do with where we are in our bereavement. In our
early grief, “bereaved parent” was our identity. We wore it as a badge; we were bereaved and little else defined us. Thankfully, that has changed with time.
Rita: “I no longer define myself as a bereaved mother. That would negate the fact that I am the mother of another very much alive son.”
There are so many raw emotions involved in the fragile family dynamic that exists between grieving parents, who are hardly able to get themselves through the day, and their remaining children. The children have not only lost a brother or sister, to whom they may have been extremely close, but they have also lost the mother and father that they always knew.
Lorenza: “Our daughter Allegra lived alone in the city. For a while she stayed away from our house because it was too painful for her. At times she was unable to speak to her father on the phone because his voice betrayed the depth of his grief and anguish. There were so many memories for her and she felt that we, her parents, had changed.”
In some cases, our surviving children witnessed the enormous grief that enveloped their parents and they could not help but wonder if the dead child was the favored one. Did their parents love that child more?
One of us cringes to this day as she recalls wondering in the midst of her terrible grief if she actually did love her deceased child more than her surviving children. The rest of us do not remember ever experiencing that particular inner turmoil, which once again points to the fact that reactions differ among bereaved persons.

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