Resilience (8 page)

As I read of your bargains with God, I thought of myself. Every day, I ask God to let me take Wade's place. And failing that, to hold my boy as I would hold him, to protect him from our grief, to give him every happiness to which a child of his righteousness would be entitled, and to let him experience ecstasy. I ask for John's health, and for Cate's health, safety and happiness. And I ask God to give me faith.

It is unfair—how often that word is right—that there should be only six years of memories of Lucas. How comforting that those six are so deeply embroidered. How privileged I am that you have shared that with us.

I was privileged to be with Gordon and later Phil and Shelby and Astrid and Sue and Michael, and with their children or with their memories of their children. So often they said what I wished I had had the words to say, but it was more than that. So many days I felt as if I had fallen into a deep black hole, unable even to know which was up anymore. These people—and too many others to name—reached their hands out of the darkness and drew me to a ledge where I could get my footing again. I would fall and they would reach. They would fall and I would reach. They sent me poems when I needed poems and hugs when I needed hugs.

And sometimes in the midst of the advice and the imaginary hugs were new maps we might follow, like the one offered by Skip Smeiska.

Skip's son Joshua died in September after Wade. Josh, who was idolized by his younger brother Matthew, was nearly nineteen when he died. It is not unusual for teen grief to be expressed as anger or hostility, but when seventeen-year-old Matthew closed up altogether, Skip became concerned and wrote Matthew a letter. What looked like a Christmas letter to a son was much more. Skip wrote to Matthew, but I heard it, too. Skip's story is a road map, really.

An artist who was successful in many mediums—ink, oil, watercolor—wanted desperately to be an accomplished woodworker, a carpenter. He tried—small items, mostly, wooden bowls and platters, a breadbox, even a chain—but he was never satisfied. One day, the artist's wife asked him to make a table. Not only would he be working in wood, he would be responding to a request from the wife he dearly loved. He worked long and hard and produced for her a table, plain and solid and strong, not unlike the artist himself. The table became a part of their household. His family gathered there for supper. There they played games together. His children did their homework at his plain table, and there he wrote letters to friends and his wife made cookies. The table was as solid as his family.

One night a thief broke in. For some reason that would never make sense to anyone, he stole one of the legs to the table. The artist and his family were sad. How could they ever use this beloved table again if it only had three legs? But it was the only table they had, so they tried. Every time they tried to use the table, though, any item near where the leg had been went crashing to the floor, upsetting the table and the family. They tried putting heavy items on the opposite corner of the table to balance it, but the heavy items took so much of the table that it was hard to use. Soon the leg below the corner where all the heavy items were started to move out and away from the other two legs. The table seemed doomed to collapse.

The artist, forlorn, took the table back to his workshop. He cut and carved, shaped and sanded until he had created from their sturdy four-legged table a slightly smaller but strong three-legged table. It was a work of art, unique, beautiful and functional. The artist became, as he worked, the fine carpenter he always wanted to be, and his family had their precious table back.

Our family is like that table. It was steady and strong, then for reasons we will never understand, we were robbed of one of our legs. We try to balance our table as it wobbles, we make an extra effort here or there to keep everything from crashing to the floor. But sometimes they come crashing anyway. We know our efforts are only good in the short run. In the long run, we have to remake, reshape our table. It won't be our old table, but we can, with faith and love, build from it a table that will stand.

Skip finished his message to Matthew “Merry Christmas, Son.” But Skip had the good grace to post it to our whole Internet community, so his gift went to many more who were struggling, not just to Matthew.

I had tried to keep Wade alive. I had cobbled together a collection of ways to parent his memory, to introduce him to others, to keep him as a part of the lives of those who loved him when he lived and breathed. I had, in effect, moved the heavy objects to the table so that it would not come crashing down, so that the old table could be central to my life, just as the boy had been central.

It did not happen on the day I read Skip's story. It happened slowly as I began to accept what I could not change and started to create my new life as the mother of Cate and then Emma Claire and Jack and, separately and differently, the bereaved mother of Wade. He is no less dear to me, but the longer I held him in this limbo between having died and whatever it was I craved, the longer I was in limbo, too. I admit, it still makes me cry to type the words “Wade is dead.” I still see, when I allow myself, the tenderness that crossed over his face when he would look at me or the way he would reach, almost secretively, for his father's hand as they sat next to each other, or the way he would comfort and protect Cate, his arm over her shoulder, bending down and whispering in her ear. I don't have to bury the memory to accept that I have buried the boy.

Having the opportunity in a safe place to say what I needed to say about my boy and about my pain allowed me to move forward. Parenting his memory at his grave and at the places we have created because of him—the Learning Labs (there is now a second in Goldsboro), the high school short-story contest, even the garden at his grave—I could express my need always to be his mother. Finding in the ashes something to save, something worthwhile to parent, has made each day without his physical presence less painful.

And recognizing that if I buried myself in his death, I was leaving, as part of his legacy, a wreck of a human unable to do what he would have wanted me to do: be a mother to his beloved sister. More than that, too. Wade's life would cease to exist. The way he cared for those around him—never sending anyone away, sitting with the outcast at lunch, intervening when classmates harassed another student—that would be gone. All he valued and all he loved would not matter. All that would matter was that he was dead. Wade would be his death and not his life. Picking up the phone and making plans for lunch, buying a new dress, and going to a basketball game all sound like such little things, but they were a very big step for me.

The biggest step was having more children. Wade died in April of 1996. Emma Claire was born in April of 1998, and Jack was born in May of 2000. It was a conscious decision to have more children. What, John and I wondered in our quiet house in Raleigh, will ever bring happiness back into the house in which Cate will live? What brings us joy? The answer was clear: children. Although my great-grandmother had had a child at fifty years old without medicines, I didn't count on genetic good fortune. We went to the doctor and I started a regimen of shots and medicines to increase the likelihood that we would have children. I was forty-eight when I had Emma Claire, and—with my AARP card in hand—I was fifty when I had Jack a month before Cate graduated from high school. If Cate was my someone “for whom to remain,” as Mark Helprin put it, I now had two more someones for whom to live. And to whom I could introduce their brother.

We wonder, sometimes, how it is that our son is so different from our daughter, or our oldest is so different from his younger brother. They were born into the same family, we say; how could they be so different? Well, the truth is that they were not born into the same family. Wade was born to two parents who had no other children. And Cate was born into a family of three. She did not know the family he knew. Emma Claire and Jack were born into yet other families, and their families included a brother who had died before their birth. That is completely different from Wade's family. As the parents, it seems like the same family changing and growing—and sometimes sadly contracting. But for me, I had to accept that I no longer had Wade's family. I had the family of our last child; I had Jack's. But Jack's and Emma Claire's families definitely include Wade.

I was working one afternoon when Emma Claire came in with a picture of Wade in her hand. “It makes me sad,” she said. I thought I knew what she was thinking, but I did not. “It makes me sad that Jack never got to know Wade.” Emma Claire had heard so much about her older brother that she didn't realize that she never knew him when he was alive. What to say? All I said was “It makes me sad, too.”

But in truth it made me happy, too. After we are gone, we fade a little with the death of each person who knew us. Who is left to say our name or remember some moment we treasure? Who, we ask, are those people in the picture in front of grandmother's house? And here were two more people—quite young people; Jack was born twenty-one years after Wade was born—who would remember Wade, and remember him not just as he was when he died, but how he was as a boy and what he wrote when he was seven as well as what he wrote when he was fifteen.

It was less than a year before Wade died when he and I sat in the family room looking at picture albums. We were looking at a photograph of him standing on the back stoop, his knit shirt tucked into khaki shorts, an enormous smile revealing a missing tooth, and a big sticker on his shirt with his name. His first day of kindergarten.

“I miss that boy,” I said to Wade.

“I am right here,” he answered.

“Oh, I love the boy who is right here, but that boy, that little boy is gone. I have the big you, but I no longer have that little boy and I miss him,” I said, giving the Wade beside me a hug.

Understanding that he was gone and I was never getting him back was so much easier to accept when I had lost the little Wade but still had the big Wade. Now, with empty arms, I miss them both.

CHAPTER 6
Eternity

thers have faced each of the struggles I have faced, and many have faced much deeper chasms. In each challenge, I have met people of enormous faith for whom that faith was what they needed to be resilient, to find in each challenge the love of their god. It is a great blessing, and in the many moments when I have not found the solace I need in faith alone, I have been envious of their peace and the grace in which they stand. The problem of how to view death was the biggest cloud that stood between me and my faith. The faithful were lucky and knew and believed in something that gave them peace. But to some who wanted to hold on to their faith and could not, who wanted the peace now denied them, James Russell Lowell wrote the anthem:

…

Your logic, my friend, is perfect
,

Your moral most drearily true;

But, since the earth clashed on her coffin
,

I keep hearing that, and not you.

Console if you will, I can bear it;

'Tis a well-meant alms of breath;

But not all the preaching since Adam

Has made Death other than Death.

…

That little shoe in the corner
,

So worn and wrinkled and brown
,

With its emptiness confutes you
,

And argues your wisdom down.

I knew if I could believe in the deepest part of me that death was more than just death, if I could have but the hope of one day with my son, I could live through the other days knowing I had that one I could share with him. And if I could embrace that we could have—together—life after death reunited, I could live with such peace now, knowing I would be with him—not in a year, but someday. But belief in that required belief in a place where we would reunite, a heaven, and therefore a god. But what kind of God could there be if He allowed the wind to take Wade from us? Could I expect such beneficence from the God who let him die?

In the Book of Job, chapter 1, verses 18 and 19, a messenger comes to Job and says, “Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking in the eldest brother's house, and, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men and they are dead.” Wade was driving to the beach when he died. The invisible wind crossed the eastern North Carolina fields and pushed his car off the road, and he could not right it and it flipped and, crushed, it fell in upon Wade, and he died. The invisible wind. The hand of God? The hand of Satan that God had loosened on Job? Is his death a response to his or our failings, or is it a test of God? How can I lean on a God who had taken this righteous boy, or even on one who had allowed him to be taken? The faith that might have been so important to me was, I will be honest, more than sorely tested. I had to reconcile what I had believed with what I had experienced. I had believed in a God who protected the righteous; God's punishment is meted out to those who have sinned. What's more, I had believed that God would intervene to protect the innocent. How, at forty-six, having seen what I had of the world, having walked around the site of the children's hospital at Hiroshima, near the epicenter of the atomic bomb, having seen injustice and misery reposed among the innocent across the globe, I still believed this, I cannot say. I only know that I did, until April 4, 1996.

I wrote, after Wade died, trying to sort it out: “I haven't the will to be angry with God. I don't understand, and all my efforts at understanding are thwarted, paths into brambles, paths into deserts. And yet, I cannot be angry. I know I want something of God. I want to be beside my son, and if I am to hope for this, He is my only way. Where would anger bring me? Further and farther from my boy? What use is that, save the satisfaction of it? The only satisfaction I crave is the warmth of my boy's touch and the sound of his voice. I need that hope. It sustains me.” But the search for hope was hard, and that path to God's grace was difficult to find. The map I knew did not comport with the ground on which I was walking.

The God to whom I prayed daily for Wade's eternal soul had to be another god than the one I had imagined. I had to reconsider what I had been taught. My God, my new understanding of God is that he does not promise us protection and intervention. He promises only salvation and enlightenment. This is our world, a gift from God, and we make it what it is. If it is unjust, we have made it so. If there is boundless misery, we have permitted it. If there is suffering, it came from man's own action or inaction. Abel killed Cain; God did not. Wade's death didn't belong to God. It belonged to this earth. I could still pray for Wade's eternal soul because I no longer had to blame that same God to whom I prayed unsuccessfully for his return to life.

The journey to my new understanding of God made me also understand and sympathize with the doubt of others. And among those who grieved, at my face-to-face grief groups and particularly on the Internet, doubt was a well-known companion. So many of us grew up in religious households or found the society around us organized along certain religious assumptions that few of us came to death entirely from an atheistic or agnostic position. When death or disease struck those we loved, we looked for something to make it make sense, even to make it not really so. We prayed that diseases would be cured and bones healed. We looked to religion; it is where we were taught to look; it is where our faith drove us. Our death rituals are built around religion; our funerals are largely in places of worship; the headstones near our loved ones espouse it. So here we were, grappling with God. Some good and righteous mourners found what was needed; some good and righteous mourners did not.

Part of the appeal of religion, viewed dispassionately (which is not, I know, the right or proper way to consider faith, and I mean no disparagement whatever by it), is that religion provides a way to believe that our loved ones have not really died. Their bodies have died, their spirit lives. The thought is more than comforting. Not only have they not ceased to exist, reunion is possible. Where does the atheist or the agnostic go for that same degree of comfort? There is no place, for I do not think there is the same degree of comfort elsewhere. I do think there are things one can do to help the spirit of those whom we love live on after their deaths, ways in which we can translate their spirit into tangible things or activities that represent their spirit. We can build statues, and we do. We can write books, and we do. We can find ways in which we can translate what is temporal—life on earth—into something permanent. None of these require faith. And the permanence they provide is real. How many religions have come and gone or changed since Ovid wrote
Metamorphoses
, in which he described the endurance of literature in the epilogue?

Now I have done my work. It will endure
,

I trust, beyond Jove's anger, fire, and sword
,

Beyond time's hunger. The day will come, I know
,

So let it come, that day which has no power

Save over my body, to end my span of life

Whatever it may be. Still, part of me
,

The better part, immortal will be borne

Above the stars; …

I shall be read, and through all centuries
,

If prophecies of bards are ever truthful
,

I shall be living, always.

And I am reading the words, so maybe Ovid is right. And then again, he is not living; the making of statues, the writing of words are not the answer I need, however comforting they are in the here and now, because the existence of other roads to an enduring presence, to “living, always” does not, unfortunately, diminish the need for a spiritual answer. What I needed was not Wade's eternal memory; I needed his eternal life, a life greater than sixteen short years, and I needed the hope of reunion.

Until my own heart could settle on a way to make life and death and hope as much a part of our being as breath, the platitudes and parables, religious or not, did not help me. So I read, and I prayed for my son's eternal protection and for faith for myself to believe in that protection. And I prayed for answers, answers that my faith would never provide. Faith would one day provide a credo for the rest of life without my child, but like the statues and poems and physical memorials, it could not answer the question I ask every day after a loss or an injustice or any suffering: It cannot tell me why.

How rare it must be for someone to say, “I deserve this cancer; it is a proper punishment for my sins,” or even more unlikely, “God was right to take my child, for I am not pious.” We all have to redraw lines and rearrange our expectations of faith in these moments, and it is understandable that we do not come to rest with precisely the same understanding. In my online grief groups, there were Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, and there were many with no faith at all. We had talked about graves and headstones and cremation and every manner of thing, and so we felt secure enough in this group to talk about this, the most important of things, the likelihood of eternal life and ultimate reunion. But those who needed, understandably, to believe that eternal life was absolutely assured perhaps by some ritual in which their child had engaged surely hurt, by their strident insistence on the importance of these rituals, those whose children did not so confirm their faith. So arguments began among people who had previously understood the rules of the group to be that we would, at all costs, protect one another. I had to wonder, as it happened, what God, looking down on His creation, would think of us. He would, I imagined, be perplexed that we understood so little of what He wanted from us.

But now it was more about what we wanted from Him.

If you are able, like Job, to place yourself firmly in the hands of your god, you have, in my view, a greater gift than resilience. You do not have to come to terms with a new reality of a child in a grave or with a disease silently ravaging your body. This is not a new reality; this is what your god has ordained for you, handing you the suffering in one hand and the faith with which to come to terms with it in the other. Some who are not fully satisfied with God's arms or God's answers looked elsewhere. I will not judge them, for what they got is what they needed. I wanted a god, but I needed a different understanding of my God than the one in which I had believed before the wind swept Wade from the road.

I listened as there were discussions of mysticism and after-death communications and other places I was not willing to go. I would not then and do not now condemn that search. What do we know, really? We are all on a journey to understanding, and we cannot know the end or scope of it, and even in the most mundane ways, we can hardly come close. I was—and still am—completely amazed by telephones: that I might dial a set of digits here in North Carolina, and my sister might answer the telephone more than a thousand miles away in Florida, and that I speak and she recognizes my voice. What happened to my voice? It must have been taken apart and sent in waves to the sky and back to someplace on earth where it knew it was meant for her and was sent only to her, and the voice that was waves was put back together and became again a voice, incredibly, that she could recognize. And what is more, we can talk, even talk right over one another, so it seems all the taking apart and sending and putting back together happens at once. I remember talking to my father overseas one time when I was a girl. His voice was almost his voice, but it would crackle and fall apart, and there would be pauses, the last words echoing while I waited my turn to speak back. I know that the old almost-voices and the new perfect-voices are only physics, but it is a wonder. A wonder that seemed like a trick, then seemed imperfect, and then became what we know and accept: That is my sister's voice, and this is mine. What other rough edges and crackles will we smooth so that what seems a difficult or impossible communication—even communication across the barrier of life—is clear, is commonplace? About much more important things, I am not vain enough to think I know at all. You do not have to believe in order to believe that you do not know.