Until it does.
The odds of losing a child before you lose yourself…by age 60, in US, is about one in ten.
I was only 45 on May 9, 1987, when it happened to me.
I am reading Fi: A Memoir of My Son, by Alexandra Fuller, whose son died at the same age my son did (21), 37 years ago. The quote above is from her book; It has been an accidental read--I saw it suggested at the bottom of the last kindle book I’d finished and having loved her other books, ordered this one.
Some say, ‘There are no accidents.’ I mostly don’t believe that, as Geoff’s accidental death was certainly not part of any great plan, but a random event, at least in our family’s belief system.
But possibly my choice of this book to read during the days preceding the anniversary of Geoff’s death on May 9 does fit that saying. I plunged into it immediately, finding much consoling resonance with my own experience, despite our very different personas and mothering styles.
There is a comfort in that resonance, a comfort that those of us who have suffered this loss connect with--though we need no words to grasp our shared experience, words can be a great help, as I have found in my years of writing and publishing poetry, in the response to it as well as the alleviation of my own anguish.
Fuller tells us, “Grief is hungry.” Oh yes.
Though my grief has ceased to devour me as it did in the years after he died, it still catches me off-guard, especially at anniversary times, or when, in an unplanned shuffle through the piles of saved stuff I am determined to unload, I find a homemade birthday card, a childhood picture, a grinning photo of him in Italy, where he died.
It eats up space in my heart and head; I don’t begrudge it-after all, the size of the grief is the size of the love we have had for our child--and that is huge. Fuller and I share both that belief and burden.
In those early, raw months and years, I fear it consumed pieces of my relationship with my surviving son, and most likely, my husband as well. For this I have great regret as well as contrition, but loss’s monstrous appetite subsumed most of my waking life long after he died, the support of loving friends and family, a compelling career as a family therapist and advocate for women notwithstanding.
A friend’s young daughter asked her, “Will Sharon and John ever be happy again?”
I imagine our friend said yes to her daughter’s question. But that it would take some time.
And it has.
In those early years, so many things helped--the unwavering support of our surviving son, Geoff’s friends and our own circling around us, working together to make the old Block Island barn we bought on a whim into a home, the yearly memorials at his grave and parties afterwards. Leaving an unfulfilling school job to open my own family therapy practice, years of personal and marital therapy, Taos, Natalie Goldberg and writing practice. Publication of now eight collections of poetry and a memoir. Becoming a grandmother to three outstanding boys, now men. Traveling the world.
This rapacious monster has changed me for the better; I am quite sure I would never be the person I am today if his death hadn’t scrubbed me clean of my old ways of seeing and being in the world.
I found a way to grieve myself whole.
My years of work with the Touchstone and Hotchkiss girls, with women of all ages, my breaks with past unhealthy relationships and experiences, my meditation practice and shamanic training, but most of all, my return to writing, the great love of my life since childhood, have stood me on new, sturdier feet.
In early loss, we survivors search for forgiveness for ourselves for what we were sure must have been our fault--something we ate while pregnant? smoking while nursing? hereditary allergies and asthma? a less than perfect marriage? uneven mothering? holding our child too tightly?
As parents, we are supposed to keep our children safe. Even though Geoff died in Italy, far from our home in Connecticut, I felt his death must be somehow my fault. It took a long time to move away from that belief.
I came to understand that all parents who have lost their children, whatever the cause--accident, disease, drugs, suicide (there are no ‘natural causes’ of death for a child who dies out of life’s ordinary order) feel this way.
Self-forgiveness is one of the first steps in what I have come to call ‘carrying your grief differently.’ Everyone in the helping professions as well as mindfulness practice talks about the importance of letting go. It had been a frightening concept to me as I know it is to many others--frightening because we imagine it means a kind of cutoff from our child, an abandonment of love--because after all, isn’t the pain of grief and loss a continued connection? Isn’t self-blame a strange way of staying close?
But no. Letting go, as I have come to understand it, involves forgiveness to self for both imagined and real faults and flaws, perhaps to the beloved child for dying, to ancillary events and people around the death. For me, it also has involved repair of important relationships, and as I said earlier, leaving those which do not nurture and support. It has involved years of sitting on a cushion at mindfulness retreats, breathing in, breathing out, hoping for release of what is called ‘complicated grief,’ which had been holding me hostage. It has meant understanding that freedom can come from surrender to what is, even if I had to practice that surrender over and over and over, still do.
And letting go has involved the willingness to take a vacation from anguish, moving away from daily dwelling on what has been lost and opening to learning who I could be without my child and the life that I had with him and that that new life can and must hold room for joy and celebration.
It has meant knowing that I have a living child, now a grown man with a wife and family, who needs and needed my love and attention too, knowing that I shortchanged him in those years of terribleness, knowing that I continue to need his forgiveness for that.
As a parent, my job has been to give our children both roots and wings--I finally came to understand that even in death, I needed to give Geoff his wings, the freedom to be wherever he is, without me.
That was the hardest part, in some strange way.
But the most essential.
*********************
My deepest thanks for all the many who have supported us through these challenging years, most especially Mary Lou and Elizabeth who have always showed up, from the very first to the present.
And to Greg Kosmicki, who took the chance to publish my first full-length collection, Branch in His Hand, a memoir in poetry of all the experience of Geoff’s death and its aftermath. What a difference that made to me at such a tender time; thank you so much, Greg.