That’s something else I’ve learned. I try not to ask, “What can I do?” Instead, I think of something that may be welcome like fresh coffee, then go ahead and do it. “The best thing a friend did when my mother died,” said a teacher, “was to call and say, ‘I’m bringing dinner tomorrow night. If you don’t need it, just put it in the freezer.’”
People in crisis may be in shock. They can scarcely hear the well-meant “What can I do?” let alone summon up a vision of what needs to be attended to. Thus, the biggest help may be to make a specific offer such as “I’ll walk the dog, shall I?” or “I’ll stay here to answer the phone if you like.” The suggestion allows the person not to have to think if it seems beyond her at the moment, and the question allows her to say no if what you’re offering is an intrusion.
Molly could have said no to my coming at nine in the morning, but she didn’t. I thought she might want to talk, but she barely looked up when I came in. She was on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. Only when I noticed she was polishing the same spot over and over did I realize she was scrubbing to keep from going to pieces.
When there was nothing more to clean, I said, “Come on, Molly, we’re going for a walk.” I didn’t ask if she wanted to; how could Molly be asked to want anything but her daughter well and alive? I got her coat, held it as she put it on and took her arm.
We walked through the pine woods in the back of her house, our footsteps so muffled by the needled path that a doe and her fawn didn’t take alarm until we were almost upon them. When we came out at the shore of the pond where our families often picnicked, we stood staring out across the winter water. Dark and still, it was not the friendly pond of summer but cold and bottomless.
“I wonder if death is like that,” Molly finally said.
I longed to cry out, No, no, it must be kinder. But I echoed, “I wonder.”
She said, not really to me, “How am I going to get through the next weeks?”
I forced myself not to be reassuring. “I don’t know, Molly,” I answered quietly. “I just don’t know.”
Months later, she told me that was the moment she knew she would find a way. It’s hard to describe, but I knew what she meant because once it had happened to me. People said kind, well-meaning things like “You have to be brave” and “You’ll get over this.” But all I thought was, You’re not me. You don’t understand. Then someone said, “It’s going to be very, very, hard; you’ve got a long way to go,” and suddenly I knew I was going to make it. Someone had listened to me, had heard my despair, and instead of trying to talk me out of it, had accepted it.
To listen, to be there, to accept—that is the emotional first aid we can offer each other when a bad time comes.
Molly asked whether I thought she and David should be honest with Hilary or try to pretend her illness wasn’t serious. In talking it over, I described a former neighbor, a much older woman, whose husband lay in bed with stomach cancer. She often came into my kitchen and slumped down exhausted, needing a few minutes’ rest from the effort of keeping a cheerful face. Even when her husband said, “Look, Reb, you and I both know what this is,” she couldn’t give up the game. “No, no,” she insisted, “you’re going to be all right.”
Do people want to be spared the knowledge they are dying? If you listen carefully, the dying person himself will often let you know. Doctors say they hear it in how a question is phrased. If a patient says, “I don’t have cancer, do I?” it is likely that he does not want to know. But if he says, “I have cancer, don’t I?” then he may be ready to talk about it.
Dying is a lonely business if you can’t share your feelings. Physicians at the University of California Medical Center found that, of a group of children with leukemia, the ones whose parents denied the seriousness of their condition were the loneliest because they had no one to talk to about their fears.
This is not to say that family or friends should be aggressively frank and insist on the truth even if the patient doesn’t want to hear it. That happens sometimes, I think, when people want to prove they can talk fearlessly of dying and death. But you should not be brave on someone else’s time. Let them tell you what they want to know.
That’s what Molly decided to do with Hilary. As it turned out, though, the doctor had been in to visit Hilary and she had asked him. Not what she had—she had already sensed that—but how long. He had told her weeks. She was dressed when Molly got there. “Please, Mom,” she said, “take me home. That’s all I really want now—to be home with you and Dad.”
One evening after supper, Molly finished the dishes and went quietly down the hall. The only light in the living room was firelight. Hilary and her father, almost hidden in easy chairs, were talking—sometimes as father and daughter, sometimes as two people trying to find their way in a sea of mystery.
Quite easily and naturally, David was able to ask Hilary, “If this new drug doesn’t work as we hope, is there anything you want us to know?”
“That I love you and Mom, always,” said Hilary softly, “even when I acted like I didn’t. That I’d like to be buried in that little country cemetery we found that day we were driving in through the valley. And that I hope you won’t throw my diaries away. I’d like you to put them as far back under the eaves in the attic as possible—and to leave them there even if you move. Then maybe someday somebody will find them there and read them, and it won’t be like I never lived.”
“Imagine what we would have missed,” Molly said after Hilary was gone, “if we couldn’t have talked of her dying. We wouldn’t have known her wishes. We could have missed what, in a funny way, was the best part of our lives together because we were so extraordinarily close and open with each other those last days.”
That closeness, that openness, can come about not just with families, but also with friends. Critic Leonard Probst wrote that his own life-threatening illness led people he had known only in the context of success to share with him “litanies of fear, failure, anxiety and frustration they had never spoken of.” The point of visiting is not, of course, to dump your own burden of woe on the counterpane, any more than it is to match stories of sickness and suffering. But you can listen for cues. And if the person seems to want to explore deeper water and you are courageous enough to follow, it can be a time of intimacy and trust that is incomparable.
Even if all you talk about is everyday matters, however, your visit is still important. To convey love and warmth and respect is the most valuable kind of emotional support. Your presence alone does that, so don’t let worries about what to say keep you away. The one gift only you can bring is yourself.
After a person has died, your thoughts turn to what you can do for the survivors. Again, the answer is much the same: Be there. Listen to them. Accept their grief.
I was struck by the grace and simplicity of Hilary’s friends who came to the house the day after her death to say a few words and to hug Molly and David. They must have had thoughts like “Hilary’s parents won’t want to see anybody but family at a time like this” or “Other friends were closer than I was.” But if they thought of such excuses, they had the sense to ignore them. They came because they cared—and just coming showed Molly and David they cared. “I’m sorry,” they said. “I loved her, and I’m going to miss her.” It was enough.
Hilary’s tennis partner asked if he could have the small silver plate inscribed with her initials from the heel of her racquet; he wanted to put it on his own, he said, in her memory. A close friend asked for a string of azure beads Hilary often wore. And a neighborhood youngster said how kind Hilary had always been to her and could she please have Hilary’s yellow T-shirt to hang in her room. I was a bit taken aback at these requests until I saw how it pleased Molly and David to know that Hilary’s friends wanted to remember her.
A young man Hilary had gone out with a few times called from across the country to say how sorry he was. To my surprise, Molly started chuckling in the middle of the phone call, then lau
ghed aloud. The young man was telling her a funny tale of a day he and Hilary went whitewater rafting and tipped over. For a few moments Hilary, young and laughing and happy, was alive again.
How kind and unself-conscious it was of the young man to call. Did he stop to think that he wasn’t a close friend? A friend of mine did, when she heard that someone she knew only casually had lost both her parents within the same week. My friend reached for the telephone, stopped, then reached again, thinking, Oh, well, she doesn’t have to talk to me if I’m intruding.
An hour later, they were still chatting, for the woman had been feeling terribly alone. The friendly, unexpected voice was a lifeline pulling her back to a warmer world. She still speaks of how grateful she was for the call.
Another friend had a similar experience on the receiving end. The morning the announcement of her mother’s death appeared in the paper, a woman she hadn’t seen since grammar school called. She spoke of butterscotch sundaes at Schrafft’s, ice skating in the park, a matinee of Pinocchio—kindnesses the mother had included her in.
“Ever since then, I haven’t hesitated to pick up the phone,” my friend says. No one else called that morning— they didn’t want to bother the family, I’m sure. But I can’t tell you how consoling it was to know that somebody who hadn’t seen my mother in years still remembered her with such fondness.
Curiously enough, our impulses in such circumstances are usually right. It’s our second thoughts that trip us up. We have to learn to ignore that self-deprecating voice that says, Oh, they won’t want to hear from me, or I’ll just be in the way, or Somebody else will call.
Do call. Do go. Do reach out. Don’t be put off by the thought that you won’t know what to say. To bring emotional support to someone in crisis requires only this: Be loving. Be there.
Jo Coudert
Lot’s Wife
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of overcoming it.
Helen Keller
Enid was an older woman whose husband had died unexpectedly two years before she came to see me. Withdrawn and distant, she had not cried or spoken of his death to anyone in all that time. She no longer cooked or looked after her garden or her house. Most of the time she sat in her bathrobe in the living room, looking out the window at nothing at all. She had been given antidepressants by her doctor, but they had not made much difference, and after a while she had simply stopped taking them. “They won’t bring him back,” she had said. She had been brought to see me by one of her daughters who told me, “I lost both my parents the day my father died.”
At first Enid and I sat and looked at each other in silence. She was a lovely woman in her early seventies, but she seemed as lifeless as the chair she sat on, as if she were only the wrapper that had once enclosed a life. She seemed so fragile that I wondered if she would have the strength to stay the full hour.
I opened the conversation by asking her why she had come. “My husband has died,” she replied, turning her head away from me to look out my window. “My daughters would like me to talk about it, but I do not think that I care to.” When I gently asked her to say more about this she said simply, “Talking seems a waste of time. No one could possibly understand.”
I nodded in agreement. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You have lost your life. Only your husband could understand what you have lost. Only he knew what your life together was like.” At this she turned back to look at me. Her eyes were gray, like her hair. There was no light in them. I nodded again. “If he were here, Enid, what would you tell him?” I asked her.
She considered me for a long moment. Then she closed her eyes and began to speak to her husband aloud, telling him what life was like without him. She told him about going to their special places alone, walking their dogs alone, sleeping in their bed alone. She told him about needing to learn to do the little things he had always taken care of, things she had never known about. She reminded him of times that only he would remember, old memories that no one else had shared. And then for the first time since he died, she began to cry. She cried for a long time.
When her tears stopped, I asked her if there was anything she had not said. Hesitantly she told me how angry she was with him for abandoning her to grow old alone. She felt as if he had broken a promise to her. She missed him terribly and all that he had brought into her life.
“He was a teacher of love for me,” she told me. The child of rigid and suspicious people, she had been amazed at her husband’s selflessness, his readiness to extend his hand to others, even to strangers. She told me story after story of his generosity, his kindness, her eyes looking beyond me to the past. “Herbert always went the extra mile,” she said. “So many people loved him.”
I was deeply touched by Herbert and by the woman he had loved. “Enid,” I asked her, “if Herbert were here, what would he say to you about the way you have lived the last two years of your life?” She looked startled. “Why, he would say, ‘Enid, why have you built a monument of pain in memory of me? My whole life was about love.’” She paused. Then for the first time I saw the hint of a smile. “Perhaps there are other ways to remember him,” she said.
Afterward she told me that she had felt that if she let go of her pain, she would betray Herbert’s memory and diminish the value of his life. She now saw that she had indeed betrayed him by holding on to her pain and closing her heart. She never came back to see me again. Herbert had told her everything that she needed to hear.
Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don’t grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot’s wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt.
Grieving is not about forgetting. Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone, and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.
About a year after this meeting, Enid sent me a clipping from the local paper about a group of widows she had organized to help elderly people with the tasks they could not do for themselves in their homes. There was no note with the clipping, just a tiny one-breath poem she had written and signed. “Grief./ I pull up anchor,/ and catch the wind.”
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.
THE FAMILY CIRCUS®
By Bil Keane
“When a lady’s husband dies,
why does she hafta be a window?”
Reprinted with permission from Bil Keane.
One So Young
The measure of life, after all, is not its duration but its donation.
Peter Marshall
Grieving over the death of my newborn twin sons taught me many lessons. The most important was, whatever the challenge, we all have enough strength within us, as long as we have enough support around us. I resolved to do my part in providing that support to as many grieving parents as possible, including gentle encouragement of the family to take advantage of every opportunity that would help them heal. Since the luxury of time for decision making is not allowed in the days following a death, time was of the essence. I never heard a grieving parent express regret for something they had done, but many times I’d heard, “I wish I had. . . .”
On a late winter evening, a mutual friend informed me that a young couple’s baby had died the day before, apparently of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). She told me that the mother especially was having a very difficult time and asked if I would visit them.
Armed with photos of my own babies, I was met by the grieving father as I walked up the driveway.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. He nodded and showed me into the house.
At the table, seemingly oblivious to my entrance, sat the baby’s mom, Rhonda. She stared at her hands with swollen eyes. Our mutual friend and her daughter were with her, looking sad and feeling very helpless.
We were introduced, and Rhonda barely tipped her head in acknowledgment. I sat next to her and waited. When she offered no conversation, I started talking about my own experience with my twins. Although I was aware that in no way could I know what she was going through, I did want her to know that I had endured a similar situation, and yet I was still here, whole and alive.
Finally, Rhonda spoke about how she had found her daughter. Rhonda had picked the infant up and handed her to her husband, hoping beyond hope that Barry would be able to revive their baby. Automatically, he tried, but it soon became apparent that Sarah was dead.
When the coroner arrived, he placed baby Sarah on her parents’ bed while he made his preliminary examination. Rhonda shivered, “How could I ever sleep there again?” Now it was clear. Not only did she detest death because it had separated her from her baby, but also because it had contaminated her home and family. Rhonda had little energy left, and she was spending the remainder on loathing her vile enemy.
I brought out the photos of my little boys. “When Josh and Cole died, we kept them with us for several hours,” I said quietly.
For the first time, Rhonda looked at me, her eyes penetrating, searching my face for answers to questions she didn’t even want to ask. I continued, “We took locks of hair, had our babies footprinted and just held them close.”
“But they were dead!” Rhonda had stumbled into a territory so foreign to her that she couldn’t even believe she was saying the words.
“Yeah. They were dead. But we had to make the transition from loving them as earthly bodies to loving them as spirits. It’s one of the hardest things to learn to do, but it can be done. Even though the spark of who they were, their soul, was no longer in those little bodies, nonetheless, the bodies were there for us to hold. And for that, I will be eternally grateful.”