The ride home from my mother’s house on Christmas night had always been a time of supreme bliss for me; my two boys tucked safely into the backseat of the car, each of us filled with the joy and wonder of the day. I had savored this time and counted my blessings. Last year, our first Christmas without Adam, I wept. But this year, I was focused on those candles and all they represented. We drove home in silence, each of us lost in our own private memories of Adam; each of us wishing that somehow, some way the candles still burned.
As we anxiously approached our driveway, we strained to distinguish a glimmer of light in the darkness of that Christmas night. And YES, the candles remained burning and so much brighter than we had expected! When we reached our driveway, our hearts soared as we saw that there, under the white bow in the very small flower garden by the side of the road, a third candle now burned with our two.
The third candle had been placed by two very caring people who undoubtedly understood the very profound nature of their very compassionate deed. They are bereaved parents as well, who on a cold, dark Christmas night had come to our home to secretly fill our mailbox with small, meaningful gifts. All to be discovered on another day, at another time. What they left behind was a promise of light, perhaps just a small flicker at first, but a light nonetheless, always burning through the darkness of our grief.
Nina A. Henry
3
COPING AND
HEALING
I would say to those who mourn . . . look upon each day that comes as a challenge, as a test of courage. The pain will come in waves, some days worse than others, for no apparent reason. Accept the pain. Do not suppress it. Never attempt to hide grief.
Daphne du Maurier
Sorrow
In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all,
and it often comes with bitter agony.
Perfect relief is not possible,
except with time.
You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better.
But this is not true.
You are sure to be happy again.
Knowing this,
truly believing it,
will make you less miserable now.
I have had enough experience to make this statement.
Abraham Lincoln
Love and Water
Mama died just days before my eleventh birthday, and my destiny careened dramatically from snuggly to loose-ended. Overnight, my childhood vanished. In the coming months, Dad met Dot at work and began seeing her regularly. A year later, they married.
So much. So quickly. Another woman moving into our house stirred anew my still-fresh memories of Mama. At the same time, Dot inherited a brood of three children, ages five, eight and eleven.
When alone, I listened to an old recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and I was convinced my mama sang those words to me from the other side. Yet in moments of grief I wondered, How can she walk with me now? My child’s heart yearned for a mother’s touch.
“Do you want the kids to call you Mama?” Dad asked Dot one day. Something in me wanted her to say “yes.”
Dot looked troubled for long moments, then said, “No. That wouldn’t be right.”
The no felt like a physical blow. Blood’s thicker’n water, came my grandma’s favorite litany. I’d not, until that very moment, grasped its meaning. My stepmother’s answer seemed proof that blood was thicker, that I was merely Daddy’s “baggage”—proof that, to her—despite the fact that she introduced me as “my daughter”—I was biologically not.
I was of the water. So I distanced myself.
My sulky aloofness hid a deep, deep need for acceptance. Yet no matter how churlish I became, Dot never hurt me with harsh words. Ours was, in those trying days, a quiet, bewildered quest for harmony.
After all, we were stuck with each other. She had no more choice than I.
I visited Mama’s grave every chance I got to talk things over with her. I never carried flowers because fresh arrangements always nestled lovingly against the headstone, put there, no doubt, by Daddy.
Then, in my fourteenth year, I came in from school one day and saw my newborn baby brother, Michael. I hovered over the bassinet, gently stroking the velvety skin as tiny fingers grasped mine and drew them to the little mouth. I dissolved into pure, maternal mush. Dot, still in her hospital housecoat, stood beside me.
In that moment, our gazes locked in wonder. “Can I hold him?”
She lifted and placed him in my arms.
In a heartbeat, that tiny bundle snapped us together.
“Like your new coat?” Dot asked that Christmas as I pulled the beautiful pimento-red topper from the gift package and tried it over my new wool sweater and skirt.
In a few short months, Dot had become my best friend.
At Grandma’s house one Sunday, I overheard Dot tell my Aunt Annie Mary, “I told James I didn’t think it was right to force the kids to call me Mama. Irene will always be Mama to them. That’s only right.” So that’s why she’d said “no.”
Or was it? Blood’s thicker’n water. Was Grandma right? Was that always true in matters pertaining to familial loyalty? I shrugged uneasily, telling myself that it didn’t matter anyway.
The following years, Dot embraced my husband Lee as “son,” she soothed me through three childbirths, and afterward spent full weeks with me, caring and seeing to my family’s needs. Intermittent with these events, she birthed three of her own, giving me two brothers and a sister. How special our children felt, growing up together, sharing unforgettable holidays like siblings.
In 1974, Lee and I lived two hundred miles away when a tragic accident claimed our eleven-year-old Angie. By nightfall, Dot was there, holding me. She was utterly heartbroken.
I moved bleakly through the funeral’s aftermath, secretly wanting to die. Every Friday evening, I dully watched Dot’s little VW pull into my driveway. “Daddy can’t come. He has to work,” she said. After leaving work, she drove four hours nonstop to be with me each weekend, a trek that continued for three long months.
During those visits, she walked with me to the cemetery, held my hand and wept with me. If I didn’t feel like talking, she was quiet. If I talked, she listened. She was so there that, when I despaired, she single-handedly shouldered my anguish.
Soon, I waited at the door on Fridays. Slowly, life seeped into me again.
In 1992, Dad’s sudden auto accident death yanked the earth from beneath me, and I lapsed into shock, inconsolable. My first reaction was that I needed Dot—my family.
Then, for the first time since adolescence, a cold, irrational fear blasted me with the force of TNT. Dad, my genetic link, gone. I’d grown so secure with the Daddy and Dot alliance through the years that I’d simply taken family solidarity for granted. Now with Dad’s abrupt departure, the chasm he left loomed murky and frightening.
Had Dad, I wondered, been the glue? Did glue equate genetic, after all?
Terrifying thoughts spiraled through my mind as Lee drove me to join relatives. Will I lose my family? The peril of that jolted me to the core.
Blood’s thicker’n water. If Grandma felt that way, couldn’t Dot feel that way, too, just a little bit? The small child inside my adult body wailed and howled forlornly. It was in this frame of mind that I entered Dot’s house after the accident.
Dot’s house. Not Dad’s and Dot’s house anymore.
Will Daddy’s void change her? She loved me, yes, but suddenly I felt keenly DNA-stripped, the stepchild of folklore. A sea of familiar faces filled the den. Yet, standing in the midst of them all, I felt utterly alone.
“Susie!” Dot’s voice rang out, and through a blur I watched her sail like a porpoise to me. “I’m so sorry about Daddy, honey,” she murmured and gathered me into her arms.
Terror scattered like startled ravens.
What she said next took my breath. She looked me in the eye and said gently, “He’s with your Mama now.”
I snuffled and gazed into
her kind face. “He always put flowers on Mama’s grave. . . .”
She looked puzzled, then smiled sadly. “No, honey, he didn’t put the flowers on her grave.”
“Then who . . . ?”
She looked uncomfortable for long moments. Then she leveled her gaze with mine. “I did.”
“You?” I asked, astonished. “All those years?” She nodded, then wrapped me in her arms again.
Truth smacked me broadside. Blood is part water. Grandma just didn’t get it.
With love blending them, you can’t tell one from the other.
I asked Dot recently, “Isn’t it time I started calling you Mom?”
She smiled and blushed. Then I thought I saw tears spring into her eyes.
“Know what I think?” I said, putting my arms around her. “I think Mama’s looking down at us from heaven, rejoicing that you’ve taken such good care of us, doing all the things she’d have done if she’d been here. I think she’s saying, ‘Go ahead, Susie, call her Mom.’”
I hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “Is that okay?”
In a choked voice, she replied, “I would consider it an honor.”
Mama’s song to me was true: I do not walk alone.
Mom walks with me.
Emily Sue Harvey
Garrit
My son Garrit died eighteen months ago. We were on safari in Botswana when a spotted hyena took him from his tent just after midnight, dragged him into the bush and killed him. Eleven years old, he died quickly, but his small body was left mutilated and torn apart.
Only hours before his death, he listened to me read to him while he lay burrowed beneath his blankets. When I’d kissed him good night, he thanked me for bringing him to Botswana, then said, “I can’t wait until tomorrow.” Had he not been killed that night, we’d have spent the next day viewing pods of hippos, animals that never failed to bring a smile to Garrit’s lips. Garrit was more precious to me than anyone or anything I’ve ever known. His last words, “I can’t wait until tomorrow,” are etched in my mind just as the smell and feel of my son will always remain a part of me. At the same time, Garrit’s death transformed my world into a no-man’s-land, a place marked by shock and disbelief, a barren landscape stripped bare of life—unrecognizable, incomprehensible. I felt as if I, too, had been torn apart inside.
For we don’t expect our children to die. It doesn’t fit within the natural order of things. Don’t we instinctively protect them from illness and danger from the moment they are born? Aren’t they supposed to outlive us? The death of a small child is virtually unthinkable to a parent. It almost defies logic. When it happens, you continue to exist, though walking the terrain of mere existence can be frightening. A dark abyss looms just ahead. You hesitate, wondering if the waters inside will swallow you up. And yet, again and again, you are drawn to the precipice. For you hear the whisper of some elusive promise of hope rising from the depths.
Questions haunted me day and night: How had it happened? Why had it happened? Who was to blame? Why hadn’t the hyena taken me instead? Did Garrit suffer? Where was he now? Was he all right? Would I ever see him again? The answers lay in Africa, I thought, not at home in the States.
Staying on in Botswana for almost four months, I contacted hyena experts, police and wildlife officials investigating Garrit’s death, the emergency-rescue crew, doctors who had examined the body, local safari operators and others who might be able to answer some of my questions. Though my search for answers was productive, I was vaguely aware that it was also a means to distract myself from looking the enormity of my loss in the eye. Still too raw to allow myself to feel the pain, I could only run from it.
I’d read enough to know that distraction and escape were not the typical prescriptions for healing one’s grief. Nonetheless, I followed my impulses instead. In hindsight, I was still numb with shock. I’d drifted into the trauma survivor’s eerie state of temporary detachment. My instinct for self-preservation impelled me to avoid the potentially overwhelming impact of grief for as long as I needed.
Though keeping busy usually kept the pain at bay, it sometimes seeped out with a life of its own. The sound of children’s laughter and the sight of boys Garrit’s age playing soccer was intolerable. Grocery shopping was an ordeal: My eyes riveted upon the ice creams, puddings and treats I used to buy for Garrit; every aisle contained some food reminding me of his absence. It took stamina to enter shopping malls: Halloween costumes on display, books Garrit had loved and T-shirts just his size confronted me like apparitions of ghosts.
I trained myself to ignore the giraffes, elephants and warthogs drinking from the waterhole in front of the wilderness chalet where I stayed. I hardly noticed the long-legged ostriches chasing one another in circles, flapping their wings like cartoonish characters. The sight of those creatures had delighted Garrit and me. Spellbound, we’d watch them for hours. Now, I turned my back on them.
If it weren’t for the compassion and wisdom of others, I might have ended up a brittle shell of a human being, my sadness clamped tight inside, my capacity for joy a frail memory.
A friend who invited me to spend a week with her in the hinterlands was discerning enough simply to let me be. Grateful, I breathed in the softness of the river and the sound of fish eagles gliding like miniature planes on air, then swooping through thickets of papyrus into the shallows after their prey.
A helicopter pilot accustomed to National Geographic photographers as passengers flew me for a small fee to the site where Garrit was killed. Discreetly, he waited in the distance until I was ready to leave. During our flight back, he told me that several years ago he’d witnessed his fiancée die when her helicopter crashed. The subject of death did not seem to embarrass him. Yet no more words were necessary. He understood that I needed to hold in my hands the earth where my son had taken his final breath.
The young Indian woman who ran one of Botswana’s few Internet cafés and let me stay after-hours had lost her eight-year-old son to an illness doctors had misdiagnosed. She told me that her life had never been the same. “Nine years have passed,” she said, “but I still cry for him. The pain lessens, but you’ll always live with the loss.”
For the most part, people neither shied away from me, nor tried to console me with the empty platitudes considered appropriate expressions of sympathy in Western cultures: Your son is at peace; God is taking care of him; time heals; it’s time to get on with your life.
Even the healers and Bushmen I contacted for answers to the more existential questions preoccupying me were fearlessly direct and humane. Why had such a terrible thing happened? I asked. It was his destiny, they said. When I probed further, their responses varied from the disconcerting to the wondrous. Bushmen elders felt that some antipathy had been unintentionally misdirected at Garrit, bewitching him. A reflexologist thought to be psychic believed that Garrit was one of the “indigo children” who would return to Earth during the next world cataclysm to ensure the survival of traditional cultures and peoples. Though I was skeptical of such concrete explanations, the possibility that Garrit had been destined to die for some purpose opened my mind to the prospect that there might be a meaning to what seemed a senseless death.
Healers invariably told me to face my pain. “Feel your heart break every day,” one advised. “Only then will you begin to heal.” A Bushman, placing his hands over my heart, told me that I hadn’t finished crying. “You are in pain. Your son is worried about you. You must cry now, then stop. That way you can help your son.” A white man who’d grown up in Botswana, who possessed a combination of bush wisdom and Western knowledge, took one look at me and said, “Your heart needs to cry more, to soften and feel the sorrow. Mourn for as long as you need to.”
Intellectually, I understood the message that if I opened my heart up and let myself feel the pain I’d been running from, a healing process would begin, which, in turn, might help Garrit. In retrospect, however, I wasn’t ready to accept the wisdom behind the words. Only months
after I’d returned home would I recognize that the seeds for healing lay within me. It would be up to me whether those seeds remained dormant or germinated.
I was ambivalent about returning home to Baltimore because I felt as if Garrit’s spirit lived on in Botswana. Going home meant abandoning my child. It meant facing the myriad fragments of boyhood he’d left behind—his menagerie of cats, dogs, emus and cockatiels; the swings behind the house, soccer balls, basketballs, hockey sticks, old sneakers; Mother’s Day letters he’d written over the years; books about Africa and wildlife we’d collected; the new bedroom I had built for him while we were away and that he’d never sleep in; the radio he hid under his pillow to listen to in secret after we’d said good night.
Despite my trepidation, I had to go home, if only temporarily. I could no longer pretend that the bank accounts I’d depleted during the months following Garrit’s death would rejuvenate on their own. Moreover, recurring flashbacks haunting me day and night needed professional attention unavailable in Botswana.
Now, after having been in the States for fourteen months, I’d like to tell you that some cookie-cutter solution to grief worked like a magic balm. I’d like to say that the abyss of suffering looming before me was only a mirage.
I wish it were so simple. But grieving souls do not heal easily.
Going home turned out to be a rapid descent into hell. The familiarity of my surroundings only sharpened my awareness of Garrit’s absence. Incomplete without him, I’d lost a vital part of my identity. Estranged from Garrit’s father since our divorce years ago, and with little family to count upon for emotional support, I went into virtual isolation. There was only a handful of friends I’d see, and a psychiatrist who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorders. A stranger to myself, I felt as uncomfortable in most people’s presence as I assumed they felt in mine.
I closed the curtains and stayed in bed for over a month, rousing myself twice a week for therapy. Days and nights merged into one another; time became irrelevant. I stopped answering the phone, stopped bathing, and began to swallow more pills and alcohol than food. Alternating between sleeping and crying, my eyes vanished into pockets of swollen flesh. My strength and inner resources shriveled. When I thought my body was shutting down, I no longer cared whether I lived or died.