Lately I have been reflecting on grief. Specifically, I have been reflecting on memories of the grief of loss. The reason I think this is important and relevant is because the ways that we are treated during our childhood, specifically the ways we are shown to experience grief and loss, have effects on our psychological well-being over our entire lifetime.
So, for my probate and trust administration clients, or for anyone else out there who has recently experienced the sudden loss of a loved one, I am going to share my personal experience of losing my mother when I was a child. Perhaps there is something in what I say or how I express my feelings that will help some parent or aunt or uncle out there who is in a position to comfort a child who has experienced the sudden loss of a parent or other close family member.
As you will see below, putting a small amount of thought into how you would handle certain logistics if your child’s other parent died unexpectedly could avoid poor decisionmaking by a surviving parent during the immediate crisis that follows.
If you are one of my clients or colleagues who think I am Superman, and you want to continue to believe in the illusion of my mastery of the universe, then you may not want to read this. It is very personal, very emotional, and I express vulnerability.
Here goes.
I was 8 years old, in third grade, at Barrows Elementary School in Reading, Massachusetts. It was an average New England October - neither too hot nor too cold, football season was in full swing, the Patriots were among the worst teams in the NFL (OK, so that part is not average any more), and the leaves were blooming on the trees like flowers, falling to the ground as they died and dried in the cool autumn air.
I mention this because any ordinary day could be the last day of your life or the life of a loved one. It is not like the movies, where you can expect tense violins and perhaps some cloud cover to warn your spirit.
On Monday, October 21, 1968, my Mom took my brother, my little sister and myself to the Redstone Shopping Center in Stoneham Massachusetts. We didn't buy much - but my Mom was often restless during the afternoons and was always looking for an excuse to take us out and buy little trinkets and so forth. My father, an engineering draftsman, never made a whole lot of money, but she made do with a few bucks here and there to continue the ruse of our middle-class lifestyle.
Columbus Day back then was not celebrated as it is now - always on Mondays - but rather was celebrated on October 22, whenever that happened to occur. That year it was Tuesday, the next day. So the Monday was a sort of Friday, a kind of pre-holiday party day.
Mom bought me a red football jersey (the Patriots’ old uniform) with the number "22" on it - I think it was Gino Capelletti's number. I'm not sure. In any event, it was a halfback's number, and I loved to run with the ball, which fit my scrawny 8 year-old frame. (I didn't grow into my linebacker size until late adolescence - I was a late bloomer).
I still have that jersey in my closet today. No, it wouldn’t fit. Had I realized then what I know now, I might have done a better job saving her handwriting, photos, maybe a personal item or two. Something to think about: consider setting aside a “box” of mementos for each child, especially if you are a surviving parent.
My older sister Nan was not home when we went to Grant's, so when she arrived later in the day, my Mom promised her she would take her on her own trip back to Redstone and buy her some trinkets. We had dinner, uneventful. My Mom left for Grant's around 6 o'clock, and by 8 o'clock, she still had not returned.
I'm a premonition person, which is a whole other story, but I became very worried around 8 o'clock and began to ask my Dad where Mom was, and why she was not home. My Dad - himself a former college football player - thought I was a needy and clingy little boy and he had little appetite for my insecurity. "She'll be home soon," he assured me.
Words uttered the day someone dies become magnified, similar to a heated argument between lovers or spouses. The words often take on meaning wholly out of proportion to the intent with which they may initially have been spoken.
Around 8:15 or so our front doorbell rang. This was unusual - in our home, anyone who knew us came in the kitchen door, next to the driveway. The front door was one of those large, formal doors that no one used. No one, that is, except for formal visitors like the police.
The sound of the front doorbell continued to invoke fear for years.
The police advised my father that there had been an accident. A car crash. My sister was injured and had been taken by ambulance to the hospital. They did not tell us the truth about Mom. I was standing behind my Dad, and now I know, upon mature reflection, that they must have known the truth at the time but chose to wait to tell him what they knew.
My father told me that the police told him they had not found my mother and that maybe another ambulance had taken her to the hospital already. The newspaper later reported the sequence of events. The police informed my father while he was at the hospital.
I am sharing this with my readers and clients because the newspaper doesn't report the sequence of events that happen to a child. It is up to the surviving children to share with the world their feelings and their stories in order to help others cope with the unique and unusual experience that will happen if they are called in to such a situation to help.
My father asked an adult neighbor to come to the house so he could go to the hospital to see my injured sister. I went to bed. I tossed and turned for an hour - "she is OK," I would think. "She is not OK," I would envision. And back and forth. For a long time. Until I fell asleep, tired of all the rumination.
At 2 a.m., I awoke to voices in our living room. All of the voices were men. They seemed to be speaking in soft voices, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. When I came into the living room, I noticed it was filled with smoke from cigarettes, and that about 7 neighbors and our minister were there. They saw me and my brother, whom I had awoken, and the entire room became quiet and still.
My father broke the silence, "I suppose you know why we're here." He always said things in an oblique way.
"No," I lied.
"Mom's dead."
There. Blandly. Just like 'it's raining' or something when the bomb went off in Hiroshima and thousands were vaporized in a millisecond.
I sat there is stunned silence, expressionless. I stared at the coffee table or some other inanimate object. There was no physical contact with either me or my brother. We were allowed to sit there, with the men. And do nothing, and feel nothing, and express nothing. I do not know to this day if any one of them said much in the way of condolences, or were able to reach out to an 8 year-old boy. I know how I felt. I felt insignificant.
In later years I would reflect on this moment over and over again. At some point in time I forgot the moment itself and then only remembered remembering the moment, and then the moment was probably not what a videocamera would have recorded but rather just my recollection, interpreted through the prism of my feelings, and I wondered which was more accurate - the event that the videocamera would have recorded or the event that my memory can now retrieve? It would make a judge unhappy, but I believe we remember things more accurately - not less - over time, not because they are distorted by our feelings but rather because they are informed by our feelings.
I have learned since 1968 that the objective truth we seek to assess culpability and provide justification is a silly excuse to confront the reality of our present-day feelings. If we feel we have been betrayed, or that we have done something mean or cruel, we will behave as though we actually did - whether or not any "objectively" culpable conduct occurred on our part. So its our feelings that matter, that inform our present behavior, not what actually happened. It does not matter whether I actually had a premonition, for example - it matters now that I believe I did.
A neighbor identified the body. Her engagement ring was cut off her finger and put in a drawer in her bedroom. I saw it years later. The coroner reported the cause of death - traumatic head injury and multiple skull fractures. She was killed instantly. The police knew when they saw us. But for whatever reason they said nothing at our home.
Another thought I would like to share about this moment is that Moms and children have a different relationship than Dads and children. I have three children, and I had a Mom and a father. Its not a slight against men. Its just the reality of the human condition. But if the mother is lost, there should be women present when the child is informed. I am not sure, but I would guess that when a father is lost, there should be men present when the child is informed.
The next week was hell on earth. We - my brother and I - were left unconsoled. Upon reflection, I believe there was this presumption that I was really too young (at age 8) to understand what happened and that therefore my feelings and emotions could be disregarded. I guess they thought I wouldn't really remember anything, or maybe that I would get over it. A large number of people – adults alike – had no bearing on how to respond to a 46 year-old mother of six killed suddenly by a drunk driver. One can see why maybe an 8 year-old boy was allowed to dig a deep hole and bury himself in it without anyone asking questions or soliciting his feelings.
The next day - Columbus Day - was a Tuesday and we had the day off school. I woke up, dressed in my clothes (probably the new football shirt), and ran by the relatives in the kitchen who had since arrived, out to the street and down the street to the neighborhood kids at the end of the road. They were kicking it around a pinball machine that Markie Brennan had. They saw me coming and stood aside - they said it was Peter's turn. I knew they knew, because they parted in front of the machine as I approached to let me fling the pinball.
"We heard about your Mom," one of them said.
I walked away, slowly, head down. Didn't know what to do. Neither did they.
My stomach hurt in a low-level achy way. I hadn't felt that before. It was like someone just took a little bit of your guts out and stuck a refrigerator bag in its place. Like a quick burst of fear, only longer, slower, and more deliberate. A hollow drum, about the size of a pint, two inches above and behind my belly button. Leaking fear, drop by drop. A little like falling, but not hitting the bottom of anything. I could ignore it for a few seconds after a day or two, and then a few minutes after a week or two. I felt it every day for at least a year. Dark circles would soon develop on my pasty white cheeks under my eyes, and there are photos from a few months later where we - the 4 kids left at home - appear. When my wife saw the photos the first time, she gasped. We were the walking dead. I have those dark circles to this day.
I don’t know that the adult caregivers could have done anything to avoid the dark circles. While there are doors to a child’s mind, we may not always be able to find the keys. Don’t panic if you don’t seem to be getting in. It’s the effort that will be remembered.
The next day - Wednesday, October 23, 1968 - was a school day and my father told us to dress for and go to school. Not 48 hours after our Mom was killed. We did.
Needless to say, the schoolteachers and staff were surprised to see my brother and I arrive at school. I have no idea what they must have thought, or what they later said to my father. But I do know that the next day - Thursday - I again awoke dressed for school, and ambled through the kitchen on my way out the door.
My father's voice interrupted my trance. "You're not going to school today." That was it. No explanation, no discussion, just that we weren't going to school that day. Or the next, as it turned out. It was how he communicated facts that made him uncomfortable – use only those words necessary. Like he was using Morse code in a war zone or something.
That weekend was the funeral. Because I was "too young" to understand what had happened, I guess, I was taken to Mrs. Whitney's house to be watched (babysat) during the funeral. My 3 year-old sister could go to the funeral, but I could not. I didn't really understand that then and I still don't understand that today. I watched silently from Mrs. Whitney's den window the cars pull away with the rest of my extended family inside them, except my sister Nan, who was still at the hospital. I smelled the wood on the window frame and bit into it with my teeth. Mrs. Whitney made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Her children were grown so there were no toys in the den. There was a black and white television. A game show was on - I think it was "What's My Line," or something similarly unintelligible. She left the room and there I was. I think I pretended some ashtrays were rocket ships, paced restlessly around the room for an hour or two, occasionally looked up at the TV and occasionally took a bite of the sandwich. I remember the feeling in the pit of my gut - I wasn't really hungry. It was not telling me to eat. But Mrs. Whitney had made this sandwich for me. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do.
There was no grief counselor, no therapy, and frankly no open discussion anywhere by anybody about my mother's life or death. In fact, in the years that followed, my family (my father, for example) rarely mentioned my mother around me, and when he did this pall came over the room like the undertaker had arrived. She was not mentioned except in the context of this abstract persona who was killed suddenly and unfortunately. Rarely did any relative discuss who she was as a person or what her life was like. My father preferred to remember her and share her with us as the person who died. The dead Mom. That's what she was condemned to become.
This is clearly not the legacy we wish to leave our children as parents. If we die suddenly or unexpectedly, perhaps even violently, most of us would like to be remembered for how we lived. If someone someday plops a bullet into my head, I don’t want my kids to think of me as the guy who got whacked. I’d like them to think of me as the loving, giving, silly, nurturing father I am (who made impetuous mistakes, of course, but always had his heart in the right place). I want them to be able to talk freely about me and my life, without feeling like my name opens up their belly and inserts the refrigerator bag.
But I was disengaged from the process of grief, loss, and loneliness. No funeral, no hug, no hand holding, and no discussion. Just dead. She's gone; live with it. Deal, bud.
Later that year, my friend Billy Jones told me that his father, who had been with us in the living room when we were told our Mom was dead, told Billy that "Peter took it like a man." Yay. How's that? - I'm too young for the funeral but I took the news of my mother's sudden killing "like a man." It was the sixties, alright. Surprising no one offered me a cigarette and a stiff drink.
In school, I remember one instance of having to step out of the classroom. Mrs. Marshall, my third grade teacher, saw it coming and followed me out to the hall. It was maybe a month later - mid-November. God bless her, she hugged me. The first hug I got since my Mom hugged me before she was killed. My circulation started again.
I hope I have painted the picture as accurately as I can remember it now, 39 years later. I hope I have painted it well enough, and expressed my point of view between the events I have written and remembered so that you, who are entrusted with the lifetime emotional health of a traumatized child, will see that this is not the way to treat a grieving minor child. To this day, I remember the neglect and the feeling of insignificance. To this day, I have visceral emotional reactions to even slight incidents of neglect. I live in fear of the loss of female friends, especially close ones. I react with a deep survival instinct when threatened with rejection - or, more accurately, perceived rejection.
I wear my dark circles, which appear every Fall around October as my summer tan wears off. They are the scar.
I am no psychiatrist. But I have a pretty good feel for how not to treat a traumatized child, and let me offer some suggestions to those of my readers who are entrusted with the child's emotional future immediately following the incident of sudden loss of a loved one:
1. Reach out to the child. They will not know how to respond any more than you do, assuming that you knew the parent or victim personally. But they need to see your grief and they need to see that you are trying to connect to them. You don't have to be very good at it - its probably better that you are not. They will appreciate someone else who feels awkward.
2. Engage. I know, this one is hard. Your instinct is to try to disappear and let him disappear. You do not want to feel the child's pain any more than they want to share it. But you are not cursed with ignorance; you are blessed with wisdom. Even if your wisdom is your own version of the truth, if you are faithful to what is happening inside you, some of that will resonate with the child and they will not feel like they are the only one with a refrigerator bag in their gut.
3. Don't ever, ever, deprive them of their parent's funeral. I don't care if they make loud noises from the first pew and disrespect the entire process. If they are not allowed to attend their parent's funeral, I guarantee you they will make loud noises and disrespect the entire process that is their emotional growth.
4. Do not leave them alone for at least three weeks after the loss. Aside from periodic bathroom breaks, there is no reason in the world that a traumatized child should be left alone - and especially do not shelf them with a babysitter, without toys, watching game shows they don't understand. God, that one really hurts me.
5. Use words. Saying "you're not going to school" or "no, that's just how it is -we have company now and you have to sleep on the couch" is going to echo for years. If they have to sleep on the couch, then that's fine, but for Pete's sake provide more than one sentence of explanation, and sit with them until they fall asleep. But honestly, they should get their bed (or maybe better yet, yours) and the visiting company can use the couch. If they are not going to school, explain it to them, with eye contact, making them feel important, like you're sharing some precious secret with them (because you are): "we need you here at home, because this is a very difficult time for all of us and we want to be together no matter what."
6. Use pros. There are professional grief counselors in the world. There are therapists. There are psychiatrists. There are even - dare I say it - estate lawyers who have significant experience dealing with grief and loss. If you need a break - which you will need if you are with a grieving child - then by all means set up an appointment with a professional and let the child have another point of view. Give yourself the time off to grieve for yourself and to re-position yourself to support the child.
7. Follow up. I remember Mrs. Marshall, my third grade teacher, to this day, because for years afterwards, she and I shared this special bond. She was the adult female in my life when my Mom was killed. We were suddenly and viciously thrown into a mother-son relationship neither one of us wanted but both of us eventually came to cherish. You will leave and indelible impression on the child's emotional future - he or she will be honored that you continued to care and your closeness will continue to be the medicine for his or her pain.
-Peter Myers, December 2007
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