In a new memoir, Once More We Saw Stars, father Jayson Greene vividly recounts the raw feelings after his two-year-old daughter Greta died and his continuous journey through grief.
Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.
A stunning accident claimed the life of two-year-old Greta Greene in 2015, when a piece of masonry fell from a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and struck her in the head.
In a new memoir, Once More We Saw Stars, her father Jayson Greene vividly recounts the raw feelings after the loss, his journey through grief with his wife Stacy, and the couple’s striving toward hope.
Q. You’ve spoken about writing as a tool for survival. Is that what brought you to write this memoir?
A. Journaling is a common approach to grief. I wrote a book because I’m a writer, but writing is an instinctual thing. I mean, I’ve been to Compassionate Friends meetings and other sorts of grief retreats.
People have written pages and pages and pages about their child or their loss, because writing is a profound way to process grief.
Q. How is promoting the book and talking to people and continually retelling the story?
A. It’s cathartic.
Telling the story of what happened to Greta is a way of testifying. I think that’s probably true for many.
One of the things that you do when you go to a grief support group is — because there might be somebody new there every time — you retell the story. And you know, every time you do that, it’s a way of acknowledging that you’ve been marked, because people might sort of intellectually know, ‘oh, yeah, there’s, there’s Jayson, that horrible thing happened — they lost their daughter, and how tragic.”
But in the course of a regular day, it’s not exactly at the surface of your interactions with people. It’s often several layers down. Sometimes you yourself forget the degree to which you are always grieving that person. I’m doing what most grieving parents do in a somewhat different set of circumstances. And through the sort of conduit of a book, and I’ve written the book, and it’s out there, and people are asking to speak to me.
I am grateful for the fact that I’m able to talk about my Greta all the time right now. And there’s a context for it. And there’s a receptive audience for stories about Greta.
There are a lot of people who will listen to me talk about her life, how much we loved her, how much we still love her. And what happened. So in some ways promoting this book has been healing.
Q. What would you like people to know about Greta?
A. She was very talkative from a very early age. She learned how to talk really early on, around 13 or 14 months- words and some sentences -which was startlingly early. But it gave us a chance to hear a lot of what she thought which was very, very meaningful. We feel very lucky to have had that.
She was very opinionated. And she had a really developed sense of humor. She always seemed to be smiling at a private joke.
Q. What does it mean to be a writer finding the right words and language to convey the vast and continuing consequences of grief?
A. As I’ve talked to people, I have learned a lot about the words that we assigned to our feelings. I’m a writer. And that’s basically what I spent my life doing is assigning words to my feelings, I’ve thought about it maybe a little bit more intensely, because it’s been my focus forever.
Healing has been a word that’s meant something to me. I remember thinking about my grief as a massive wound, even right in the days after the accident, My mind seized on this metaphor of wound care — the idea that I had massive life-threatening wound on my body, and if I didn’t spend every single day cleaning it and tending to it, and changing the bandages and applying salve that it would infect and kill me.
That’s what blunt force trauma, emotionally speaking, feels like. That’s what acute shock and catastrophic loss feels like. It is very literally threatening the fabric of your existence.
Everything you’ve ever understood is completely destroyed in an instant and that does feel life threatening. I mean, it is not going to literally stop your heart. But it feels like annihilation, because it erases everything that you thought you knew, it erases all your context.
Q. Jayson has written a Washington Post column about being a grieving parent on Father’s Day and other holidays. He says people struggle to know what to say to grieving parents.
A. People worry so much about what to say to grieving parents.
I always try to say that you’ll never say the right thing because there is no right thing to say what’s most important is that you listen to the person, and that you’re there for them.
The other thing I would say to that person who’s worried about what to say, is that you might step on a landmine. And that’s also not the worst thing that happened to that person that day.
If you’re talking to someone who’s just lost their kid, you saying something dumb is not going to matter. all that much, because they are grieving something so much larger than you, or your concerns about what to say. The only thing you can really, truly offer — the only true currency you have — is yourself. And if they get mad at you, just take it as part of what you can be there for, but they’re processing a lot of feelings. If they momentarily flare up, and you have the strength to absorb that and sit there with it and allow them to work through it, the chances are that they’ll probably vent at you and then soften and say that they’re sorry. And then you can both sit in that together.
Q. As you have what have other grieving parents connected with?
A. The stuff about the shock really speaks to grieving parents, as much as I can tell.
When I was sort of reeling from the loss, I had the nastiest, most poisonous, bitter thoughts I probably ever had in my life. And they’re all very clearly rendered in the book.
I think a lot of people have felt that — it spoke to memories they had. People have found a lot of resonance in some of those feelings — I don’t know that those kinds of feelings have made it to the page in a lot of published books about grief.
Q. What is your favorite passage in the book?
A. Probably the last two pages where I’m talking both to Harrison (his living son, who is now three years old) and to Greta, because it’s such a hard, hard and long journey to the place where I felt like I could hold them both inside of my heart.
I wrote it shortly after Harrison was born, and he was still very new to the world, closer to where Greta was, than he is now. Now, he’s very much of this world, which is a joyful thing. But you know, it also means that there’s distance between who he is and who Greta was. But in that moment, they were very close. And so I felt like I could sort of address them both. And it was maybe the only time in my life I’ll be able to feel that and so being able to capture that feeling and write it. To have it be the last two pages of the book is very meaningful to me.
Also read:
Am I Still a Father? — After his son Jon’s death, Ron Kelly helps other fathers live with their grief.
Two grieving mothers seek efforts to bring transparency, safety to college abroad programs
Ros Thackurdeen remembers the hype as she sat through a college study abroad session with her youngest son Ravi at Swarthmore University.
“It was pretty exciting,” Thackurdeen said. “I wanted to go on it. You had students who talked about their experiences … You didn’t hear anything bad about it.”
But there was no happy ending for Ravi, who ended up on a study abroad trip to Costa Rica to study global health and tropical medicine. In April 2012, program leaders took Ravi’s group on a surprise trip to Playa Tortuga which, Thackurdeen has since learned, is considered one of the country’s most dangerous beaches. A local fisherman found Ravi’s body two days later.
“I thought it was study abroad’s first death,” Thackurdeen said. But, not long after, she searched study abroad student death on Google and was surprised by what she found — 85 pages of links and stories about the deaths of other college students like Ravi. She started printing out the stories, filling up binders with information and reaching out to officials with questions about safety measures.
“I wanted them to see the faces because I was seeing faces and that was hitting me really hard,” she said. “That is somebody’s child just like my child, and they too are going through the same pain that I’m going through.”
Through her research, Thackurdeen eventually met Elizabeth Brenner, whose youngest son Thomas died while studying abroad in India in September 2011. Together, the two founded Protect Students Abroad, a nonprofit that is working on efforts to prevent fatalities on study abroad programs and provide transparency so parents and students can make smart decisions.
“I can’t abandon this,” Brenner said. “I wouldn’t know how to abandon this. It’s really, really hard. But there is, at this point, because of everything that’s happened and because of the person that I am now, no other choice.”
No mandatory reporting
Study abroad programs are growing. The Institute of International Education’s 2018 Open Doors report found that the total number of U.S. students studying overseas grew by 2.3% in 2016–17 when compared to the year before. About 10% of the country’s undergraduate students study abroad.
But, said Brenner and Thackurdeen, parents and students often know little about the programs.
“If the third party program appears on the university’s website and if they appear in a study abroad forum, most parents and students assume that the home university has eyes on the program,” Brenner said. ”Nothing can be further from the truth. And on the backend of it, if it goes wrong, every single parent we have met with talk about how far the programs will scurry away [saying] ‘This isn’t our program. We have nothing to do with this.’ There isn’t a requirement. Parents find out on the backend, and the waivers are really, really tight.”
For both Brenner and Thackurdeen, that lack of support and transparency is part of the problem. For many parents who are grieving a child who died overseas, it can be almost impossible to find out the details of their death.
“There’s no mandatory reporting at all,” said Brenner. “So, potentially, you will get the narrative that they would like to have been true. … We know of families who really struggle to figure out what really happened to their child.”
Brenner and Thackurdeen are luckier. For Brenner, a student newspaper reporter took an interest in the case. Together, the two traveled to India and were able to find out what happened. Students who were on the trip with her son also provided some answers. Thackurdeen got answers from a couple who were taking a walk on the beach and witnessed what happened, along with some of the other students who were on the trip.
“You may spend the rest of your life not knowing what happened and not getting the truth from anyone,” Brenner said. “It adds a whole different layer to the experience.”
Pushing for passage
Together, Brenner and Thackurdeen want to prevent other families from suffering similar heartbreaks. The two are working to secure the passage of two federal bills that would provide families with more transparency when a student dies on a study abroad program and help other families make informed decisions about which program to send their child on.
“One of the first things that surprised me was finding out after Thomas died that it was his program’s 12th death,” Brenner said.
Both bills, which have bipartisan support and have been introduced in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, tackle the issue from different angles and, Brenner and Thackurdeen said, are needed.
Named after Thackurdeen’s son, the Ravi Thackurdeen Safe Students Study Abroad Bill amends the Higher Education Act of 1965 to require colleges and universities to report safety incidents, including deaths, accidents and illnesses requiring hospitalization, sexual assaults and events that generate a police report.
The American Students Abroad Act requires that the U.S. Department of State share consular reports of U.S. citizen deaths abroad to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so that the CDC can analyze the data to uncover patterns and find ways to prevent these deaths and injuries.
Despite their own family’s experiences, both Brenner and Thackurdeen still support opportunities to study abroad. Each have two other children who went overseas on study abroad trips.
“We hear back from programs and colleges that this will hamper us, cut into study abroad growth,” Thackurdeen said. “That’s just not going to happen. One of our student interns is going on her study abroad. She’s very much aware from working with us of some of the dangers, and she’s using that information to ask questions and educate herself about it.”
For parents and students who are contemplating a study abroad program, Brenner and Thackurdeen have some advice.
#1 Educate yourself
Check out Protect Students Abroad’s website to learn more about the safety issues for students traveling abroad. “It’s really learning, firsthand, from what we’ve gone through and taking that information and asking better questions and doing some of the research,” Thackurdeen said.
#2 Make sure your child’s prepared
Encourage your child to read local newspapers from the area where they are traveling and remind them about the importance of being aware of their surroundings at all times.
#3 Ask the hard questions
Seek out statistics about injuries or deaths. Ask about safety measures. Make sure you truly understand the relationship between your child’s home university, the study abroad program and the host country.
“They may not be in alignment or communicating with each other even though it looks like they are from the website or from the study abroad forum your child went to or the literature that has come home with your child,” Brenner said.
#4 Read the waiver
Said Thackurdeen: “Look very hard at the waiver before they sign it. If you are uncomfortable with the language of it, speak to a personal attorney. It’s not about money. It’s about having your day in court.”
“And getting the truth,” added Brenner. “How many of us are fighting to just get the facts about what happened to our child.”
Brenner and Thackurdeen encourage others to ask their U.S. Senator and U.S. Representative to support the two bills in Congress, S. 1572 and S. 1575 in the Senate, and H.R. 2875 and H.R. 2876 in the House.
June 2013, during recovery from what was supposed to be a routine heart catheterization to assess his heart condition, Ron Kelly’s son’s heart failed. Doctors weren’t able to revive 16-year-old Jon. Today Ron helps other grieving fathers, particularly those in the workplace.
After struggling with identity after his son’s death, Ron Kelly helps other men mourn
*Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.
R. Glenn “Ron” Kelly’s son was supposed to make it.
Jon was born in 1997 with a rare and potentially deadly heart condition, but doctors were optimistic. He’d need medical intervention, including three open heart surgeries before the age of two to rebuild his heart, but, they said, he’d live a full life.
“He had a wonderful childhood,” Kelly said. As a teenager, Jonathan picked up golf, and the family moved to a golf course community where he could play all the time.
“The year that he passed, he was in line to be the first freshman to make the high school golf team,” said Kelly of his only child. But, in June 2013, during recovery from what was supposed to be a routine heart catheterization to assess how he was doing, Jon’s heart failed. Doctors weren’t able to revive the 16-year-old.
Ron Kelly said his son Jonathan had a wonderful childhood. As a teen, he picked up golf, and the family moved to a golf course community where he could play all the time.
“I take a lot of comfort that I got to hold him when he took his last breath,” Kelly said. “To me, that meant a lot. Not at first, but it certainly does now.”
Still a dad?
The death left Kelly and his wife reeling. Kelly, a former Marine and cop, grappled with an identity crisis and tried to quash any emotion. After his son was born, he had walked away from a career serving others to work as an executive in the defense industry and focus on being a father. But, after his son died, he didn’t know if he could still call himself a dad.
“I went back to work where I could control things,” he said. “I would go back as the number two man in a large company and control my environment and repress my grief in that way. I’d walk by pictures of Jon and avoid looking at them. I was repressing the grief, but I was still wondering, ‘Who was I? Was I still a parent?’”
Six months after his son’s death, said Kelly, “I think Jon came to me and said, ‘How dare you.’ He asked, ‘Are you still a Marine?’ Of course I’m still a Marine. ‘Are you still a cop?’ Part of being a cop will be in me for all my life.”
Then, Kelly said his son asked him, ‘How do you think you’re not still my father?’ It was a good point.”
It was a watershed moment for Kelly, who realized that he needed to let himself grieve. But as he looked for healthful ways to mourn his son, he found few resources.
“There was nothing out there for men by men,” he said. “I had to strike out on my own. I met some wonderful people in the field who nurtured me on my way. I studied human emotions and why we are the way we are.”
As he navigated his grief, he decided to share what he learned with other men by writing a book. And that book, “Sometimes I Cry in the Shower: A Grieving Father’s Journey to Wholeness and Healing,” launched a new career that’s focused on helping men and working with employers to build grief-friendly workplaces.
“It’s been a wonderful opportunity to go out and help others heal,” he said.
Today, Kelly is the author of four books, including “Grief in the Workplace,” “The Griefcase: A Man’s Guide to Healing and Moving Forward in Grief,” and “Grief Healings 365: Daily Inspirations for Moving Forward in Your New Normal.”
Before his son’s death, for example, his managers would stop by his office each morning to let them know what their plans were for the day.
“When I lost Jon, I came back to work and nobody stopped by my door anymore,” he said. “It’s a small anecdote alone, but think about what that did for productivity.”
Those managers just didn’t know what to say, said Kelly. And they weren’t trained in advance to know how to interact with Kelly upon his return.
Now, he said, “I’m going around to businesses and civic organizations and advocating the care and feeding of the bereaved once they return to work.”
Those efforts don’t have to take up a lot of time and money, Kelly said. It can be as simple as sharing, with the employee’s approval, details about how their loved one died before they return, so they aren’t bombarded with questions from curious co-workers.
It also could include teaching managers to spot signs that an employee might need to take a break from time to time. Giving those employees a little grace, said Kelly, “beats rehiring fees and retraining costs and turnover costs.”
Kelly recommends that grieving employees take off their “grief mask,” and be honest about the moments when they need a few minutes outside the office to take a walk.
Serving once more
For Kelly, his work, now a full-time job, has helped him in his own grief. But, he said, he’s also taking a cue from Jon.
“All those years, as Jon was going through interventional trips to the doctors (for his heart condition), he also voluntarily put himself up for research,” Kelly said. “And in his own words, he said, ‘I am helping out other children who were born after me with the same condition.’ He was serving.”
And now Kelly, the Marine and cop, is serving once again.
Bryan Burgess was killed in action during a 2011 deployment to Afghanistan just 16 days before he was scheduled to return home — a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday.
Telling and re-telling the story of his son’s life and sacrifice pulled Terry Burgess from deep depression
In the early morning hours before Terry Burgess learned that his son Bryan had been killed in action in Afghanistan, he had a vivid dream.
“We’re in this outdoor movie theater, me and Bryan,” Terry remembers. “He’s on the movie screen in his combat uniform and there’s a glass coffin beside him. He steps into the coffin and, when he lays down, he turns into my little boy Bryan, like seven or eight years old. Then little boy Bryan steps out of the coffin and becomes Bryan the soldier again. He gives me a salute and then the movie screen just goes — bam — white. That’s when I woke up to the phone ringing.”
The call was from Bryan’s wife, Tiffany, with the news that Bryan was gone. Terry and his wife Beth would receive an official notification through a visit from Army officers later that morning.
The next days and weeks were a whirlwind of events honoring Bryan. They met with their Casualty Assistance Officer from the Army, whose job it was to handle paperwork, and anything else they needed for a year.
Soon the cards and letters slowed, then stopped coming, Terry said. “The casseroles stop, people stop checking on you, and you’re just isolated.”
“After his funeral, after we got home from all the ceremonies, I just sank. I just literally sank. I was unemployed, I was laid off, I had no purpose,” he said.
Terry’s wife Beth was afraid for him. “He would just spend days and days and days just sitting… not talking, not eating, just sitting. While I’m at work, I’m terrified that I’m going to come home, and that he’s going to be gone, and I don’t know what to do about that….it was a very, very scary time,” she said.
Beth started looking for organizations that could help Gold Star parents and couldn’t find much. “There was a lot out there for the widows — understandably — and for kids and moms. But there was almost nothing for dads,” Beth said.
A documentary film changes everything
More than a year after Bryan’s death, the producers of a documentary called “The Hornet’s Nest” contacted Terry and Beth. The film used footage collected by an embedded journalist who traveled with Bryan’s unit in Afghanistan. Helmet and hand-held cameras captured the 360-degree firefight with the Taliban that claimed Bryan’s life, and included an interview with Bryan, talking about how much he missed his children. The film’s producers asked Terry and Beth to screen a rough cut of the film, hoping to earn the approval of the Gold Star families before releasing it to the public.
“Beth got me out of bed and got me cleaned up,” Terry said. They traveled to Dallas to watch it. “And there was Bryan in his army uniform on screen. It was a slap in the face for me.”
Terry felt he suddenly understood what his dream on the morning of Bryan’s death had been about. “I thought, ‘that’s what Bryan was trying to tell me,” says Terry. “I can’t just spend my life mourning the loss of my little boy. The innocent little boy had to die when Bryan became a soldier. Now he wants me to salute him back however I can.”
Bryan’s story reflects others’ combat experience
For over a year, Terry and Beth toured with the film, visiting military bases and colleges and other venues. Every time they watch it, “it rips us apart,” Terry said. “But I tell people that it saved my life.”
Terry, Beth and the other families involved in the film were asked to speak at each screening. “It was a lot of holding hands and squeezing hands… a lot of tears,” Terry said. “It was kind of cathartic for us because we got to tell Bryan’s story to so many people who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise.”
Bryan with his children Makya and Zander.
The screenings also gave them an opportunity to help educate the public about the ways that combat changes the lives of the veterans who survive.
“Bryan changed the very first time he went to Iraq and came home. He was a completely different person. And it was very hard to connect with him,” Beth said. “A lot of what we did was just to help everybody understand everything that the guys were going through when they came home, because they all carry a huge amount of survivor’s guilt.
Reaching other Gold Star fathers
Last year, Terry published a memoir about the family’s experience of losing Bryan titled When Our Blue Star Turned Gold. It’s given him a broader audience to continue to tell Bryan’s story and reach out to other parents, especially fathers.
Bryan and his dad Terry, who started Gold Star Parents retreat and network.
“My biggest hope is to reach more dads,” Terry stressed. “There is a very high suicide rate among Gold Star dads. The more of them we can reach, and save, or just help…. We just want to let them know they’re not alone.”
New speaking engagements and publicity for Terry’s book, including an interview on NBC’s Today show, have helped to fill the annual retreat he and Beth created for Gold Star parents. They aim to keep making room for any parent in need.
“We tell Bryan’s story,” Beth said. “And we help as many people as we can to tell their stories.”
America salutes Terry and Beth
As the nation searches for ways to recognize another Memorial Day weekend, they can draw inspiration from a 2011 American Airlines flight. Following Bryan’s funeral, Terry and Beth boarded a flight to head home. They were crouched in the very last row of the plane, emotionally exhausted. The Casualty Assistance Officer, who had been with Terry and Beth since Bryan’s death notification, contacted the airlines.
Touched by their sacrifice and Bryan’s service, the pilot took time to meet the Burgess’. Sitting across Terry and taking Beth’s hands he said, “I want you all to know how very, very sorry I am for your loss. I’m fixing to be deployed to Afghanistan myself.” They shared stories of Bryan and appreciated the compassion and comradery.
As the plane approached its destination, the pilot announced, “We have parents of a fallen soldier on the plane. I would appreciate it if everyone would stay seated and let them disembark first. Let them go home.”
With Beth carrying their newly received flag in her arms, fellow passengers stood still, applauding them as they disembarked. As they passed through first class, a veteran stood up and saluted Terry and Beth.
In that moment, America stood with Terry and Beth. They were not alone.
*Read more in the story of how Bryan’s dad recognized his son’s caring, protective nature early and continues to honor him: “A Legacy of Protecting Others.”
When a child dies, what happens next makes all the difference. This article brings focus to the cascading consequences of parent grief that our nation’s lawmakers and changemakers can do something about. Photo by Gus Moretta on Unsplash.
From job losses to social media trolls, there’s always something
When a child dies, a family deeply grieves. They plan a funeral, gathering pictures and keepsakes to share at a memorial. Friends and neighbors bring over food, but know it’s not enough. And then life continues, though it’s never the same.
That’s what the aftermath of a child’s death might look like to observers who haven’t experienced it themselves. But for those who are mourning a child, their lives aren’t just defined by the work to pick out a grave site during their darkest hour or decisions about what to do with their child’s belongings.
Parent and sibling grief is ongoing. Years later, they may crumble when a child’s favorite song pops up on the radio or when the entire family is gathered — except their son or daughter.
Reminders and grief triggers don’t just appear during family celebrations or small private moments. They also come crashing into the lives of bereaved parents thanks to government agencies, long-standing policies, employers and retailers that we all deal with daily.
When a child dies, what we do next makes all the difference. Here are just a few of the cascading consequences grieving parents face that we can do something about.
Job and income loss
The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows covered employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or a spouse, child or parent with a serious health condition before they return to work. The law, however, doesn’t give parents the right to take time off to grieve the death of their child or even plan a memorial. And employers aren’t doing much better. They tend to give their employees just three or four days of paid leave when a child dies. And some employers offer even less if a parent is grieving a stillborn baby. In many cases, parents return to work just days later, so they can hold on to their job.
Lawmakers in Washington, D.C, are considering the Parental Bereavement Act of 2019 which would give parents the time to mourn.
But until legislation is passed to actually tackle the issue, many parents will continue to face an impossible question: Can they afford to give themselves time to grieve?
Ongoing reminders of their loss thanks to social media and big tech
Washington Post staff writer Gillian Brockell recently detailed her experience on social media after her baby was stillborn. During her pregnancy, like many excited expecting moms, Brockell fed her various pages with details of her growing belly or searched online for nursery items. At the same time, tech company delivered to her feeds targeted ads for maternity clothes and baby gear.
But even after she posted about her stillborn son, those same ads still appeared. And, what’s worse, when she attempted to opt out of them, she started seeing ads for nursing bras and tips for getting a baby to sleep at night. The algorithms assumed she’d given birth.
Soon after writing about her experience, tech companies reached out to Brockell to apologize and said they were working to make changes.
Others intentionally and cruelly target bereaved parents. Online trolls regularly target parents of children who died in mass shootings and even the flu.
CNN recently reported that groups who oppose vaccinations are targeting parents of children who died from the flu, posting on the parent’s Facebook page that their child never existed, vaccines killed their son or daughter or even that the parent murdered the child.
Two years after a police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the city of Cleveland sent a letter to Tamir’s estate seeking $500 to cover the ambulance ride and other services he received after the shooting.
The city quickly apologized and promised that Rice’s estate would never have to pay the bill, according to USA Today. Cleveland’s mayor called it a “mistake” that the bill was not flagged before it was sent and said officials would look for ways to keep it from happening again. For the boy’s grieving family, however, Rice family’s attorney said the bill added “insult to homicide.”
Unfortunately, billing issues like these are all too common for families with children who have died after an accident or crime. But, in most cases, these families don’t have the public platform to raise their concerns or get recourse.
Roadblocks in the judicial system
In cases where a child died at the hands of another, parents often grapple with unexpected roadblocks when they attempt to get justice or compensation.
In the state of Washington, for example, parents can’t sue for wrongful death when their adult child dies. Some are pushing for a change to the law.
And the Wall Street Journal recently uncovered issues with Care.com, the popular online platform for families seeking care for children and the elderly. The newspaper found incorrect listings for hundreds of day care centers that claimed to have state licenses and nine caregivers with criminal records who committed additional crimes while they were watching children or the elderly. In one case, twins died at a day care center that wasn’t properly licensed. District attorneys in California are now investigating the platform.
At Evermore, these are the kinds of experiences we hope to put into focus for our nation’s lawmakers and changemakers. Parents will never “get over” the death of a child. But, as a society, we should make every effort to make their path through the rest of their own lives just a little bit easier.
Grief teaches a mother lessons she never wanted to learn
My husband Brad came home to tell me what he had learned minutes earlier. Sarah is gone… Our Sarah-Grace. Our beautiful 24-year-old daughter. Dead.
With three words and within mere seconds, I was shattered, gutted, disoriented.
Any word that implies destruction, pain or confusion is relevant to that moment, but none alone, or combined, capture the devastation and confusion I felt after hearing those words.
Two years later, I’m trying not to evaluate a string of heavy days where my grief is so raw it feels frighteningly new.
I remind myself that grief has nothing to do with functioning well or poorly, and the characteristics of it on any given day don’t mean much.
Instead, I’ve learned that grief is my constant companion with a rhythm and intensity that’s unpredictable and often overwhelming.
Processing death, understanding grief
After Sarah died, I’d catch myself thinking that I’ll be relieved of this suffering because I’m trying so hard and I’m doing my best.
The process of understanding that Sarah is dead, however, has been an agonizing and bizarre evolution.
First, there were the feelings of anticipation. Most days during the first year of grief, I’d tell myself, I can’t survive this. Then, Yes, I can. Just hold on. This will go away. When Sarah comes home.
For a second, relief soothed my broken heart until truth slapped me in the face. No! That’s not true.
These battles with reality went on for months. I don’t know what made them stop, but one day I simply noticed they had ended. ‘I’ve been defeated,’ I thought. ‘Truth and reality have won. I know the truth about Sarah will never change.’
In more grateful moments, I marvel at the way my psyche works to gently integrate this truth into my consciousness.
When the words, Sarah can’t be gone, pop into my head, I recognize that my grief is changing. But it’s slow and subtle, and grief is still wildly and strangely independent of my other emotions, making any day unpredictable.
And these days, I have two kinds of days, OK/fine or bad/terrible. Both are unsettling. On the bad days, I wonder, will I be this way forever? On the OK days, I wonder, does this mean I’m over the trauma of Sarah’s death? I know the answer to both of those questions, but I’m new in this process and I don’t know what the future will bring, so I have to ask.
What I’ve learned about grief
All that I’ve learned as a grieving mother is only vaguely describable and not very teachable.
I remember in the early days being told that my grief will change. After two years, I can say that’s true, but I can’t really explain what’s changed other than, it’s different. Or, how it still feels painful, but in a different way. Or, what occurs to make that happen other than an excruciating breakdown of life and self, followed by the arduous rebuilding of everything. And that’s not very helpful.
Sarah’s death on Nov. 7, 2016 brought devastation, pain and confusion to her family’s life. Her mom shares that “one of the most important truths that keeps me going is Sarah wouldn’t want that to be her legacy. She doesn’t deserve it either.”
So, when I read that people feel their child, or that they carry their child’s heart in their heart, I wonder how that came to be? What am I doing wrong that I don’t have that? Is it even true or possible? What does that even mean?
But I know there’s nothing of what I will come to understand about grieving and surviving the death of my daughter that can be fast-tracked or transferred from one person to another.
I know I’ll find answers because parental grief is the most persistent and demanding teacher I’ve ever encountered. The insights are so painfully acquired.
Charting a path toward survival
I can’t imagine ever breathing easily when I think of or say the words Brad came home to deliver. I don’t even write them with ease.
I’m not innately wired to cope with the death of my child. Instead, I must consciously try not to fight against my grief and be, as is often said, present with it. That’s the second hardest thing about Sarah’s death — the daily decision to accept my grief and keep going. But I made a commitment to do just that on the day Sarah died.
That commitment was made during a desperate phone call to Brad’s brother Blaine as the two of us drove to the mortuary. Blaine and his wife, Cheryl, buried their only child, Kyle, 18 years and 5 months before we would bury Sarah. Brad and I had gone to the mortuary with them. We were broken-hearted for their loss and grateful we weren’t in their shoes.
“How do we do this, Blaine?” I sobbed. “How do we even survive?”
“You really have two choices,” he said. “You can either let it completely destroy you or you can try to keep living.”
Somehow, I got through the worst weeks of my life. Later, when time demanded a routine, I was unprepared for what was required of me to heed Blaine’s counsel. The seeming ease and comfort of giving up, rather than trying, has always been alluring.
So, I remind myself of the promise I made when Sarah died: That through every dark, gut-wrenching, lonely day, I will keep trying. I will slog through hell.
What I learned in the conversation with Blaine still grounds me. Surprisingly, it’s not that he pointed out that we have a choice. Rather, it was the chilling summation of his advice, spoken with heavy, palpable sorrow. After giving us our two options, he added, “and I don’t have to tell you what I chose.”
I cry thinking about the price that was paid, so he could impart that wisdom.
Resolving to do it again
When Sarah died, I expected my grief and faith to be companions, but grief is lonely. At the end of the day, I’m alone with thoughts, questions and fears that make me an inhospitable environment for the whispers of spirituality. Yet, I still hold on to my faith, knowing a power beyond my own helps me through the minutes and hours.
And each day, I resolve to do it again, though it’s never an easy decision.
Doubt and dread can strike without warning. It’s a constant fight through pain and confusion. But, I want to keep trying, for those I love and for those who love me.
And, missing Sarah as I do, I hope and pray that someday, somehow, I too will know what it means to carry her heart in my heart or feel her with me.
Sarah’s death on Nov. 7, 2016 brought devastation, pain and confusion to my life with a power that could have destroyed me, Brad, our two sons and youngest daughter. Today, one of the most important truths that keeps me going is Sarah wouldn’t want that to be her legacy. She doesn’t deserve it either.
So, to honor Sarah and her indelible place within our family, for Brad and our wonderful, grieving children, I do the hardest work I’ll ever do, even when it feels impossible.
I choose to try. To keep living.
Evermore is immensely grateful to Sarah’s mom Cynthia for sharing her experience to benefit other bereaved parents and families.
The death of a child is considered one of the worst trauma any human can experience with cascading consequences that endure for a lifetime. How society responds can make all the difference. That is the national imperative we will continue to address here. Toward that end, republishing and citing our work is highly encouraged!
