Don’t Lean Into The Brokeness

Nearly three years ago the nation’s attention was gripped by the shooting death of Michael Brown, a young black man who was shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. As unrest unfolded in Ferguson, larger questions about racial inequities and institutional racism began making headlines. Today, police shootings continue to be scrutinized, but racial bias and the inequities that plague families do not capture America’s attention.

Going largely unnoticed, except for sensational headlines decrying Chicago’s latest homicide count, are the thousands of families who live in communities where it is conceivable that their black son may walk out the door in the morning and never return. Although homicide is the leading cause of death among black men ages 15-35, many families feel invisible and left behind. This reality is true in a portion of Washington D.C. known as Anacostia, less than ten miles from The White House.

“How many of our kids are going to die before somebody sits up and says, “This is a problem,” says bereaved mother and Anacostia resident Judith Hawkins. Judith’s son, Alvin, was shot and paralyzed from the chest down in July 2015; over time his mental health declined precipitously and he took his own life less than a year later. “I’m really grateful to be able to talk about him right now because I feel like he didn’t matter, to nobody but me.”

Judith’s stoicism is cloaked by a contagious, hardy laugh, often making it difficult to understand what she is trying to convey. She cannot hold a conversation without laughing, no matter how intense her pain is. In the last two weeks alone, Judith has been a source of comfort for two other bereaved mothers by virtue of just being in the right place at the right time.

Despite the many seemingly lighthearted moments, Judith is clear about the pain she feels, the injustices she sees, and the tragedies she witnesses in her neighborhood each day. The first anniversary of her son’s death having just passed, Judith knows all too well the silent agony and pain that bereaved families face, particularly in the the first year following their loss.

Scientific evidence shows that mothers are more likely to die from both natural and unnatural causes in the years following a child’s death and more likely to be committed to a psychiatric hospital in the first five years following the death. Through our work, we have seen this firsthand with the death of Amy Huber, a young, healthy mother who simply went to sleep one evening just days before the first anniversary of her daughter’s death and did not wake up.

Judith suffered a heart attack upon learning her son had been shot. When Alvin left the hospital he was a paraplegic and celebrating his 21st birthday – the day his Medicaid benefits were set to expire. From that day forward, the two struggled to make ends meet in a dilapidated building that, according to Judith, was the only building in the area that could accommodate Alvin’s wheelchair on her nonprofit salary.

Since this lowest point in Judith’s life she has moved into a new, safe apartment and has maintained her job with Bread for the City. As she navigates the reality of living without her son, she continues to struggle with a concept of justice, “You don’t just lose your child; you lose your dreams.”

When Judith talks about the grief she carries and the traumas she sees daily at Bread for the City she reflects on what society tells her, “Do I have time to properly grieve? I don’t know what proper grieving is. I’ve got to get up and go to work. Do I make enough money to pay bills? No, I work every day. I cannot lean into the brokenness or it will take over and I won’t survive.”

Despite the hardships, the racism, and the continued homicides taking the lives of young black men in her neighborhood, Judith remains gregarious and optimistic, “When it comes down to it, the great equalizer is grief. We are bleed blood and we all cry wet tears. The reality is that there will be more [deaths]. Until it happens to other, more prominent families, it will continue.”

Bryan Burgess (center) was killed in action during his final 2011 deployment to Afghanistan just 16 days before he was scheduled to return home — a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday. His parents Terry and Beth created Gold Star Parents retreat and network in his honor.

Grieving Bryan, their son who gave all, Texas parents Terry and Beth Burgess found hope by creating supports for fellow Gold Star families

When Bryan Burgess was seven years old, he and his father Terry visited a friend’s house, where the family was having an Easter egg hunt. Asked to join the fun, Bryan won handily, earning the day’s prize — a great big, cellophane-wrapped Easter basket full of foil-wrapped chocolates, toys, and other sweet treasures.

“Some of the other moms were clearly upset because we weren’t family, you know, we were just visiting,” says Terry. “But before anybody could say anything, Bryan unwrapped the basket and stepped back from it. He said ‘dig in!’ and he let all those other kids and the moms take all the candy they wanted before he took a single piece.”

It’s one of Terry favorite stories to tell about his son, because he says, “it’s when I knew that he had a very special spirit.”

Bryan’s manner of caring for others continued, according to his stepmother Beth. “He was always very protective and security conscious,” she says. He wanted to be a policeman and would remind his dad to fasten his seatbelt in the car.

At 22, Bryan enlisted in the Army, determined to become infantry in the wake of 9/11. “As soon as he signed up, we knew that he would almost immediately go to war. And sure enough, he did,” said Terry. Bryan’s commitment had already been made when they were told. “All we could do was support him in his decision.”

Bryan loved his new military career. He served two tours in Iraq, met and married his wife Tiffany, and they had two children, Makya and Zander. He was killed in action during his final 2011 deployment to Afghanistan just 16 days before he was scheduled to return home — a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday.

The wait for answers

Upon learning the devastating news about Bryan’s death, the Burgess family was given little information about what happened. “It was frustrating,” says Terry. He and Beth, along with all of Bryan’s other close family members, traveled to Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of the fallen are brought back to U.S. soil for the solemn tradition of the “dignified transfer.” There, they met five other families, each of whom had lost a solider in the same mission where Bryan was killed, all of whom knew very little about the circumstances.

“We were all thrown together at the worst possible time and each of us was trying to piece things together,” Beth said. But the process created connections that they could lean on for years. “We had an almost immediate support system.”

Bryan’s wife decided to postpone his funeral until the rest of his unit returned from Afghanistan, widening the circle of people Beth and Terry could connect with over their loss. As they began to piece together the story, they learned that answers would be so slow to come, in part, because Bryan had been killed on day one of a nine-day classified mission.

They bonded with three of the families from Bryan’s unit — others who would receive the deeply painful honor of receiving the Gold Star pin that signifies losing a loved one in service. They remain in contact to this day. Bryan’s spirit loomed so large that four men from his unit have named a son after him.

The Gold Star parent “grief calendar”

According to Beth and Terry, the number of dates that cause spiraling grief is exponential: Bryan’s birthday, the date he was killed in action, the dignified transfer, the date he was supposed to return home alive, and the last day they spent together when he was home on leave. Bryan’s final deployment began on Mother’s Day of 2010, permanently changing the meaning of that holiday. “It’s an ongoing grief calendar, all year long,” says Terry.

“We have many ways to honor and remember Bryan on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veteran’s Day, but they tend to be painful holidays,” Beth said. “It’s hard, because everyone’s very patriotic, and you know what that really costs.”

When someone says “Happy Memorial Day,” it hurts, Terry said. “For us, it’s not a three-day holiday. It’s not barbecues and mattress sales.”

The Gold Star parent network

Beth and Terry discovered new purpose in supporting a network of Gold Star parents. But they found that the label is often restricted to combat-related deaths. They wanted to change that, and give every parent who had a child die while in service to the country a way to connect and help each other.

In 2017, they established a non-profit called Gold Star Parents Retreat, It is an annual, free retreat held in Gainesville, Texas for parents who have lost a child serving in any branch of the military, under any circumstance, including training or car accidents, complications from vaccinations before being deployed, and suicide.

“We bring them together to just connect with each other, talk to each other. We may now know what they went through,” Beth said. “We don’t try to fix,” Terry adds.

“We want to give them just a tiny bit of hope,” says Beth. “You’ll never get over it, but you’ll learn how to carry it. I guess you get better at carrying it. You’re not alone — there are lots of us out here who will help you carry it.”

Read the second post in this series: “He Wants Me to Salute Him Back” — how a documentary film featuring the firefight with the Taliban that took Bryan’s life led his father Terry to strengthen support for grieving Gold Star fathers.

Kelly Farley and Barry Kluger are the dads behind the Parental Bereavement Act.

Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.

Kelly Farley and Barry Kluger met because of a horrible coincidence: They knew what it was like to mourn a child.

For Kluger, it was his 18-year-old daughter Erica, who died in a car crash in 2001. For Farley, it was two children — his daughter Katie, who died by miscarriage in 2004, and his son Noah, who was stillborn in 2006.

The two met several years later after Farley launched a blog that covered his own experience grieving the death of his children, and Kluger invited him on his talk radio show.

As they chatted about what they both had been through, the two fathers started talking about finding an issue they could work on together. That discussion eventually turned to better bereavement leave for parents mourning the death of their child. Soon, they became the dads behind the Parental Bereavement Act.

“Your employer will give you three or five days of bereavement leave, if you’re lucky. That’s just not enough time. You bury your child, and you’re expected to get back to work the next day. We didn’t think it was realistic.”

Uphill battle

Despite the bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, the two know that they still have an uphill battle. As the country grapples with an opioid epidemic, mass shootings and other pressing issues, helping bereaved parents isn’t top of mind for many.

Kluger and Farley continue to build momentum and support, and say that a couple of weeks don’t go by without another senator or another representative signing on.

“Bereavement leave is something where people say, ‘That’s a pretty good idea,’ but … the passion is not there,” said Kluger, who wrote a book about his daughter and her death called “A Life Undone: A Father’s Journey Through Loss.”

Most Employers Grant Only Three Days Of Paid Leave After A Child Dies

There are times in which an entire life can change in a moment. It may come in the form of an anxiously anticipated milestone: graduation, marriage, or the birth of a child. But there are darker, unimaginable tragedies we often refuse to consider – tucking them into the deepest recesses of our minds because they are too painful, too life-altering. For Deana Martin that moment came on a busy Friday afternoon.

Going through routine updates during her weekly supervising meeting, Deana’s phone began to ring. It rang again, and again, and again, incessantly. Continuing to devote her attention to work, Deana reviewed department finances, all the while noticing an unknown number with her hometown Indiana area code. Given the relentless nature of the caller, Deana acquiesced and picked up the phone.

The news was devastating: she had lost not one, but both of her children. But the death of her children was just the tip of the iceberg. As for many parents, a glacier of change was underway.

In the days following her unimaginable loss, she fought through indescribable pain – all the while planning funerals; making accommodations to become the primary caregiver for her young granddaughter; informing the employers, family members, and friends of her deceased children; and attempting to comfort those around her. It was during this time she learned her employer had given her two weeks of bereavement leave – one for each child.

Today, child death is not a qualifying event for job protection through federal legislation known as the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). As a result, bereaved families have no choice but to negotiate leave with their individual employer – at a time when they are least emotionally and mentally capable of doing so. Oregon and Illinois are the only states in the nation to require employers to allow bereaved families to take two weeks of unpaid leave; Illinois provides additional leave – up to six weeks – for the loss of multiple children. According to one industry survey, 69 percent of employers grant three days of paid bereavement leave following a child death – not enough time to plan a funeral. As a nation, we can do better for our families, especially in a time of significant crisis.

Those two weeks passed in a haze for Deana: burial arrangements, negotiations with insurance companies, building a new life for the granddaughter who had been robbed of her mother and uprooted from the only surroundings she had ever known. With compassion and care, Deana persevered.

Deana returned to work, yet she did so in body only. Her mind, heart, and health would not recover. It took years for her to realize that her life was forever changed. Her grief was severe and enduring: chronic depression, anxiety disorder, insomnia, panic attacks, and a condition known as complicated or prolonged grief syndrome – all symptoms many families endure for decades, if not a lifetime. Ultimately, Deana was released from her job by an employer who was unable to support or assist in her recovery.

Deana still struggles to define herself and her purpose in the aftermath of her loss: “My children were and are my life. My identity as a mother and a career woman disappeared. I struggle with the question, Who am I now?“

As she rebuilds her life, she focuses on caring for her granddaughter and working to help other families who have suffered the death of a child. “I know I am where I am meant to be in life and that my experiences are more normal than not,” says Deana. “I know it will still take time to rebuild and sift through the rubble of my shattered life of twenty-five years. In time I will build a new foundation and new coping skills. There is one thing I know without a doubt, and that is that I have to give of myself to society, for I have a heart and compassion for other hurting parents like me.”

Evermore is dedicating this Father’s Day week to bereaved dads who will always be fathers.

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.

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 dads, one mission: Better bereavement leave.
• Son’s death launches father’s re-education into the dangers of teen driving.