questions and answers

photo by wakingphotolife.

What is Lucy made of, Mama?

She is made of people ash with bone.

She is white, almost. Sometimes grey.

She had no knuckles, she was too young, I think. So there are no knuckles bones. So she is the other bones with people ash. That is what her body is made of, daughter.

But the important part of her is made of whispers and prayers and paint fumes on a spring morning, a candle lit to push away the stink of it, and a moment we took advantage of. The wind blows the chimes in the dining room.

She is made of chimes.

She is made of sprouts and nests and small mites writhing in hay. There is a chipmunk who sits on the roof of the garage. I wave to him every morning. She is made out of him.

She is made of wood blocks and printing ink. She is made of porcelain and  papier-mâché. She is made of vine charcoal and 90lb. paper, shredded and waterlogged with seeds embedded in its pulp. She is made of summer and fiddleheads. Yoga and smoothies with berries and almond butter. She is made of long flowing skirts, and a purple dress that made me look like Barney, but feel like a goddess.

She is made of email fights and heartbreak and broken clavicles, too. I try not to talk about that part of her, because I used to believe that the dark parts of her making killed her. Sometimes I think that is what made her live so long. It gave her tenacity. She is made of strength.

She is made of the moon. Further, she is the moon. Hanging effortlessly over our nights, disappearing gradually day by day, and then appearing again, brighter and closer than ever. She is also made of winter solstice. She is made of icicles and darkness and sad songs about sunshine and being taken away

She is made of atoms and stardust and self-sacrifice. She is made of nothing, but everything.

How old is Lucy now, Mama?

She is as old as the trees, my love. Her roots are so far into the earth, they are lava and rock. She is the Anasazi. She is the crone. She is the baby whose bough is breaking. She is as old as the canyons and young as the idea. She is a moss-covered age, one with ferns at her base. She is sixteen and driving erratically. She is eighty and hunched over in secret lives never lived.

She is three and two months old. Younger than you, but also ancient, like the gods, and at the same time, she is always newborn.

What happens when we die, Mama?

Our skin grows cold and turns ashen. Our body becomes stiff. The skin around the fingernails recede making every fingernail longer. The skin hides away and reveals something animal about our humanity. The meaning of life is gone then. The carnal meaning, I mean. The impulse for more is gone. We are just skin and bone. We are carbon, filtering into earth. It nourishes something lovely, we like to think. That also is transitory. The spark leaves our eyes and enters other people's hearts and burns brightly. So brightly it feels like fear. I want to tell you that our body is a shell, as cumbersome and heavy as a turtle. We figured out how to carry it, but it is not comfortable. The part that rots and makes a home for other creatures of the dark, that part is not us. It is something else. It is soil. It is life in its death. We do not have a soul, baby. We are a soul and have a body. I read that once. I believe that.

But what happens to our soul, baby, is not my privilege to know. I just sense that we become part of every person and everything, like a raindrop falling into the ocean. Can we separate the raindrop again? Never, but we still are water.

What do you think happens when we die, baby?

I think we go into trees, Mama. That is why it is very important to hug trees.

+++

What round about answers are you giving these days? What kind of questions do you get asked, either by children or adults, that stump you? How do you answer them? What kind of questions do you ask? Are your answers concrete or esoteric? Have your answers changed over time?

or alternatively, you can just tell me what your child is made of...

The Older Sister

Sometime this weekend, while she is playing, or reading, or sleeping, or eating, or attending that second live concert in one weekend, or having tea with a real live writer (her aunt knows the coolest people), or working hard at improving her full turn or her free hip or her tuck, sometime in this weekend packed with so.much.fun she will cross a threshold she is not aware of, but I am. Sometime this weekend my daughter will have lived more than half of her life as a bereaved sister. I could calculate it exactly, down to the minute, really. But I don't let myself. I don't want to know that precisely.

This is a kind of thing my mind gets hung up on. I remember coming up on living (then) half my life in this country, and it seemed a big deal. My sister, who's eight years younger than me, and so reached the same point that much earlier just sort of shrugged-- she was so far past that place herself that it was no longer a thing for her at all. Thinking about that I wonder whether this will ever seem like a big deal to Monkey. I know she is not thinking about it now, and I don't know whether she ever will. She is, by nature, a storyteller, not a mathematician or scientist. And so it is not clear to me that even looking back from any place in her hopefully long and eventful life this invisible line will matter a diddly to her. She was so very marked by her brother's death itself that it might never matter to her that there was a time before it, or how much time that was.

She grieved. Oh, she grieved. Out loud and quietly. In her first language, the one we speak at home, and then, as she started school and her English improved and they started learning Hebrew, in two more. Like all of us, she is no longer in that acute all-encompassing phase of early grief. But neither has she dispensed with it. Which is, of course, as it should be. And, at the same time, as everything about this, it's too fucked up for words-- the kid's not yet ten, and she's lived with grief for half her life.

There are things about her that are undoubtedly shaped by her experience as a bereaved sister. It's not that she is somehow an expert at other's grief. But she has a fine sense of what is and isn't about her. She understands the shades of sad. When a beloved teacher in the school died suddenly and unexpectedly in December, she was sad, but she also understood with piercing clarity that hers was a sadness from a distance. She and a couple of classmates spent some time that afternoon writing letters to dead people, including the teacher. She let me read her letters.

She wrote four letters total-- one to the teacher who died, one to her brother, one to my grandfather who died before she was born and in whose honor she is named, and one to my grandmother who died in May and whose funeral was the very first Monkey ever attended. There is no sentimentality in any of these. There is no cuteness. There is no mixing of her issues in with the sadness of others. And that is why these letters (I kept them) get me still. She is not even ten, and she has this understanding that we all wish more adults around us had.

To her brother she says that she misses him still and loves him. She notes the age he would've been, and how she thinks her younger brother would've liked to have an older brother too. And, still, still, still, she says she wishes she could see him. Me too, kid, me too.

To my grandmother she says that she didn't really know her (true-- dementia is a horrible thing, and by the time Monkey could remember things well, my grandmother wasn't herself anymore; they did have a lot of fun earlier in Monkey's life, though, and for that I am glad), but that she knows how much her daughters miss her.

To my grandfather, and I must say that it surprised me that she wrote this one, she says that she is named after him and tells him that though it is very sad, his wife has died recently, and also that he is still very missed.

To the teacher she says that she is now very sorry she never really knew her. She was a middle school teacher, but she also had been involved in many things at the school. It was remarkable to me that Monkey understood the difference between how she knew the teacher and how the teacher's students knew the teacher. Monkey says that she is sure her daughters miss her (of course), but then she doesn't say that about the students. She describes, instead, what is happening near the teacher's room in the school-- there is a bathroom across the hall, and Monkey writes that the lower school kids are not allowed to use it because her students are in there-- they are crying and washing their faces, and crying, and washing, and on and on. I cried when I read that. I have tears coming up now as I write about reading that.

The mindfuck of this is that it's not that she is naturally fearless in the face of pain. She is sweet and she's always been kind, and she has a good deal of empathy. But she is not, and I know it is strange to say about a kid who hurls herself at the vault table and flies to execute her bar dismount, she is not naturally the most courageous person you've ever met. She is cautious and risk averse. And as we all know, death is a scary thing, and raw pain of a grieving person is perhaps scarier still. So the fact that Monkey is better than most at handling other people's grief is mostly about her own biography, her own story. It sucks. I am glad she is the way she is. I hate that she is that way because her brother died.

I heard it said about the senior rabbi of our congregation that because his father died when he was very young, he is drawn to comfort the grieving. Like a proverbial firefighter, he runs towards the grieving family when others are tempted to run away. Monkey is not like that. She doesn't run towards the grief. She might even hesitate, as she did about whether to attend my grandmother's funeral or about whether to visit her kindergarten teacher recently as she mourned the loss of her own elderly mother. (This was the teacher who helped Monkey find her voice in both English and Hebrew, the latter because at the time she was saying kaddish, Jewish mourning prayer, in the classroom every school day for her father, and entirely without prompting and without telling us Monkey joined the ritual.) But even in those cases, it takes but a short conversation, a few sentences really, for her to change her mind and be there for the grieving.

On the way back from the visit with the kindergarten teacher Monkey asked why the teacher'd said that visiting the grieving was one of the most important and difficult mitzvot (good deeds). As I think about the conversation that followed now, we focused mostly on the "important" part, discussing how visiting with the grieving lets them tell you about the person they are missing and about how that itself brings comfort. We kinda skipped the whole "difficult" part of the statement. I guess we both know there are harder things than that.

If you were lucky enough to have older children when your baby died, have you marked any significant grief-related milestones in their lives since? Do you see them as bereaved siblings? Do they see themselves that way? If you have younger children, are there things about them that you see as grief-marked? Are there other children in your life that are connected to your baby who died for you? How do you see their milestones?

i'm gone and i'll never look back again

Laying flat on my back on the couch surrounded by the darkness in my heart is how I have spent many bright days and long cold nights over the last three years since Silas died. I was not new to the idea of sadness and loss and hardship, but it was a revelation to be consumed by it so completely.

After all, there is nothing as completely devastating as the loss of your son or daughter.  We know our parents and grandparents are not immortal, but it seems like a given that our children will outlive us long and strong, healthy and true.

But now I know.

Silas's death transformed my guts.  I used to shit perfectly.  Once in the morning, once at night. Solid, honest craps each of them.  But now I'm erratic.  Sometimes the toilet sucks, and I know I'm not good when I'm not looking forward to that daily event.

Do you know the gurgles?  When laying flat on said back completely annihilated by how painful it is to miss my son I feel the slow crawl of tension mixed with terror sleazing through my innards in the dreadful, lonely night.  Lu is next to me so I'm not alone but the loss is endless.  Like the night will never end.  Like the gurgle slip-slithering through my insides will never end in a solid shit.

It is the gut-pit we all know.

It seems clear to me that all the sorrows of all that is known can fall endlessly into the despair that parents feel for the loss of our little ones.

Based upon my own experience, it really is that fucking bad.  You can't hyperbole the shitiness of this shit.

Our arms are made to hold them close, even when they are not here.

Here he is, though.  Absolutely present in my life.  My son Silas.  He exists more concretely in the typing of his name than in his physical existence.  I held him briefly hooked up to tubes and then later when it was only us, but I've held him even closer in the way I think about him, the way I write about my life without him.

I've learned to think in a certain way that seemed invaluable to survival.  Music was my first refuge.  I fell in love with music that made me feel Silas's absence with crystalline clarity.  After music it was laughter.  My brothers helped to remind me that bitter laughter is better than none at all.  And if I could find my way to open my mouth to speak or yell or maybe even laugh, then food and drink would surely find it's way in.

Look at me!  I'm a normally fuckitioning human.  Yeah that's right.  Fuck you functioning.  Good as fucking new.

Slowly I re-learned how to present a relatively normal facade, but always at the center of our focus was creating Silas's sibling.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I write to you now from the other side.  Stop reading if you are angry about not having a child, or if your loss is so fresh everything is enraging.  Read that top part again, and keep fighting.  Don't let anyone stop you from being exactly who and how you need to be.  Do not stop.  Do not stop.  Get up, stand up, throw those fucking hands up.  Push out the night.  Hide from the daylight.  Embrace your endless, enraging tears for your child, your daughter, your son, your big sticky stinky shitting fucking life.

It's true, it really does suck this much, and it always will.  Always always always.  It will always suck exactly this much that you and me and my wife and your grandparents and our siblings lost a life that was going to be amazing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stop reading if you're not pregnant yet with your next child, of if you're in your pregnancy and are freaking out all the time like we were.  Stop reading if you're me a year ago and I couldn't stand to read about the next, bright part of people's lives.

I'm on a futon in the living room and Puck is digging his furry, feline head under the folds of my sleeping bag.  The detritus of baby surrounds me.  In what used to be my bedroom: my wife, the other cats, my second son Zephyr, all sleeping & feeding & crying & pooping as babies do, and sometimes moms and kitties, too.

I stopped believing in hope and now it's my full-time fucking job.  I hope he's okay.  I hope that rash is no big deal.  I hope he's not crying because he's deathly ill.  I hope I get to see him more tomorrow.

I have to hope, and I've trained myself to stop that silliness and deal instead with exactly is right in front of me.  Except now, what is right in front of me, in my arms, is a son I feared to hope for.

The gurgle is in my heart, now.  The gurgle is in my brain when I see Zeph's little-old-man-new face staring back at me, absurdly alive and utterly clueless to how powerful he is. He has annihilated time.  It reminds me of when we first lost Silas and day or night meant nothing at all.

It is so much better now.

I didn't want to write this part.  Lu thought it was necessary, though.  She wanted people to know that there is still always hope of some kind.  We were the worst kind of unlucky to lose our son Silas, but we are profoundly fortunate to have Zeph with us now.  She never let go of that possibility while I continued to prepare for exactly what was, every day, over and over again, no matter how shitty.

She's in there right now using her breasts to feed and grow our son.  I'm out here on the futon writing about our insanely brutal and beautiful and sad and hilarious lives as Airbag blasts from little speakers, my toes tucked into the sleeping bag and Chumby our cat curled up on the couch.  I will sleep tonight completely enraptured by the endless darkness of Silas's absence and the now-ever-present force that is my other son Zephyr who is brilliantly alive and utterly confounding.  How do we do this now?  How does anyone?

Okay, I hear tears.  Maybe time for a diaper change or midnight dance-party.  Different day, better shit.

What physical aspects of your life changed when you lost your child?  What have you reclaimed since then, what is forever altered?  Has the lack of physical connection with your lost child forced you to find other routes to feeling close to them?  What are they?  What else do you want and how will you get it? 

the language of loss

A colleague of mine lost her son last month. His car went off the road on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and he passed away from his injuries.  Another friend lost her 8 year old niece recently in a similarly unexpected and tragic accident.  Their deep sadness echoes within me and I've spent many moments living in their skin when I think about their grief. Or maybe it's the other way around.  Maybe it's that suddenly I could see them wearing the same stretched skin and hollow eyes I know so well.

I hated seeing it on them and in them.

I never knew Silas as a grown boy or young adult.  I never knew him as anything more than the potential of everything we were about to become.  I felt his kicks and saw him grow behind the veil of Lu's bulging belly, but I never had him all to myself, not even for a moment.  My friend knew her niece, saw her grow and develop.  My colleague had 23 amazing years to share with her son.  All three of our experiences are terrible beyond words, and I'm certain none of us would like to trade with the other, for any reason at all, ever.

How do you qualify for being one of us here at Glow?  What are the parameters for Medusa-hood, for babylost?  Those people were their babies even though one was a man as well as a son and the other was not her offspring but still her child in so many ways.  Does a miscarriage at 10 weeks count?  How about a father of 80 who buries his son of 40?  Or by that time does the father already know that the Universe is far from fair and things like that just happen?

I went to Tommy's memorial and heard the amazing things his friends and family said about him.  As I absorbed the stories of this wonderful friend, brother, son, man, I wondered what people would have said about my son.  And then I wished I would never know because he would have died after me, after a long life together where I could nurture and cherish him and teach him to be a good person and a great friend like my father taught me.

The twisted layersof 'what-if' and 'what-should' and 'what-isn't' were nearly overwhelming. At the end of the memorial that was 400+ people strong, I gave my colleague a long, deep hug and told her how sorry I was that her son was gone.  I could barely even look at his younger brother, the loss and shock etched into his face was terrible and so all I could do was tell him to hang on and hold on to his parents and just hold each other up, any way they could.

A few weeks later when I saw my colleague again I gave her another huge hug, but I didn't ask her how she was doing.  I always hated that question in those first days and months and years after losing Silas.  I know it is just something people say because they have no idea what to say, but I still hated it so I didn't ask.  Instead I just told her how we have been thinking about her and her family and that I hoped they were holding up as best they could.  And then later that day we talked.  We talked about how some people we knew well were quick to pull away in our times of loss.  How people we never expected were able to stand right up next to us and hold on tight.  How getting up and taking a shower could be counted as an enormous accomplishment, to say nothing of getting back to work, back to the World, back to the everyday experience where our offspring were not.

I could look her in the eye and hold her in my heart and I was not at all afraid of what she had become or what she represented.  This wasn't some theoretical possibility in my life.  In some way that transcends Tommy's age or Silas's even briefer life I knew to the core of my marrow the filthy chaos and shocking confusion that gripped her tight despite her ability to stand there and talk about her son that was gone.  The pit that was hollowed out within me nearly three years ago is so deep and black and awful that her pain just slipped right in and swirled around comfortably.  I hoped that by standing there with her and using his name and letting her speak about her new awful life that I could lessen her burden minutely, if only for a moment, perhaps until the conversation ended, if that.

For so long, the despair I felt seemed larger than me, something I could never contain.  But somehow I've managed to grow and now it fits into my life without overwhelming me.  It doesn't seem less, not at all.  Instead I had to change the shape of my soul so that everything about losing Silas is in me and a part of me.  Speaking to my friend about her son Tom, I realized that I could stand with her and listen and absorb a bit of her grief because I know how to digest the truth of death.  That sick, awful feeling is to be expected, that it will not destroy me, and that hopefully this loss won't destroy her either.

I hoped that I could serve as a signpost along this path of sadness, that somehow by engaging people in their time of grief that I was doing right by Silas.  It is always better if he were here, but since he's not I have to find scraps of good and use them to the best of my ability.  I will never shy away from people when they are confronted with death because I know how important it was to me when people would talk to me and listen to me and help me to pretend that I was not losing my mind during my worst times.

I can talk to people when they are stricken because I know this language, all too well.  It is a terrible gift from Silas but if it helps one other person pull back from the brink I am more than happy to make use of this awful knowledge.  Even though it feels like we are each all alone with our absent child, the fact is it is all too common.  The death of a child, no matter how old, is always exceptionally shocking and wrenching.  It is something no parent should ever have to experience.  But as we know, 'should' doesn't count around here, just what is and what is not. 

Silas isn't here, and now Tom and my friend's niece are absent, too.  And so for those of us left here, devastated and alone, we have to help each other face each day and grow into people that can survive what we should have never had to endure.  We can only do it together because no one can withstand this alone.

Are you able to speak with people that have lost children or relatives?  Is it something you encounter often, sometimes, never?  Do you feel specially qualified to engage in these types of conversations, or do you prefer to keep your grief and experience private? What words do you use?  How do you speak to people when they are raw with sadness?

Grief, suspended. Grief controlled?

My grandmother died two weeks ago. A few hours shy of two weeks actually.

The phone call from my sister broke time in a way we are all familiar with. It really shouldn't have, probably-- it had been a long time coming. She wasn't well, as a matter of fact she wasn't herself. She had Alzheimer's. But physically she was relatively strong. She'd had bouts of infection and a few other things, any one of which probably could've killed her if not for profound attention her daughters paid to every little change. Some weeks before she died a blood test revealed that she probably had some kind of cancer, but given her condition nobody wanted to put her through invasive tests to figure out exactly what kind it was. Her daughters signed her up with hospice. About six months was their prediction. Even that was hard on the daughters. In the end, her end was a lot gentler than her last several years.

The last several years were awful. Watching a strong person diminish is never easy. Watching a strong person lose themselves, lose their understanding of who surrounds them, lose all their bearings in the world is a particular pain, made worse when you are the caretaker. My mom and my aunt kept trying to relate to their mother, and their mother wasn't there. That made it worse.

My rabbi visited us in the hospital, when I was being induced. My son still in me, we talked about funeral arrangements. She explained the Jewish custom of quick burial by quoting from sacred text: "[y]ou can not be comforted while your dead lie before you." I've thought about this a lot during my grandmother's decline. Removed somewhat from the situation, I could accept a lot earlier than my mom could just how little of the woman we knew remained in the woman my mom was faithfully caring for.

My grandmother, in her time, took care of her own sick and dying mother for many more years than what her daughters ended up doing for her. But my great-grandmother had a stroke and lost her mobility. She was still herself, and so she died when she died. In contrast, I can tell you when my grandmother's body died. I can't tell you when she left, not really. It's been a long time since she recognized anyone. Yet mere weeks before she died, she had a good day when she seemed to know who everyone in the family was. One good hour, really.

So over the course of the last four years, my family had to slowly let go of my grandmother. Expectations, understandings. Memories. Things that bind us together. Bit by bit. Two weeks ago the definitive, indisputable end. Before that? Strange state of suspended grief. Her daughters didn't have their mother anymore. But I don't think they knew how to grieve that, and they didn't really have time for it anyway-- they were her dedicated caretakers, after all.

This story is the opposite of most perinatal death stories. We rarely get any warning, and even those of us who do are never prepared-- we're supposed to be raising them, not burying them. My grandmother had a hard life, full of pain and loss. But she also had a rich life, full of joy and love. She was in her late 70s before her mind started going. My daughter knew her, and even if she doesn't now remember most of their interactions before the onset of the bad part of the disease, she has a sense of her great grandmother. We chose her casket because that color and even the spare details on it was the kind of wood furniture she liked. We knew what she liked. The opposite, you know?

We now know that she realized things were going wrong, and to cope, while she still could, she wrote notes to herself. That makes perfect sense-- too proud to tell anyone, but determined to manage.

My grandmother came to visit us along with my parents and aunt and uncle for Monkey's fifth birthday. That was less than six weeks after A died. While here, she asked to see A's pictures. I now think of that as the very last thing I can confidently say she did as fully herself. After she'd seen them, it seems she let go. Even during that trip, she was not the same after the pictures that she was before. I think she must've written a note to herself about A, about asking for the pictures. Either that or she willed herself to stay fully with it until she did. Task completed, she could let go of the enormous work it took to hold on. (She did not disappear completely after that, but she was less present, and for less time. And for a while after, she remembered A-- she'd talk to my mom about how sad it was.) That's the kind of backbone that defined her. And it took one hell of a disease to be stronger than that.

We took Monkey with us to the funeral and the burial. We didn't take her, less than five years old at the time, with us to A's. She still tells us we were wrong in that decision. She probably always will. She's never been to a funeral, in fact. I think my grandmother's was a sort of a proxy for her. She got to see the casket put in the ground, the kaddish recited, she got to see and hear the dirt hitting the casket-- the hollow sound of finality, of indisputable end. From the safe distance of four plus years and her great-grandmother's eighty three and a half, she could imagine her brother's funeral. The rabbi and the funeral director were incredibly kind to her, and that helped too.

She's perceptive. She gets the difference. She knows great grandmothers die, and it's sad, but it is how life works (though she is not exactly happy about this). Little brothers shouldn't be dying, but hers did, and it's a different kind of pain and grief. And yet, she also gets that sometimes the differences matter very little. We were talking about the different kinds of sad, and that though it is how it is, it is still sad for me that my grandmother died. "It's [my grandma]'s mom" she said, as her eyes got bigger with recognition of the enormity of the loss for someone else. Yes, she was.

Have you encountered death since your child's? How has it been for you?

Kindred Spirits?

A month or so ago, in the space of about 10 days, two women I know lost step-children to gun violence. In two completely separate instances (in two different states), two teenagers lost their lives in broad daylight for no other reason than being in "the wrong place at the wrong time."

When I say I know these women, I should clarify: I've never had either over for coffee. But I see one almost daily, weather permitting, and we chit chat about weather and kids and such; and the other I see in her professional setting when I happen to be there and we are on a hello basis. But it really doesn't matter how near or far I hold these women: children died.

I don't claim to know what it is they're going through -- I have no fucking idea. One woman I hugged, said I was sorry, asked if there was anything I could possibly do, asked to please express my condolences to her husband. I felt trite and superficial and wondered if I should have said something deeper and more meaningful. I wondered what on earth that something could be. For the other woman, I attended a memorial service for her daughter. I hugged her tightly twice, and told her as briefly as possible that I understood the very outer parameters of what she might be feeling, and could relate to much in the service. She said she'd like to call me.

These deaths have made me feel extremely small, and extremely . . . lucky. I at least got to set the terms of my daughter's death (to a degree), and she died in my arms.  She did not die violently, she likely felt no pain. I said what I needed to say to Maddy even if she likely heard not one word of it. She did not die in view of the world, in the headlines. These parents have none of that peace.

Since Maddy died, I feel a strange sort of connection to parents whose children die in war, or die in gun violence, or die in car crashes. Or jump off bridges, or accidentally step off cliffs, or fall victim to being on the wrong Duck Boat on the wrong afternoon in the middle of the Delaware River. Just this past weekend, the local headlines blared the death of a child in a house fire. We are not remotely the same these parents and I; I can't claim to have any idea what it is they might be feeling.

And yet. What used to be some otherworldly Shakespearean-type tragedy glimpsed peripherally between the day's political news and the comics now hits very close to home. I now stop to pour over these stories, and the language is so similar -- the grief so familiar in it's outline. These parents hang on to times and places. There was the man who kept his son's watch set to Iraq time. Time. That bastard. It doesn't stop for us. It keeps going. Even where your child fell for the last time. The mom who sat in a lawn chair, simply being in the presence of a cold piece of granite bearing her child's name. Parents who try desperately to have something positive come out of their most horrific experience through scholarship funds and concerts and road races. The pictures, the shrines, the tears.

I don't know. I can't possibly. And yet once, while listening to a program about mothers of fallen soldiers who congregate at Arlington cemetery, I had to fight every fiber in my being not to whip my car in a U-Turn, hop on 95, and drive three hours to see if they were there.

As a historian who spent a fair amount of time studying war, I've always felt I at least understood Memorial Day and observed it to the best of my ability. I realized after Maddy died that I didn't have a fucking clue. Three Memorial Days ago, the remembrances in the paper and solemnly on my radio -- that I absorbed on my way to a family picnic -- broke me in two. I asked my husband, who was driving, if he felt like continuing on the road to a small Pennsylvania town where the son of the man speaking on our radio was buried. He said he did, but we had another commitment. We did decide that we both needed to do something more on this day, now that we at the very least could hear what people were saying.

We have yet to formalize our observance in any significant way. But this holiday now strikes perilously close to home for the both of us. We do spend time thinking of it's meaning. And all of the parents who who received the worst possible news and then spent the remainder of their lives tending gravestones instead of grandchildren.

I'm loathe to call such new awareness a "gift" because Maddy's death was simply a tragedy and I've come to decide I don't need to peel any good away from it unless it beats me on the head. I certainly don't need to look for it in order to understand it. But it left me with a new frame of reference, a new vocabulary, new metaphors, fluent in a language that I now recognize instantly. Because I may not know what they're going through at all, but I understand what they're saying. About missing, and promise, and a future without. About having a child permanently frozen in time as a child, never to progress.  About mourning dreams. About having to move through time (that bastard!) while the milestones rain down like an avalanche of boulders.

In the memorial service I attended for the young woman, people spoke about continuing the speak the child's name, associating her death now and forever with a season (Fall), and not wanting to find joy in what was left, but simply wanting her. I have never been good at languages, finding all the rules too easily malleable and forgetful. Here, for perhaps the one time in my life, I felt I grasped everything said while everyone else sat rather uneasily, shifting in their seats, trying to comprehend the sounds and locate sympathetic similes within their life stories.  I got it all.

And yet, I have absolutely no idea.

I just felt horribly sorry for the parents, and wondered what on earth one said to another at a time like this.

How do you feel when you encounter other parents -- either in person or via the news -- whose older children have died? How has it made you feel about your own grief and circumstances? Do you find their situations -- with children older than babies dying by means other than usually discussed here -- completely foreign or somewhat comprehensible? Do you feel a strange camaraderie with these parents, or do their vastly different circumstances leave you fumbling for words and feelings? (Is it possible to feel so similar, and yet so wildly removed?)