rubbernecking

I'm not sure why it's always such a shock. It shouldn't be...part of me knows that all of us out here - fingers touching in the dark, keeping company - are just a tiny statistical measure of some great silent rift of sorrow and scars that runs through the Happy Here and Now of our society.

And yet each time we multiply I'm floored, gobsmacked, as if my own personal secret hiding place were suddenly drawn out into the light; a cockroach discovering we are truly legion. The news comes by email or by way of a blog post and it makes impact and I am instantly utterly naked in the face of fears normal people presume are too lurid to happen to them.

Each time, I think oh, little one, oh child. Each time, I think oh jesus, those parents. Each time, I think, please not again.  not me. 

And then it is on CNN. Their son, Jett, 16, died Friday in the Bahamas, reads the announcer. John Travolta and Kelly Preston Grieve Son, blares the headline.

And I sit surprised, hot tears running down my face. Them too? Clearly, I don't know them. Nor what it's like to have a sixteen-year-old, lose a sixteen-year-old. But the chasm that yawns between the words of that headline, I know its outline. The shock of it. The empty, whether a crib or a chair at the table or a first car or what. The waking up and then remembering and everything is just wrong, upside down like a bad dream except...it's true. And you know it's true by the way everybody else's eyes turn down after and the way nobody quite knows what to say, and they watch you to judge whether you're grieving healthily, even if what that might actually mean to them is nothing more than hollow words in their Harlequin romance acquaintance with the ugly, confusing work of grief.

And if you're famous, they is the whole world, no sanctuary.  No private, anonymous blog to work it out on, no respite from the grinning and the bearing. Everybody sees you're blown apart...everybody feels the wind blow. In every grocery aisle across the tabloid-reading world, you are going to Graceland.

The news is full these days of How Parents Cope with Losing a Child and The Death of a Child: A Parent's Greatest Fear, the scabs and scars and snakes we wear here suddenly the flavour of the week courtesy of those poor fucking Travoltas. And I scan the pieces and realize those objects of curiosity described like museum exhibits are us, and my naked cockroach-self wants to skitter away safely back into my secret lair and hopes against hope that no one I know has seen those articles and read them and thought of me. I do not want to be a Poster Child.  I want to pretend I am not exposed.

Maybe I wanted to believe all I needed was a private jet and I'd never be vulnerable again. I get that this is ludicrous, that vulnerability is as simple as the price of love. I still want to go on believing I paid at the door.

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What goes through your mind and heart when you hear of another family losing a child?

Comments

[kate]

Oh my god, Bon: "...a cockroach discovering we are truly legion."

That's exactly it, isn't it? I hear of another family losing a child and my darkness sort of hums. And I send that hum to them.

[sally]

"those poor fucking people" is pretty much what goes through my mind these days when i hear such news. just recently, a 21 year old australian backpacker was killed in croatia and her family here in australia were plastered all over the news. it was just weeks after i lost hope. i could really relate to what they were going through, and i felt sad for them that they had the eyes of the whole nation upon them. i told a friend i could really relate to their pain and she told me it was "different". i tend to think not. she may have been 21 and my hope may have never taken a breath, but our daughters still died in the wrong order. we both still outlived our children. messed up however you look at it.

[aliza]

i think it's too sad. children are not supposed to die. not babies or teens or kids of any age. it is just too sad. my heart hurts for all of us. no one is exempt, not even john travolta. i feel ashamed to walk around my town, as i imagine everyone pointing and whispering 'oh there she is, poor her, the one whose baby died'. i can't imagine having the whole world watch while i grieve my child. it's too unbearably sad. i've always thought a sick child, a child dying, there is nothing sadder. and now here i am in the saddest club.

[Carly]

I got cold chills today when I read that a sweet little three year old girl was mawled to death by dogs at her neighbours house. I imagined that happening to my 3 year old petal. I just cried.... and cried and cried. I want to go and hug her mother. How can anyone ever get through that.... how will her mother survive this when she will always be reminded of her daughters violent death when she looks at the scars on her other 18 month old baby.

What a cruel place this Earth can be.

[CLC]

Like you, I still feel the shock- as if I didn't know that death can happen at any age. And then I just feel immense sadness, not only for the parents' loss, but for their future. They probably won't know what hit them for a few months, but when the actual reality sets in, well that's the part that I find the cruelest.

[tash]

For me it's the moms who lost sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan (and even in a shameful aftermath, here in the states). I know my situation isn't remotely like theirs at all. And yet when I hear them speak, everything from the knock at the door to crying at their grave, I understand completely. As if it's some secret language that pierces right through to my gut.

I fall apart, perhaps not completely, when I read of someone else going through this whether famous or no. Sometimes I wonder if outwardly grieving famous people gives us some needed attention, but usually I'm just really fucking glad I don't have to go on Larry King and try and explain myself. I wish it would force people who don't know what to do with me to click on a few more links and try and understand, but I realize they probably just read the story, mutter "poor sorry people," under their breath, and go on waiting for the next movie.

[Erica]

One of my dearest friends lost her son to suicide when he was in high school. After that, whenever she heard of someone else's loss, you could *see* is resonating in her, hurting her. She has called me several times over the last few months and is never turned off or deterred by my monosyllabic moods, or by the times when I can barely gasp out words on the phone, or by me not being the person I was. She's one of the few people for whom I don't feel pressured to wear the brave face, and I loved her before, but now, for that, I love her more.

I like to think that, given some more time, I'll be able to take her as my model and use my pain as a sort of map by which I can find ways to help others, but right now, I just cry. And to be under constant public scrutiny after losing a child...I don't even want to imagine what that feels like.

[HMC]

(Ironically?) I used to say "the death of a child must be the most painful thing a person could ever experience - I don't know how a person would survive that." And here I am, surviving. I have always suspected the level of pain a person must feel when they lose a child. Now I know, and my heart aches when I hear stories of others who have lost their babies - no matter what age. I can't pretend to completely understand another's experience of the loss of their child - but having lost my child I can comprehend the LEVEL of the pain. I, too, weep when I hear of bereaved parents - no matter the circumstances, and no matter whether the baby is newly born or forty-five.

[kimberlee]

Usually? I get sick to my stomach remembering how fresh and raw everything was. Knowing the very long and lonely road they have in front of them.

It always makes me feel raw and vulnerable again.

[G.]

At this very moment, my parents and younger sister (only 12 years old herself) are driving to the church to attend the funeral of her best friend. He was a 12 year-old sweet little boy who died suddenly and unexpectedly of cardiac arrest on Tuesday.

I just can't wrap my mind around the fact that some of us stay and some go.

My mind flashes back to my own daughter's funeral- a frozen Saturday much like today only one year ago. And I think of this poor little boy's mother, who probably still hasn't slept more than a few hours, burying her son in the frozen ground this afternoon, and I just want to shout and sob or crawl in my bed and never wake up.

Because as hard as today will be for her, some of the darkest days are yet to come.

[tash]

G: "some of the darkest days are yet to come."

Ain't that the truth. Please send this family my love, they're in my thoughts. As are you on this sad anniversary.

[KBF]

When I heard about this death in particular I thought of my own son who did not die, but who has had seizures. And who I watched one night not breath even when the doctors asked nicely. And who, because of the not breathing, needed a tube forced down his throat to help him breath.

I thought my own son was dying in front of my eyes and all I wanted to do was escape. I wanted to escape because I was unable to do what a mother really wants to do: hold her son, make it better, and yell at the doctors to "do SOMETHING!"

My son did not die that night. And he did not die with any of the other seizures. But he still, very rarely, has been known to have one. And my biggest fear in life is that he will die like Jett Travolta. I can hide the fear away most days, but it's still there.

My heart goes out to all families that have lost a child. Including to my brother and his wife who lost their first baby to SIDS nearly 18 years ago.