Surviving the Loss of a Child

Recently I was reading Off Season by Anne Rivers Siddons. She is a favorite novelist of mine-savvy and smart. In this particular novel I was stopped by her description of surviving the "fall" after a loved one dies. In this case it was the death of a spouse but her description fits with any loss of a close family member or friend.

Until recently my life has been blessed with little tragedy. Those family members who died were the older members, those who had lived full lives and their time had come. And, though, we mourned their passing, there was a natural order to things. That is until we lost my 19-year-old nephew.

It's been 18 months since Skyler died, towards the end of his first semester in college. The initial shock of this unexpected death was unlike anything I had ever lived through. I literally had trouble catching my breath. The days that followed left me numb. Moving through those days felt like acting, like we were on a movie set acting out a particularly tragic family event.

The ensuing months have proven that one does survive. That parents survive the loss of a beloved child and that extended family feels the pain in their own fashion; although always mindful of the immediate family and their loss.

People ask me all the time, "How is your sister doing?" I am never sure how to answer. She is living, she is eating, she is working, she socializes, parents her living child, laughs, celebrates life events. So... on the surface she is doing well. Despite this, I know there are deep, dark moments, that have probably lessened in severity but will follow her all of her days. I know holidays suck. I know she sometimes has a bitter outlook on life. Yet, somehow she survives. As does her husband and her daughter.

What everyone wonders is how? As parents we think we could never survive the loss of a child, though we all know of parents who do. Once you've lost a young family member it's as though people come out of the woodwork telling their loss stories. A coworker who lost her brother when he was 18. Although it's been 20 years, her mother still morns the anniversary of his death in a deep and sorrowful way. A neighbor who lost her son to polio in the 50's and still speaks of him as though he is a living being. The family in your church who survived the loss of two children. You see them in church. You know they get up each morning, work, live, eat. So we do know that most do survive.

I imagine there are some who don't, who slip into deep despair and never recover. And I've wondered why can some people go on and eventually live full, seemingly satisfying lives and others can't move on. That brings me back to the Siddons novel. In it she describes what's it's like each morning, following the death of a loved one, to wake up and for a split second all is okay and than you remember.

"Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and lie there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. half of you is not there, and never will be again. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only a blackness and an endless well of red pain."

"At the very first, the effort to haul yourself out of the pit hand over hand seems impossible, and, indeed, unnecessary. What is there up top for you? But somehow you begin; I know few people who have truly surrendered to the blackness, even at the beginning, when a leftover life seems to hold nothing to give you life. Many of us have other lives, other beings, that wait for us to minister to them, and on their shoulders we toil, finally far enough up to begin to stumble forward. I do not know what happens to people who have no family, close friends, or animals. Perhaps they simply do not come back up. Or perhaps they are steelier souls than ever I could be."

Those passages spoke to me and though I knew on some level that was the very reason my sister and her family have survived, I had never seen it so eloquently written. My sister survives because she has a husband and a daughter and a spoiled, much loved dog; because she has amazing friends that go back a lifetime and because she lives in a community that embraced them at the time of Skyler's death.

I can think of no better reason to cherish and nurture those you love than to know that sometime in the future, when you are falling into an abyss of despair, they will be there to pull you out, to breathe life back into you and need you to go on living. That's how one survives the death of a loved one. You do it because those you love depend on you to do so.