Mike: “I returned to work and tried to stay focused. It was okay as long as I kept going. If I slowed down, I thought I would never have the energy to start again. Move, constantly move. Eventually, the ache deep inside me took it’s toll and I stopped working.”
Joe: “With Lorenza back at work and me being retired, I had to do something. On television, I saw a group of women who were sculpting in an adult education program at the high school. I called up the television station and a very compassionate lady gave me the number to call. I lost myself in the sculpting. Marc died on the water. I made fish, fish, fish; I made dolphins. I gave them to family. That was my therapy. I would sculpt; the ladies were talking of their children and grandchildren. I couldn’t talk about my child. Eventually in class, my voice got a little stronger and I had a little more energy.”
Bruce: “I went back to work a week after sitting shiva with the hope that work would give me something to hide behind. It didn’t really and after a few years, I completely lost interest and didn’t care. The economy had turned bad and the business needed more thought and energy than I could give it. I gave my partner a year’s notice. I felt it was time to get out and make changes, even if it meant doing nothing. And it did. Now I help Barbara with the bookkeeping for her business, but nothing really structured.”
“As far as being tired, I was tired, but no it doesn’t end in that first year. Are you forever tired? Yeah. You’re investing so much energy in just getting yourself
up and trying to function at some level close to where you were before the death of your child. I’m sure some of the fatigue is periodic bouts with depression. Every now and then, you’d find yourself tired of feeling tired. It starts to wear you down that you’re always feeling worn down.”
Tom: “My office was still operating. I went there, but I was incapable of making any decisions. I fought with everybody. A couple of years later, I closed down the office. By that time I had no more staff; I had fought with them all.”
Whereas our wives spoke of wanting to die and having nothing to live for, we never heard them actually say they contemplated suicide. A couple of us, however, did actually think of taking our own lives. One of us tried and failed. Whether or not we thought to kill ourselves following the deaths of our children, we have all come to know death in a decidedly different light or a different shadow … depending on the day.
Mel: “I didn’t contemplate suicide. But I wasn’t afraid of death.”
Mike: “I wanted to be with Brian. I would scream in my head that I couldn’t stand my life. But would I take my own life? I never answered that question.”
Bob: “We didn’t talk about suicide. I didn’t think my son would want us to. We want to live, but we’re not afraid. We have a closer relationship with death.”
Don: “The same with me. Lisa did not even want us at the hospital when we had a vacation planned. She always wanted us to continue living. I never contemplated suicide.”
Tom: “Maybe I was suicidal for a while, but I don’t think I really ever contemplated suicide. I was very reckless.”
Joe: “Some time after Marc died, I had to order a casket for my father. I already had a relationship by then with death. It was the same thing. I’d been through it.”
Our wives felt enormous guilt and the majority of us also harbored unrelenting guilt. In some ways we men—the stronger sex, according to the upbringing of our generation—felt even greater responsibility for what happened than did our spouses.
What we have learned collectively about the guilt we felt then and in some cases continue to feel is that we have been handed a lot in life
for which we were never trained. We could never have prepared ourselves for how we should or should not act upon losing a child. It is important to try to forgive yourself and cut yourself some slack. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.
Much of the blame we take upon ourselves is, of course, totally irrational, but we are not dealing with a rational state of affairs here. One of the words we often use, and have used in this book repeatedly, to describe what we have been through is “surreal.” When the place you are coming from is surreal, any nightmarish emotion or reaction is possible … even probable.
Mel: “Supposing I didn’t give Andrea a stick-shift car. Supposing I’d given her an automatic car, would this accident have occurred?”
Don: “The guilt I felt and still feel was not being able to stop Lisa from doing what I knew was not right for her, having that general anesthesia. Carol and I knew it was not good for her to have it, but she was a married adult. Still it’s guilt. I say to myself that if I’d exercised stronger influence maybe she would have lived a little longer.”
Tom: “When you talk of guilt everybody brings their own baggage. Michael died in an auto accident. I was car crazy, I used to race cars, I still am car crazy. And I still smoke after my father died of lung cancer. Isn’t that insane? I taught Michael how to drive; I set poor examples for him because he liked to be crazy with the car, too. I didn’t do my job. I didn’t teach him enough safety behind the wheel. It was absolutely my fault and I couldn’t fix it. Then after a few days my dog died. My wife and son were falling apart. They brought a priest into the house to bless it and rid it of evil spirits. Where were my tools to fix this? All my life I’d been lucky, I was able to fix things … . I couldn’t fix this.”
Irv: “I felt guilt because just before the accident, my brother-in-law-asked if he should stop the boat because we were getting to the end of the lake. I said, ‘Make a turn to the left,’ and that’s the way we went. It was one aspect that I’ve had to live with. Even worse, I couldn’t spare Audrey the pain. I realized she was hurting even more than me.”
Don: “I think the hardest thing for me is that men put themselves in the role of protectors; that’s our job. We try to help our wives with their pain, but I couldn’t help Carol. I felt so helpless and useless. It was a very, very difficult time
for me until I realized that there was no way in Hell I could help her. It took me about two or three years before I realized I couldn’t help her.”
Mike: “I still carry around a lot of baggage for so many reasons. Now that we are talking about it, I guess I felt omnipotent. I selected a medical specialty that gave me an illusion of being in control. I was used to running an operating room and things were done just so and were so rigid. And then I was so disappointed in the care that Brian got. First I was a physician, then an anesthesiologist and a pain reliever and I couldn’t do any of those things for Brian. I had the illusion that maybe if I could see that every little thing was done properly, he’d stand a chance of surviving. I still feel I could have done more and if I had, maybe. But who do I think I am? That’s part of my baggage.”
Joe: “We introduce our children to nature and it’s a positive thing. What’s wrong with that? We teach them to enjoy the backyard, bugs, growing things, fishing. He always used to tease me. I would go fishing with him, but I would never really fish. I introduced him to fishing. It was a very innocent thing. He bought a boat before he bought a car. Maybe if I hadn’t introduced him to that.”
“I was always concerned about him being on a small boat. One time there was an accident not involving Marc and I called him to kind of warn him. He said he’d heard about it and he thanked me. That’s all I could do. You second guess yourself, like Monday night quarterbacking. But at the end of the day, he was an adult, he had a wife, he loved the sea and that’s what took him.”
Bob: “Luckily I didn’t feel guilt. I didn’t think I had control over what happened to Michael. At Compassionate Friends we talked to people in similar situations. Half of them felt guilty because they didn’t have their child go through a bone-marrow transplant. The other camp said they felt guilty because they did. They couldn’t both be right, and that kind of unburdened us from our decision. It was a big help not to have the guilt to obscure the rest of the problems.”
Bruce: “Guilt? No, I never really experienced that. Only regrets one or two times that I should have done something differently after Howie was injured. Like I wish I had sat by his side every second of the thirty hours he survived in the hospital. I couldn’t feel guilt that I let him go off to school and most of the time didn’t know what he was doing. He was twenty-one, there was no reason for him to check in with us every few seconds. In listening to a lot of people speak at meetings and such, a lot of that guilt comes from a feeling they were judged by
God, that they were being punished for some inadequacy on their part. In my mind, I hear them and I sit there screaming quietly, ‘What kind of a God is this that goes after your child because of something you did wrong?’ This is not a God that I would ever accept, but then I’m not much of a believer.”
What of God? Have we lost whatever faith we may have had before the deaths of our children? Do we blame God? Do we continue to practice religion?
Bruce: “Having a strong belief in God is both a positive and a minus. Because if you’re like Barbara, who had a much stronger religious belief than me, you felt betrayed. You do what you’ve been brought up to do and therefore everything should be fine. When it’s not fine, another anchor is pulled from beneath you. If you don’t have that anchor going in, you can’t lose it. I went to temple on Yom Kippur, which falls right around when Howie died, and I saw all these people coming up and donating pledge money to the temple and telling of how they had this or that illness or a relative did and they prayed and did the right thing and everything turned out okay. I’m thinking, it doesn’t always turn out okay. Would these folks be praising God if their story ended with a death?”
Bob: “I went to Catholic school and was heavy into theology. After my son died, I decided they were full of shit. It just can’t happen this way. Somebody is wrong, and I’ve got the proof. When you read what various religions say about death, they all have diverse opinions. There’s no cohesive way to treat death. Even the mainstream religions don’t know. So, they can’t all be right.”
Joe: “I don’t believe what happened to Marc was written in the big book somewhere. I don’t believe it was destined. I used to think you were rewarded for doing good, but all that was turned upside down. I was very angry with a counselor at church. She said when we are born again we have a brand-new body. She quoted the pope. I said I just wanted my old son back.”
Cliff: “I accepted what happened. I never hated God. I was brought up with strong faith, and I was never taught that God owed me anything. Maddy wasn’t raised with that understanding of God, which was unfortunate. I wish she had been. I understood that if you were a good boy it didn’t mean you got presents from God and that helped me a lot.”
Mel: “I went to a rabbi and he couldn’t explain it. I went into a church and
found a bishop and he said he understood. He had lost a daughter. He said, ‘God wanted your daughter in heaven.’ That kept me docile for two years and then I got angry again.”
Tom: “I would have hit the bishop.”
We railed against God and we railed against formal institutions, we railed against the doctors who treated our children and we railed against society in general. We just didn’t care anymore, and much of that stony apathy has stayed with us over the years. Our priorities are forever changed.
Bob: “I had a tremendous distrust and reversal in my feelings about institutions. I even hated the public library for six months. I remember driving past a gas station, which had a person in an Easter bunny costume standing outside waving to passersby. I gave him the finger. The world just cannot continue as it was because it has changed irrevocably. I’ve totally withdrawn and become devoid of social niceties. Like if I walk into a store and hear people agonizing over the color of a fabric … should it be blue or green … I want to hit them over the head with a chair. One benefit is that I’ve learned to say no. People ask would I like to do this or that. I say no. It’s like having money in a bank account. But, I don’t have any emotional capital to give; it’s gone, it’s spent. I have to take care of me first. If that goes, I might as well be a vegetable.”
Don: “Lisa had a lot of doctors in the ten years or so she was sick. She was in maybe six or seven hospitals. I can only recall one doctor who was really compassionate. I could tell you weeks of stories of doctors who wouldn’t listen to us because we were laymen, but we had seen what she was going through for years.”
Bob: “That may be true, but we’re all angry at the medical profession because they couldn’t save our kids. Our anger centers on them.”
Mike: “There were many compassionate people around Brian, but to this date I still remember the faces of those who failed to ease his suffering. I’m angry that they ignored Brian the young man and instead focused on his horrible disease.”
Bruce: “There was a young neurosurgical resident who was involved in Howie’s case and with him at the end. Just minutes after Howie died, we met him leaving the elevator and laughing with some other interns. His expression
quickly changed when he saw us. I wondered how you become so callous so quickly, especially after handling the death of a young man, almost your contemporary.”