We have a newly acquired sensitivity to the pain of others. When others are bereaved, we seem to take it unto ourselves and make it part of our own existence. We have been there.
Mike: “I’m certain I have something to give to someone else who has lost children. Just being there for them. The day is worthwhile if I can take some of
my pain and suffering and turn it around and have someone else’s pain diminished.”
Tom: “I share that feeling with you.”
We look at the monuments and memorials that have risen in memory of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. We know that those monuments may help the non-bereaved to put in perspective what happened and reach their own “closure.” But for the parents and spouses, the sisters, brothers and children of the victims, monuments mean very little. Again, there is no closure.
Bruce: “Monuments are so other people can see the loss. The victims’ families go home with their loss.”
Mike: “I just returned from the funeral of a close friend who was murdered. I’ve been to other funerals since Brian died. This was really the first time I allowed myself to feel the deep loss. I was crying. This friend died before his time and that’s what happened to our children. I couldn’t stop crying in the church.”
Bob: “The families of the 9/11 victims had their grief capitalized on. Ours was not. In one instance, friends of my wife’s were staging a fund-raiser for a very sick man. He spoiled their plans by dying before they could hold it. So they simply changed the name of the event and carried on, business is business. It was totally mind-boggling the way they could write off a human being in that way.”
With time, we have even learned to enjoy ourselves … upon occasion. We laugh, we travel, we anticipate some event with hopeful expectation. We have resumed some of the activities we enjoyed prior to our children’s deaths, but without the same enthusiasm.
Irv: “I went back to tennis almost immediately. It was a distraction, going through the motions to keep occupied.”
Mel: “I play tennis. Someone came and got me after six months, which was a very long time for me.”
Don: “I enjoy myself now. But in the beginning I was miserable, burying myself in my work. There were months that went by that I don’t recall at all. But the next year, I started to play golf again … slowly … at first I couldn’t get my head into it.”
Mike: “I enjoy woodworking. I just immerse myself in the wood and the tools and the peace. It’s very peaceful.”
Joe: “I feel more at peace when I am with this group here. I enjoy my art class, the sculpture. If not for Marc, I would never have pursued that. I always thought I might want to do it, but Marc’s death pushed me to do it.”
Cliff: “I never stopped doing the things that made me happy … reading Sherlock Holmes, the Yankees. I don’t feel euphoria if they win, but I feel happy. A lot that happens to me is contingent on how Maddy is feeling. So, if she’s doing well one week, I can sort of ease up on myself and feel a bit better. Yesterday she found some Sherlock Holmes coins for me, and that meant a lot to me; she was thinking of me for a change and not wallowing in her grief. It was a good sign.”
Bruce: “I play golf. It’s a good escape and all consuming at the moment. But so much that was important before is not now. I used to be a sports nut, now I couldn’t care less about the teams. My concentration ability never came back to what it was.”
But we try to move on. Our families grow. Life improves and grows more complicated.
Bruce: “We were in the house and the neighborhood for thirty-two years. It held nothing but triggers of our past life. We took turns wanting to get out and said if we both reach that point at the same time then we would move. That was coupled with the fact that the housing market went sky high and our two surviving sons were living in Connecticut. Now we are there, too. It’s worked out positively because while we walk around the house and have all the same photos on the wall and the same memories in our heads, it’s not the place where everything happened.”
“We have a grandson nearby now. He’s adorable. You can love again. It’s something that just happens that you may not believe will ever happen again. You almost have to steel yourself against getting close to somebody again because you’ve been burned so badly. But if you were a loving person before, there’s every likelihood you’ll become a loving person again, in spite of your fears … especially when they put this little baby in front of you and he looks just like his father, our eldest son, at that age. You bond very quickly. But, of course, whatever I say there will be cases that prove me wrong.”
We know that our wives think a great deal about someday seeing our children again. We are not as absorbed in the thought as they are,
and we try to differentiate between reality and fantasy. But neither are we altogether willing to take a chance and rule out the possibility of a reunion with our sons and daughters.
Mike: “There’s that slim hope.”
Bob: “It’s a very strong pull. The son of an acquaintance of mine died. When I called to offer my sympathies the only words he could muster were, ‘Bob, please tell me … am I ever going to see him again?’ I said yes, because that was his main focus. He had to perpetuate that hope.”
Tom: “There is a spirit world, we just don’t deal with it everyday.”
Joe: “How do you measure that?”
Tom: “When I die, I don’t think I’ll see my son as I knew him as a human being. But I think we will connect spiritually. It’s funny, even now sometimes I don’t feel that I’ve lost Michael. I have a pretty good relationship with him. Certainly, I’ve lost him in the physical sense, but for that matter, I haven’t lost my father, my grandfather, my aunts, either.”
Joe: “You’re talking of what you remember of them.”
Mel: “I don’t talk to Andrea. I think of her. I really don’t think I’ll see her again. It’s a fantasy.”
Joe: “I can’t talk to Marc. The telephone has been disconnected.”
Bruce: “Will I see my child again? You want to keep that feeling that you’ll come across him or her to hug them or throttle them or both. You have to hang on to that crutch. It’s what stiffens your legs and your backbone in the morning, so that you can get out of bed.”
The Siblings Speak
O
ne of the first things people ask when they hear that our parents lost a child is, “Do they have any other children?” We are … “the other children.”
We have heard ourselves described as “forgotten mourners,” and in some respects that is so. When our siblings died, we were young adults. We were not tiny tots clutching the hand of a grown-up or weighted down by our fallen brother’s fire hat at his funeral. The world was too moved to notice that we, too, were in mourning.
As we stood shocked and trying to come to terms with the horror of our brother’s or sister’s death, we were admonished to “be strong for your parents.” We were expected to take on a mantle of maturity for which no one is prepared.
Wendy Barkin Sutkin (Wendy was twenty-five when her sister Lisa died):
“Everyone came to pay a condolence call and everyone said, ‘Make sure you are good for your parents.’ Hello, what about me?”
Tom Volpe (Tom was eighteen when his brother Michael died): “I was trying to keep it together as much as possible for the sake of my parents, who were just blindsided. I was going through a lot of emotions, but I tried to be the good son and keep it all together.”
Allegra Colletti (Allegra was twenty-eight when her brother Marc died): “I felt that I apparently didn’t exist.”
Barry Levine (Barry was twenty-six when his sister Andrea died): “You had the enormous responsibility of worrying about your parents, and they couldn’t worry about you. I remember telling them I loved them. I took walks around the block with my father. I saw my parents in a different light. They were emotional, crying a lot, I’d never really seen my father cry.”
Philip Goldstein (Philip was twenty-four when his brother Howard died): “No one ever came to me and said you need to do these things. I was their first-born son, I knew they needed me to do certain things.”
Some of us were oblivious to what anyone had to say.
Abbe Levine (Abbe was twenty-nine when her sister Andrea died): “I felt pretty numb and may not have been aware of expectations, but I did what I had to do to get through each day.”
It is not natural for a teen or young adult to lose a sibling. These were the people we laughed with, shared secrets with, the only ones who could see our family from our perspective.
Allegra: “Marc and I were less than two years apart and as close as you could get to being twins. We were connected, attached. My mother used to call us by the same blended name. I don’t remember reality before him. We always looked out for each other and I thought we would eventually grow old together.”
Tom: “He was twenty, I was eighteen, there was just the two of us. Everything is different. My grandmother still calls me by his name.”
Debi Cohen (Debi was thirty-seven and the mother of three children when her half-sister Jessica died): “Jessie could have been my daughter. She was like my fourth child in many ways. She spent her vacations with me and my children.”
We not only lost a sibling, we lost the parents we had known. In time they might find a “new normal,” but they would be forever changed.
Debi: “It was painful just to look at their faces, their eyes.”
Wendy: “I remember my mother saying she didn’t want to live anymore and it was awful hearing her say that. After that, my parents changed a lot. To this day they are different people, they look at things differently.”
Abbe: “While I was twenty-nine and knew my parents were human, I wasn’t prepared to see how vulnerable they were.”
Philip: “You are completely destabilized by seeing your parents unravel before your eyes. I don’t think it matters how old you are. You always assume your parents are there to be the stability in your life. For many years after Howie died, I saw my parents as sad, in pain and fragile. Over time, things got much better. Today I am amazed that they have found a new normal in their lives that enables them to enjoy travel, retirement, each other and their family.”
Our parents’ lives ground to a halt during the first year after the deaths. Yes, they went through the motions of daily living, but they did so almost as automatons. We on the other hand were expected to carry on with our lives much as before.
Wendy: “Lisa died three months before my wedding. I said I didn’t want my wedding, but my father broke down and said Lisa would have wanted it. No one was letting me not have it. They tried to make it still about me and my best day, but I could never watch my wedding video.”
Barry: “I got married several months after Andrea died. One of the first things my mother said was that I was not to change my wedding plans. In my wedding album my parents have blank stares. They wanted to be at the wedding for me, but they were there with heavy hearts.”
Tom: “I had been a happy-go-lucky kid a couple of months before, and then I started college three months after he died and I wasn’t anymore. They thought I should take some time before I started, but I wanted to go and not feel as if everything in life had just stopped. At school I wouldn’t talk about my brother. I turned to drugs for a lot of years. It was a tough time developmentally.”
In their too short lives our brothers and sisters had little time to develop the faults we who have gone on to live have often accumulated. Sometimes it seems that our siblings died pure … they were perfect.
And, even if they were not perfect, they oftentimes seem so in our parents’ view.
Allegra: “There can be a lot of revisionist history. It’s their version of things and maybe it’s not always accurate in my eyes.”
Tom: “They put him on a pedestal. All events that were not wonderful are simply erased and they only remember the good days. His life will always be written as full of promise, no mistakes … he will always be perfect. He wasn’t perfect before, brothers know things their parents don’t. We rewrite history.”
Debi: “No, I don’t feel that way. My parents have come right out and said that Jess wasn’t perfect.”
Barry: “I don’t think my mother and father put Andrea on a pedestal. They speak of her sense of humor and of highlights about her as a person and I’m okay with it.”
Much as our parents have the dilemma of how to answer when people ask, “How many children do you have?” so we, too, must deal with “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
Barry: “My decisions are made spontaneously depending on whom I am talking with. If I feel comfortable with the person I will tell them about my sister.”
Debi: “You self-monitor what you say depending upon the listener. Some people are very sensitive, and we monitor what we say to protect others.”
Allegra: “In the beginning it was important to me not to deny. I was so afraid that everyone would forget that Marc ever existed. I was adamant about telling people, even if was awkward for both them and me … too bad … that’s the reality, deal with it. Now it’s more like, why bother.”
Wendy: “I don’t go into it much. It’s easier to just say I had two sisters. People don’t really want to know.”
Tom: “But if you don’t mention them, you feel like you’re denying them.”
Philip: “At first I didn’t include Howie because I was ducking the follow-up questions. Now I enjoy talking about both my brothers. I also have discovered there are unfortunately many others like me who mourn the death of a sibling.”
Much as we do not share our parents’ compelling need to tell people about the child who died, not all of us go repeatedly to the cemetery. When we do go it is usually to mark a certain occasion or for the sake of our parents.
Wendy: “July seventh was my sister’s birthday. On that day I take my kids to the cemetery. My older daughter is named after Lisa. I bring them because I feel it’s important for them to know of her and her death and to know that I had a sister.”
Tom: “My parents are at the cemetery all the time and that’s great for them. It’s how they deal with it. But, I don’t want to remember him that way and I don’t think he’d want me to remember him that way.”
Allegra: “Instead, I go to the memorial stone by the water and I look out at the water where he died. Once it seemed as if the water and life went on and on forever.”
Barry: “It’s not the way I want to remember my sister. It works for my mom. She will go and sit and talk to my sister. I feel guilty about that, but it’s not for me. My connection is the memories I have.”
Guilt comes over us in other ways as well.
Wendy: “I found for quite a while I felt guilty about enjoying anything, like when I first got married. She wasn’t enjoying life. So there was a lot of guilt. You get over it. I don’t feel the same guilt today. That feeling of why am I here and she’s not took a year or two to fade away. It becomes an ache in your head instead of the center of everything.”
Tom: “Sometimes you wish you’d died and maybe they’d be less upset. You think all sorts of crazy things. Doesn’t every sibling go through that? But, over time you learn to live with the pain.”
Abbe: “I feel guilt or something like it that I don’t have much memory of my sister or a sense of connection. I wish I could find ways to keep her more alive within me but it has been twenty years.”
Philip: “Being a constant mourner is exhausting. It made me feel guilty at times that I was dishonoring Howie’s memory by coping and moving on with my life. But, I had to.”
Being young adults, we all had our own circle of friends. Some of us were married, engaged or had significant others. Some of these people understood what we were going through while others did not. We learned to take each situation in stride.
Debi: “I wound up dropping a lot of my closest friends because they disappointed me. They weren’t there for me physically or emotionally. It may be that
they didn’t know what to do or say, but I’m not tolerant of that. Previous to Jessie, I had not been tested as a friend that way, but I’d like to think I’d have made that special effort to be compassionate.”
Barry: “My wife Patty and I were engaged when Andrea died. Patty was closer to my sister than I was in some ways. They had a certain bonding. Patty is very emotional and she was terrific for my parents and very supportive for me. She was with me when I learned of Andrea’s death and she mourned with me.”
Abbe: “My husband and I were married three months when Andrea died. He was supportive, but it’s not easy to live with someone who is sad so much of the time. I know that now, but I wasn’t so aware of how hard it was for him at the time.”
Wendy: “I was engaged at the time. He tried to be there for me, but he didn’t know how. I think I just accepted it because I didn’t know what else to do. I would cry at night and not be open about it.”
Allegra: “My then fiancé didn’t call for four days after Marc died. He did come to the funeral, but he was clueless, emotionally unavailable. He said he didn’t know what to do and didn’t want to intrude.”
Allegra’s fiancé could offer no further explanation for his reaction. Eventually, the couple went their separate ways. However, his inability to show compassion reminded Allegra that years earlier she, too, had been of little comfort when a friend’s mother died.
Allegra: “I remembered how as a teenager I had been horrible to a friend when her mother died. I didn’t understand what was happening. But when my brother died, she was there for me, calling people, inviting them to the funeral. I said not to, but she said you tell people and let them decide for themselves. Later I apologized to her for not being there for her when her mother died.”
Tom: “At school I wouldn’t talk about my brother. I was an escapist.”
Barry: “A few months after Andrea died, my parents set up a memorial fund in her name at a children’s hospital. On what would have been her fortieth birthday, my mother asked me to send letters to my friends regarding the fund. I was disappointed with the contributions we received and I had words with some of my friends. I wanted them to acknowledge Andrea’s life. I didn’t want to hear excuses. I wanted their contribution to mean more to them than it did … most of them had never met Andrea. Today part of me understands their reluctance to
give, but it was never the monetary value, it was an acknowledgment of a cause in my life that has a very deep meaning. Today it still hurts. It just sticks with you.”
Wendy: “Some relationships got stronger, the ones with the people who were there for me. I stopped speaking to some who weren’t there.”
Common wisdom has it that people usually don’t begin to face up to their own mortality until middle age. In our lives, we’ve had to deal with it far earlier. Sometimes we worry that what happened to them could happen to us.
Tom: “You question your own mortality in a way. It’s like watching yourself die. It was my first experience with death, and our lives had been so intertwined. It’s the bigger picture of life and death you’re dealing with. My brother died in a car accident. I don’t think he was being reckless. We don’t know what really happened. For quite a few years, he and I had both been daredevils and took risks.”