Phyllis: “At the time of Andrea’s death, I had been thinking of leaving my job. When she died, that was the end of it. I couldn’t imagine going for an interview or changing my lifestyle in any way. My expectations for myself dropped.”
Audrey: “We can’t seem to move forward or to make a major change.”
Our immobility in our redefined lives spilled over into an inability to plan ahead, particularly for the long term. For years, we did not want to think of the future. With time, that inertia has dissolved somewhat, but probably we will always have difficulty trying to look ahead with any degree of certainty. Look what happened years back when we planned for the future.
Audrey: “The joy and passion of anticipating what is going to be is gone.”
Lorenza: “You really learn to live one hour at a time. To this day, I don’t like to make plans. Everything is spur of the moment. It can only be like that. Even when we made a trip to Europe, it was on short notice because what if I get up tomorrow morning and I’m in such a state that I don’t feel like doing anything
that I had planned to do. So, now we don’t plan. If someone says, go, we kind of go with the wind, so to speak. We don’t make commitments.”
Ariella: “When I have expectations, I set myself up for disappointment. Now, with time, I find that when I don’t expect anything, I am open to surprises.”
Once upon a time we were rather childlike in our love of life; now it is hard to recall what being light-hearted felt like.
Lorenza: “The child within me died. Anything a child does—the happy singing, dancing, laughter—was gone. Even today they’re not there. I now just exist. I fill up my day with as many activities as possible. I go through the motions of my daily routine. Even my laughter is superficial.”
We carried the guilt of our early bereavement into our redefined lives, some more than others. Our families had always been our foremost concern and our greatest source of joy. We reveled in our motherhood. We were so proud of what we had accomplished, and we were all “good” mothers. How could we be punished in this terrible way?
Barbara E.: “I felt like I was a failure because I couldn’t protect Brian. I didn’t want to take care of anything. I even got rid of my house plants. I believed I would kill everything I came in contact with.”
That terrible burden of guilt hung heavily on us for a long time, and only began to abate gradually, as eventually we were able to look at the situation more rationally.
Ariella: “From the time you’re a child, you’re told you’ll be punished if you do something bad. We have suffered the ultimate punishment. But eventually we realized we couldn’t all have been evil and cruel in our lives. Look at all those parents who lost children in the World Trade Center on September 11; they weren’t all evil and cruel.”
Maddy: “My husband said if people were punished in such a way by God, you’d be walking down the street and see kids dying. That’s when I was able to put it into perspective.”
Audrey: “Irv and I constantly searched. What did we do that was so bad?”
Perhaps the most painful change any of us have experienced is the inability to trust in love. We have grown afraid to feel closeness for fear
that the one we love so dearly will be taken from us. We know it could happen anytime and in any place. We hear the screech of a car’s brakes, the siren of an ambulance, a phone rings in the middle of the night and we cringe. There is an immediate flashback and our hearts race.
Phyllis: “I’m afraid to get too close, never wanting to be hurt again.”
Barbara G.: “I’ve tried to build a wall around my emotions. I was hurt once and I will not be hurt again. Although it has been years since Howard died, I live in fear of catastrophe striking again.”
Maddy: “Being afraid to feel close to people is something a lot of us felt. I didn’t like meeting new people for a while, because I might learn to care about them and I could lose them. My husband even quit the synagogue because most of the people were getting older and we were going to a lot of funerals. He didn’t want to keep watching people die.”
Our faith in religion has been tested and in some cases trampled with the deaths of our children. We each travel our own road in regard to spirituality. But we all wonder what kind of Supreme Being would allow a young person to die before they have even begun to experience life? So, while some of us do continue to attend religious services within our own faiths, we have allowed distrust to enter and mingle with our spirituality. We have too many questions that the clerics of all of our faiths seem unable to answer to our satisfaction.
Barbara G.: “I am saddened by the loss of God in my life, but not nearly as much as by the loss of my son.”
Carol: “I haven’t forgiven God yet.”
Barbara E.: “If you were the type of person who did all the right things, you thought God would protect you.”
Lorenza: “Now when I am in church, I analyze every word in the songs. The words are so painful, songs like ‘Walk Through the Waters.’ Where was God when my son was drowning in the waters? For a while, my husband searched in literature and in religion, trying to find an answer as to why something as horrific as Marc’s death could have occurred. He has stopped searching. He found no satisfying answers.”
Audrey: “Entering a temple and hearing the music dissolves me to tears. I
now go only for the Yizkor service, which is the prayer for the dead, and for Jessica’s Yahrzeit, which marks the anniversary of her death. It conjures up memories of when we were an intact family and Jessie was sitting by my side in temple, her head resting on my shoulder.”
Ariella: “I never found comfort in traditional religion, but my spirituality has preserved me throughout my grief. My parents lost most of their families in the Holocaust. They lost all faith in a religious God and I grew up in an antireligious atmosphere, but with a spiritual belief in the world. My relationship with God is spiritual, not religious. I felt I could connect with a higher power on a one-to-one level. I was never angry at God because I didn’t think there is a God who decides that people will suffer and die because of him. I always thought that life is predestined and that we all fulfill our destinies. It has helped me cope with my grief.”
In our new skins, we try to differentiate between the religion and the people who are the messengers of that religion. We have found hypocritical rabbis and priests who simply could not understand our feelings and fears. But, then again, there are those who have found a strong belief in God to be very supportive.
Rita: “It’s neither the people nor the going to church, it’s the belief. I go to set time aside to have a time and place for myself. And now the stakes have changed. Now God has our kids and I have to believe my kid is okay. It’s very important for me to believe. I have to work on my religion. The more I believe and the better I believe, then I’ll see my son again and I’m connected to him.”
Audrey: “I like the traditions, the rituals, but now it just makes me cry. It’s a reminder not only of Jess, but of my dad. You sit there and wonder. Did you ever think life was going to turn out this way?”
In the Jewish religion, the tradition following a death is to sit in mourning, or “shiva” as it is called, with friends and family for a week following the burial. In the Christian religions, the burial follows several days in which friends and relatives visit and console the bereaved at a wake or at the funeral home.
The expectation in both schools of thought is that the bereaved will have opportunity to talk about the deceased. We were not for the most part consoled; rather we sat numbly as if spectators ourselves. For most
of us, it has caused us to redefine our religious practices along with our shaken beliefs.
Phyllis: “I found sitting shiva to be an obnoxious social affair. In fact, when my mother died recently I told my brother I would not do it, and I didn’t.”
Maddy: “Because Neill died on the way to Atlantic City, some people actually thought it appropriate to discuss gambling at the shiva.”
All of us placed great value on education for our children before their deaths. Now we wonder why? How can we have stressed the need for them to have good study habits, to strive to do well in school when it all came to naught? For those of us who are teachers, the dilemma was particularly difficult.
Lorenza: “As a teacher, how could I tell children to work hard? Why did I insist that Marc do well in school? Why did I insist that he stay home and study instead of going out to play? I see my son’s diploma hanging on the wall, and I think of how he memorized and studied to become a marine biologist. It hurts. I have this guilt about how many times I had him stay home to ‘do the right thing.’”
Rita: “I used to think that getting an education was paramount. Now I wonder why I had my son waste so much time on studies he never got to use.”
Even those who aren’t teachers wonder why we stressed the importance of a good education.
Maddy: “Now I would tell them to go out and have a good time.”
There was of course anger in our new selves. In many cases and many ways, we were consumed with harshness and resentment. Anger was one of the few emotions we could still feel deeply. Often, in our redefined existence, we were insensitive to those around us. We were so wrapped up in our own sorrow that we were sometimes unable to grieve for older family members who passed away in the years following the deaths of our children. At times, it made us seem uncaring and unmoved. Our anger wore many guises.
Carol: “I was very angry, and hearing people talk about what I considered to be trivial problems made me even angrier. I no longer cared about the little things in life and I did not worry about trifles.”
Barbara E.: “It took me almost five years to relax enough to talk and joke
with my colleagues at work. It took so long because I was stubborn … more like in a rage. I couldn’t bear their laughter; their families were intact and without tragedy. I found it difficult to be happy for them if they were celebrating special moments in their lives. I did this openly and without shame, as I was trying to protect myself from further hurt. In later years, I felt badly about the way I had acted.”
Phyllis: “I retreated into a shell and became very cold and numb. I thought my bad luck would continue in all things.”
Maddy: “I thought I would be immune to any small annoyances. I didn’t think anything bad could happen. One of the first things I bought for myself after Neill’s death was a blouse I ordered that came in the mail. It was the wrong size. I thought, ‘How could this happen? I’m not supposed to get the wrong size. Everything is supposed to be right for me now because of the way I’ve suffered.’ I fought with them and made a big deal of it all. It was idiotic.”
In the early years, redefining ourselves meant giving up all the things of everyday, routine life … . there was no longer any such thing as everyday, routine life. Of course, the days went on as they always had, but now they seemed to stretch on interminably.
Ariella: “How can you do anything? My husband and I gave up music, television, movies, tennis, dancing, sexual intimacy and ‘civilian’ friends. We were simply in despair.”
Rita: “I could not dance for years. All hobbies were meaningless. Men’s departments in the stores put me in a tailspin.”
Carol: “The list of things I can no longer do in my new life? I cannot go to places I went with Lisa. I cannot look through family pictures. I cannot go past her apartment. I cannot go through her things. I cannot go to the cemetery very often.”
All of us found that foods and items of clothing that were our children’s favorites became terrible triggers of our grief. Because we were the nurturers, the ones who fed our children, clothed them, and tended to their every need before they went away, we were left to cry over a cereal box, a chocolate bar or a plate of Chinese food.
Audrey: “For the first couple of years, trying to shop for food or clothing would render me nauseous. Seeing things Jess either liked or disliked caused me
such anguish that I often ran out of the store. Chinese food, Jess’s favorite, has become taboo for me. The thought of eating it without her is too painful.”
Maddy: “I could not go to the supermarket without bursting into tears. There were his favorite breakfast cereals staring me in the face. The unusual soda flavors he liked mocked me. I bought pineapple soda, forcing it down my throat, trying to develop a taste for it because he could no longer enjoy it. I tried to replicate the low-budget meals he learned to make at college. I usually burned them as I cried, but we ate them anyway.”
Barbara E.: “I would go to the deli, order a pound of turkey breast and say, ‘Did you know my son just died?’ I needed everyone to know. At the supermarket, I stood in the aisle in front of the sports drinks and cried hysterically. People would avoid the aisle.”
Lorenza: “I would see a young man wearing a cap or ripped jeans the way my son wore them and I would go close to see if maybe that was my son.”