Writing through sorrow
For years I have lived the gypsy life of a military wife, moving from state to state, region to region, finding new friends, carving new communities for a season, then moving on to the next place. We had been in Washington more than three years and it was beginning to feel like home. My oldest had just moved out on his own and even though I still had eight children at home, and daily life was more or less the same as it had always been, it felt like a page was turning in my story.
I have an incredibly distinct memory of a particular cold night in February. I was driving home from a usual day full of shuffling all of my people to all of their activities. I had, myself, come from a book discussion group that was powerfully impacting my life in ways I hadn’t imagined, the new highlight of my week. Life felt full, but really good. I remember exactly where I was, driving past the city library, when I was struck so profoundly with the simplest of thoughts: I am so blessed.
The thought was so simple, so mundane, banal even, but it just felt so incredibly powerful. It seemed like almost everyone we were close to was in the midst of some sort of struggle: marriages, children, finances, health issues, big decisions. But not us. Our life was perfect. I almost cried at the thought. How was I so blessed? How did I deserve this life: my lovely supportive husband, nine healthy children, a beautiful community, the loveliest friends, financial stability? I had it all. I didn’t deserve this life and yet it was my life all the same! That night, as our youngest, Killian, lay sleeping peaceful in his crib near our bed, I quietly told my husband about this reflection. I fought back the tears again just to retell it. Our little life was just so incredibly perfect. We were so blessed.
The next evening I found my son dead in his bed. We had laid him down for the night after feasting for his brother’s belated birthday celebration. I snuck into my room a few hours later to put away the special pillar candle on the chipped china saucer that we always brought out for family celebrations. Keeping the room mostly dark, I tiptoed past his bed to the bookshelf, careful not to wake him. I glanced over at his bed; he was curled in the corner that he always slept in, snuggled up peacefully on his little pillow. Something caught my eye though, and something just didn't seem right at all. He seemed too small. I stepped closer. He seemed too still. I gently laid my hand on his back, the way you often do with infants, to feel their warm backs rise and fall with breath, and I felt nothing. I pressed my hand more firmly onto his back, and still there was nothing. No breath. No warmth. His body was cold and still. My perfectly healthy, beautiful, twenty month old son was dead in his crib.
I screamed and scooped him up into my arms. His body felt like a sandbag and his head fell heavy onto my left shoulder. I held him close and ran down the hall to my husband. Chaos ensued. My husband was shouting in disbelief. My other children were screaming. Killian’s body was limp, his eyes were dark and shadowed. His dark tinged lips haunted me for days after. My son was dead.
I paced on the frosty back porch while the 911 dispatcher asked a thousand questions. My husband did CPR on the hallway floor, bringing color back to Killian’s face for a moment but bringing no life back to his body. I reached out to my priest and my best friend and collapsed at the prayer table in the corner of the living room. I knelt praying, ‘Jesus I trust in you, ‘ over and over and over again. I don’t know what I was praying for; I didn’t know what I needed. My brain didn’t know what to do; but my soul knew I needed Jesus and my soul was praying, ‘Jesus, I trust in you’. I never saw the paramedics working on my son, trying to force life back into his body in the dining room right behind me. I didn’t see them carry his lifeless body out to the ambulance.
When Father arrived he encouraged me to reach out to another good friend and the news of my son, now officially pronounced dead, spread through our greater community like wildfire. Killian’s Godfather called and came over to be with us. Some teens came to be with my older son. Members of our parish arrived and sat with my children, holding them, hugging them, in shock with them. My teens called their oldest brother and their grandparents who were all too far away to come. My husband’s commander and his unit’s chaplain crowded into our cold downstairs living room. The officer stationed at our front door began turning people away because the house was so full. I felt like a ghost in my own house. Nothing felt real and everything felt cold. There were strangers everywhere, asking questions, taking photographs, taking notes, whispering to one another. I wondered what they were saying. I wondered what they thought of me. I wandered from room to room, nodding answers to the presumably routine questions. Emotionally I was numb, I couldn’t even cry. Eventually I laid down on my daughter’s couch, clutching the rosary she had handed me, and tried to sleep.
After what felt like hours and felt like only moments, we were finally invited into the ambulance to say goodbye. I sat with my husband and my priest and my dead son in disbelief that this was now my life, my new reality. My son was dead and there was not a thing to be done to change that, it was just a new fact of my life. I still felt more numb than sad, but tears finally came now for the first time that night, rolling slowly down my cheeks, with the acceptance of the reality that his life was certainly gone. Killian’s body lay before me on the stretcher, empty of his soul. I wanted to hold him but the paramedic wouldn’t allow it, so I brushed my hand over his face, trying to close his eyes like you see people do in the movies. It didn’t work; and I didn’t want to even touch him really if I couldn’t hold him. His body was only an empty shell that had once contained my son. Father wore his stole over his jacket and read some Bible verses and a blessing over Killian’s body, sprinkling him with holy water. I touched Killian’s face before exiting the ambulance. He was so cold.
We came back into the house, the emergency professionals dispersing, the detectives heading back to their cars, and our friends hugging their goodbyes. Father blessed my bedroom where Killian had died, and gave the names of two women who would organize meal delivery for our family. They would call in the morning. “Otherwise,” he said, “you’ll have more food than you know what to do with”. I nodded, in numb obedience, grateful for someone to tell me what was happening because I felt nothing and knew nothing. I was sure he was exaggerating. He wasn’t. When everyone was finally gone, I got into the shower and sobbed until I couldn’t cry anymore. By the grace of God we all slept soundly that night.
When I woke the next morning my house was already bustling. My oldest daughter had been up early making sure the other kids had breakfast, and already coffee and donuts had been delivered by generous friends. There was no shortage of food. When I stepped out of my bedroom, two friends were standing in my hallway analyzing my busy calendar. Food came pouring in: lunch, snacks, Valentine’s treats, pizzas, and oranges, so many oranges. Flowers and cards came pouring in, my dining room looked like a flower shop. People came pouring in, bringing with them hugs and tears and more treats and more coffee. My daughter and my friends were organizing it all. As the weeks unfolded, every imaginable, and unimaginable, need was met before we could even suspect it was a need at all. I sat on the couch each day, snuggling my baby’s blanket, sharing stories with friends, laughing, crying, and clutching a relic of the Holy Cross. Out of town family flew in and were hosted and cared for and loved on by our local friends. Meals were delivered daily, not only to my family, but to the families of Killian’s godparents and to our dearest friends who had known Killian the best and were also grieving the loss. The generosity seemed endless. We were beginning to understand what a true community was, what being truly loved by a community feels like.
It was probably a week after he died that everything started feeling fuzzy already. The details were incomplete, my memory was jumbled. There were versions, feeling almost scripted at that point, of what had happened that I was sharing over and over with each new visitor. I had repeated them so many times that I felt detached, like I was telling someone else's story. I began to realize that some details, some of the notable memories, were being etched in stone and the others, important but untold, were silently fading away. So I grabbed a blank journal and I began to write. I had always loved to write but had rarely found the time in recent years. Suddenly it seemed I could do nothing else. I couldn’t focus on reading or knitting or homeschooling my kids or cooking for my family. Eating was even difficult, but writing never was. The real life happening right in front of me was the only thing that mattered, and I needed to remember it. So I began writing to chronicle the days, knowing that otherwise I would never remember all the details with any accuracy. I wrote to preserve the memories. I wrote to document myself, to document my crazy and to preserve my sanity. I wrote to keep everything real. I had an influx of new and uncharted territory in my life; I was constantly discovering and rediscovering; and I wrote about it all. I wrote about rekindling a love for poetry and classical music and romanticism. I wrote about the friends who sat with us in grief and in joy and in every feeling in between. I wrote about the strangeness of feeling ‘okay’. I wrote the dark and ugly details of the days I wasn’t feeling ‘okay’. The words flowed freely and the act of putting my experience into words was cathartic.
It was hard to begin regular life again after being held so dearly. It was hard to find the paths that kept us close to God but put us back into our earthly lives as well. The next year was speckled with additional significant tragedies, but that next year was abounding with grace as well. On the first anniversary of his death, I felt good, really quite content, definitely not too sad. It felt like everyone around me was reaching out, reminding me that “anniversaries are hard” and that they would be praying for my family. I had so many of these messages that I began to feel nervous. Would this day be harder than it seemed it would be? Would I suddenly be transported back to my darkest days of sorrow? We planned a dinner with Killian’s godparents; everyone was telling us not to be “alone”. God had other plans though and dumped a foot and a half of snow on our little farm that weekend. Alone is all we could be, and it was lovely. We set the table with his photo and his baptism candle and piles of pizzas and sweet treats. My kids kicked off the ‘remembering’ with, “Remember all those oranges?” “Remember how Father used to make orange juice with us every time he came over?” “Remember all those treats the homeschoolers made us on Valentines’ day?” We reminisced for hours of all the ways that people loved us and how sweet and silly our Killian was. We weren’t really sad at all; we were loved.
With distance I can look back and see that God had laid a foundation in our lives. We had allowed God in, had welcomed him into our daily lives in tangible ways. As we became involved in our parish, we simultaneously began intentionally adding more prayers and more liturgy into our lives. We sought out friendships and fellowship with good and holy friends. We feasted and fasted through the liturgical year in community with others. God prepared us, made us a lovely little nest, and then God allowed our sweet baby to die. He caught us when our stable world began to shatter before our eyes. He held us close for a bit, then tucked us into that cozy nest surrounded by a loving community of friends. God had prepared us to bear this cross.
I’m certainly grateful for all the friends who walked through grief with me, who continue to brave that journey with me. I’m grateful for the friend who patiently bore the brunt of misplaced anger, the one who let me ugly cry on her couch, and the one who spoke hard truths I needed to hear even when I was really sad. There were many hard days, many wild emotions, and many kind and patient friends. I’d indeed be lost without their companionship. But most especially I am grateful for the comfort that writing brought and continues to bring to me. I am an external processor and I was processing something that shook me to the core. I was processing something that was so unique and so hard that there were increasingly few people I felt I could really even talk to about certain emotions I was feeling. I had started journaling to remember; I filled page after page with the details I could remember, and it was balm to my soul to have it written down. But I kept journaling to slow down time, to stay present and to grab a hold of my thoughts so that I could be more aware of them. Words made the feelings more tangible, more legitimate, and more real.
I am grateful for the words I wrote into all those journals, sometimes feverishly, sometimes drowsily, sometimes with tears, sometimes with boundless joy. I’m in awe of how aware and curious I was of everything happening around me and all that was stirring in my heart, both the beautiful and the ugly. My curiosity was insatiable and my awe of the reality happening around me was infinite. Some days there was joy and passion, shouting praise to the Heavens. Some days there was confusion at the sudden onset of tears again when I had thought I was ‘fine’. Some days I wrote reluctantly out of an unspoken duty to my future self. Some days I copied meaningful and impossibly relevant stanzas of poetry or song lyrics. Some days I just wrote angry prayers to God. I can look back and read some entries and it is hard to imagine that some of those lovely and poetic thoughts were really my own. I can also look back and read entries so regrettably ugly and angry and wild that I barely recognize myself as their author. The words become the proof of the reality of these feelings which would sometimes feel ethereal if they hadn’t been documented. The words become the proof of my very existence when I feel lost and lonely.
Without the written words as my proof, the memories alone tend to present as neat and tidy images. The memories alone are proper and rational and well behaved. Without the words as proof, I can convince myself that my grief probably actually followed some predictable variation of that cycle of grief you learn in Psych 101, that I was probably very sad more often than I remember, and that the peace I remember having was certainly an illusion brought on by the shock of the tragedy. Without the words as proof, I would never believe how much I laughed and loved in those early days after he died. I wouldn’t believe how many generous friends were coming in and out of our front door. I wouldn’t remember accurately how I swooned over a poem or a piece of music, or how intensely I was overcome with joy while kneeling before the blessed sacrament at a time when I should have logically been overcome with grief. I wouldn’t believe that I didn’t cry the night he died until I entered the ambulance. I wouldn’t believe the frightening intensity of the sadness I felt when I laid crumpled on the floor on All Souls Day and sobbed until I could barely breathe. I wouldn’t believe how desperately I once craved the touch of a cold marble gravestone to my cheek. I simply wouldn’t believe my own memories or the intensities of my emotions; but the words make it all real. The words are my proof of the profound existence of the unimaginably hard and the impossibly beautiful. The words are proof that those two things, the hard and the beautiful, the suffering and the grace, are concurrent and are inseparable.
Our pastor, who suffers with ALS, is known to respond to the ‘how are you’ questions with “I am blessed.” I had always admired this. I saw this cheerful response as a stoic overcoming of the pain, overcoming the fear. I saw this as a mind game of sorts in which he would convince himself daily that everything was okay when it really wasn’t. It was only after Killian died that I felt ‘blessed’ in a way that I finally understood what Father must truly mean with his reply; I felt blessed more powerfully because the blessing was concurrent with suffering, not in spite of it. The night before Killian died I had been brought to tears with the recognition of my own blessings. This was a graced moment indeed, because already on the first evening after the night he died, I was overcome again with the same feeling. Over the coming months my gratitude for the blessing and for the suffering would continue to grow beyond what I could have imagined possible.
My son is dead. Also, my son resides in Heaven. I am immensely more happy for his reward than I am sad for my loss, and yet the peace still doesn’t always quite make sense to me. I miss him, but I delight in sending him on intercessory errands to Jesus with my prayer intentions. Grief is a constant contradiction. It doesn’t go the way you think it should. It’s not cyclic, it’s not linear, and it just doesn’t behave. It also doesn’t stand alone, grief gets itself all mixed up with our other emotions. But with faith, we can unite our grief with the sufferings of Christ and our blessings become so entwined with the grief that the two become inseparable. Together they can overcome the other emotions and exist together for our sanctification. There are no saints who haven’t suffered, and looking forward to joining them one day in Heaven, I am grateful for the gift of a heavy cross. These sufferings, these blessings, and these words are for my sanctification.
"Sorrow" by Christolakis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
