The Unimaginable
Tonight is graduation at the high school nearby. All through our dinner we saw grads in caps and gowns walking by. Parents, trying to find parking, nervously carrying flowers and hurrying to find seats in the stadium. I thought about how many years would pass before I’d be making the same walk. I thought about how proud I would be. And I remembered my own graduation, how my own parents must have felt. And then I remembered something else.
The night I graduated, I wore not only my cap and gown, but a necklace. It was a gold heart. It had a picture in it, a picture of one of my friends, and it was given to me by her mother to wear on the night of my graduation and, what should have been her graduation. She had cancer. She died when I was in 11th grade. Her mother gave three of her friends the same necklace to wear so that she could be with us on that night. And that evening she sat in the audience and listened to her daughter as her daughter was acknowledged at the ceremony.
I remember a lot of things from my friend’s funeral - being surprised that our school principal was there, feeling like the person doing the eulogy didn’t really know her, feeling oddly disconnected. What I remember the most clearly though is seeing her mother laying on her casket and sobbing at the cemetery. She had to be pulled away. Her daughter had died.
Children die. They do. This is something I have tried to both understand and deny since becoming a mom. I wasn’t sure if it was normal in the beginning, but I used to always picture the different ways my Sam might die. I also saw vivid scenarios in which he was abducted right before my eyes and I couldn’t run fast enough to catch the abductor, or I would see myself sitting by his hospital bed holding his hand as he suffered from some horrible disease that I could not cure. I wasn’t sure if it was a common thing, but then I realized it had to be. As parents, how can we not constantly envision the unimaginable when we know how completely and utterly incapacitated it would make us? When we are completely convinced that we could not go on in the horrible event - and horrible isn’t even enough of a word - that something might happen to our child, how could it not always be in our minds?
When I share my feelings with my husband, when I get worked up and upset over just the possibility that something might happen to one of our boys one day, he tells me it won’t. It won’t happen to our children. But it happens to someone’s. It does. Someone’s child dies. Someone’s is stolen, leaving them to ache and wonder where they are, what is happening to them. Someone’s child gets sick, as they have to look on and know that they cannot help. My friend’s mother had to do both - she watched her daughter be sick for years, and then she watched her die. And then she went on. I don’t know how. I don’t know how one doesn’t just curl up on the ground and stay there, whimpering.
I’m sorry, because I know this post is just awful. But I also suspect that if you are still reading that it is because you already know all of this because you feel it too - the threat. And I think in order to keep functioning we sometimes just have to face it and look at it, and just let it be there, because pretending it’s not just isn’t going to work. We know it’s there because every so often we’ll see that it happens to someone else. We’ll be standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes and hearing Pomp and Circumstance in the distance when an indescribable image will flash into our mind, one of a mother holding her daughter’s casket and refusing to let it go.
I can hear the cheering crowd at the graduation ceremony. I see myself, years from now, sitting in the stands and watching one of my baby boys walk across the stage as I try to remain composed. But I also wonder if anyone graduating tonight wore a heart necklace, a gold one with a picture of a beautiful smiling girl on it. I wonder if there was a mother in the audience, watching a ceremony that should have been for her child too.
There is a truly insightful and lovely essay written on this topic if this is something that rings true for you - Holding Baby Birds, found in Brain, Child - Fall 2007
Amber also posted about this recently.
What a heartbreaking post…but what a wonderful way for your friend’s mom to keep her memory alive. I just just can’t even imagine….
oh my goodness… this was so sad. I just went through a graduation of two of “my” kids and am dealing with a lot. Suddenly the message here really struck me…
Yes- I know what you are saying too well and will those thoughts away as it’s quiet at night and I think so much about how I never want to lose my children and want them to always be safe. This pregnancy, oh it can’t hurry up fast enough, I’ve known of four miscarriages- early and very late- since I’ve gotten pregnant and I can’t bear to hear about one more. I don’t want to be that Mom.
Steph
I’m sure I already mentioned that my niece was murdered a few years ago. She was missing for two years before we found out what happened. It is the weirdest thing. I am amazed at how strong my sister is. How she has managed to cope. I can honestly say that I do think she has lost her mind a bit. I don’t intend to sound rude but she is my sister and I know her. And I know that sometimes when she acts a bit strange it’s because of what happened. Because it’s always there but in order to get up everyday and live life she has to be a little crazy. We lost Erin before I was married. I don’t think I fully grasped my sister’s loss until I had A. I couldn’t relate. I mean, I’d lost my niece, who was only seven years younger than me. A girl who I was closer to than I am to my siblings. But once I became a mother, I could understand what it would be like to lose a child. I try not to think about it too much or dwell but it does come to my mind. Perhaps more because that kind of loss has been such a present thing in our lives. I think it is something we all need to think about sometimes. Because like it or not it is a real possibility. And I think accepting that makes us better appreciate every single day that we have to spend with our kids.
Imagine it? Yeah… I imagine it. But I think I am less hit by the dreams and images since I have taken more care to stay away from media that reports and portrays hurt and dying children, I gotta do it for my own sanity. I am also less obsessed with losing a kiddo since our brush with the Pearl girl last year. Or I should say MULTIPLE brushes with death. I had to really, honestly consider how I would survive her loss, and for me the answer was simply that I had other children to live for too.
Then again… when I do my strength training or am running and I feel like I don’t want to finish, or that I am too tired… I imagine that I am holding one of my children and someone is chasing us, or we are out-running disaster. Then I light a fire and finish the run at a sprint.
I agree that you have to look the possibilities in eye. Face them. ACcept that they MAY happen, and not just to somebody else’s babies. Admit that there are SOME THINGS in life that you cannot predict or prevent.
And then move on. Because living life in fear of death isn’t living. Living life BECAUSE of death’s inevitability makes it all the more exciting…
I’ve certainly imagined the what-ifs. I know my children are mortal and subject to illnesses, accidents, and evil.
They don’t know it, necessarily. All four-year-old boys are made of steel.
My cousin’s six-month-old daughter died while co-sleeping. So I stopped co-sleeping, immediately, out of sheer fear. I’ll never do it again. One of my daughter’s classmates got cancer. Any time one of the kids would have a weird bruise and complained of feeling tired, I thought of the boy.
And I still think of the friend who died in a car accident two days before senior year. A lot of us grew up that day. His parents were at the graduation, too.
I think the lesson is to embrace every day, with all it’s joys and sorrows. It’s life. It’s beautiful, it’s ugly, it’s a gift.
if i think about it for too long i can get myself so worked up and freaked out. if i let the wondering go on inside my head for longer than a minute i have to do algebra in my head or sing a song really loudly to dislodge the vision. it’s too scary to contemplate and yet i do sometimes let my my mind go there. and i wonder how many tranquilizers i’d have to be given before i would calm down if something ever happened to one of my kids.
a parent having to bury a child is just so wrong.
Excuse me, I’m just going to go in the other room to check on all of the kids…
Hey… I got here from Sari’s site and read this post and just sat back and thought, “Huh!” Because something really similar happened to me not long ago.
I posted about it in my own blog. Basically I just got completely wrecked overhearing a woman at the salon tell the stylist that her son had died of cancer earlier that year. Obviously it’s something parents can relate to on a deep, deep level. How else could a story like that have affected me that much and I didn’t even know the woman or her son. But I could glimpse the kind of pain that poor woman must’ve been feeling and the tremendous amount of loss just strangled me.