Author: Sheila Quirke

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Guest Post: Forgetting to Grieve

I am happy to feature the words of Kathy Mathews, a fellow grieving mom, as a guest poster.  Kathy is a blogger at ChicagoNow, and is approximately 5,327 times craftier than me.  You can find her words at Quilting! Sewing! Creating! here, or hang with her on Facebook here. I am grateful she is sharing her son with us today.  

My infant son Matthew was born with congenital heart disease and died four days after he was born.  He died on the operating table and for a very long time I felt I had died right along with him. What made it even harder is that not too many people had known him, shared any memories of him or even understood how a tiny baby could leave such a vast hole in my life.

His death set off a ripple effect in my life and the lives of others. Just like having a child who lives changes your life, so does having a child who dies. The first year each holiday was mixed with pain, I had imagined having two children, celebrating a baby’s first Christmas. I was constantly grieving. One day that year I forgot about tiny Matthew for a couple of minutes and I felt panicked. If I didn’t remember him, he would be so forever gone. Grieving him became a way of keeping him live, as if I would ever forget him.

I can look at pictures of my daughter from those first years and remember vividly the pain I was feeling while trying to live and enjoy life for her. My living child came first but my dead child was always there. Whenever we went to a restaurant it seemed each empty chair should have been filled with him. Those first three years grief was my constant companion. From that grief I learned lessons of compassion for others and to value the good things I did have in my life, but at such a terrible price.

I felt I got my life back when my daughter came from Korea to us, her forever family. I felt lucky again, I felt blessed. I never forgot my Matthew but grief was not my shadow, my ever present friend. It was tucked away and came out on Mother’s Day and his birthday. I managed my grief by avoiding sad movies or books. I couldn’t watch medical TV shows for fear there would be a baby die story line. I fought hard to maintain a positive balance.

I never wanted to go back to those dark days of such searing pain and grief. Each year I would remember him on his birthday. It was a private remembrance of what could and should have been. I would cry and the early years, anticipating his birthday was almost more painful than living it. Over the years the pain changed and the last really sad, hard birthday of his was when he would have been 25, maybe because that is such a milestone birthday.

In spite of my best efforts, I have revisited that fresh, hot searing grief. When my daughter delivered a stillborn baby girl Darcy, I found it almost impossible to separate my remembered grief and my fresh grief at her pain. I fought to save her from despair and battled my own grief. Once again life went on and I am the insanely in love Grandmother of a precious 7 month old baby girl, Zara.

This year on the 4th of July I was talking to someone about bad times of the year and realized I had missed Matthew’s birthday. His “would have been” 29 I had not cried or wondered. I was initially bewildered then surprised and have been pondering ever since how exactly I feel about this.

What I know is this. I have not forgotten my only son. I still wish he had lived. I have not forgotten the lessons of kindness, compassion and hope that I have chosen to take away from my experiences. Instead, Matthew has given me one last gift, he has led me to where I can still remember, but also to where I can forget to grieve.

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Scott Simon Tweets About Death and I, For One, Am Grateful

As someone who writes about grief and death, I wish to express my deep gratitude to NPR’s Scott Simon for live tweeting from the bedside of his mother’s vigil.  Little did he know it, but Mr. Simon, and his mom, have started somewhat of a revolution.

The thing is, we all have two things in common, each and every one of us. We are all born, and we will all die.  Truth.

I spend a lot of time writing about grief.  Initially, when I started this here blog in January 2011, it was a release from grief.  Having buried my daughter fifteen months earlier, I was ready to write about something other than loss and the sadness I felt.

This blog was my ticket out of grief.  There is more than coincidence to my choosing the name Mary Tyler Mom to write under.  “You’re gonna make it after all” is the theme song that I needed at the time.  Still do, truth be told.  I was ready.  ‘Forward motion,’ I told myself.

But then, six months into writing about working mom stuff and dishing on Gwyneth Paltrow, I knew I wasn’t being authentic.  For better or worse, I am a grieving mom.  It’s my thing, you know?  Do I wish it were different?  Abso-freaking-lutely.  It it heavy sometimes?   Yes sir, it is.  Do I feel better when I write about it and share the sadness with a virtual room full of supportive readers?  Yep, I most certainly do.

So thank you, Scott Simon, for shedding light on grief and loss.  Thank you for sharing that death, like life, is multi-faceted, beautiful, full of wonder, and sacred.  There is no mystery here, folks, and nothing to be afraid of.  I wish more of us understood this.

Before cancer, before writing, before both my mother and daughter died of brain tumors, I worked as a clinical social worker.  The folks I worked with were older adults and I was beyond lucky to find a position in a fancy pants retirement community on Chicago’s North Shore.  I used to get in trouble for calling it “Disney World for older adults,” which was flip, yes, but also meant to be complimentary.  The people I worked with were well off and lived in a beautiful environment — the best that money could buy.

But death, as we’ve agreed, is the great equalizer.  No matter how fat your wallet or portfolio may be, death is still gonna come a-knocking.  None of us are exempt.  A few years into my position, the community started its own in-house hospice.  I was named Bereavement Coordinator, a position I lobbied hard for after helping dozens of my clients through the last hours of their lives.  And I was good at it.  Damn good.

Turns out, I had a great capacity to help people during their last hours of life. The most important thing I did was sit with older adults and their families.  Sit and witness and share their stories.  Those hours, those experiences, are something I am immensely privileged to have shared.  They prepared me, I think, for my Mom’s illness and death, and, yes, for my daughter’s, too.

I learned that death is not always easy, but it can be, when you stop fighting it.  I learned that in those moments of extreme vulnerability, people are often at their finest.  Or their worst.  I learned that there is beauty in the last stage of life.  I learned that if you were open to it, life-changing lessons were there for the taking.

There is so very much that death can teach us about life.

Ha!  Talk about having my finger on the pulse — as I write these words, Scott Simon is being interviewed about his tweets on NPR.  I hear his voice wafting in from the kitchen radio as I sit at the dining room table.  Here are a few snippets of his wisdom:

  • “I found it very natural for someone to hold a thought for someone else in deep pain.”
  •  “We’re all afraid of dying, but that doesn’t mean we don’t do it.”  
  • “We should be afraid of dying, but there obviously will come a time . . . where I will let go of her, we let go of one another.”  
  • “This was a way of taking notes for me, my children, her grandchildren.”  
  • “I didn’t do anything that violated my mother’s privacy and dignity.”  
  • “It was all part of a son’s love to share with the wider world.”
  •  “I feel obliged to help keep that light alive and shining in people’s hearts.”

I get it, understanding every word and motive that Mr. Simon describes above.  He has done in Twitter form what I have attempted to do with words in Donna’s Cancer Story, and my friend Angelo has done with photographs at his blog, “My Wife’s Fight With Breast Cancer.”    Letting people into our grief does not cheapen or exploit it (as Angelo and I have both been accused of) — it allows us to share it.  Grief is one of the most basic of human emotions, and yet, we are taught, and teach our children, to bury it. Pun intended.

Social media, Facebook and Twitter and the Internet, have brought us back to the practice of sharing our grief, publicizing it, putting it out on the proverbial table for others to see.  Historically, grief was always a shared experience.  There is nothing odd about that.  To the contrary, it is natural to seek support and company in times of loss and sorrow.  Social media, as this excellent New Yorker article explores, simply gives a new venue to do that.

Let’s not be ashamed of our grief.  Perhaps if we are allowed to share it, and have it acknowledged by others, it will have less of a hold on us.  I certainly have found this to be the case.  I shake my head as I remember a therapy visit I had last year.  In preparation for adoption, our agency was concerned that we never sought professional treatment after the death of our daughter. Before we could be approved to parent again, my husband and I needed to be seen by a therapist.

You do what needs to be done in adoption, so we went.  I so distinctly remember telling the therapist that I grieve every day.  Her eyes widened and she corrected me (in the business, it is called re-framing, but it is really a correction), “You remember every day,” she said.  Sigh.  No, actually, I grieve.  Every day.  Changing the language does not change the reality.

I grieve every day, and it is okay, because grief is a part of life.  And when you look hard enough and get comfortable enough with it, you will see the beauty and wonder in grief, because grief is nothing more than the evidence of loving.  Thank you, Scott Simon, for reminding us of that.

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Homosexuality, Bullies, Discipline and Other Things Moms Don’t Talk About

A few weeks ago I was sitting with some mom friends enjoying a late summer afternoon while our kids played nearby.  One of the moms said, “I need some mom advice.”  An opening like that is crack for a mom blogger. Stone cold mom blogger currency.  The stuff wet mom blogger dreams are made of.  You get my point — my mental recorder was on and ready to go.

Long story short, the mom’s five year old had begun to ask about homosexual relationships.  You know, boy on boy, girl on girl action.  Boom chicka bow bow.  But not really.  Cause the child was five and sex doesn’t really enter into a question about men with men and women with women, or men with women for that matter.  I immediately felt a wee bit puffed up, cause I knew exactly what I would do if the question came from my kid.

I jumped in, all self-satisfied and shit, and offered my solicited advice:  “I would talk to the kid in an age appropriate way.  Explain that sometimes men fall in love with men and women fall in love with women and that is the way of the world.  Only answer the question the kid asked and don’t for a second stress about anything else.”

Mom hesitated and talked about her discomfort in explaining that some boys kiss boys and some girls kiss girls.  She didn’t want to give her daughter the impression that it was okay to start kissing her playmates — boys or girls.  A few other moms at the table chimed in and then so did I.  “Your girl will only think it’s odd if you give the impression it is odd.  She will pick up on that. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.  Just answer the question she asked and try not to come off as the deer in headlights.”

Yeah, I had all the answers.

A few minutes later, the ice broken in awkward subjects, another mom at the table asked for some advice for her own mom issue.  Ping!  Mommy blogger manna from heaven!  This mom wanted to know how the rest of us handled aggressive behavior towards our kids from other kids on the playground, etc.

Oh, dammit.  Suddenly I had no answers.  None.  Deer in headlights heal thyself.

You see, confronting other parents about their kid’s behavior is one of my personal no-nos.  I can’t do it.  I suck at it.  I sort of freeze up and clam up and my instinct is to simply grab my kid and run for cover.  But the mom who had just asked about how to address gay curiosity with her kid?  Well, she had this one covered.  Mhhh hmmmm, no problems there.

Her solution was a “nip it in the bud” kind of approach.  All of our kids are five and under, so mom’s approach was to tell the aggressive kid to stop and address it with said kid’s mom.  No judgment, no awkwardness, no fear of offending the other mom.  Just a kind of, “Hey, keep your eyes on your kid, cause what he’s doing isn’t cool and is hurting other kids.”

For a moment I thought I had whiplash.  Here this mom who was struggling with how to explain gay love was a master at confronting bullying behavior, something that made me suddenly lose all the answers.  That self-satisfaction I had felt just a few minutes before poured out of me like sangria from a pitcher.  I could not do what my friend could do.  And she could not do what I could do.

Huh.

It got me thinking about the things moms don’t talk about — with their kids and with one another.  And why we couldn’t address certain issues.  And how personal those proverbial lines in the sand are.

Shhh-1

As always, when faced with personal and parenting revelation, I took it to Facebook.  I posed the question to my Mary Tyler Mom Facebook followers (Dude!  You should totally and completely join us.) and asked what was off limits for them.  The answers were revealing, and as expected, some I totally got and others I did not.  Here is a sampling of issues us moms refrain from addressing with our kids and with one another:

  • masturbation and sexuality in ourselves and our kids
  • parental frustration
  • discipline
  • parental depression
  • grades, school performance
  • only children v. multiples
  • divorce
  • puberty, hormonal changes
  • food preferences, special diets
  • special needs in kids, illness in kids
  • grandparents
  • our own past
  • TV and screen time
  • sugar consumption
  • motherhood in general
  • money
  • faith, lack of faith
  • homeschooling
  • guns

Wow.  That is quite the list, and it is by no means exhaustive.  I didn’t even include the age old trifecta of mothering taboos:  breastfeeding, circumcision, and vaccines (OH MY!), let alone the tired and overdone SAHM v. WAHM v. full-time worker v. part-time worker.  Been there and done that too many times.

More than anything, I guess I just have come to embrace that the gravest of sins one can experience in modern life is being judged.  As if judging is one of the worst things evolved humans can endure.  Sheesh.  I am tired of it.  I am not religious (judge away!), but there is a saying that goes something like this, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” and clearly, many of us take it to heart, at least superficially.

Those of you who read me regularly know that I am a gal that is chock full of opinions.  I have lots of them and love to share those opinions much of the time.  I have demonstrated that in this here post (refer to my smug opinion above regarding discussing gay love with kids).  What better place than a blog to share opinions, right?  But, damn, our fear of being judged is seriously, in my opinion, cramping our style.

I think it is okay to have opinions.  I think it is natural to judge.  There, I said it. We judge.  All of us do.  You do it, I do it, the Internet sure as hell does it. What I fear, though, is that in trying to seem as if we don’t judge, or in fear of being judged, we have stopped talking to one another.  Judging is part of the human condition, but the thing that elevates us from other species is our ability to contain it, recognize it, understand its impact on those around us. Judge away, but practice empathy in tandem.  You can do it!

One of the things that struck me most in the Facebook thread were the comments about how very lonely mothering and motherhood can be.  And now, I think, we know why.  We keep to ourselves too damn much on those issues nearest and dearest to us.

What a shame.

Even Charles Darwin wants us to keep our traps shut. Shhhh.
Even Charles Darwin wants us to keep our traps shut. Shhhh.

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