Ann K. Finkbeiner - After the Death of a Child: Living with the Loss Through the Years

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I want to thank all the parents kind enough to talk to me, some of whom I could not include in the book.

I want to thank Renee Dudnikov.

I want to thank my husband, Cal Walker.

This book is for T.C. Colley.

The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is perhaps the price we pay for love.

Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement

I have a mental picture of myself in my twenties, standing on a hillside talking to a neighbor, with my four-year-old son wandering somewhere behind me. My son was skinny and had yellow hair I didnt cut often enough and glasses that slid down his nose. He had a bad attitude: he seemed to think his character was his own business and none of mine. I thought he was some sort of appendage, but more loosely attached, like a balloon tethered to my ankle. Anywhere I tried to walk, he was so underfoot I fell over him.

Anyway, that day the neighbor was telling me about mutual friends whose child just died. I tried to understand this. What happens when someones child dies? I had thought about this, of course; all parents do. But I always hit some sort of wall. I was so attached to my son. What could people do when someone so attached to them dies? The neighbor was vague: Theyll never get over it. What does that mean, never get over it? This mental exercise was painful and I gave it up. I remember saying, Ill bet for those people, everything will be entirely different.

Fourteen years later, my son died. His name was T.C. (for Thomas Carl) Colley and he was eighteen years old, a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design, a superb art school that unaccountably admitted him with mediocre high school grades, a small portfolio, and the attitude hed always had. At RISD, T.C. hit full flower in four months. I bet you dont know what icongraphy is, he told me over the phone. He was not going to be a photojournalist, he said; he was going to be an artistic photographer. A few weeks later in another phone call, he said hed met a girl named Janie from Charleston, South Carolina, and they stayed up all night talking and since then, he said, we havent been apart for more than three hours. After the Christmas holidays, he wanted to get right back to school and Janie. So on January 4, 1987, I took him to the Baltimore train station, kissed him good-bye, and told him I was proud of him. I know, he said. I am too. Twenty minutes later, a freight train hit the train on which he was a passenger. He was one of sixteen who died, many of the others also students going back to school.

About four years later, I noticed I was better. The pain was mostly controllable, acting normal was only intermittently difficult, and I was increasingly interested in my job, other people, and in life in general. I felt younger, lighter, and smarter. I wondered if this was recovery, though I had recovered nothing except this spark of interest and a sense of equanimity. Anything I would have wanted to recover was gone. I was clear about T.C. being dead; I understood that I would live without him the rest of my life. I disliked being part of a world in which such things happened. I still felt as attached to T.C. as I had before. I had been right: everything was entirely different.

But exactly how it was different, I wasnt sure. The closest I could get to articulating the difference was a series of metaphors. One metaphor was that I was a fish, flopping around on dry land. I yelled, Hey, you guys, wheres the water? The guys looked at me and said, What water? At this point, I thought, if Im a smart fish, Ill grow lungs and legs.

Another metaphor was that my life was a story I had been writing and now I knew the story was out of my hands. If it was even a story at all, it was not me writing it. The third metaphor was that I had thought that life was a bargain I made: you get an interesting, pretty world, you pay with death. But, I had thought, my own death, not T.C.s; Ive paid a fortune for some dime-store junk.

Separately the metaphors each made a kind of sense, but together they made no sense at all. I knew the metaphors were saying something about how T.C.s death made everything different, but I didnt understand what.

So I thought I would see what the experts said about the effects of a childs death. I am a science writer by trade; I learn about some field of science, then write it up for the general reader. So I knew how to find and read the psychiatric, psychological, and sociological research on grief. Most grief research concentrated on the year or so following the death of a spouse. Less research was on the death of a child, and only a handful of studies were on the long-term effects of that death. In short, not much research was directly relevant to my question.

The research was not only sparse, it was focused on recovery. Grief researchers have a mild obsession with how people recover; the reason is that grief researchers are usually in the helping professions, and people whose children die often need help. Earlier research said that people recover from grief well within a year, that recovery meant detaching emotional investment from the person who had died, and that failure to detach was pathological. Since the early 1980s, however, grief researchers have been saying they not only dont know what pathological is, theyre also not sure what normal is, and they doubt whether recovery even exists.

I dont think recovery exists either, and anyway, that hadnt been exactly what I wanted to know. I wanted to know, when a child dies, what happens afterward to the parent? What are the long-term, largescale effects? So I did what writers do: interviewed people and got a contract to write a book.

I put an ad in the Baltimore newsletter of a national self-help organization for bereaved parents called The Compassionate Friends, asking parents whose children had died five or more years before to call me if they wished. About thirty called, we met, and I asked them questions. Has your marriage changed? Has your relationship with your other children changed? Do you notice yourself more distant from people or closer to people? Which people? Do you have any guilt or self-blame? Has your feeling about God changed? Do you feel more vulnerable in life? Do you feel the same about your own death? What is most satisfying to you? Do you still feel pain? At any particular times? Do you have a way of making sense of the death? In general, the questions broke down into two categories: the effects of the childs death on your relationships with the outside world and on your internal world.

The parentsrich and poor, old and young, Christian and Jewish, black and white, biological and adoptive, educated and nottalked articulately, thoughtfully, and honestly. I could hardly do better than to get out of the way and let them talk. But I think a reader wants some context, wants to know what experts think and what the author makes of all of it. So this book is a series of profiles, alternating with a series of essays. But essays on what?

Many of the questions I asked got single-word, uninterested answers. For instance: has your childs death affected your feeling of your own competence in life? Researchers say that bereaved parents feel incompetent because they couldnt keep their children alive, and I thought that sounded reasonable. But no one got interested in the question. Some felt a little more competent, some a little less, most said no change: no big deal. What was a big deal, however, was guilt. I heard about guilt not only when I asked about guilt, but also when I asked about something else altogether. Guilt was on their minds. So the essays will be on those subjects that parents wanted most to talk about. The researchers are included in the essays as a sort of Greek chorus, a mostly nameless group of experts with a large statistical base who comment on what the main characters are saying.