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Someone That I Used To Know
“Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,” said Gandalf. “I fear it may be so with mine,” said Frodo. “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same.”
I had a friend back in the late 1980s. He was quite a bit older than me. I was in that stage of life where all of my children were very young and we were consumed with the loving and raising and disciplining and feeding and diapering that goes with that phase of life. My friend was early in his senior years — his winter of life was just beginning to set in.
My friend loved children in a kind of shy and awkward way. He kept his pockets loaded with candy and quietly handed it out in generous amounts to any small children who crossed his path. My kids called him “the candy man.” I just called him Paul.
Paul loved people of all ages, I suppose, but he was known for his concern and attentiveness toward children. After I got to know him a bit, and learned his story, I better understood some of what was behind his candy-filled pockets.
Paul and his wife had lost a child under horrific circumstances many years before I knew him. Their son had been run over and killed in front of their house by a school bus. During the time that I knew Paul, when all of my children were young, the idea of ever losing a child seemed at once so terrible and so “out there” that I couldn’t imagine how it was that Paul and his wife had ever managed to recover.
So I asked him one time, “How do you ever get over losing a child?” His answer was immediate and short: “You don’t,” he said, “you just learn not to cry all the time.”
Gut. Punch.
Last month marks three years since my own daughter died, an event that, had I any inkling of it at the time that I knew Paul, would have filled me with unspeakable horror and dread. It is, as they say, “every parent’s worst nightmare.”
It’s one thing to have a person in your life, like Paul, whom you used to know. But it is different in every way when the person you used to know is your own child.
Shortly after my daughter died, I wrote these words to some friends:
Everything about my daughter is now in the past.
Of course, we are not the first parents to lose a child, but I suspect every parent of a lost child knows too well the obscenity of the idea that your own child can become someone from your past — someone you used to know.
It’s eerie and disconcerting and wrong.
Our daughter was a young adult, not a child, when she died. Her death was acutely distressing but not entirely surprising. Her death was recorded as being caused by an accidental Fentanyl overdose. It would be truer to say that her death was the culmination of years of reckless thrill-seeking. Notwithstanding what the relentless propaganda in the media would have us believe, there are very few truly innocent among the Fentanyl dead.
We loved her more than our own lives, but in essential ways, even before she died, she had already become someone we used to know. “Things that should not have been forgotten were lost,” wrote JRR Tolkien. That very much describes our daughter’s early adult life. And her untimely death finally foreclosed any possibility of recovering something we had desperately hoped she had only lost for a time. When I shared the terrible news with my wife, that our daughter was dead, she immediately doubled over and, choking through her tears, cried out, “now we can’t hope anymore.” There would be no recovery from this.
One of the unnerving things about losing a child is the way that it alters you in almost primordial ways. So much so that it seems like the person you were before your child’s death has become yet another someone that you used to know. You have a memory of your prior self, but it is deeply misaligned in essential ways with who you have become.
What I mean is that something foundational about the expectations you brought to the world is shattered when your child dies. It seems impossible to ever see your life or your future in quite the way it had always been. It isn’t that you can never again have joy, or give and receive love (although at first such thoughts seem grotesque and abhorrent and strangely disloyal). It’s just that those things are altered for you now. It is very much as Frodo said, “Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same.”
I think I understand better now why my friend Paul chose to invest himself in giving little bits of joy to all the children around him.
My own grandparents lost a three-year-old daughter to pneumonia during the late 1920s. My grandfather very nearly succumbed to it himself. A close relative purchased two cemetery plots for my grandmother to use because everyone expected that both her husband and her only child were about to die. But my grandfather survived somehow, and only his young daughter is buried there now. Twenty-five years after those events, my grandfather, two sons married, was known as someone curiously devoted to his daughters-in-law. Unusually so. He doted on them. Their wishes were his commands. And his daughters-in-law adored him for it. I have come to suspect that he was lavishing on them the love he had stored up for a daughter which, for a quarter of a century, had no place to go.
Leaning into the giving of joy and the lavishing of devotion — those are the reactions to losing a child that I have watched in the people that I used to know. It is certainly a beautiful thing to behold, but it is only obtained at a most terrible price. It may be the most expensive thing in the world. I understand it better now than I did in the before times. My entire experience of the world has been permanently colored by the knowledge of how someone you desperately love can suddenly slip completely out of reach. Forever.
Like the dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
Thou art gone, and forever!
Love is the thing. Love big while you can.
Published in General
Thank you!
I hope you will reconsider allowing this to go to the Main Feed, many other people could benefit, including my sister and her husband who I would like to send it to. (Their son killed himself last year.)
I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through, Keith, to write such a moving post.
Powerful, beautiful, and so, so true.
Thank you so much.
Our closest friend just took his only recent vacation. It ended on Monday night with him arriving at his residence, knowing that his beloved son had died there 2 days earlier while housesitting for him.
He is beyond devastated.
I will be printing this out and sharing it with him once he has a little bit more skin covering the deep wound.
My heart breaks for you. I can’t imagine the devastation. Thank you for sharing this story, Keith.
Thank you for this.
I’m trying to work up the nerve. :)
@susanquinn – thanks for these kind words.
Just so you know, some of what I’m doing with this post is grappling with how to write about this in a way that conveys some of the learnings of our experience, in the hopes that they might be useful to other people.
It was really hard on us at first, but we’re doing really well. I don’t want people to take away a view that we live in despondency or depression. As my wife said during the worst of this, “we’ve learned to have joy in the midst of suffering.” She was right about that, and while we do have a hole in our lives, it is far from being raw and festering.
Today, we have a lot of joy and find that we’re useful to others in many ways. My work is still a source of interest to me. We have other children and grandchildren nearby and there is often the clatter of little feet and much laughter (and associated chaos) in our home. We are very involved in our church and have many friends there. I don’t want to paint too much of a downer picture because our life is far better than that.
We are different than we used to be, though. And I was trying to be honest about that. We nevertheless still have a lot to be thankful for.
We do want to figure out if our experience can help others get past the same disorientation and shock that we felt at first. We feel like what we’ve learned could be useful to others and this post is kind of an exploration in figuring out how to tell our story.
I had a dear friend who died of self destructive behavior, and my reaction was the same as your wife’s: now we can’t hope anymore. I like to believe that in another universe, he licked it and your daughter did too. But in this one, their time ran out. Just so tragic and sad.
I do hope you consider allowing it to be posted more widely as others have suggested. It is beautiful and powerful. and I know that it will help someone, somewhere who is dealing with the same unspeakable and senseless loss.
Thank you, Keith. I think you figured out quite well how to tell your story.
No words, but bottomless sympathy.
You have written a most elegant and intimate essay. We’ve known of children’s deaths in our family – teens, young adults and recently a mid-‘30’s adult nephew. Since they were not our children, I’ve only observed the immeasurable pain when that happens. I think you should only publish what (and when) eases you and your family’s pain. Grief has its own timetable.
Thank you…
I see that you are allowing your post to be promoted, Keith. Many people will benefit and be grateful for your sharing your experience.
Keith,
We have no words. Please know we are here.
I’m sorry for your loss, and for Paul’s.
One of my closest friends lost his son in a motorcycle accident. It was less than a year after the boy started following in his father’s footsteps by becoming a deputy sheriff that his bike slid out of control on a curve while riding with friends. At the funeral, it was the only time I’ve ever seen my friend cry.
Today, he can freely share stories about raising his son as he grew up. You never get over it, but you are able to get back to living . . .
I think children are the best teachers of the phrase, “to love is to suffer.” We haven’t lost our daughters to their debilitating medical conditions, but we’ve had a common experience of many other parents of experiencing the profound pain of their lost potential.
I can’t remember who said, “God must love you very much to let you suffer so” — the implication being your suffering united to Christ’s is for the sake of the whole world. It’s this lesson that gives so much meaning to suffering. In a paradoxical way, our wounds make us better, more fully human, compassionate people.
When I described the trials we’d been through as a family due to my youngest’s medical condition, our pastor said the most comforting words. . . “you are at the very heart of the church.”
That’s you and your family, too, Keith. God bless you.
@westernchauvinist
Flannery O’Connor said, in a letter to a friend, “People think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”
I think she, and you, are onto something. Maybe it explains why my own faith so often looks more like white knuckles and gritted teeth than blissful and pious repose. :)
I pray for your family. I’m more sorry for your suffering than you know. Your suffering brings weight to your words, though, and infuses them with perspective. I look forward to reading your writing any time I see that you’ve posted something. Thanks for the encouraging words in this particular comment. You’re a blessing.
I love this. So true. We went through a period where we’d ask, “What next, Lord?” And God would provide. Everything from a nerve-wracking at-home regimen of 12-hour plus or minus 30 minutes on-the-nose of antibiotic infusion for LMA (meningitis) to exploding Coke cans in the garage refrigerator to mice chewing through the starter wires on Mr. C’s car.
I consulted an exorcist about demonic oppression at one point. True story.
And this. . .
made me cry. Don’t feel bad, though. I’m getting purgatory over with in this life. ;-)
I “follow” you for a reason, Keith. This post, for instance. You’re a blessing, too. Thank you for your prayers.
Many people do manage to put the worst of their grief behind them, but some people don’t.
There is no magic pill to give those people who can’t overcome the most intense of grief.