7
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
– SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
I’ve been told that the loss of a child you loved is among the worst agonies a human being can suffer. A subjective statement, of course, and I certainly don’t want to get into any contests about grieving. My stepfather died eight years ago. That hurt me a lot. One of my wife’s sisters died the following year, and that hurt a lot. Those were my only experiences of powerful grief. Until now. But those two painful losses can’t compare to my present agony. I shudder at the thought that I might survive my wife. For the moment, though, let’s grant the statement. The loss of a child you loved is among the worst ordeals a human being can suffer. The promise of youth destroyed. The potential for zest and goodness torn away. The unfairness of it all, and you miss the kid so much.
There have been days when I didn’t think I could survive the pain. I contemplated suicide. What stopped me is that a month to the day after Matthew died, my daughter found the body of a friend who’d shot himself to death. He’d placed a towel beneath his head before he pulled the trigger. To minimize the blood. I couldn’t put Sarie through more torture. I couldn’t bear forcing her to attend the funeral of her father.
So I survive day by day, and the thoughts that help me are as follows.
8
The world is based on entropy, the messiness of the universe. Physicality is imperfect. Disintegration and random chance are the rule. If you have a good day, count yourself lucky. And if you wonder how God could cause something so devastating as the death of your son, you’d better rephrase the question, because God didn’t cause your son’s death. The chaotic nature of the world did. God is perfect. The world is not.
You could say that God should have done a better job when creating the world. But Perfection can’t create Itself. It can only create a lesser version. You could also say that God should have intervened to prevent the death of your child. But that would be a miracle, and no one has a right to expect a personal miracle.
I remember praying for a miracle. When Matt was close to death, I tried to make one of those bargains that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross refers to in her books about the nature of death and dying. But I couldn’t think of a reason for God to help me instead of all the other troubled souls in this world. I finally thought I’d found an argument that couldn’t be refused.
Dear God, I prayed, just as you’re supposed to be a father to me and to love me as your son, so please identify with the love I feel for my son. Please help my son, because Your son is asking You.
The prayer didn’t help. But I’m not bitter that it wasn’t answered. After all, I was trying to make a deal, and maybe that’s the wrong thing to do, to try to make a deal with God. Maybe if I’d believed in Him totally before Matt got sick, maybe if I’d had faith in Him to start with and not just now, Matt would have lived.
Well, that’s another issue. The miracle did not occur, and God neither caused nor took away my son’s cancer, because the nature of the universe He created doesn’t permit His intervention. That’s why there’s a heaven, I want to believe, because it’s a goal, a step up from the chaos of earth.
9
If you believe in Original Sin, you understand why the world’s imperfect and why God tests us instead of intervening.
But if you don’t believe in Original Sin…
Compassion.
I’ve said that Matt believed in the value of good nature. If everyone every day showed good nature to everyone else, most of society’s problems would disappear. Recently an editor acquaintance called me and paraphrased a quotation from a book whose title he no longer remembered. “From the start of human history, there’s been so much pain and suffering the stars should have stopped in their tracks.” My acquaintance ought to know. He’s suffered twice my tragedy. Two of his children have died. I don’t know how he keeps going. But my acquaintance (I keep using that word because I see him but once a year, and that’s what impressed me-he wasn’t a friend and yet he was phoning me) spoke only briefly about his own tragedies. He said he was calling because he’d heard about my son’s death, and he wanted to tell me how deeply it filled him with sorrow.
Compassion. If you think about it, every person you know, every friend, every stranger, in every building you pass, will one day (and perhaps even now) have a devastating personal loss. My acquaintance exemplified what we have to do. Show our compassion. We have to say, “I’m filled with sorrow for what you’re suffering.”
We have to weep for the pain of our fellow mortals. You’ve probably seen those bumper stickers that ask, “Have you hugged your kid today?” You bet. And our fellow sufferers. The letters of consolation my family received, not only from friends but sometimes from strangers, were powerfully helpful. They showed my wife, my daughter, and me that we weren’t alone, that someone cared, that shoulders were there to lean on.
Lately I’ve found that I’ve been hugging people a lot, and until Matthew’s death, I wasn’t what you’d call a touchy person. I hug them impulsively, and it seems to help me and them feel better about the day, about persisting in this tenuous universe.
“Life is suffering,” I said in Matt’s euology, quoting the first of the great truths of Buddha. Let’s face up to that and show the best of our human qualities-not intelligence; I think that’ll doom us, if nuclear weapons and worldwide pollution are any evidence of our stupid cleverness. Not intelligence but compassion.
What else have we got to depend upon except each other? If someone you know has pain, tell him or her you’re sorry. Don’t keep a distance. Be human.
10
There’s another aspect of grief I need to talk about. Its physical effects. I’ve described my collapse while Matthew was unconscious in Intensive Care. I’ve dramatized my experience in the Emergency Ward, where cardiologists and neurosurgeons tested me and finally explained that I’d succumbed to stress and exhaustion-a frightening condition, though I hadn’t yet learned that “fear” exactly described my symptoms.
Three weeks after Matthew’s death, at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, I sat in a La-Z-Boy chair to watch a TV program I’d been anticipating, an episode in a brilliant thriller from Britain, called “Edge of Darkness.” I use the world “thriller” in a qualified sense. At the beginning of this episode, there was nothing “thrilling” going on. Scenes were being set, characters established. But the show was a distraction, and I was grateful for anything that might help take my mind off Matthew’s death.
Suddenly I felt a tingle in my feet. In hot and cold rhythms, it rushed up my legs, soared through my abdomen, and reached my heart. As I’ve said, I’m a runner. Because of that physical conditioning, my normal heartbeat is sixty. At once, it beat faster. I checked my pulse. It had risen to ninety. With equal abruptness, it raced beyond my ability to check it.
I hyperventilated. I convulsed. I felt as if I’d just run a fast five miles. My guess is my pulse was now a hundred and fifty. And then the spasms hit my head, and as Donna raced across the room to try to help me, I managed to say, “I’m having a… heart attack. I’m… going to die.”
You can’t imagine my terror, and you can’t imagine how quickly this incident occurred. A minute ago, I’d been fine. Now I was heaving in my chair and sure I was dying.