On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
("One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.")
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There was once a little Princess. I met her in a Michigan hospital. She opened her eyes for the first time and looked right at me, seeming to say "oh, so it is you who are my dad".
Four days after she was was born the little Princess got her picture, and the picture was used for her birth announcement; she was held between the arms of her mother and her father. She was still pretty small, this princess. In this picture she gazes at the camera with eyes open and rests her head on her hand, like she is just hanging out with her mother and her dad.
Four months after she was born the little Princess went to Arizona, because her mother was graduating and wanted to be in the ceremony and her parents wanted a picture of her in her mother's arms as she posed in her graduation gown with her diploma, her honors award and celebratory tassel. She seemed OK with that too, although her cry was loud enough to fill the graduation hall, and she had to endure a three hour flight coming just after a three and a half wait on the tarmac to get there. But she didn't say anything, although her parents cussed a bit.
The snake came for her mother after she was one year old.
Welcome, fellow travelers on the grief journey
and a special welcome to anyone new to The Grieving Room.
We meet every Monday evening.
Whether your loss is recent, or many years ago;
whether you've lost a person, or a pet;
or even if the person you're "mourning" is still alive,
("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time),
you can come to this diary and say whatever you need to say.
We can't solve each other's problems,
but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Unlike a private journal
here, you know: your words are read by people who
have been through their own hell.
There's no need to pretty it up or tone it down..
It just is.
Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé.
("You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.")
How often we do have to point out what a cruel and merciless disease cancer is. In the introduction I used the trope of a poisonous snake, but I think on reflection that it is unfair to poisonous snakes. Poisonous snakes kill quickly. Poisonous snakes don't often, after all, kill people. poisonous snakes usually bite after someone screws with them first.
But, then again, poisonous snakes are not overly concerned about the consequences of their bite. That is completely beyond their comprehension. So maybe the metaphor is apt after all; sort of like a cancer cell which decides one day it will keep on dividing, regardless of consequences it cannot even imagine. Be fruitful and multiply, little cancer cell, one day you will rule the body. For all the good that will do you.
My little princess was one year old when her mother, my wife, was diagnosed with cancer. She was almost three when it recurred. She was four when it spread to her lungs and her liver. She was six when her mother died, unconscious, in a hospice. Which was two weeks or so after I told her that her mother was going to die. She did not seem surprised by that news; she had watched her decline the previous two years, watched her get weaker and weaker, and she is smart enough to make the connection and guess the outcome.
In fact, I think her first concrete memory was when we were getting treatment in Houston, at the Most Famous and Most Awesomely Best Cancer Treatment Center in the Whole Wide World. Pardon me, I have no need for sarcasm; it really is good and I think gave her an extra three years of life. We never brought our Little Princess there, by the way, we felt it was most emphatically not a place for children. There was a little daycare center nearby that we left her in; it was a nice one. I think some of the employees at the cancer center used it…but they did not seem surprised when we explained why we needed it for the three months that we did. They even got her toilet trained there. And we took her one day to the Johnson Space center, and they had a play area and I know that is a memory of hers, because she talks about it occasionally and once or twice has expressed an interest to revisit. I see no need to inform her that it will be a long time, if ever, that I will return to Houston willingly.
Her mother tried to take care of her as long as possible, sick and weak though she was. It is a not uncommon coping strategy in cancer patients, and she had gone though much to bring her into the world; it was a difficult pregnancy and childbirth. I helped out as I could and kept busy with matters of consequence. I did the lifting and the running-after when she no longer could. Her mother must have told her that she was ill. But the child never asked me. She never commented or inquired during the times when things were tense between her mother and myself; when the strain of this cruel illness took its toll; why the grown-ups never seemed happy anymore. Even when I finally had to take the car keys away because one fine day a cop shows up at my house and asks who drives the vehicle with the so-and-so license plate number, and several people called to complain that the vehicle was being operated in erratic fashion. Yes, the empathy of cops is simply microscopic to behold.
I tried to be as family inclusive as possible. The summer before she died, we went to Michigan Adventure, a place that the Little Princess had always liked. But by now my wife was pretty much confined to a wheelchair and of course lacked the strength to go on any rides with her. Going to amusement parks is generally an experience for the healthy. My child noted, I am sure, the contrast between everyone else's healthy parents and her own; and it wasn't too long after we got there that she started acting out and pretty much asked if we could just go home.
I suppose at this point I can mention that I too lost my father to cancer at a young age. Younger than my daughter and it was a lot quicker; in those days they basically told you there wasn't a lot they could do, and get your affairs in order. I can remember him, but I don't remember anything surrounding his death. I don't remember the funeral. I don't remember moving after my mom sold the house. My mother says that up to the last minute, I would wander around the house like I was looking for someone and puzzled why they weren't there.
* * * * *
The fact is that one in nine children will lose a parent by the time they are age twenty. I maintain there is an entire world contained within those numbers. Losing a parent puts children at significant risk for adverse outcomes, and the closest thing I can think of is being a veteran of a war; it is a complete disruption of one's world and one cannot blame them if they find it hard to return to anything called normalcy
in fact, besides sadness and anger, what children seem to want is to not be different; to feel normal. Because they do feel different and I see that with bereavement and also with parental illness. I will never feel the same as someone whose father did not die, for example, and I have very little doubt it contributed a lot to my personality, both its positive and negative aspects. I would also submit that it is not a given that any child will relate to any other child or group just because they have lost a parent too. I can demonstrate this; shortly after her mother died, I took my little princess to a support groups for grieving children. The fact that they held it in a building not 100 feet from the hospice where her mother died did not exactly help, but she overcame that after one or two sessions. But one day, she stormed out of a group session and swore she would never return. What exactly happened I do not know. The support group facilitators seemed more bewildered than anything and would never give me a straightforward account. Nor did my daughter. But we never went back. Conversely, with some trepidation I agreed to let her go to a brief weekend camp for grieving children, and they each had a one on one counselor. She loved it and what can I say except that maybe she found someone who could really understand what she went through, and not just someone who just thought they did.The little Princess has always impressed me with how perceptive she can be, maybe because she felt she had to, because the grown-ups never really explain anything
And it is said that you can do things, that you can ameliorate the problems, that you can be a supportive parent, and at this I try as well. I still read to her, put her to bed at night and promptly comfort her when she gets hurt. I go to her school plays and parent-teacher conferences. I try to set expectations and impose limits and discipline in a loving but firm way, although I suspect I am kind of a softie and may even be perceived that way. Occasionally I will tell her little anecdotes about her mother, always in a positive light. Maybe we will light a candle next month for her moms birthday; I just cannot bear to ritualize or re-live the date of her death. I have my own ghosts that need dispersing.
I remember when I had to tell the Little princess that her mother had finally died. She had seen her in the hospice, near unconscious from the drugs. She seemed bewildered and a little uncomfortable when I started crying, and in fact has never seemed at ease with me expressing grief, and I thus try to not do it around her, all psychobabble advice to the contrary nevermind. But if there is one thing I have to reinforce, at many different levels, for her is the reality that I will not be going away. The anxiety that children feel is real that if they lost one parent they might lose the second one, and then where would they be? I takes a lot of reassuring, because, you see, that's also the thing about grown-ups; they just go away sometimes and they never really explain why.
* * * * *
C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante.
("It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important.")
Part of her didn't and doesn't want to deal with the bereavement thing and I don't blame her. Her aunt, my sister took her to see 'Wreck-it Ralph' and for a Subway during her mothers memorial service. And for sure, the Little Princess did not accompany her father when he went with the funeral people to cremate her mothers body. It was not such a heavy body after all.
She will always have her pictures to remember her by. They say that sort of thing is important for children. We have since moved her out of the house and to another state, and while she says there are things she wants from the house, she has never asked to move back in. I am not superstitious, but our old house sits forlorn, with bad memories, and sometimes I swear my Little Princess thinks it is haunted by the ghost of her dead mother.
But perhaps on some level there are the good things about her mom; her playfulness when she felt well; the things she made for her; the cards and recordings and the fact that she is always remembered and not forgotten. It is the time that was put in, tending the rose, so to speak.
And so, my Little Princess, I cannot comfort you after your mother has gone. There is no comfort beyond time. I can only say that your mother, like the tale, is a star in the sky that you can always look up to and maybe one day hear her laugh, and it will be as if the stars themselves can finally laugh with you. And your father might, in time be comforted too. One day you might even be able to laugh with them with your own little Princess or Prince, and then you can tell them everything.
My little Princess, who reminds me what stars are for