If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.
~Earl Wilson
My friend Carol and I walked home from school down 111th Street. We made it almost to the bus stop a block from my place. It was a Friday because I carried my white Keds home for their bi-weekly cleaning, as required by the gym teacher. My name was neatly printed along the side, and I had them tied together by the laces because they looker cooler that way.
I know I was in fifth grade because I remember the cocktail of growing freedom that fall – I could take unapproved routes home, pick up candy at the school store with my babysitting money, climb on the giant boulders where the vicious dog lived – without anyone telling me I was too little. Life was already good, and getting better.
As usual, Carol was preoccupied with the fact that she was adopted. She was bewilderingly resentful of the gentle older couple who revolved around her wonderingly. My favorite thing at her house was the Christmas table display that included a mirror posing as an ice skating pond, complete with motorized skaters. I could watch it for hours. This girl had no reason to complain. Her kind dad even made overtures to me, offering a little fathering.
For my part, I was preoccupied with the fact that I was fatherless. If I couldn’t have my own father, I certainly wouldn’t consider siphoning off someone else’s, so I declined his offer, politely.
As Carol and I walked along kicking acorns and rehashing the day, the subject of my father’s absence, something I rarely discussed, came up. He died before I could remember in a plane crash, blameless in my view, and permanently heartbroken that he couldn’t see me grow up.
Carol wanted to explain something to me that she’d been thinking about ever since Sunday school the week before.
“Your father,” she opined, “must have done something really bad.”
I stopped. Nobody had ever said anything bad about my father.
“Because God had to punish him by making him die,” she explained.
I sputtered in outrage. Words fled. How could mere words ever bridge the gulf that opened between us, anyway?
She stopped too, waiting for my reply, wise in her own mind, satisfied that she had enlightened me.
I let my gym shoes speak for me. I took aim at her smug certainty. The right one connected with her cheek, bounced off , and headed for the ground, the left one hurrying to keep up. They landed behind her so that I had to step closer to retrieve them. She flinched.
“That’s not true,” I managed over my shoulder as I took off.
I wasn’t known for acts of physical violence, in fact this was my first one. As I ran home to lay all of this at my mother’s feet, I felt a frisson of satisfaction that I had taken such radical action against Carol’s slur. I hadn’t had many opportunities to stick up for my father.
In subsequent years, I haven’t pursued the violence, but I am still on the run from platitudes that issue forth in response to a loss. Since that fifth grade day, I have sat witness to my own grief, that of friends and loved ones, and of many counseling clients. I know we can do better.
Our society has trouble with grief. We can’t stand pain, and we want the bereaved to get over theirs before it upsets us. The few standard responses that people offer to the bereaved prove it. In fact, they aren’t much better than Carol’s childhood attempt. And the bereaved are usually too stricken, or too polite, or without their gym shoes, to respond as they’d like. Allow me to stand in for them.
He’s in a better place, the probably well-meaning comforter says.
What the bereaved would like to say: Oh yeah? His place is here by me. Spare me your easy version of heaven. And spare me the suggestion that I should feel guilty for my own pain. I have a big job to do – to come up with my own understanding of where he went and how I’m supposed to live without him here. And you’re not helping.
Another frequent attempt is: It’s God’s plan which you can’t yet understand.
To which the griever would like to answer: Since you seem to have a
straight line to God’s inner workings, can’t you do better than this flimsy attempt to make my tragedy palatable? My question is not how you explain this theologically. It is how I am going to make it through tonight.
Another common one: He wouldn’t want to see you suffer like this.
The unvoiced response from the bereaved: Don’t try to shame me into shoving my feelings underground. She didn’t want to die, and of course she wouldn’t want me to suffer, but she did and I am. Try to understand how connected I was to her and therefore how deep my feelings run.
The next is an imperative: You have to let go.
The griever’s response: Never. My job is to create a new relationship with her, now that she is no longer physically present. She will always be emotionally present for me. It is how she lives on. Don’t take that away from either one of us.
I have a suggestion for those who wish to offer comfort. Take up Frank McCourt. His book Angela’s Ashes recounts the endless suffering and tragedy of his poor Irish mother and her large brood. The words he remembers hearing beat the feeble lines above hands down:
I’m sorry for your troubles, the women say to each other with each new loss. Acknowledgement and caring. As simple as that. No pat explanations, no rush to judgment, no hurry.
If I had the chance to talk to the Carol of today, I would thank her for the nudge she gave me toward my life’s work. Chances are she would not even remember the incident, as it couldn’t have had the emotional punch for her that it did for me. But I wouldn’t apologize for the gym shoes. They taught me that even when words fail, I can still have my say.
CBH 06/11
