Loss Of A Child - My Child - My Story

After the divorce I wanted to give my two daughters and a son a good life, but with little more than church membership to recommend me! I knew I wasn't very marketable in the "cold cruel world" with only two years of college.

I liked to sew, read and play with my children, but I wasn't one of those with a secret passion for some kind of craft to turn into sales.

After a couple of years, I earned a college degree and started using it as a newspaper journalist.

The bereavement following Audra Marie, "Dru"'s, death was frightening and overwhelming. My youngest child was hurt by both his sister's passing and by the effect of it on the adults in his life.

~ ~

My life closed twice before its close,
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

~ ~

Find this and more Emily Dickinson poems at Famous Quotes

November 30, 1983 was rainy and cold in East Tennessee when 16-year-old Dru called me at work. She wanted to know if she could use the car that night for a potluck dinner at her high school. As one of the "Pom-Pom Girls," she was expected to attend a get-acquainted event for incoming basketball players, their parents and coaches.

Her sister Michelle, who was older by 20 months, was a newly installed freshman in a college about an hour away. Dru and I were only slightly accustomed to this new condition. With Dru as the middle child now coming and going with only her little 12-year-old brother to consider, it was beginning to feel a little easier to manage.

My son was taking his time playing at home with our dachshund, Winchester, when Dru and I drove off. She took me to meet a friend for dinner on her way to the high school for the event.

She never got to the school.

Though I had no way of knowing, she died instantly when the car slid on a rainy highway into the back of a flatbed truck. About 30 minutes after she dropped me off, I was seized by nausea while the molding on the restaurant's wall at the ceiling hypnotized me. Trying to hide my inexplicable feeling of fragility, I was unable to swallow or breathe as my friend drove me home. As soon as I walked inside the door a family friend called to say she was coming to get me because, "There has been an accident."

I knew.

As soon as she identified herself, I started crying.

She cried, too. We were feeling the worst pain. Our daughters had died. The thing is we were crying the worst tears a mother can cry, but we were doing it together. We became friends. We found more mothers who shared our loss and became friends of theirs.

If you or someone you know is grieving the death of a child of any age, I recommend getting in touch with The Compassionate Friends. It doesn't matter if the death was last week or years ago, every family who has lost a child needs the unique bond of another bereaved parent.

The Compassionate Friends is founded on the same simple truth that Liz and I discovered in that first phone conversation. And, in times together after that. When the mountains of grief ahead ~ and behind you ~ are too much to bear, bereaved parents together can help like others cannot.

Nobody is there to say, "Go there," or "Do this," when the big changes in life occur. Even if I was the one who asked for a divorce, the loss of hopes and dreams precipitated the fissure. I don't know about you, but from about 16 years old I have been making life-altering decisions I had to live with from there on out. Some good. Some not good at all. And if someone DID attempt to tell me what to do and I mindlessly obeyed? Well, I believe that would be a sign that I wasn't really starting over.

It would mean I was in shock and grateful to someone for directing me through the traffic of a temporary condition of emotional blindness.

How to approach a strange new life? How to get through when sunrise itself feels hostile? How to do better than before. Without the love and support of a community of friends, I couldn't have held us together when my children were small and I became a single parent.

Problem is, I didn't appreciate them. And, set off on a course that led to loneliness and some enormous struggles. I did all the wrong things. For awhile. Some of us just don't know any better. Uh! Moi! for example.

If you were coming in the Fall,
I'd brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls -
And put them each in separate Drawers,
For fear the numbers fuse -

If only Centuries, delayed,
I'd count them on my Hand,
Subtracting, till my fingers dropped
Into Van Dieman's Land.

If certain, when this life was out --
That yours and mine, should be
I'd toss it yonder, like a Rind,
And take Eternity -

But, now, uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee -
That will not state - its sting.

~ ~ by Emily Dickinson