| In
this period of time between Mother's and Father's
Days, I am thrown back in time. It was during
these same few weeks that John and I suddenly
became bereaved parents. On Mothers day, I happily
opened gifts from two children; on Father's Day,
John sadly opened just one. Each Father's Day
since has been a reminder to me of just how
differently Ty's death affected each of us.
It's so easy for people to
make flat statements about other people's grief.
"If they love each other, they can get through
this." "If their marriage falls apart,
there was something wrong with it to start with."
"Something like this can really make or break
a marriage." The feeling was that this was
somehow a test of our love - if we survived, then
we won. Frankly, we weren't up to a test. We had
lost enough already.
As you have undoubtedly realised,
everyone must bear his own pain. It's just not
true that you can share it - wouldn't we all give
it away if we could. I didn't know that then,
and what I wanted the most was to share my pain
with John, and to take some from his aching heart.
What we learned was what Harriet Sarnoff Schiff
says in "The Bereaved
Parent." "A common grief is not the
best possible adhesive to cement a marriage."
That is a shocking disappointment
to realise when you are reaching with desperate
fingers from opposite ends of a sinking lifeboat.
I had expected John to be
his usual "tower of strength". He had
expected me to be my usual organised self, to
somehow put this in order. Under the weight of
our individual sorrow, we failed miserably at
these roles we had, up till then, successfully
filled. What we both needed to do was to grieve
- freely, fully, with no restrictions. It was
too hard to do with each other.
A large part of the problem
was that we were suddenly forced to deal with
a situation that we had been given no preparation
for. Like many bereaved parents, this was our
first mutual experience with the death of an oh-so-loved
one. I didn't have a clue what to do for him.
He was equally at loss, and
that seemed to make a very bad situation much
worse.
We were lucky to have friends
and family to lean on. It seemed easier for me
than for John though. While I had friends I could
cry with, his friends, like many men, weren't
comfortable with tears or painful reminiscing.
I still cringe when I recall what one of John's
closest friends said, in a way of a compliment:
"At least you didn't make the rest of us
feel bad." That unfortunately, sums up what
makes it so hard for any two people to grieve
together, but especially parents: we don't want
to make the other person feel bad.
The most helpful thing
for our marriage was the availability of meetings.
John, quiet honestly, went only because I asked
him to, but there he learned things that helped
him understand my grief. He heard other mothers
describe their aching arms and he saw that I wasn't
going crazy - I was grieving in a pretty usual
way. I learned the same sort of things about his
grief. I saw how much harder it was for the dads
to express their pain.
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