The first time I saw a mother learn her child had died, I was making cookies. It was in the freshman dining hall's massive kitchen, where I worked several hours a week alongside two late middle-aged ladies from Middletown, CT, all of us in pink smocks and hairnets. It was at the end of our shift, early afternoon. A man in a plaid shirt, stocky and bow-legged, walked past and toward the two ladies, who were friends and always chattering. He came in right close to them, he said something, and then hands were grabbing at air; the man's face crumpled, and there started a sound I at first took for joy; I instantly thought, a baby has been born, and then right on the heels of that: someone has died. The shorter of the two women was keening, the man, her husband, was trying to hold her up by the shoulders, and the other woman was wailing, running her hands in an outline of air around the couple's bodies. I learned later, the man in that moment told his wife, their daughter had been killed in a car accident. I return sometimes in my mind to that moment, that kitchen, a moment when the entire world changed for these parents, this mother.
I stood on the porch yesterday evening, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling the warm air, seeing the grasshopper green of the leaves, and knew I have it very easy. My child is safe. I am allowed the luxury of listening to the the wind without also thinking, but my child is dead. Then I started to cry (again, more crying). I had just spent an hour reading Katie Granju, who blogs as Mama Pundit, and her account of losing her 18-year-old son. I am not going to attach the words "grueling" or "brutal" or "unbearable" here, because they cannot support the weight of Granju's loss, made more terrible because it was slow, with spikes of hope, and in some ways, long in coming. It will take you an hour to read the account. I suggest you start here and work forward. But if you go right to her homepage, you will also see that yesterday, Granju had a baby girl. (More crying.)
Last week, I started to put into folders all my digital photos. Naming the folders was easy -- "Tafv Fashion" "Wedding" "SF Boys in PDX." But then I came across images that I have downloaded and kept for my own reasons, and for them I created two folders, entitled "Grief" and "Love/Beauty." There were times when I could not decide which folder an image belonged in. This made me know what everyone who has ever loved knows: you do not get one without the eventuality of the other. And there they go to the prom, Grief in her widow's weeds, Love with stars in his eyes; they will always be together.
For Henry