Grief math

A few days after Aidan’s funeral, we still couldn’t manage to go back and stay in our house. Instead we headed out to Cape Cod, where a friend offered up his family’s house to us. Once we arrived, we heard some dreadful news from town. Another boy, named Dylan, was also killed suddenly. It was a horrible accident where he was riding a bicycle and struck by a commuter train. We were only distantly acquainted with the family, and their kids were in different grades than ours. Struggling to understand what happened, I found myself idly mouthing much the same phrase we had recently heard repeated dozens of times. Oh my god, I can’t even imagine what that family is going through. I stopped myself, and did a quick double-take. I felt stupid for saying it, out loud no less. But then I began thinking about it and stepping through it word by word. I realized I was right. I couldn’t imagine what they were going through, because I couldn’t imagine what it was we were going through. I was in the midst of experiencing it, but I couldn’t really get my head around it.

When Aidan died, the bottom fell out from under us. The loss was so sudden and complete, it was a struggle to comprehend the magnitude. I felt lost simply in trying to gauge the loss. I wound up doing a bunch of strange mental exercises. I was very conscious I was doing it, and I wondered if there was something particularly geeky about it. I thought of it as a kind of math, an effort to quantify. The first question was, How bad is this? Well, at least he didn’t suffer. At least he didn’t get kidnapped and tortured to death. It could have been worse. How big is this loss? Big. For one thing, it’s not at all like losing an elderly parent. It was nothing like suddenly losing my father when he was only in his 50s. It certainly feels bigger than when we lost my brother-in-law Bryce to cancer at age 40. Despite many difficulties, at least Bryce got to live to adulthood, and started a successful business that survived him. You got a good sense of Bryce’s trajectory, and what he brought to the world. Aidan was a very smart, talented kid. We got some tantalizing glimpses of extraordinary potential, but can only imagine where he would have taken it.

I also compared our loss to those who lost much younger kids. A friend lost an infant in the crib due to SIDS. A former colleague had an anencephalic son who was only alive briefly after his birth. Is that any better, or worse? It felt very different to me. You never get to know the child. You never invest the same kind of time and effort. That was one of many items when tallying up our loss. Aidan took quite a bit of effort to raise. He wasn’t easy. He required extra patience. It was like an investment. When he was suddenly gone, all that effort seemed like a total waste. There was none of the pay-off, no graduating to a mature and self-confident adulthood. In retrospect, you had to tell yourself the effort was inherently worthwhile, regardless of any promise of a reward. And you had to get yourself to believe it.

Tallying up all the loss, it was overwhelming. We lost him as a human being. We lost whatever he would contribute to the world. We lost a son. My daughter lost a brother. She lost her only sibling. She lost a friend. So did I. So did the other boys on the block. We lost knowing any girlfriend he might have had in high school. We lost any new friends from college. We lost a daughter-in-law, and the rest of her family. We lost grandchildren. We lost his jokes, his unusual insights, his sense of the absurd, his bullshit detector. With our daughter poised to leave home for college, we lost perhaps the single most important connection to others in our community, through our kids. We lost contact with his friends. They will now go on through high school and graduate without him, then move away from home and scatter. As parents, we were also suddenly out of a job.

This entire mental exercise helped me navigate within what I started to think of as a space. It’s a bit like being in a room, blindfolded. Once I figured out how big it was, I could manage to move from one place to another, spend a little time here and there, and always know where I am within the room.

Knowing where those bounds are helped on many fronts. People often talk foolishly about something or other traumatizing them. You often hear of absurd cases on college campuses, where all it takes is for someone else to voice an unwelcome contrary opinion to trigger the trauma. All this might make me angry, and I might respond, I’ll show you a thing or two about what trauma is. But before I start acting as if I now own that word, it helps to map out the space. How far does this thing called trauma extend? Certainly past anything I’ve experienced. One of the books I read in the midst of grief was The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich. It was all about what it was like to be a Soviet woman along the front between the Red Army and the Germans in World War Two. It was horrible, ghastly, endless bloody warfare. The war on that front was on such a scale, and so total, that women participated in combat to a degree perhaps never seen before or since. People who are fighting desperate infantry battles, seeing friends of theirs get randomly shot up and blown to pieces day after day, and for years on end, they know the full extent of trauma. Being in a Gulag or a Nazi death camp is as traumatic as it gets. If I had to set up a scale of one to ten, losing a kid like we did is maybe a two or three. Reading Alexievich helped put that into perspective.

There can be something of a problem, when you start to measure your own grief the way I tried to, where inevitably you compare your own degree of grief to others. But the point is not to say mine is bigger than yours. It’s to understand how big it feels to you, and to be able to acknowledge that and communicate how it has affected you.

A woman I used to go to grade school with, Ann Faison, wrote a short book called Dancing with the Midwives, based on her own loss of her stillborn daughter. I started out having trouble relating to her experience. She didn’t really get to know her daughter. Not the way I got to know my son. That’s what I told myself. But that started to change once I read her account of another family in her town who lost their teenage daughter in a shooting. She looked at their house from some distance, tried to relate her own grief to their recent trauma, yearned to reach out and talk to the mother, but understood the difficulty communicating. I get how that happens. Finishing up the book, I realized there was much I didn’t understand about her own experience, and probably never would. She had a child she could feel growing and moving inside her. And she got much the same feeling of elation and accomplishment from the difficult task of giving birth, even after knowing her baby was dead. It’s a mystery, but that’s how mothers are built. Interesting how that phrase, giving birth, is all about giving.

If you can think of plumbing your grief as a kind of math, I was making a Venn diagram. The area where the two circles meet is called empathy.