We talk incessantly about loss around here. It isn’t that I’m an expert on loss. It is more that I am a student of loss. While not a class I intended on enrolling in, loss, and his partner grief, have proven themselves to be apt professors. See, I still want to see God’s beauty in this cruel world. You may say prayer is the answer. I happen to agree with you. But, how does one use prayer to the fullest in the face of the paramount tragedy, the death of a child? Professors Loss & Grief tell me it is by diving in headfirst. A shrinking wallflower does not an intentional prayer make. Now, I may have forgotten to tell you one important detail. I have flunked this class several times already. Many of my exercises remain nonsubmitted zeros in the grade book. Others have been masterfully plagiarized, nearly to the point of my expulsion. I may or may not have paraphrased a few Edna St. Vincent Millay poems into prayer assignments, but let’s have that remain between us, shall we? During my current enrollment period, I have managed to pass most of the class. I’m now in the do or die phase. Everything rides on this final grade. And, it is the direst assignment of them all. I call it prayer by practice. How do you show up for someone else when you still can’t emotionally handle your own stuff?
PTSD is an unforgiving beast. I am self-diagnosed, mind you. Using the labels of a current generation, I now recognize my “triggers,” these perfectly innocent occurrences that, once seen by my grieving brain, vault me back to a time and place I do not wish to visit, namely that 6th floor PICU unit at the hospital where I was told my daughter would no longer smile with her dimple or dance through the halls of my home any longer. So, trigger warning to you, my friend. The Little Mermaid is a trigger for me, both the movie and the merchandise. When Jodi Benson starts off the song with, “I wanna be where the people are,” I lose it. Pat Green’s Wave on Wave is a massive trigger, as my daughter sang this to all of us with her masterful
impersonation of my mother. Mom would drive the kids home from school pointing her finger and turning the steering wheel with her left hand, right hand on the gear shift with feet on simultaneous brake and clutch pads, gravel flying, as she did her spoken word repetition of whatever Pat was singing just after he sang it. Clogging is a trigger. Funerals, especially for children - colossal trigger. Dimples are, too. Beautiful moles next to beautiful top lips - another trigger. Honorable mention triggers include, but are not limited to: Usher, Nelly, mentions of Kidd Kraddick, the Twilight books, Christmas Vacation, the movie Juno, all weenie dogs, and the smiley face sticker Walmart once used for falling prices. See, these are all things my daughter loved, or was good at, or just remind me of her for reasons only my heart remembers. You would think I’d have learned to steer clear of all these things by now.
I had an overwhelming urge to attend a child’s funeral recently. More so, I was compelled to volunteer to help at said funeral. Funeral is the word I subconsciously chose to use though you may insert other words like memorial, home-going, or even remembrance service. I knew it would be difficult, but I thought I could do it. After all, it’s been almost 16 years since I stumbled through my own child’s funeral. I stood in the foyer of my church, doing everything I could to keep an expression that could pass for a smile on my face. My job was to look for anyone sporting a concerned expression and make sure they knew the bathroom was just down the hallway next to me. Later, I cut and served pies. There’s a certain finesse one must have when working a dessert table at such an event. A child’s funeral tends to be about eleventy thousand times longer than an adult’s. The receiving line for parents is hours long. I am not exaggerating. While a mom who lost her child isn’t going to eat, it is important, or it was to me on this particular day, to have ample dessert op-tions still waiting to be chosen. So, you have to sweetly shoo away the children on their 3rd or 4th dessert table pilgrimage, explaining to them that, while they may have beaucoup brownie bites, there will be no more pie offerings until the family has had a chance to choose their desserts. If junior challenges me on this, I will politely request the audience of his mother.
In between the bathroom direction and the pie cutting, there was an actual funeral. Every seat was taken. That’s normal in these situations. The death of a child stands in opposition to natural order. Our children are not supposed to go first. They are to suffer under our parenting until such a time where we require their caretaking as elderly folks. We usher them in. They usher us out. So, these anomaly funerals are well attended. I stood along a back wall. As the people exited, I knew something they surely did not, yet. A child’s death is a defining moment. Those classmates will be marked forever. In years to come they will tell their spouses about the day they laid their friend to rest. The siblings will never be the same, lives forever marked as B & A - before when they had a brother or sister, after - when they did not. That father’s heart is broken and will remain so forever. Dads ought to fix and save all the things, after all. And, the mother, what will become of her? She’ll cry, a lot. And, tears are prayers, my friends. When words won’t come, God says the tears will do just fine. Pie always helps, too. One day, that mom might just cut the pie for someone else. This will serve as my thesis for Professors Loss & Grief. I am happy to say, I am graduating at last.
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