Shortly after my son’s death, I came across his bathrobe in a closet; hugging it to my chest, my nose detected his scent. For the next few days, I frequently held his bathrobe to my face to breathe in his smell and perpetuate the illusion of his presence. The scent eventually dissipated, but the journey had just begun.
I have approached many people to talk about their grief journey – especially parents who lost a child – hoping to learn something from them. What I ultimately learned is that even when the pain is similar, people grieve differently.
When your child dies, memories of that child are like rocks strewn across the path of your grief journey, and when you trip on them it may be quite painful, but they also often trigger your mental camera. As you recall past images and scenes, they are often pleasant to remember; yet when they pass, the feeling that remains is the emptiness caused by the absence of this child.
For some people this is reason enough not to remember, so they focus on the present. Yet one of the last things my best friend said to me before he died of cancer was: “Don’t forget me.”
Although his absence is painful to me, I choose to remember him. At various times I revisit memories of my friend, of my son – happy moments or sad ones – to stay connected to the loved ones who cannot be here, to honor those whose lives enriched mine.
Kent Koppelman 2012
Adapted from:
Wrestling with the Angel
As a bereaved parent who writes about my child too, this is beautifully said. Thank you for this!
P.S. My daughter Nina also died in a car accident in 1995. I am the chapter leader and newsletter editor for the St. Paul Chapter of TCF. Would you give me permission to use this in an upcoming newsletter? We do not charge for our newsletters and will go out to approximately 300 people. Thank you.
Cathy,
I am sorry to hear about your daughter. Garrison Keillor expressed my
sentiments best when he said “Grief makes relatives of us all.” As for using
the above short piece, you certainly have my permission to use it in your newsletter.
Kent K
‘When your child dies, memories of that child are like rocks strewn across the path of your grief journey, and when you trip on them it may be quite painful, but they also often trigger your mental camera. As you recall past images and scenes, they are often pleasant to remember; yet when they pass, the feeling that remains is the emptiness caused by the absence of this child.’
I empathise completely, Kent. I, too, want my mental camera to keep being triggered, despite the ensuing pain. Indeed, my fear is that my ability to see my darling son clearly will weaken. It is only 19 days since his death. Please tell me: Do you dream of your dead son? I have had one dream of mine, on the second night after his death. It consisted of a short, mundane event that could have happened while he was alive: He came into my bedroom carrying a very heavy metal ladder with difficulty. I warned him to be careful, for he was about to hit the chandelier with the ladder. Then I was out of bed and on my hands and knees, picking up the shards. ‘It’s all right mum, I can glue it all back together,’ my son said, looking me straight in the eye. But he was crestfallen, clearly aware that the damage was not reparable.
Please tell me your view of how much, if any, entitlement you think one has to take a dream like this to be a message from one’s dead child. Frankly, I am taking this dream as my son’s apology to me for having accidentally killed himself, despite my oft-expressed fear that he would.
Sophie,
In my book, The Fall of a Sparrow, I describe a dream about a week after my son died, which appears to have rescued me from a deep bout of clinical depression. A few years later I addressed a grief group consisting of Native American people, mostly women. I told them what a doctor said about dreams possibly provoking a chemical reaction in the brain that purged me of the depression, but after my meeting with this group of women, I found that in their culture they believed that my son knew I needed him so he came to me in that dream to help me. Each of us can decide what explanations make the most sense to us, and in most cases I would choose the most rational explanation. But in this case, the women’s explanation is such a compelling one that I would rather embrace it than the doctor’s “clinical” explanation. I think you should believe what you choose to believe as well, in terms of what satisfies your deepest sense of what our world is or should be.
Kent Koppelman
Thank you, Kent. You generously gave me the leave you knew I was seeking. And you did it exquisitely. I shall read your book, certainly.
One can only hope they are not forgotten after passing.
There is no joy without sorrow.