Spirituality Can Ease the Pain of a Child’s Death

It is a sign of our precarious times that so many parents know the numbing shock of nevermore. Always unprepared for death, and especially for the sudden catastrophic death of a child, they have become an almost familiar presence in the news as they try to blame and fix the horrible wrong that took their child--the drunk driver, the drug dealer, the unsupervised youth in a fatherless community.

In the case of author William Wharton, it was the government-approved practice of grass-seed burning in Oregon that obscured Interstate 5 one summer afternoon in 1988, causing a fiery pileup that killed seven people, including his 36-year-old daughter Kate, her husband and their two small daughters.

In his recently released book “Ever After,” (Newmarket Press, 1995), Wharton mixes fact and fiction to show us what he lost and how he has managed to accept the utterly unacceptable.

Until that summer day, Wharton, wife Rosemary and their four children had lived a “charmed life,” he said. They had moved away in 1960 from the television-obsessed culture of Southern California to raise their children in France.

The hardest hours were the first ones after he and his wife heard the news. “It was the two of us, alone, after 36 years and thinking of all the things you do with a child, helping her to get to the age she was, developing a wonderful individual. And there was nothing we could do to have stopped it,” Wharton said in a telephone interview.

Without any prepackaged paradigm to explain the loss or help manage his anger, grief and mangled sense of continuity, Wharton did what many others have done: He threw himself into his work and into his cause--in this case legal action against the state, the farmer, and the trucker who rear-ended his daughter’s car. But unlike others who under the same circumstances might question their faith, Wharton embraced the spiritual.

The night before the funeral, Wharton said he was visited by his dead son-in-law. When he awoke, Wharton said he was certain the family was still together and happy, that it was only as if they had stepped off a train and were awaiting their next destination. Wharton said his son-in-law also asked him to photograph “what’s left of what we call ourselves” and use the pictures to help stop field burning. He complied.

But after a costly and nearly fruitless campaign to raise public indignation, Wharton eventually was forced to settle the lawsuit. He then turned to writing as a last chance to fulfill the mandate from his son-in-law.

In writing the book’s first section, he chose a harrowing technique: turning himself into his daughter to write in the first person in her voice. He produced the passage in a three-day rush. “The feeling is that she was telling it to me,” he said. “I would laugh and cry sometimes when I wrote it.”

While Wharton (author of “Birdy” and “Dad”) said he wrote from his imagination, family members later confirmed some details were factual--such as Kate conceiving her first child in a Greek monastery.

The book may be made into a movie, Wharton said. Even so, he said he feels as if he has done what he needed to do and can let go.

In contrast, he said his wife manages her grief by pretending occasionally that nothing has changed. “She regularly writes and phones them, holding her finger on the phone,” Wharton said.

He has also found comfort in the “inside information” he said he now has about death. “Death,” he said, “is like birth: You change from one kind of existence into another.

“I don’t ask anybody else to be convinced,” he said. “My word is, stop trying to repress the things in your life which could be spiritual like dreams, deja vu, all the coincidences. . . .

“Keep yourself accessible to your own spirituality and all spirits. Don’t close yourself down.”