A Lifetime of Worry Is Price Parents Pay

Sometimes, I think of all the laughter I didn’t hear, the blind love I never got and the confidences I never shared and know how great it would have been.

Then again, sometimes I think maybe it’s just as well I’m not a parent.

This is one of those weeks. I pick up the paper and read about an 8-year-old boy killed in an accident so freakish it defies belief, and the same old question haunts: After something like this, how do parents ever put one foot in front of the other again?

Even knowing that the answer is “They just do” doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, it makes it more painful, knowing that the answer isn’t something mystical. Rather, it’s just something you have to do.

It has always seemed to me that people go into parenthood thinking of the fun and the challenge. Then they find out that they’ve also bought a lifetime ticket no one told them about: a concern that outstrips any they’d known before.

They worry about their kids on the playground. Then about them when they begin driving the car. Then when they leave the nest for good. Knowing that a tragedy probably won’t befall a child doesn’t erase the omnipresent fear that it could.

And then something way off the charts happens, as it did this week in Laguna Niguel when a mammoth concrete park bench toppled onto an 8-year-old boy and killed him. And you get the phone call that couldn’t possibly ever come, but that, once it does, stays with you forever.

And you wonder, how does a parent bounce back from that?

“I lost a son eight years ago to a brain tumor,” Renee Miller says. “I remember someone writing me a letter at the time and making a couple points that I’ll always remember.

“They said, ‘We just admire the way you and Marvin handled it. . . . He said you could have chosen to be positive and keep the family together, and you did. Or you could have chosen to go the other way and be angry and hurtful and spend the rest of your life being angry.’ ”

The weird thing, Miller says, is that she didn’t remember making a choice. She just knew she had two other children, and the voice in her head said she had to go forward.

Miller, 44, is a counselor with a program in Santa Clara called Touchstone, an offshoot of the group Parents Helping Parents. A volunteer for several years, she gave up a manager’s job at Macy’s three months ago to work full time with Touchstone.

I ask if she made peace with her son’s death. “Eventually,” she says. “It was about a year or so ago, maybe two, that I finally came to grips with how deep the loss had been for me.”

I ask what she, a layperson, brings to the job.

“Sometimes all parents want is someone to hold their hand who knows how they’re feeling,” she says. “It’s a special club, an exclusive club, one I wish I hadn’t gotten membership to, but I got chosen.”

I ask if she struggled with the whys of her son’s premature death.

“I didn’t even try to grapple with that. I think it would make me crazy to think of the sense of it all, because to me it would make no sense.”

I don’t mean to sound like I just dropped onto the planet. I know people have accepted these terms of parenting since the dawn of time.

My mother just wrapped up a month’s visit. One night last week around 11, I told her I was going to walk to the bank and deposit my check. “Are you sure it’s safe this time of the night?” she asked.

No problem, I said; I do it all the time.

The trip takes 45 minutes. When I got home, Mom called down from her room, “You’re back already?”

This woman who is 73 and who normally falls asleep after hitting the pillow just happened to stay awake for 45 minutes that night.

Another parent with that silent alarm in her head.

An alarm, I guess, that never shuts off.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com