Parental Grief Is a Cry That Echoes Forever
He begins the meeting with a welcome, and a warning. They are here to talk about their children, to light candles in their memory, to share stories of happier times drawn from reservoirs of grief.
“I’m sorry you have to be here but glad you’ve chosen to come,” Mel Giniger says as he convenes this month’s session of Compassionate Friends. “And I have to ask you to please, please, keep your remarks brief . . . and forgive me if I have to cut you off, so that everyone has a chance to speak.”
But as we wind around the circle, no one who rises to speak is shushed. Not the man who stands silent for an eternity, struggling to compose himself enough to describe his daughter’s final Father’s Day card. Or the woman who reads aloud a three-page letter from the best friend of her now-dead son. Or the elderly lady who clutches a collage of photos and rambles on about the life and death of her 33-year-old child.
“It’s not something we’re ‘allowed’ to talk about much on the outside,” Giniger explains. “It makes people uncomfortable. It scares them . . . the idea that your child could be taken away. The families and friends, they want you to go back to being the person you were before this happened. They don’t understand, you’re never going to be that way again.”
So every month, dozens of families gather at this Westwood church for the support only fellow sufferers can provide. Some carry grief so raw they seem to radiate pain: the couple whose 13-year-old son just committed suicide. The man whose daughter was “clobbered by a truck” in July. The parents who lost “the love of our lives” to a surfing accident four months ago.
Others, like Giniger and his wife, Nan, have made peace with the worst of their pain. Their 18-year-old daughter, Amanda, died in a traffic accident 11 years ago. They found solace in the arms of this group and its sister organization, Bereaved Parents, USA. Now, a decade later, they still come, to help others along the journey.
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Their children are the people we read about in newspaper briefs . . . the bicyclist cut down by a drunk driver; the third-grade victim of a hit-and-run; the surfer whose life was lost to the ocean. And they are the folks whose deaths never make the news . . . the young mother who died in her sleep of an aneurysm; the honor student-turned-mental patient who committed suicide at 25; the infant girl found dead in her crib, still her mother’s only child.
They biked and hiked, wrote poetry and played tennis, liked pickup trucks and golden retrievers. Their lives shine out from the photos their parents have assembled, behind a montage of burning candles: a handsome young man at his sister’s wedding, a curly haired girl in a graduation photo, a baby girl in ruffles and bows.
“I used to cry and pray and ask, ‘Why me? Why did it have to be my child?’ ” says Rennia Davis, clutching a picture of her 8-year-old daughter, Symfonee, who was struck by a car on her way home from school six years ago. “Then I had to look around and ask, ‘So whose child should it be?’ Would I say, ‘Take hers or hers, but not mine?’ ”
“Like every parent, I don’t feel like I got enough. But what’s enough?” she asked. How many years would it take to fill a father’s capacity to love, to satisfy a mother’s need for her child?
Eighteen years? Ask Mel Giniger. Forty years? Ask the father of Steven, who died of pancreatic cancer, at “49 years and 11 months old.” Fifty years? Ask the elderly woman, here for the first time to light a candle for her daughter, Francine. “She was a wonderful, loving person, and I just wasn’t ready to let her go,” she says quietly, sobbing. Her child was 56 years old when she died.
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By evening’s end, I am spent and shaken. I rush out, past knots of red-eyed families still sharing stories in hushed tones; past a woman crying on the church’s back steps, fumbling for a cigarette; past a mother and daughter, leaning unsteadily on one another as they make their way, sobbing, to their car.
It is after 10:30 when I get home. My children are, mercifully, in bed. There is no one to pester me about homework, complain that her sister ate all of the brownies, remind me that I promised to sew that rip in her pants.
All three of my girls are asleep in my bed. Any other night I’d clear them out, usher them sleepily back to their rooms. Tonight, I squeeze in, gratefully. And as I lie sleeplessly beside them, I am content, for once, just to watch them breathe.