So Tell Me

06 Jul 2013 27 Comments

by Denise in Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

From Fourth of July:

Today is Natalie’s birthday; Happy Birthday to you, my sweet girl. I love you so.

Today I found us an apartment; Happy Birthday again, Natalie. It’s small, but we’ll make it work. It’s located exactly where we want to be, the rent is okay, and – the big one – they’ll take the dogs. Around here, that’s a Godsend. My application is in and I’m waiting for approval. The manager who showed me around wants us there. Assuming all goes well, we’ll move August 1st.

Today, I’m wondering how it got to be July again, without Philip. I didn’t want to use this blog to whine, but here I am. I think of him, my stomach churns, the tears at the back of my eyes spring forth, my voice has to fight its way out of my throat and the dark place is all there is. Natalie just turned 20; she’s closing in on him and I’m scared. One day she will be older than him. Do I have to add, ‘God willing?’ And I think I say this stuff because I’m reaching out for help, and I know people care, but no one can take this from me because if they took my grief, they’d take my love. And there is nothing that can “take” my love for Philip.

                                                    *******************************************************************

 So I piece together all that has happened and continues to happen. It’s the grace of connection I’m yearning for, the light of meaning, the knowing of what it is I am waking up for. My son – I don’t know how to live with him dead because the feeling is too much to bear. But these bits and pieces along the way tell a story, a story whose meaning I’m struggling to find and whose end won’t come until my own does. If, even, then. I’ve talked about some of it already: Philip, not yet two, saying his grandpa was, “In the light;” the day at the beach, when I almost lost him; the desperate need I had that last year to let him know how goddamn much I loved him;  my “all bets are off” conversation with Natalie; my “dead in a ditch” message, which ironically enough makes me smile because that’s the sort of joke Philip and I would laugh at. And I feel him, smiling back at me.

Then the fact of where I was at spiritually, emotionally, psychically. For the six months or so leading to his death, I’d crossed a line, chosen to live, chosen to stop asking why I was here and accepted the fact that I was. Tried to figure out what I wanted to with the life I was given. Began to understand my inner state was up to me, that my emotions did not, in fact, control me. And I had the tools to work with all of this. Take a breath, take a mental step back from inner turmoil, look at it. No resistance, I’d say, which is the same as “accept it” except those words meant something to me in a way “accept it” didn’t. “No resistance” was a big, deep breath to which I had a physical response. My chest would relax, my arms and shoulders followed. My stomach remained tense and knotted. My stomach was always knotted; it was a question of it being background tension or being whacked-in-the-solar-plexus tension. “No resistance” helped me manage myself.

And, of course, I kept reminding myself, “Accept it, leave it, or change it.”

A year before Philip died, when he was a second-term sophomore, he took a creative writing class. He liked me to read his work and one day sent me an essay about a kid walking down the street, high on LSD, what this kid saw, what he felt like. Shit, I thought.

A week later he came to visit. You know that story I sent you, he asked? That kid walking down the street? That was me.

Well, duh.

“Philip,” I said, “listen; I know you drink, but now you’re doing drugs. Drugs are dangerous. I can’t force you not to take them, but I am asking you please, please, do not do drugs.”

To which he said that he’d done LSD twice, that he didn’t like it, wasn’t going to do it any more, not to worry.

“This is great,” I answered. “I’m your mom, you tell me this stuff, I can’t do anything about it, and when they find you dead of an overdose, they’ll blame me.”

We laughed.

And then there’s this:

The months leading up to Philip’s death, I kept seeing him dead. An image of him would float up in my mind, from the waist up, in a soft yellow button-down shirt (??), his eyes closed,  dead. I didn’t get upset, didn’t think I was having a premonition. I just saw him, dismissed it. Except for the couple times I thought about it a bit, thought about myself at his wake, pictured myself waist down, wearing exactly what it was I wound up wearing when I was actually there. And when I pictured myself, I wondered how I would act. If I truly understood “accept it, leave it, change it.” Because if I did, I’d have to be at peace. But how would it really be?

Since I’m not Jesus or Buddha, I’ll tell you how it really was. I was wrecked. I walked into that funeral home with Phil and Natalie and my brother and outside the room he was in was a plaque that read, “Philip Smyth Jr.” which made me just a little more sick and a little more dizzy.  The name that so touched me when I saw it on a birth certificate or passport or high school diploma or fencing award or even in his own uneven handwriting, now turned on me. Are you telling me that the last time I saw my son we were saying good-bye in the restaurant where we’d just eaten dinner, and the next time I’ll see him is when I walk through that door and he’s lying a coffin? Phil went in first. I waited a minute to follow. And there he was, handsome boy, lying dead, looking exactly like he always did and I fell to my knees and sobbed and all the wide world was Philip, dead. There was no life in that body. What am I to do with this? What the fuck is this? What does it mean to be dead? That’s not an academic question, it’s a blood-and-guts question because Philip was just here, just around to talk to and laugh with and eat with and hug and just like that he wasn’t. So where was he? Don’t tell me he’s in my heart, don’t do that. Of course he’s in my heart, he’s my son. He has been in my heart since the night I woke from my sleep and heard  – I heard – the whisper in my ear: you’re pregnant. It is not enough that he’s in my heart. He has to be where I can touch him, watch him, call him, hold him. Where I can feel he protects me because I know he’s got my back. What is this dead body, what has this to do with my son? I am his mother, I carried him alone before he was born and I’ll carry him alone now that he’s dead. Don’t tell me you’re there to help me because I don’t even know what you’re talking about. If the dictionary-def of help is, “to give or provide what is necessary to..satisfy a need,” then tell me what can be done to bring my son home because that – that – is my need.

So tell me what you’re going to do to help me, and don’t leave me alone when I say that you can’t.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

The Risk I Took

17 Jun 2013 10 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , ,

Here’s how I know I’m getting better:

A couple weeks ago, I was at Cindy’s house when her decorator-friend came to put up some curtains. DF and I were alone, so I asked her about her life instead of talking about mine (that’s number one). I asked her how she got into the decorating business, not about how many kids she had (numbers two and three). And then – number four, the really big one – when she (through no prompting on my part) said, “I miss my son,” and I asked, “Why?” and she said, “He went overseas for a term to study Arabic and now that he’ll be home in a week, I realize just how much I miss him,” I did not say, “Lady, you don’t know how fucking lucky you are.”

And on a maybe more minor note (maybe), when Cindy’s, em, “friend,” found out the wrist she thought was sprained was actually broken and required six weeks in a cast followed by physical therapy and characterized the whole freakin’ thing as “A Nightmare,” I did not ask her how many of her three children were still alive since, well – oh wait; they all are.

Of course, then there’s days like Friday, when I spent four morning hours watching the final season of “The Big C – Hereafter” and then cried to  Rene, the construction guy who was  in my TV room fixing some water damage on the ceiling. It wasn’t Laura Linney’s fault. If I’m watching morning TV I’m already gone. Turns out Rene had a daughter with his first wife and she died the day after she was born. He’s remarried and has no kids and I’m sure he had hours worth of story to tell me, but how do I ask when I don’t know if he’d want to tell? “Not everyone’s like you, mom,” Natalie likes to say when she thinks I’m too quick to share what she considers private.

It’s just that I’m as interested in other people’s stories as I am in my own. I want to be in your world for a while, to see it the way you do because even if it’s in some small way, I will recognize me and that means we are connected. Once I asked someone I cared very much for if I was still there if he didn’t see me. I knew I was pleading for something he couldn’t give me. Now I know I need to see as much as I need to be seen. I need to tell you about Philip as much as I need you to tell me what’s true and authentic in your life because if I cannot live in what’s true and authentic, even if the true and authentic is grief, then I will become one of the walking dead and that is not what Philip wants.

What Philip “wants?” After Philip died, Phil said to me that he wanted to carry Philip’s kind and generous spirit into the world and that I should too; that Philip would not want me to be in the grief I was in.

“How do you know what he wants?” I shot back. “Maybe he’s lonely. Maybe he wants company. Maybe he wants me with him.”

Phil didn’t answer, but months later he told me that after I said that, he thought, she is fucked up.

But here’s the thing. Some point during The Wilderness of the two days between when Philip lay dead in his room and then dead in a coffin, I was out driving somewhere for something.  Stopped for a red light at the corner of Park and Chestnut in front of  Montclair High School, I thought, I am done. I have had it. I am going to do it. I don’t know how, but I will do it. I have had it; I have had enough. And for the second time I heard my son and he said, “Mom, you have to find the joy. It doesn’t work that way.”

I knew what he meant. I knew that whatever it was I had to work out, I had to work it out where I was and that killing myself wouldn’t matter. I had to work this out. And Philip asked me if I wanted to take the way I was feeling, pick it up and give it to Natalie. Because that’s what killing myself would do. And I had this weird vision, like I’d crossed over and was standing next to Philip, unable to get to Natalie, and the grief I carried was now for her.

See, I took a risk. I took the risk of having children and what I had was one that was dead and one that was alive and needed me. I chose that responsibility –  I chose it. But all that made me feel was trapped. It was my love for Natalie that would give me the strength to lay my burden down, but I couldn’t feel it. The heart that loved was gone; without it, where could I find what I was supposed to give her?

“For I am just a troubled soul
Who’s weighted…
Weighted to the ground
Give me the strength to carry on
Till I can lay my burden down
Give me the strength to lay this burden down down down
Give me the strength to lay it down.”

From “Little Bird” by Annie Lennox

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Maybe God, Maybe Not

15 Jun 2013 16 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

When I joined AA I had pretty low opinion of God, if I had one at all. He wasn’t much of a factor in my life. If He created me, He must’ve gotten interrupted by a phone call or needed a bathroom break so that when He got back to it, He forgot what He was doing and left a piece out. If He existed, why wasn’t I happy? It didn’t seem fair that I walked around wanting to die while every day millions of others actually did.

God made no difference in my life, but drinking did. Why waste time on my knees when The Answer was limitless, close and affordable? And fast. If there was a God, He took too long, what with all those people he had to care for. So I took care of myself, starting with Boone’s Farm Apple Wine when I was 12 (those days I could take my 12-year-old-self into the liquor store and buy what I wanted) then graduating to rum, vodka or gin (mixed with soda so it wouldn’t taste so bad), pot, quaaludes, amphetamines and whatever I could find in any bathroom I entered that had a medicine cabinet.

God was a nonstarter until January, 1983, age 24, when I took my beaten self to an AA meeting. Instead of finding smoky basements filled with the old and the wet-brained, I found a group called Young Winners* and met people my own age. Younger, even. The group met on Friday nights, which made sense because Friday was drink-your-ass-off night. After the meeting, we’d go out to a diner. I didn’t do God and I didn’t do diners but I was doin’ what I was told because I believed it would make me better.

AA gave me the idea that maybe it was God that I was missing. I thought if I changed His name to Higher Power, it would change the way I thought about Him. Except HP As I Understood Him was still pretty much as distant and pissed off as my parents used to be. I was told prayer was talking to HP, and meditation was listening, so I tried both but I still felt like the only one I was talking to was myself. I was told not to worry, to “believe that we believe.” After a couple years, that’s exactly what I did. Praying got me nowhere so I let everyone else believe and concerned myself with keeping sober and trying to find the right group or the right book that would lead me to some version of a Benevolent Being just right for me.

What I didn’t know was that I was looking for something Out There that only existed in here. The connection I wanted was with  myself which sounded like some platitude until I understood what it meant. I thought I had a connection to my-self, a worthless, shameful self I devised and despised and so when I wasn’t drinking to destroy that self, I tried to do it by vomiting or starving myself (name me one addict who has only one addiction). I didn’t know that the “self” I hated was born and nurtured from the voices in my head which, powerful as they were, were just, well, voices, and since they were in my head not only could I choose not to listen to them, I could make them say something else. Something nice, even, weird and uncomfortable as that felt.

Which brings me back to Simple Isn’t Easy, but at least it’s clear and sensible. And revelatory.

Feeling more connected to a self that I was starting to like let me feel more connected to my kids. I was never as close to Philip as I was when he died. I might’ve tormented myself when my kids were growing up, but I didn’t torment them. My heart hurt for loving them and for not being able to feel how much they loved me back. And when I would tell Ed that in a show of love, Philip did this or Natalie did that, he’d say, “Why do you act so surprised every time you realize how much your kids love you?”

In the couple years before he died, Philip grew more tender than I’d ever seen him. Or maybe I just noticed it more because once he left to live on his own, he no longer had to come if I called, but he did. He’d often get in touch with me in the middle of the night to tell me he loved me. One night he called and said, “Mom, you fascinate me.” What the?? I was living on the top floor of my friend’s house ‘cause I couldn’t afford an apartment, I hated my job, I was manless and restless and still wondering what meaningful thing I could do when I got up in the morning, so what the hell was so fascinating?

“Because you’re growing up,” he said. “And I’m growing up. And we’re doing it together.” `

To which I said nothing because he’d taken my breath away.

The year before Philip died I found myself desperate to tell him I loved him. He was sweet and vulnerable and I didn’t know what I meant by that except I felt a hole in him that I was trying to stuff with my love. I told him that when I was a kid I was struck by the idea that an inch was such a tiny thing, but if you divided it, it became infinity. “I am that inch,” I told him, “and inside this body, my love for you is infinite.”

And a few months before he died, I sent him a text that read, “I am sorry for any time I was ever angry at you or made you feel bad about yourself.”

There was something between us, me and my son. Something relaxed and familiar and right. Something like we fit together, and all it ever was was easy. And that is why on the landing, when I finally stopped crawling and screaming and gave Phil a moment of space to say what he had to say, and what he had to say was, “They found him…” I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence because what I heard was Philip, and what he said was, “Mom, you gotta go deeper.” In the hot, swirling, sinking, stinking mess my world had become, I heard my son and I knew what he meant but all I could think was, fuck you, are you fucking kidding me, is this some fucking cosmic joke? and it occurred to me that right then, right that very second, there were people all over the world who were finding out their children were dead and they were feeling exactly what I was feeling and if it was possible to feel like this, what was the point of being alive?

Accept it, leave it, change it. Somebody, anybody – please, tell me; are there any other options? Because these are not going to work for me this time; these are most definitely not going to work.

*I’m not sure if anonymity only applies to people, but just in case, this was not the real name of the meeting.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Simple Isn’t Easy

04 Jun 2013 4 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death, Faith, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

One day Krishnamurti told his followers he was going to tell them his secret. I can imagine the excitement rippling through the crowd, the expected relief, the gratitude that they must be his Very Special Followers since they were the ones present at this much-unexpected announcement. I imagine many of them thought their journey was over, that once they knew this secret, their suffering would end. And I expect it would, if they could really understand what he said. Because what he said was, “I don’t mind what happens.”

Truth is simple. That doesn’t make it easy.

I already said that Natalie was unhappy at school. She was a freshman at Rutgers in New Brunswick, the same college where Philip was a junior. This wasn’t a matter of oh-she’ll-be-fine-in-a-couple-of-months. In February of 2012, she was in the middle of her second semester, and I was still talking her off the ledge. She was working on transferring, and I was trying to encourage her to hang in and just finish the semester.

Conventional wisdom says “Going away to college is good for them.” CW isn’t always – if ever – wisdom. CW easily turns into something she said so he said so everyone says but not many give much thought to what they’re saying. Some kids do well at college, some don’t. There’s more than one way to live a life, and SAT brilliance coupled with a $60,000-a-year Ivy League education doesn’t mean you or your kid are going to have the fantasy future you think it promises. If you have a future at all, that is.  But it sure is fun to tell your friends about it. Even more fun than telling them about your last raise or your new Mercedes or any of those other things that make us really proud to be us until we need the next proud thing because the first proud thing is well, just so yesterday.

Philip took easily to living away, but Natalie did not. Many of my conversations with her were to remind her that there were three options in any situation: Accept it, leave it or change it. She was trying to change it by applying to other colleges; but on the way to leaving Rutgers, all she could do was accept that she was there for the short term. To do that is to take responsibility for your life, for what you’re feeling and how you’re thinking. Blame your circumstances all you want, all you’ll get is more suffering. Which isn’t to say you “accept” any kind of crap that’s thrown at you. You recognize it’s crap and figure out how to clean it up and stay out of its way once you do. And not once; it’s never once. It’s the work of a life, the work that matters most, the work that every degree in the world isn’t going to ensure you’ll have mastered.

Not to suggest this is any sort of easy. See, I’d been grappling with How to Live forever. The first time I drank I was 11, which is just to say how early I was unhappy, how early I was looking to escape. At 24 I joined AA, but nearly 30 years later I still didn’t get what was so great about life, why after 30 years of therapy and 10 of antidepressants I still didn’t want to be here. But I’d spent the year-and-a-half or so before Philip died listening to Eckhart Tolle CDs whenever I drove anywhere – and often, to listen was the reason I got in the car in the first place. Accept it, leave it or change became my credo because it gave me a way to think about a given situation instead of reacting to it.

And I paid attention to the 24/7 film festival that was going on in my head, which was mostly playing reruns. Stories of vengeance, hate, anger, victimhood, all of which I wrote, produced, directed and starred in. Worst of all, I believed them, and my emotions acted accordingly. It wasn’t the situation that was causing the feelings; it was the endless, looping, dog-chasing-its-tail stories that kept my gut churning.

So I stopped. I became a spectator instead of a participant, stopped the show when I didn’t like it. Simple, but not easy. But the work was to stay here, in the present. Not in the past that was gone or in a future that never came except as the now.

When Philip was little, I used to tell him that I was going to paint on his wall, “Be here now.” I was so busy noticing he wasn’t present that I didn’t get that I wasn’t either.

Accept it, leave it, change it. This was the work I was doing at the moment of impact, the moment I crashed and burned on the landing.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

R.I.P.

14 May 2013 11 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , ,

Neither Philip or Natalie were “there” for all of my life. But loving someone can do strange things to the space-time continuum. It’s hard to remember I had a life before my children. I can remember scenes, of course, but I don’t remember what I felt like then, how I lived without the love that has both brought me to my knees and given me a reason not to stay there. Phil told me about a friend of his who lost her son. She has a place where she’s set some things of his, and every morning she spends some time with him. Then she gets up and lives her life, reminding herself she had a life without him even when he was alive. Phil used that as a model.

But we all bring what we bring to the situations in our lives. There is a sameness to I-lost-a-son-and-you-lost-a-son. But it’s circumstantial, is all. We aren’t each other and we didn’t lose each other’s sons. And maybe you were pretty damn satisfied about where you thought you were headed, maybe you had a sustainable marriage or work that made you feel useful and productive or a burning desire to do x, y or z with the time that you had that was free for choosing.

I was trying to figure all of that out, and when it was hard or I got scared because I felt so alone, I’d think, “I have my kids.” They were my place to rest. But that place has to be my place; that place cannot depend on who is or isn’t here or what anyone does or doesn’t do.  Yesterday I said that Philip’s love is mine and so it doesn’t leave. Not so with my peace of mind. Maybe just not yet.

On Sunday I read something someone had written for her mom on Mother’s Day. She’d written the standard, “You were always there, etc.,” but not just because it’s what you say. It’s because – and this was clear – she meant it. Her mom meant to her, and she wanted her mom to know. But all I could think of when I read that was Philip. I might have been “here” first, but I wasn’t here the way I was after he was born. I want to say to him, ‘You were always with me,” because he’s just as gone as if he had been.

My dad died. On Mother’s Day, around 11:30 or so. His heart was so very tired. Today is his birthday – He would’ve been 83. It’s also my parents’ anniversary. 58 years, I think? I have to check.

My dad loved to bowl. Laura, Philip’s ex and good friend, knew my dad. She sent me a text that read, “It’s comforting that he will be able to spend time with Philip…they can bowl together.” For whatever reason, I laughed; how good to laugh. And Nicole, go join in and kick their asses!

Dad, Philip, Nicole. I love you, we all love you. And what we wish most is for you all to rest in peace. We will try to do the same. We need time, so be patient with us. We’ll get there. I promise.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Still the best day…

12 May 2013 11 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

It’s Mother’s Day, and I am reminded that my children are the best thing I’ve done in my life. And I do know they’re not “mine,” not really. They came to the world through me, and I’ve guided them as I’ve let them go.  All letting go of them ever meant was allowing the bond between us to grow longer. They are, truly, the people I love most.

It might be more precise to say that they evoke the most love from me. That is my comfort; that this love is deeply me, and in that sense, I “have” my children. But I miss my son and I love him so much, so very, heart-achingly much. Still; it’s my love, and always will be.

This is my second Mother’s Day since Philip died. I have the last Mother’s Day card he’d given me on my desk. That year he and Natalie picked out particularly lovely cards, so I laid them flat on my desk, fan-style, as a decoration. This is what the front of Philip’s card says: “You are not only my mother, you are the woman who shaped my life.” He signed it, “Yeah, it’s corny. But it’s true. I love you.”

There is a reason – a very real reason – people say, “Don’t go to bed mad.”

So here are some stories because I very much need to talk about him right now.

Two weeks before Philip turned two – and while I was four months pregnant with Natalie – his Grandpa Bill (Phil’s dad) died. I took Philip to the wake. Death is a fact of life and I don’t think it should be hidden from children. The question is how to tell them? There isn’t any right answer. There’s you and your child and your capacity to know what s/he can handle and some imagination about how to broach the subject. I wanted Philip to begin to understand that sometimes the people in his life would no longer be there. I didn’t want to say his grandpa was sleeping and I didn’t want to say he was dead. One was a lie and one was too difficult to explain. There’s only so much an almost-two-year-old can grasp. So I knelt down to face Philip with a belly full of Natalie and said, “Philip, we’re going to see Grandpa Bill. He’s going to be lying down, and he’s not going to get up. Is that okay?”

Who knows how much he understood of what I was saying? But he was a calm child, so I wasn’t worried. I got him dressed, then picked him up and stood him on the kitchen table to straighten his little shirt, smooth his little pants. As I was being  a (slightly) fussy mom, I asked, “Philip, do you know where Grandpa Bill is?” to see if he’d say, “Sleeping.” Instead, he raised his little hand high in the air, index finger pointing toward the ceiling, smiled, and said “In the light.”

Whoa. I stepped back and stared at him, this sweet, innocent, amazing little boy, standing there with his hand in the air, full of smiles and secret knowing. I didn’t know where the hell that came from except to say that children are closer to something that gets lost for most of us as we get older.

After Philip died, Phil, Natalie and I went to the house he’d been living in to get his things. I took his notebooks, and it was just a couple of weeks ago that I looked through them. I found a short essay he’d written about his childhood, and he talked about two things. The first was the apartment we lived in until he was seven, which he described as small, dark and cramped. It wasn’t. It was a big, bright apartment, the entire first floor of a house. But the room he shared with Natalie was small, and maybe that’s what he was remembering.

The second thing he wrote about was the wake. He thought he was four years old, said that he saw his grandpa lying in a coffin and it was creepy, but that he looked around and saw people talking and laughing and then he knew it was okay. Being there struck him deeply, more deeply than I ever knew.

And this is what I mean about Philip being a calm kid:

We were a “traditional” family. Phil worked, which meant I got to stay home with the kids. They were my “work.” I nursed them because it was a way of loving them, washed their diapers because I didn’t like fuzz and plastic, made clothes for them because I love what I can do with fabric. I put them to sleep when they were tired and stayed up with them when they weren’t. And when they were ready for solids I made their food, which mostly meant throwing whatever I cooked for dinner into a blender. I don’t get buying Designer Baby Food packed in teeny, expensive jars. I can mash my own bananas, thank you very much. And what was the point of made-for-baby-applesauce when Mott’s-no-sugar-added served the same purpose? Earth’s Best came from my kitchen and not from a jar, no matter how many green fields, fresh fruits and diapered-only toddlers its adorable label had.

But traditional doesn’t mean popular, and the few friends I had went to work soon after their babies were born. My world was small and lonely before I had Philip, and shrunk to mostly me and him after he was born. By the time he was a year and toddling around I hadn’t changed my mind about staying home, but I was bored and frustrated which I attributed to my lack of imagination and not my circumstances. Most of my conversations were the ones I was having with myself, which is pretty bad news since I do not keep myself very good company.

One thing I did was set up a nook in the corner of my dining room where I could sew. Which involved pins. Lots of pins. When I worked, I’d wind up spreading out to the floor and the dining room table and I took my pins with me. Carefully, because pins in the hands of a child are weapons, which they’re likely to turn on themselves in ways I still don’t like to imagine.

But I wasn’t careful enough. One day Philip toddled over to the dining room table. One determined hand grasped its edge while one curious hand went searching until it found a box of 200 pins which made a slightly pleasing tinkling sound when he knocked them down and they scattered all over the hardwood floor.

Drastic times call for drastic measures, and it seemed to me that picking up the nearest chair and banging it repeatedly on the floor while yelling, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE! was the exact right thing to do. Except no matter how much I tried to lose my mind, a piece of it remained. “What the fuck?” it asked. “Your kid is watching you and you’re scaring him to death.”

Philip was behind me, and I imagined the terror that must be on his face, his eyes tearing, his mouth turned down and trembling, ready to open up and start howling. Goddamnit. I stopped with the chair and turned around expecting to gather him up to shush and reassure him, except he didn’t need any of that at all. He was watching me, little Buddha, waiting for me to stop, and if he could’ve talked I swear he’d have said, “Better now?”

I was, enough to laugh and pick him up and forget about sewing pins for a while. Which makes me think of the saying, “Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” It never occurred to me what they were talking about.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

The Story

08 May 2013 7 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I thought of this story because I was talking about protecting Philip, and because of how deeply we’re affected by the vulnerability we share with our kids. Because we do share it. I might be the one who’s supposed to be doing the protecting, but look at the price I pay if I can’t.

The summer when Philip was four or five and Natalie was two or three, we stayed overnight in Point Pleasant, NJ, with Janine and her son Jake. It was hot and sunny and sticky and when we got to the beach, it was closed. If there was such a thing as a triple-X red flag, it would’ve been flying. I’ve never seen a beach this way. The water was hurling itself at the shore, right up to the boardwalk. In fact, there was no shore; just a boardwalk and lots of hysterical water.

Do Not Enter or not, the beach wasn’t roped off, so we went down the boardwalk stairs just to gape. I’m a weather girl. Not as in, oh, it’s warm and sunny so we should get our asses out and do something. I mean as in ice storms, snowstorms (which my town has decided to call “snow events,” leaving me to wonder just what it is our Town Officials spend the better part of their time – and our money – doing), rainstorms, thunderstorms, storms of any kind. The more nature misbehaves, the better. Of course, all I know is the NY Metro area kind of weather, not the Storm-Chaser, Dorothy’s-house-flying-through-the-air kind. The ocean that day might not be classified as “weather,” but it was Nature being Really Exciting.

The five of us stood just under the boardwalk, Janine and I holding our kids’ hands. No one else was there because really, no sane person would’ve been. You could see what was going on from the top of the boardwalk; no need go down those stairs to get under it. But we did, and the panorama of that unobstructed wild ocean letting its white, foamy hair down and shaking it out with a vengeance was mesmerizing.

Possessed, I took Philip’s still-chubby four-(or five)-year-old hand and walked deeper into that maniacal frothing sea. I was both thrilled and terrified; for God’s sake, I wouldn’t know how to float in a bathtub, never mind do a free-stroke or a backstroke or any other stroke that was supposed to keep my head above more than about four feet of water; what the hell was I doing tempting fate?

Correction. What was I doing tempting fate with my child?

I’d say it was a modified version of that thrill-seeking thing that makes people jump out of airplanes or climb big, scary mountains. And I think that attraction, dangerous as it is, is the pull of life. It’s the need to have all your senses mobilized and attentive, so there isn’t you and the ocean or the sky or the mountain because you are the ocean and the sky and the mountain. I mean, you’re not thinking about anything except what you’re doing, and how peaceful is it not to have to listen to the damn whining voices in your head. It’s what I’d thought meditation was about, but I hadn’t the patience to get there by sitting around and trying not to think. And here was an unsought opportunity to shock myself awake.

We didn’t walk far. We couldn’t. The water rushed at us, smacking my shins and splashing up my thighs, then rushed back on itself, trying to take us with it. It was gorgeously, savagely, beautiful; it was The Call of the Wild that I wanted to answer, but I didn’t know how.

So I turned to go back to the boardwalk, and a few steps later I realized I’d let go of Philip’s hand. I had stood there marveling at the ferocity and velocity of that ocean and then I dropped my son’s hand. I don’t remember doing it, I just remember spinning around in shock and dread, to see that Philip had been knocked down to his hands and knees, and some woman was helping him to get up.

What followed was some eerie dream-like sequence where I moved toward her and she gave Philip’s hand to me and I took it, unable to see what I’m sure were her accusing eyes behind her sunglasses, unable to say anything because the enormity of what I’d done was already taking hold, because the roaring of the ocean wouldn’t have allowed me to be heard anyway. Then somehow I was back at the boardwalk, back to Janine, who hadn’t seen any of it. I didn’t tell her. If I had, I would have had to say, “I think I almost let my child die.” That he didn’t die didn’t change my carelessness. It wasn’t because of me that he didn’t die. It was because of that woman, whoever she was, wherever she came from.  As far as I was concerned, she saved his life.

For years, right up until Philip died, I’d get slightly sick and slightly dizzy when I thought about that day. For just a second my stomach would lurch. I told Philip about it once, but he just shrugged it off. What did it matter to him? He didn’t even remember it.

But after Philip died, the truth of that day hit me, and it knocked me over like one of those big old waves did to him. My son wasn’t saved that day; I was. Because if he would have died then, I don’t know what shell of a person I would have become and what Natalie would have had to suffer because of it. Look; Philip was a young man on his own, and I couldn’t protect him from the choices he made, or the body he was given. But he is my son. He was vulnerable and I was helpless. That I can work through; and to a degree, I have. But if I’d lost him then? If he had died because of my carelessness when I was supposed to be taking care of him?

My heart is on its knees in gratitude. I was graced that day, and I understand the difference between the way it happened and what it would have been like if it had happened then. It’s a nightmarish way to get perspective. But if my son had to die, better it be with my conscience clear.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Again

06 May 2013 17 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday a window opened. Just for a moment. And there he was – Philip, in his biker jacket, standing there. Palpable. Tangible. In living color. As in I could touch him? No. Do I mean I had a vision? No. I just mean I remembered him like it was yesterday and I am aching for what I can’t have.

Sometimes…well, it’s like this – and not as in a complaint, but as a result of choices I’ve made. I haven’t anyone to hold me; I mean, to just sink into. And right about now, that’s feeling like it would be a good thing. I’d rather be sitting on my couch balled up under someone’s arm with a reassuring head resting on mine than sitting on my couch trying to explain it to you. There’s a release that happens when it’s the right person. Like lancing the wound and the pus runs out and the hot pain chills out and from the simple act of touching, there’s nowhere one of you ends and the other begins. Just breathing in a place where you think you’re safe from something it’s not possible to be safe from, but it’s okay to make believe you are, just for a while.

It’s a break in the tension. It’s what I drank for; that click, the one that came right around the third drink, when I started nodding to the music all warm and dreamy because really, everything was going to be all right.

Philip used to let me sink into him. Just for a moment, here and there. He knew me. He saw my unhappiness, he wrote about it, he tried to love it out of me. Funny thing is, I was finally letting him, then he went and died.

Yeah, well. Maybe not so funny.

I guess I’m saying that it just hit me weak-in-the-knees hard that my son is gone and I am crying crying crying again and for what? I well know that people are suffering this and I can’t do anything about mine like they can’t do anything about theirs. And it matters; it matters that people suffer all sorts of things because I don’t think I’ve been given more or less than anyone else. It matters that people are trying to cope with what’s in front of them. It has to matter because if I can’t make some sense – even some vague, primitive sense – of this, I think my spirit will lie broken and useless and my body will follow right along.

For months and months and months I asked Philip to come to me in my dreams. I had two dreams about him after he died, but no more. Phil told me he dreams of Philip. He sees him standing with his friends, and he wants to tell him something but he can’t. How do you feel when you wake, I asked? Terrible, he answered.

Then I thanked Philip for not dreaming of him because I got it. To feel like I experienced him would only make me feel worse. There’s a cushion that’s developed, between and around me and my son. It doesn’t keep me from him, it doesn’t make the grief go away. But it’s the difference between how I grieved when he first died and how I grieve now. It has to do with the physical fact of him; 14 months of not seeing him or touching him has lost its sharp edge.

Then that window that opened. It was visceral. Again; the brutality of loss. Philip popped up and was gone, and I’m haunted by the line I wrote, weeks ago:  “I see him, beautiful boy…”

My beautiful boy; oh God, where is he? When Natalie went to pre-school, and then again in kindergarten, she screamed for me. Mrs. M had to carry her in while I watched, Natalie reaching her arms out to me over Mrs. M’s shoulder, Mommy…Mommy…Mommmmmmmyy!! And kindergarten, Mrs. R holding her hand, Natalie screaming, Mommy! My stomach hurts! Mommy! Mommy! Please!

I can’t stop thinking about this because I am Natalie, screaming for help, reaching out for someone who cannot or will not help, and it’s killing me that I let her go and I know exactly how she felt, her big eyes streaming tears, terrified, not understanding how mommy could let this happen and of course it took one day for it to be all right, but she didn’t know that, not in those moments. I am stuck in that tableau where I am Natalie more than I am me. Terrified and bewildered at what’s happened, guilty and ashamed for letting it.

I know Philip’s death wasn’t my fault. But I am his mother; protecting him is what I’m supposed to do. It’s beyond sense or reason. It’s biological, it’s psychic. I didn’t do it, couldn’t do it, and that’s what I have to live with. I did nothing wrong; if you think I’m saying I feel guilty because I could have done something to prevent this, I’m not explaining it right. See, what I know and what I feel have nothing to do with each other. The fact is that Philip is dead, the fact is I couldn’t have stopped it, the fact is I am wired to protect him and I didn’t.

Next, I want to tell you a story.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Day 3, and So On

04 May 2013 6 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

I hate this. I goddamn hate that my son is dead and that you’ll say so very sympathetically, “Of course you do” but you don’t know. You think I’m brave and I’m doing great and hey, I’m writing a blog and maybe it’s what’s keeping me sane, but what do I do when I’m done with my story? Day One and Day Two (parts one, two, three and four) and now Day Three, and then what? What if I run out of things to say? Because I certainly won’t run out of things to feel. It’s my silences I don’t know how to live with.

It’s Friday, and I am at my parents’ house in Brooklyn. Philip is all around, pictures of when he was 2 and 4 and 14 and 17 and 18 and 20. He’s kissing his cousin, sitting with his grandma, sitting on a rock in Wyoming during the last vacation we’d taken as a family. And he’s in my old bedroom, on the bureau, he and Nicole, two dead grandbabies with a place of their own. And if I sound angry that my mom did that, I’m not. I’m angry that such a thing should be necessary.

I’m here to visit my dad in the hospital, where he was taken for arrhythmia on Monday, and where we briefly thought he might die. What do people think about when they’re not thinking about death? It’s most of what I think about, no matter whatever else it seems I might be thinking about. Fill it up, regular; do you know my son is dead? Three veggie burgers and a chicken Panini; do you know my son is dead? What time should we meet for dinner; you didn’t forget my son is dead?

I don’t want to be in this hospital, this Bizarre Hotel where the NICU is opposite the birthing center and which I suppose might be viewed as perfectly normal, but it’s a normal I don’t want to be reminded of. Philip and Natalie were perfectly healthy babies who were the result of perfectly healthy pregnancies and had perfectly healthy births, right in my very own home – but who knew that babies who aren’t sick or hurting didn’t necessarily grow up to be adults who aren’t sick and hurting? If they managed to grow up at all, that is.

I’m at the hospital with my mom, and my Aunt Joan and her granddaughter, Andrea. The two of them flew in from North Carolina Thursday night. I picked them up from the airport, drove them to my parents’ house and slept there with them. Natalie’s working in the city. When she’s done, she’ll take the train here, to the hospital. Tonight we’ll drive home.

But I want to go home now. I want to be in my TV room on the couch, the same couch I’d tucked myself into when I found out Philip died, and where I’d spent most of the next year because to move off it was to take my attention away from my grief and I refused to take my attention off my grief.

No. That’s not it. It wasn’t possible to take my attention off my grief. It was intolerable. People thought it would be good for me to go out, get my mind off it. Even now I want to throw my head back and cackle like a crazy hyena at the absurdity of such a sentiment. You can be forgiven if you say such a thing because you don’t know what else to say, but if you really believe what you’re saying, then naiveté is the color of your world.

Never mind. Either way, there’s deep ignorance involved to suggest there’s such a thing as getting my mind off what Philip’s death felt like, and today I am in no mood to be charitable about any of it. The damn stupidity of suggesting I could take my mind off it, like getting some fresh air would do anything other than remind me that Philip couldn’t breathe it. What was I supposed to do, pluck my mind out of my head, lay it down on my pillow, tell it, “I’ll be back a little later, when you’ve calmed down?” As if that would have mattered, as if without a mind to think about it, my body wouldn’t still have been folding in on itself in its shock and disbelief that This Is My Reality, not some episode of ER where I could shake my head and think, “Wow. Sucks to be them.”

Maybe there’s truth to that. If emotion truly is the body’s response to what the mind’s thinking, “taking my mind off it” might’ve given me some relief. Except it’s delusional to think there was another response to Philip’s death besides the one I was having, that spending my time figuring out how not to think about my son being dead was somehow going to help me live through it. Why not just tell me to go get drunk about it? That would have been just as productive as any other way to not think about it. I mean, isn’t this what I got sober for? So I could fully feel what something like this feels like?

Really?

If, in fact, “getting my mind off it” was valid advice, it didn’t matter. No one can tell anyone else how to grieve. The one thing that made any sense to me was when my friend Debbie, who works with the bereaved, told me to follow any creative impulse I had. Which led to months and months of me sitting on my couch and knitting, and to consider writing the book, “How Knitting Saved My Life.”

You’d think it would’ve taken something heroic for me to make it through that night. The magnitude of my loss seemed to demand heroism to survive it. But I’m no fireman running into a burning, crumbling tower. They were the brave ones, the ones the word “heroism” was meant for. Me – I had no choice in this. This was life. Wait – no. This was death. Happens every second of every day and sooner or later everyone has to deal with it. Just so happens now it was my turn.

That night I sat on my couch like a wild thing caught in a trap, scrunched in a fetal position, knees bent, toes clenched, hands fisted, chewing on my thumbnails and staring at nothing, wanting someone to come and help me, embarrassed and afraid that they would. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to be. For two hours I sat in an ungodly silence broken only by my on-and-off sobbing and heaving. It should have been storming outside; the rain should have been pelting, the thunder ferocious, the lightning dazzling, the trees snapping and cracking from its impact. At the very least someone in the house besides me should be making maybe a sob or a moan.  And when the silence of that huge and implacable house provoked the racket in my brain into a simply unbearable frenzy, I grabbed my phone, went to my bedroom, shut the door and called Janine.

Janine is my friend from Brooklyn; we’d met one morning when we’d taken our kids to the same park on 79th Street and Shore Road. Philip was around 4; Janine’s son Jake was a few months older. There’s no good that can come from an unexpected phone call at 4:00 in the morning, which is maybe why she didn’t pick up the first time around. I chose her to call because if you’re going to give someone a 4am call, it’s got to be someone who’s going to start screaming right along with you.

Because that’s what we do, we women. We moan when our children come into the world, wail if they leave it before we do.  Our lives then become Life Sentences, as we’re condemned to carry on without those we carried into this world. What are we to do, we ask? We are a society of do-ers. What use is it to just be? Where’s the value in that? If we don’t have something to show for our time spent, what the hell are we worth? That’s why we have such a hard time with the elderly; theirs is a time to be, but the rest of us are so busy doing that we whiz on by while they watch with rheumy eyes, eyes that probably have lots to teach us if we’d just slow down and pay attention for a bit.

How ill-equipped are we to deal with death, then? The original moment when the immovable object meets the irresistible force. My body was screaming for action while my mind understood it wouldn’t matter. I wanted this feeling out of my body. One night, during the relentless progression of Nicole’s cancer, Robert went to South Beach on Father Capodano Boulevard in Staten Island and screamed. I picture him, head thrown back, maybe shaking his fists, maybe stamping his feet, howling his anguish to that dark and endless universe, the only place that could contain it.  And maybe he screamed until he was sure he had not one more drop of rage to exhaust, only to find that all it took was one night’s sleep – and not even a good one, at that – to revive his rage, but not his spirit.

Animals caught in traps have been known to chew off a limb to escape. I was that animal, but short of ingesting my entire body, there was no escape. Where would I escape to, anyway? I wanted to escape what I knew. I cursed Eve for biting into that goddamned apple. The Tree of Knowledge; the tree of consciousness, the part where we woke up and began to know things like loss and grief and death, things that I was quite clear I did not want to know about. Not where my children are concerned. Most unequivocally, especially, assuredly where my children are concerned.

But here’s the thing. There’s only grief because there’s love. That’s what it means to live in a world of opposites. Once we decide “good,” we’ve automatically created “bad.” Once there’s birth, there’s death. Once we love a child, we grieve if we lose that child. If I intend to make meaning, then I have to pay attention to what I say. “I do not want this grief,” I say. But I love my son; I want to love my son. What am I meaning, then? That I wish I had no kids so that I didn’t have to know this formerly unspeakable thing that is kicking the damn shit out of me? But you don’t know the unspeakable without having the mad, deep love that is its cause, and I would have rather had Philip for a while than not have had him at all.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

What I Do

28 Apr 2013 9 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Years and years ago, suffering the rage, hurt and frustration of the inexplicable dissolution of what I saw as a promising relationship (in other words, the jerk dumped me), I called my friend Gerard, who told me to get into bed, get under the covers and tuck myself into a fetal position.

Next morning, I called him to say that it didn’t help, didn’t change anything, didn’t make me feel better.

“It wasn’t supposed to make you feel better,” he answered. “It was supposed to make you feel safe while you suffered.”

And so dawned an ugly truth – I couldn’t make myself stop hurting; the best I could do was make myself comfortable while it lasted. Something to this day I haven’t learned. The making-myself-comfortable part, that is. As if life isn’t difficult enough in what it asks of us – and I mean, think about it. We’re the only creatures on the planet who walk around knowing we’re going to die. No wonder all animals are Buddhists. It’s pretty easy to live in the moment when you can’t conceive that it might be your last.

Or your kid’s.

I have a particular penchant for exacerbating whatever life throws at me by treating it as a deliberate and deserved punishment for my personal version of Original Sin. It takes a certain amount of hubris to believe I’m singled out among others for life’s Divine Retribution. Not that I’ve seen it that way. I’ve called it Humility.

My reaction to Philip’s death was no different, except in magnitude. He and Natalie were what I’d done right in life. I was separated, man-less, unable to live on my own except for Nadiya’s generosity, 53 and still with a job and not a career. Living the cliché of not-knowing- what-I-wanted-to-be-when-I grew-up. I wasn’t particularly focused or directed when it came to work. I didn’t have a degree, didn’t like what I did, couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do, yet I considered work one of the things that most mattered. It’s what you do when you get up in the morning. Sure, I thought I wanted to write a book. But I live in Montclair. Throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who wants to write a book.

My kids, though. They were right. They were great, in fact. Not because they were brilliant and popular and extraordinarily talented. Around here, I seem to be one of the few moms without a singularly gifted, award-winning child. But oh, my kids; my own personal joy-toys. Two human beings who couldn’t help but make the rest of us better for having known them.  I was proud of them for being, not for doing.

I twisted Philip’s death into something I had coming to me. I’d reached a point where I’d finally stopped looking over my shoulder to see what might be coming at me, and BAM!! Life got to sneak up and whack me. The obvious question is, why did life have it in for me? I had no answer other than That’s The Way It Is. The other obvious question is, what about Phil? Philip was his kid, too. What did he do wrong?

Looking at it from that view, the question was absurd. I knew better than that. Life wasn’t out to “get” me. It is unnatural and catastrophic that my child died; but Death is not a punishment – it’s a fact. So what do I do with this? What do I do with the life that’s given me?

What does anyone do about trauma? I’ve talked to enough bereaved parents, enough people who’ve suffered other tragedies. I’ve listened to their stories and asked for the details. Yet I’ve never asked, “What do you do when you feel like this? What do you do when trauma hits? Do you try to take care of yourself? How the hell did you do that?”

I mean, literally; what do you do??

I know what I do. I get mean. Real mean. To myself, that is. I hate. I hate Life, this uncontrollable force with a will of its own. I hate dawn, that first loosening of night’s hold on the sky, the moment I’m reminded of the sun’s relentless presence. And I hate me most of all. I wish myself dead because what I mean is I want to stop feeling. I tell myself I am helpless, worthless. And when I’m told not to be so hard on myself, I actually respond, “What do you mean?” because talking to myself that way is a habit so old it’s more like instinct. I don’t know what taking care of myself means. Take a bath? I always take baths. They’re warm and soothing and I crave them. So, take a bath. Hug myself, do a mental backrub. Sink into the warmth and let my body relax.

I think not.

I couldn’t bear to think those thoughts, never mind to actually do any of that. I couldn’t do anything that might make my body relax. That’s the physicality of grief. Emotion is the body’s response to what the mind is thinking; and thinking, knowing, that Philip was dead caused such violent emotional plummeting that all I could do was tuck myself into the corner of my couch and make myself into a taut little ball. Hold on for the goddamn bloody ride. Pull myself further and further in, like if I made myself small enough there’d be less of me to feel.

Living without Philip is now my work. Not figuring out my job or “career” or being man-less or how much money I make.  Those are the details. There isn’t one answer to how I’m supposed to integrate the loss of my son into my life. It’s not the kind of work that ever gets finished. One year and two months later, I still don’t know what it looks like, and I am still as scared as all fucking hell.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

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