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

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

I am going to kick his ass…

30 Apr 2013 14 Comments

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

I am going to Kick. His. Ass.

At the end of Philip’s wake, a young woman came over to me. Look at this kid, I thought, she’s beautiful. In a China-doll way. Dark, straight, shiny hair and poreless, creamy skin (skin that even at her age I never had). The kind of girl Janis Ian was whining about when she was 17* (and sadly, she wasn’t so wrong). “Mrs. Smyth?” she said. “My name is Natalia. I’m Philip’s girlfriend.”

What the???

If Philip had a girlfriend, I thought I’d know about it. I didn’t expect to know every girl he crossed paths with, but if he called someone his girlfriend, he was serious about her. In fact, the only other girlfriend he’d had was Laura, Nadiya’s daughter (which is how I met Nadiya). They were together for a year, and remained deeply good friends afterward.

Turns out Philip and Natalia had been together about six weeks. Turns out they met because Philip was a referee for high school fencing and Natalia was a high school fencer. Turns out they wanted to wait until the end of the fencing season to go public (impropriety and all). Turns out the end of the fencing season was February 25th. That would be two days after Philip died, and one day before the first day of his wake.

Dazed as I was at the end of the wake, Natalia shocked me awake for a moment. I asked her if she wanted my phone number, and she jumped back like I’d spit fire at her. “NO,” she said, and then she was gone. I figured she was too upset to want to have anything to do with me.

Weeks later, Natalia was in touch with Phil on Facebook. It kinda bothered me that he got her attention when I couldn’t…but an active Facebook page seems the currently preferred method of communication, and other than having a page with my face on it, you weren’t going to find me there. She asked if she could have Philip’s army jacket. The one I’d picked up in Urban Outfitters and given him last Christmas. As in, his last Christmas. Phil probably took my “Um. Uh. Well. Oh. Okay. I guess” as an affirmative. Give something of Philip’s away? To a girl who’d been seeing him for six weeks, and would probably forget him in six more?

In the end, I told him to go ahead. She seemed to really want it, and besides, I had his black leather jacket, all warm and worn and broken in the way leather will, the way mere fabric never can.

Then a few weeks ago, I got an email that started “Dear Mrs. Smyth,” and at which I smiled. I’ve never gotten used to being addressed as “Mrs.” Who is she, “Mrs. Smyth?” Some older woman with a muffin top,** wearing Not My Daughter’s Jeans*** because they have so much stretch in them you can size down, their legs cut just a little too baggy and sitting just a little too long atop her sensible flats. Hair grayish and shortish because Women of a Certain Age cannot be bothered taking care of long hair. Brisk and business-like, her life in order, and having pretty much figured out all she’s going to figure out about life. Not young any more, but who cares? She has her husband, her kids (the ones who’ve flown off to separate colleges and isn’t it so great because it’s so good for them to go away), her friends, her work. She might not be in her prime, but at least her life is settled.

I wasn’t Mrs. Smyth. I was Philip and Natalie’s mom. Big difference. Huge, ginormous, world of difference. Skinny jeans, black leather boots, long streaked hair, still-don’t-know-what-the-hell-I’m-doing, God-please-help-me and all.

And did I mention I was really, really happy that my kids were a 45-minute-I’m-coming-home-to-do-laundry drive away?

The letter was from Natalia,**** and while I appreciated her respect, I wrote back and asked her to promise to call me Denise. We weren’t going to have a meaningful conversation with me being Mrs. Smyth.

Rather than go on about what she said, I’ll let her tell you herself. Here is what she told me about Philip:

Ever since Natalie posted that you had a blog dedicated to Phil, I have been quietly reading through every post, every day. It has been a very long time since I cried as hard as I did. Phil was one of the most amazing people I have ever known. The connection I had with him was one that I will never find ever again. Many people say that I am too young to know such things, but I believe that when you know when someone is perfect it doesn’t matter when you feel it, just that you do. He and I had a friendly acquaintance-like relationship the year or two prior. It wasn’t until the end of 2011 that we started to talk more. The click between us was instantaneous. It was like I knew him my whole life. He was constantly supportive… Even now, in my darkest of days, our old conversations are the only things that can make me smile. He had that sort of magic about him. He was a once-in-a-lifetime guy and I was lucky enough to even be able to be loved by him …Honestly, the way he treated a girl would make any mother proud, and it sure did make a huge impression on my mom…she loved him. There was something about him that just told her he was an amazing guy.

And when I asked her how she found out that he died, she wrote:

I found out that he had passed because I contacted Natalie after spending a few days without hearing from him and by that point I was freaking out. Something told me Wednesday that something had gone horribly wrong. The last thing he said Tuesday night was that he would talk to me in the morning and when he hadn’t (something which was completely out of the ordinary) I began to worry. My slight worry turned to full blown I-can’t-concentrate-on-anything-else freaking out by Friday. I had gone home for lunch (something I never did) and saw I had a message from her. That message came with the news…then I was on the ground, attempting to even slightly make sense of things and maybe even wake myself up from this bad dream…

And that is why I am going to kick his ass. Because I blame him? Of course not. But he is dead and I am pissed off. Much as Natalia and I are in touch, I will never know the two of them as a couple.  And here I go again. I don’t want to open my heart to this girl; I am trying to keep my heart still – like I would any other part of me that was broken. You don’t move a broken arm or a broken leg. You let it rest, give it a chance to heal. But a broken heart doesn’t just “heal.” It can’t get put back together because it doesn’t know its shape any more. And now I feel myself loving this girl, this smart and beautiful and lovely child that I already know I could have loved as one of my own if Philip had just stayed around and let me.

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

*If you actually had to refer to this asterisk, all I can say is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k39P2MK6WPo

**A muffin top is when your belly hangs over the top of your jeans.

*** That is actually a brand of jeans, made for us “mature” women with our “mature” figures.

**** I asked Natalia for some pictures. She hasn’t any of the two of them together, but she sent me some of herself. I’ve put them on my photo page. Take a look for yourself; you’ll see what I’m talking about. I mean, how do you not love a girl who rides a horse? And remember – that guy in the picture really is just her friend. Really.

© 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

Please dear god; please (Day 2, Part 3)

15 Apr 2013 8 Comments

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

I don’t think I sat very long on that landing. I was vibrating, like a big old church bell someone whacked with a gong. I had to move. Something had to be done, even if I didn’t know what. I walked down the stairs, one slow, bare foot at a time; eyes wide and stunned, biting hard on my lower lip, hands dug in and pulling my hair tight up to heaven. Maybe if I pulled hard enough, that pain would become the real pain. That pain I could recognize; that pain I could manage. Please God, please; help me, hurt me, do you what you want, anything, anything but this; because if this is true, if my son is dead, then please dear God, please, you have to take me with him.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the foyer, the policemen who’d picked up Phil were waiting near the door. What for? Maybe they knew something; maybe they could tell me something. Maybe some word came over the radio that would change things. They are officials. They have authority. They have power. Maybe if I begged them…

“What happened?” I asked, in a high and breathy imitation of the voice I was used to. But the cop I’d turned to only knew what he was told…which was what? Is there a script for this? Was Philip just another dead kid to him, one more kid who bit the drug pile? This was my son, this wasn’t supposed to happen, it was all a mistake; kids like him are not the ones who die. He was young, this cop; all he said was, “I don’t know, ma’am” and I could see he was sorry for it. He was helpless to help me, as if any answer would have “helped” me. All it would have done was put a picture in my head that I did not want to see.

I walked to the kitchen, still pulling hard at my hair. Everything was spinning. It was like walking through one of those tunnel-things at the amusement park that’s going round and round while you desperately tried to stay balanced. I walked around the table, staring, focused on something I couldn’t see, unable to recognize the shape and contour of the trembling mass I used to know as my body.

Then came the panic.

Things had to be done. I had to call someone; I had to tell the people who would protect me. My cousin Maria, first. I knew she’d be in her car before I finished what I had to say. With that call, everything started moving with a terrible momentum, flying around in bits and pieces. The tornado hit, the house was in the air, Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.

What I remember next, in no particular order:

I remember I cried.

I remember I told Phil we had to get Natalie; he said the police were already driving her here. Frightened to think of her sitting with this alone in the backseat of a police car, I was also relieved at not having to drive 45 minutes to Rutgers and another 45 minutes home. I didn’t think there was a car big enough to hold the wild, ravaged thing I’d become, who might need to scream or to scratch or to beat her hands on the floor or bang her head somewhere so it would shut itself up. There wasn’t enough room on the Jersey Turnpike to contain me.

I remember sitting on the floor in the foyer and crying, Nadiya hugging me and crying right back. What can I do? she asked. Don’t leave me, I answered. Exactly what I told my midwife during Philip’s birth.

I remember going upstairs to call Ed, who sounded confused no matter how many times I said, “Philip died; my son is dead.” After we hung up, he called me back and asked, “Did you just call me?”

I remember that downstairs, I went into the den to call my therapist. I was embarrassed to bother her because if I’m talking to her, I think I should be paying her, but guess what? She’s human and she’s a mom and when I told her, for a moment we cried together.

I remember Maria showing up in her big, brown fur coat, and I – who would not eat an animal, much less wear one – sat on the floor and folded myself into her like she was a great big Mama Bear and I was just a little Baby One.

And I remember that somewhere in the middle of all this, my brother Robert called. When I saw his name on my phone, I knew that he’d found out. But how? I answered my phone wailing and he said, “What happened?” and I kept wailing, “You know what happened” and he kept saying he didn’t know, until finally, panicked, he yelled, “Denise. I don’t know what happened. Maria called and told me to call you.” His disbelief at what I told him was outdone by my sister-in-law screaming in the background and when she got on the phone I said to her, “No one knows this like you do,” and she said, “But Denise, Nicole was young and she was sick and we knew she was going to die.”

That’s right. My brother and his wife lost their daughter, their oldest, Nicole, when she was four. In November, 1994. In January she’d been diagnosed with a rare brain cancer. Ten months later she was dead. But he and Maria, my sister-in-law, were just beginning their family; and while one child cannot replace another, children are the love we grow and the more we grow, the more love we have.

In my loss, that is exactly what I reduced life to. The number of kids you had. I saw with perfect clarity the dank, gray life I lived while my brother had warmth, and the light of Christmas. His four children were proof he was loved; my dead one was proof I was not. I was exposed for what I was, ashamed that everyone could see. Now I only had Natalie.

As if she is an “only.” As if “have” isn’t temporal, brittle.

That was the craziness battering around in my brain. And all I can tell you is that trauma will hurl you back into the hot mess of All The Things You Thought You Worked Out, and send a well-versed chorus along to remind you what a shit you are in case you’d forgotten. And what I heard were those oldies-but-goodies like, “There Is Something Inherently Wrong With Me” (else how could my child die??), “I Am the Center of the Universe” (because this happened to me more than to Philip or his father or sister) and “Of Course; What Did You Expect?” (variation of hit #1).

I am not saying I could have thought or said or felt anything other than what I did. And if I sound like I’m being hard on myself, I’m not; I am looking back one year, one month and 23 days to see where I was then and where I am now, and to ask, what does any of it mean? For months and months I believed that Philip’s death was proof of the cold indifference of the universe, which was especially intolerant of me. I knew with certainty there was a god; this much cruelty could not possibly be random.

And that was about all I thought this could mean.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

A Pause (during which, Life Goes On)

07 Apr 2013 5 Comments

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

I am going to pause for a second; that was a tough one.

As I wrote elsewhere, I’d like to say that I’ve given a solemn affirmative to the universe and have agreed to soldier on. Maybe I have, maybe I am; maybe I just expect that if that’s true, I should feel differently than I do. Better, more peaceful. It’s a process, I’m told; it’s a progression. God save us from our “processes” and “progressions.”

But it’s like this. Like today. Walking around the early Sunday quiet of Whole Foods, with its gorgeously arranged produce. It’s the peppers that take my breath away – the God-given reds and yellows and oranges. Not so much the greens – I find their waxy dullness unappetizing. Clenched against despair amidst all that abundance, I ask, what for? I mean, what the fuck? I see Philip, standing, looking at me, in the black leather jacket I’d given him, the one I’m now wearing, the one that makes me look like biker-chick. I see him, beautiful boy, in his navy blue suit, laid out in a coffin.

My son, in a coffin. In what universe does life make sense?

Or like yesterday, at The Boathouse in Central Park, overlooking the water. The simple joy and relief of spring written on faces, underlying conversations. Everyone, I think, feels it. Everyone but me. But what do I know? I’m in a city of millions. How many of us are being looked at as if we’re the lucky ones? I’m sitting down with three friends to a brunch that will cost $140, one that I won’t even have to pay for. But I don’t celebrate spring. It scares me. I see no hope in the cycle of life, where everything dies and everything is born. It’s all moving too quickly, moving without Philip. Wait, stop, I want to cry out; give me a moment to breathe; just a moment, please.

Is the phrase, “Life goes on” supposed to comfort? Because it doesn’t.

On the way home from the city, a song I like very much is on the radio. He loves her. He wants her. She is the “resolution,” he sings, “of all the fruitless searches.” All he has to do is look in her eyes and he’s complete. I used to believe that could happen. And I think I’m so loving to hear this song until my throat starts to close and my chest starts filling up with air that’s going in but not out until I can’t contain it any more and it blasts out a bunch of tears and I’m bent over, hands covering my face, shaking, shaking because if I can’t contain my weeping I can at least contain the pitiful sounds that accompany it. Cindy, my angel of a friend, is driving. I don’t want to make her feel any more helpless than she already does at my unexpected meltdown.

I think I’m crying because I see Philip’s face, and I imagine a woman looking into his eyes and feeling like that about him. He deserves that kind of love; he will never know it. But I’m probably crying for myself more than for him; crying because I believe the singer has truly, deeply found his happily ever after, and I am doomed to live with clawed fingers continually digging at my sore and bloodied heart.

Truth is, pop culture songs about love are mostly about infatuation. What does real love have to do with 90% of the stuff that goes on between couples? And why is it that people are always singing about the pain of romantic love? Ask anyone who’s lost a child about the kind of pain that’s the other side of deep love. It isn’t any wonder, not really, that no one wants to sing about that kind of pain. We don’t even want to talk about it, much less raise our voices in harmony about it.

And I’ve also paused to talk about the drug thing, because while it changes nothing about the way I think about Philip…well, that’s not entirely true. I think him vulnerable in a way I hadn’t before, and myself helpless in ways I hadn’t considered. But if you don’t know Philip, and you hear he died from an overdose, you might get a picture of him that is wrong, or at least superficial and one-dimensional. And while it’s none of my business what you think about him or me or anyone else, I am talking about my child and I do care.

Before Philip died, I probably would’ve thought that a kid that died from an overdose was a kid that was already going down the tubes. That drugs had taken over, that drugs were what this kid’s life had been reduced to. And I say this with so much empathy, because I have suffered addiction and I know its heartache and destruction.

But that wasn’t Philip. He didn’t grow up a troubled kid. Phil and I didn’t have the normal adolescent problems with him that we expected we’d have, that any parent expects to have. Philip was just easy. My dear friend Ed (and Ed is my dearest, closest friend – my mentor, my teacher, my advisor. Let me say this now so I don’t have to keep repeating myself every time I mention him) once told me that I didn’t have to mother Philip, I just had to love him. When I said Philip was a light, I meant it. He was kind, loving and responsible. Generous. People were drawn to him. I was stunned at how many showed up at his wake. And friend after friend after friend came over to me and to Phil to say the same thing: “He took care of me.”

When Philip died, he’d been seeing a young woman for about a month and a half. She was a senior in high school, he was a junior in college. I assume it was their age difference that made him go to her father and ask permission to date her. I mean, who does that??

Philip does. That’s who.

I’ll talk more about him in the days and weeks to come. I wanted to say this much because I am his mother and I am feeling very protective right now. And there’s something else.

Weeks after Philip died, when the autopsy came, Phil took it to a friend of his, a doctor, to look at. After he went over it, he said to Phil that given Philip’s age, weight, physical condition (he was a fencer) and the amount of drugs in his system, it was unlikely that this was an overdose. Something else had to be wrong – probably his heart, probably an undetectable condition. And he said that it’s easier for a medical examiner to say “overdose” when drugs are involved than to dig any deeper.

Phil found comfort in this – and I don’t blame him. Who the hell wants to think their kid died from something that could’ve been prevented? Much less from drugs – heroin, which still makes me shudder – which no matter how you cut it, casts an ugly pall over so short a life, and can make you wonder how well you knew the child who first taught you what it truly meant to love.

I’ll never know if there’s any truth to this. Whether there is or isn’t, drugs are a part of this. If not the cause, then a contributing factor. If Philip had a heart defect, his drug use shortened what might have already been a compromised life span. And at some level, this is all a distraction from the essential fact of his death how helpless I am to change it.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

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