Thoughts and Prayers

I went to a funeral when I was twenty-five. It hurts to think of it, like it hurts to think of anything that feels wrong in every way. I remember every detail, but it’s all flashes of things that don’t make sense. The casket was tiny and white. I can’t write about this for too long because I’ll be useless to you and to myself, but there was a moment. A second, really, when my eyes met the eyes of my cousin. My mother’s brother’s oldest son. I spent the best part of my childhood with my four cousins and my Aunt Louise and Uncle Richie. Even now, I can see my cousin throwing his head back, laughing in a pool in Bermuda after he and his brother knocked me off the raft I was on and into the water. I was laughing, too. I was five and I had a cast up my arm because I’d broken my thumb the week before. I wasn’t supposed to get wet, but it was so hot, and we were on vacation. I hated the cast and the garbage bag that was taped around it to keep it dry. It looked stupid and it was uncomfortable. The plastic stuck to my skin. I was on a raft, sweating, when I was supposed to be able to splash and play. So he and his brother made sure I got in that pool. Even if it meant my mom had to take me to the local hospital to have the cast cut off and re-cast, which she did, twice. 

I can see my cousin at every age I can remember. I can see him at every Christmas and Thanksgiving until I was eight years old - after that we started spending holidays with my step dad's family. I can see him on the beach at the Jersey Shore, helping me dig a hole to the middle of the earth, or racing to the ice cream truck to buy me a cone. I can see him on random weekends in the finished basement, playing hide-and-seek with me, playing board games, playing tricks on me, but not the mean kind. I can see him kissing his mom goodbye on the way out the door when he was a teenager, off to do something fun and mysterious like all teenagers. But in that moment at the funeral with the tiny casket that held his tiny son, in that moment when our eyes met, it was like the coldest knife was plunged right into my heart. I stopped breathing. Our eyes met, and his hand flew up and covered his mouth and I thought I might die from sadness, right there in my pew because there was nothing I could do to help him. Not one fucking thing.

It’s one of two moments in my life that haunt me. It’s an image I’ll never not have. His eyes, his too-white, hollowed out face, his hand flying up to cover his mouth. He probably doesn’t know he did that, doesn’t know I can still see it as clearly as I can see him at any other time in any other place. I saw him for dinner when I went back to New York last spring. I’ll see him next time, too. He survived because he had to, and so did his wife. They had another son to raise. Dying of a broken heart wasn’t an option. The only option was to live with one.

I don’t know what I can say about grief. I wouldn’t say anything at all, but it comes for us one way or another, so better to be acquainted. When my mother died it engulfed me for over a year. I saw straight enough to do the things that needed to be done, just barely. I managed to get my head up above water to gasp for air before I got sucked back in, but losing a child? That is something else entirely. I hope you will never, ever find yourself at a funeral with a tiny casket. And if you have lived through that, if you’re still reading and breathing and carrying that heartache, I want you to know that I’m writing through tears and that there are no words I can say except if you want to tell me your child’s name or the book they asked you to read over and over again, their favorite song, or the way you can still feel that little hand in yours, I will always listen. I will write your child’s name on my heart and carry it with me forever, because you shouldn’t have to do this alone. No one should.

Grief is on my mind because it’s on my mind whenever children in this world are dying, and they always are. I don’t know if it’s because of the tiny casket or my cousin’s hand or because my son and I almost didn’t make it through childbirth, but I have not been confused about the fragility of life for a very long time. I spent twelve of the twenty-four hours I was in labor, feeling like I was going back and forth across the veil, not knowing which side I’d end up on, until finally my prayer was just that whichever side it was, we’d be there together. Please just take us together. I know that everything can change in a split second and you’d better not take anything for granted. I tell the people I love that I love them, and I try to show it every day because I know that I don’t know how long I have or how long they have, and that last part is devastating to write, and a thought I allow to slip through my fingers because holding onto it burns. And it doesn’t change a thing. 

There was another fucking school shooting yesterday. The school year just started and already there are grieving parents and traumatized kids and people sending thoughts and prayers. You don’t want thoughts and prayers in that situation, you want your child’s body in your arms, hugging you back, telling you what happened at school today. It should be normal stuff. What they learned in chemistry. Why the geography quiz is going to be really hard. You’d be grateful to have your kid talk back to you and slam the door, just to have them here. I cried sitting in my car in the parking lot at the pharmacy. I was there because they didn’t fax my son’s vaccination record to his doctor’s office. My son who gets to go to college in a couple of weeks because he’s lucky in the way twenty kids in Newtown are not. Twenty kids who should also be going to college this year. Kids have to be lucky in our country to get to do the normal things like make it through the day. 

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

I sat there crying in my car because it isn’t normal to live like this, and that’s where I was when I heard it had happened again. A sixteen-year-old girl sent her mom a text during the shooting that said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been a perfect daughter. I love you.” Another kid sent this:

I got a text like that from my son a couple of years ago. There was a lockdown at his high school, the one he just graduated from, the one my daughter attends now. I was at IKEA buying furniture for my dad, who I was about to move across the country so I could take care of him. My mom had died a few months before. I was using every tool I had to keep it together. Suddenly I was standing in IKEA staring at my phone with my heart racing. 

We’re on lockdown. Someone called in a bomb threat, but there might be a shooter, I guess, or it’s unclear. SMPD is here.

Wait, what? Where are you?

I’m in a hallway, we’re not allowed to go anywhere. I think there are bomb-sniffing dogs here.

This is the part where I got on the parents’ Facebook page and asked why our kids weren’t being evacuated. Someone said they don’t evacuate because there have been cases where active shooters call in bomb threats, everyone goes outside, and then the shooting begins. Please take that in.

Are you okay, honey? Are you scared?

A little. I’m okay.

I love you so much. 

I love you, too.

In our case it was a false alarm. A horrible prank. I got to hug my kids at the end of the day. But this is not fucking normal. So much of what we’re dealing with isn’t normal.

When children are killed and the end is violent because of a deranged individual, or the action or inaction of an entire government, it is a hellscape. We have lost the thread. I can’t even write these words without sobbing. The thought of having to live with that, of the torture it would be to know that the last moments of your child’s life were terrifying and you weren’t there? Can anyone think of that and not weep and rage and wonder what in the fuck it is we’re doing here on planet earth? 

When we’re letting our children die, wherever they are dying, we are failing. Here in America, we’re failing badly. We’re banning books instead of weapons designed for war. We’re worrying about drag queens and tampons instead of children huddling in school bathrooms scared for their lives. We have politicians who line their pockets, like the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp. He took fifty thousand dollars in campaign contributions from Daniel Defense, the company that manufactures the AR-15 used in Uvalde. He took twenty-five thousand of that less than a month before he signed his extreme “criminal carry” bill into law - a law that makes it easier for criminals to carry loaded, hidden guns in public. Who thinks that’s a good idea? Then he sends thoughts and prayers when children die. He says he’s heartbroken. You don’t get to line your pockets with money from gun manufacturers, pass some of the most lax gun regulations in the country, and then say you’re heartbroken when children die. You need to go home. But first, really, you ought to attend some funerals with tiny caskets. Maybe that would get through.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about grief, about how we’ve lost the thread, about violence and loss and how to come back to something that feels like sanity and compassion, I’ll be here 9/6/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast. As ever, I thank you for being here.