Hurt

When I was twelve years old, my seventeen year old sister died in a car accident along with her best friend.  I was spending a week with one of the families from our church and I was woken up very early in the morning by my friend’s dad.  He wouldn’t tell me why I had to go home.  It was an insufferably long car ride from North County, out by the airport where they lived, back to Maplewood.  I was supposed to spend the week with them; I did that sometimes in the summer.  Disappointed that I had to end my week long sleepover three days early, I fantasized on the car ride home about a reasonable explanation as to why I would be called home so soon.  The only thing that made sense in my young mind was that my dad was going to drive over to Illinois to see his brother and I would accompany him on his trip.  We talked about going there almost every other week.  I loved visiting my cousins, especially in the summertime.  They lived in a small town with plenty of open fields and dusty country roads, with more than enough space for our imaginations to run wild.  I loved spending alone time with my dad on the drive over.  He’d find some crackling radio station that barely tuned in and would sing along to Randy Travis and George Jones, music I wasn’t old enough to appreciate.  He always knew when I would start to get tired or carsick and I would lay my head down on his lap.  We’d drive down long stretches of corn lined country highway in his undependable, old pickup and at least fifty percent of the time we’d end up broken down on the side of the road, him tinkering with something under the hood before it would start again and we’d finally be able to reach our destination. My favorite part of these trips was stopping at the blackberry fields.  We’d pick them at their ripest and bring them home and my dad would make the best, most perfectly bittersweet cobblers you would ever taste. A scoop of ice cream on the side and suddenly it was a beautiful, dark purple and cream swirled tribute to my favorite time of year.  I even told my friend, who sat with me in the back seat of the car that morning on the way home, you know, I bet that’s what it is, I bet we’re going to Illinois.  I couldn’t wait.  I just knew for sure that this was the reason I was called home so early.  I leapt out of the car and went running with excited ignorance up the front steps and into the house. 

I was stopped at the door by my dad.  He grabbed me and pulled me to him.  In between crying he said some words, “dead” and “accident.”  Was that it?  My twelve year old brain wasn’t hearing him correctly.  Death was a foreign word I never had to use before, it didn’t sound right in my ears. I couldn’t vocalize any of the questions I had at that moment.  I may have said “What?” a couple of times.  I probably did.  I barely understood what was being said to me.  I certainly didn’t understand that this was the turning point of the rest of my life.  This was the definitive moment of before and after, innocent and not innocent, secure and insecure.  Everything before this was youth.  Everything after was not.  The forceful hug of my father was not comforting.  He hugged me more than I could stand and was unintentionally hurting me.  I slipped away, walked through the house in a confused fog, and found my mother on her bed clutching a picture of my sister.  I crawled my way over next to her.  The overly affectionate response of my father was brutally contrasted by the lack of response from my mother.  I wrapped my arms around her and felt her shake and sob but she didn’t feel me, so full of grief that her body just couldn’t respond or acknowledge me.  I got up and left the room.  I didn’t know what to do.  I couldn't find my other sister or brother.  I didn’t know what to say or where to go.  I went to the refrigerator and poured a soda.  The house was full of familiar people whose faces I can’t recall, save one.  Our pastor touched me on the shoulder in the kitchen as I opened the soda bottle.  “I’m sorry Carrie,” he said.  I didn’t look up at him.  I’d never been alone in a room with him before and I was embarrassed because I didn’t know how to act.  I just focused on my glass, not wanting to spill anything. 

And that’s all I can remember about that day.  I can’t remember anything that happened after those brief moments until the night of her funeral a few days later.  My sister died on August 9^th, 1990.  I was twelve years old.

They say that losing a child is like losing a body part.  When you lose a leg, or an arm, you experience what’s called phantom pain, as if the limb is still there and it still hurts. They say that phantom pain is worse than actual pain because there is nothing left to touch, and we mothers know fully well that touch sometimes helps to ease the pain.  I don’t know who “they” are, and I don’t quite know if that’s an accurate metaphor or not.  I know that when you lose a body part, you are incomplete but you’re still alive.  I can’t say the same thing about my mom that morning.  I think for a while, she died.  She slowly came back to life later on because she had to, but I can honestly say that when I touched her that morning she didn’t feel me.  And that’s what losing a child is like, I think.  Like you’re the leg that got cut off; you’re the piece that died.  I don’t know what else to compare it to.  I know what it looks like because I saw it, even in my youthful ignorance, that fateful morning.  I saw what losing a child looks like and it looks worse than losing a limb.  It looks even worse than dying because you have to live with it. 

There are other versions of this story.  Those who were in the room with her say that my mom picked up the phone, heard about the accident from the state trooper and collapsed, emitting a sound unlike anything they’d ever heard.  My brother came home early that night, after partying with some friends, to a chaotic scene on the street in front of our house filled with screaming and crying teenagers: my other sister and her friends.  Being the youngest, I was always the last to know anything, and I was always given a loose version of the truth in order to protect me.  I’m just now finding out about some things that happened in our house when I was a kid.  As I grew older, I was given more adult accounts of the truth as I probed my family history, but I still feel that my siblings go out of their ways to protect me, even now.  I can honestly say that I’m glad God spared me from experiencing the horror of watching my family find out about her death that night.  It was cruel enough witnessing the fallout in the morning.

As a twelve year old girl on the verge of my first “Are you there God? It’s Me Margaret,” moment, I think I was too self-centered and too young to be properly grieved at that time.  I experienced the grief of her death in other ways, like, watching others respond to it. My family portrait had a hole blasted through it and while my face was still in tact, everyone else’s was torn.  Her absence in our household revealed itself dramatically to the rest of my family but slowly to me.  One day, our house was full of family and friends and the next day, everyone was gone.  I was alone.  I knew I was supposed to be grieving the loss of my sister, but I was grieving the loss of my family even more.  That’s when I started going into my room and shutting the door right after school and not coming out sometimes until the next morning.  That’s when I started writing.  I wrote god-awful, egocentric poetry to work through the inner conflict, the guilt, the grief, the self-pity.  Somehow this was all about me.  I was depressed because it was expected of me, but no one knew that really, I was just lonely.  It was not the Judy Blume adolescence I was promised. 

I’m telling you this story now for a couple of reasons.  One, my sister would have been 38 years old today.  When my siblings and I talk about her, we agree that she would’ve been a great mom and probably would have had four or five kids by now.  She loved kids.  All of the girls she ran with in high school have families now, some of whom started having babies while they were still in high school.  We all agree that she probably would’ve started young.  She was very motherly to me, being the closest to me in age but old enough to be protective.  I think about all the things she missed out on, all the things I was able to experience.  It’s a weighty responsibility, this carrying on, making up for the time lost in others.  There’s some guilt involved in it too.  I promised a long time ago that if I ever gave birth to a daughter, she would be named after my sister.  Not just because she had a beautiful name, but so the name would be associated with life and not just death.  Her name is an honor, a legacy, but also a commission.  Go with this name and live.  My sister’s been dead longer than she had lived.  Today is the first time I’ve thought of that.

The second reason I’m telling you this story is because it’s important.  Maybe it will help you understand why I want to take care of my mother so badly.  It’s also a moment I’ve thought a lot about since becoming a parent.  There’s fear that comes with bringing a child into an unstable and unpredictable world.  The minute your baby is placed in your arms you think, how can I possibly protect this child?  And then you’re slammed with a cruel reality when you realize, you can’t.  I know this firsthand.  If there was anything my mother could’ve done to prevent it from happening, it was mulled over in her brain until it wormed its way into her heart and broke it, over and over again. 

For months after my son was born I would hold him in the middle of the night after his feedings and think to myself that I didn’t want to miss out on anything he did with his life.  I can’t possibly die until I experience every major milestone of life with him.  I don’t like to think of him living without me, but, someday he will have to do just that.  And he can live without me.  I know this from having lost a parent.  But I would die without him.  It’s the natural order of things, that the parents die first.  But sometimes, children die.  That’s the part of God that I don’t understand; that life can be cut off so quickly as if it had no purpose at all, no promise of a future, and no guarantees.  It’s a mystery I hope I never understand until God Himself tells me why. 

I can’t fathom it.  I can’t go there.  It’s a fear in the back of every parent’s mind but you shouldn’t live everyday in it.  There will come a day when my son doesn’t spend every waking moment with me and I’m sure the fear will creep in and overtake me at times.  It’s taken me a long time to understand why my mom didn’t hug me back when I wrapped my arms around her.  Didn’t she understand that she had other children who needed her?  Of course she did.  That’s why she slowly came back to life and finally became my mom again.  I never held it against her and I never will, especially now that I’m a mom.  She did what I would do, what you would do, if it happened to us. 

Maybe you’ve lost a sibling.  God forbid you’ve lost a child.  I’m sure you have your own story and your own way of reconciling your past to what’s going on in your life right now.  I had to go through that to get to where I am today, we all say, with a hint of skepticism.  The truth is, we wish we hadn’t gone through it.  I wish my sister were alive and I wish her children would have been born.  I wish I never had to see my mom lose her daughter.  I wish the fear of that loss wasn’t burned into my psyche.  But I have seen it, it happened, and it changed me forever, as a person, a daughter, and a mother.  At this point in my life, I'm bridging generations of my family together and am finally able to see my mother as the fragile but strong human being she’s always been.  There’s a point in your life when, strangely enough, you see your parents as real people instead of just secondary, two-dimensional characters in the story of your life.  It makes me want to thank her for coming back to life for me.  It makes me want to hug my son so tightly, until he’s uncomfortable, as tightly as my dad held me that morning, after he tried to explain what had happened and just…couldn’t.  Because who can explain such a thing?  He had just lost one daughter and couldn’t let another one go, not even into the next room.  He held onto me until it hurt us both. 

And now I understand and love my dad a little more, and I wish I could have told him everything that I’ve just told you.