Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [52]
One night, when I could not sleep, I found alt.support.grief, the newsgroup for the bereaved. I later discovered GriefNet and, there, grief-parents, an e-mail group for bereaved parents, and I found Tom Golden’s wonderful website on grief and healing. All of these became homes for me, but at first, it was only alt.support.grief, ASG. For several nights I read the stories of those who had died posted by those who buried them. The pattern was the same. A new poster would tell his or her story, and the family of ASG would comfort him. And soon the new poster would be the one comforting another new griever. When Astrid, who lost her son Christian, introduced herself and him in wonderful stories about his too-short four and a half years, I responded in much the way all first responses were framed. I am so sorry about the death of your son, Christian. His death is part of the incomprehensible workings of a world we once naively thought fair. I hope that you find in this group what you need. Some of us will be angry on days you need resilience. Some will be cheerful on days you need to wail. Some will feel exactly as you feel on a given day. But all of us will be in pain on every day on which you feel pain. And in that, oddly, is the gift, the bond that allows us to be gentle with each other. You know that the person across a continent of irrationality understands the immense weight that emptiness and absence can have inside you. Do not misunderstand: no one else has lost Christian; no one else knows just what an incredible boy he is. But all of us are willing to learn that from you. There is no time, not months or years from now, that we will tire of him. With great regret, I welcome you to alt.support.grief. It was what I truly felt, and it was my part of the great web we were weaving—each strand weak and vulnerable, but all together strong, or at least stronger. And I was stronger for having curled myself around Astrid’s tender thread. And so it was.
I flip through the printouts of my e-mails now. “Fred, I am so sorry about the deaths of Maritta, Regan, and Jeff.” “Stefan—That your father hid from himself in a bottle does not mean he loved you less than he should; it means only that he loved himself less than he should.” “Joanna, I remember vividly the accident that took Ginger.” “Irene, I am so very sorry about the death of Gabe.” And on and on. It is a chain today and tomorrow that will not be broken.
There were threads on how to decorate a gravesite at Christmas and what to do for birthdays. People shared poems and lyrics. There were threads of pain and threads of hope. And those people and that place were home for me for the year—and more—that I needed it. I wrote at ASG words I could not say aloud, words too raw for the stranger in the restroom, words too hard for the friend who dropped by to check on me. In that safest of places, I described the importance of it, and places like grief-parents, when I wrote: In our families, we nurture and protect; our pains hurt those who love us, so without thought, we temper the manifestations of pain. Can I really let my mother, who hurts so for my son and for me and for herself and his grandfather, can I really let her see the depths to which I go? I cannot. But there is here. Thank God, there is here.
And, honestly, those people are as real to me today as if they were standing beside me. Bill Chadwick was almost always