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By Root 1024 0

Jeep in the Nagar Valley out from Hunza in the north of Pakistan, six of the seven tallest mountains in the world at their back. “The most important trip of my life,” he said. John Schoo and I lived more than a thousand miles apart, but we had close friends in common—his brother-in-law and I were godparents to the same twin boys. And through that connection, I heard why it was his most important trip. Months before he joined our group, his son, Nielsen, had died, falling over in his living room, maybe as the result of an aneurysm. Whatever it was, it killed him. When Wade died, John told me about Nielsen. And the telling and my outpourings to him opened the gates of grief again for him. I know the price he paid for every letter of support he sent me over the next months, and I love him for it, always will. It was John Schoo who wrote the day after the funeral and reminded me that Wade had a life away from me and John among his many friends, a life and stories and photographs they would be happy to share, but I would have to ask. So I did. And he was right. Before we were about to meet for the first time at a basketball game in the fall, he warned me, If you think I am immune from the tears…think again. Other members of my e-mail group—people I had met only once or not at all—wrote immediately, wrote constantly, wrote gently, checking on me, reminding me of things I had told them about Wade, which meant they remembered, and cried with me, too, when we were finally together. Catherine. Tony. Eddie. Now more than just names on an e-mail header. Now family, too.

But just like family, they couldn’t spend every minute with me grieving Wade, and the conversation had to turn back to basketball—it was healthy for it to do so. But not for me. I wasn’t ready. And I had found friends with a need that mirrored mine at ASG and grief-parents, and my e-mail box, once full of news about recruits, was now full of misery and grief, as—it is odd to say straight out—I needed it to be. All grievers in these online communities are not the same. Among the grieving, there were a couple of dozen I wanted to meet and hold, whose children’s pictures were taped on the wall behind my computer monitor. There were two to whom I was particularly drawn.

I started a conversation with Gordon Livingston, who, impossibly, had buried two sons. The Emily Dickinson poem “My life closed twice before its close” might have been written of his life. And the end of it befit him: So huge, so hopeless to conceive, as these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell. I have now known Gordon for a decade, but I have met him only once. We had dinner in Durham when his daughter Emily started at Duke. Gordon, who lets life in and lets it have its way against his great powerful soul, is forever a part of my life story. To Gordon I could even write about the limitations in support others offered and not worry that he would think me an ingrate. To Gordon I could write, Someone else writes me to ask why I am not getting professional help in my “recovery.” He views mourning as a goal-directed task: rally the troops, make a list, get it done! That has so little to do with the way I feel, and I cannot find words to make him understand. How can I tell him there is no cure for me? I cannot express how deeply this boy had grown into my being, and how I will suffer his loss every day that I breathe. I cannot be cured of it, any more than I can be cured of breathing itself. I suppose there will come the day when I will need to clean the dining room, when I must box the pictures, when I will decide what is to become of the things in his closet, when I will not be able to visit his grave each day. But we simply eat in the kitchen, and I do not walk into his room, and I make time for the cemetery and Wade, because it is important to me that he have some time in each day that belongs just to him. And if I started putting him away and blocking him out of my day, would I be recovering from his death? Well, the problem is that it also seems awfully like ignoring