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By Root 947 0

his life. The image I have for our family is grapevines, twisting around each other, interweaving, leaves pushing through until it is impossible to separate the vines without destroying much of their beauty. And this vine was, without warning, ripped from us and from among us. We heal only by growing around the wound, in constant recognition of its absence. It reminds me of a story my brother told of a woman who, having lost a son, was seeking some way to reconcile this loss with what she thought she knew of life. She went on a retreat where she was asked to walk into the woods and find a tree, her tree, to contemplate, to look for answers. She balked, it sounded useless, but she walked anyway and picked out a tall old tree for no apparent reason. She sat there for some time, staring at it without seeing it. Finally, bored, she approached it and studied it. There was an odd place in the bark, and as she fingered it, she realized that a stake had—some time before—been driven into the tree. The tree, obviously, could do nothing about the stake, so it had grown around it, acknowledging the injury but living nonetheless. I have had, in a sense, to reinvent myself, a mother of a boy who was, for I can never have an existence that does not acknowledge him. I could not excise that spike even if I wanted to. Our conversation paralleled and then exceeded the conversation on ASG, as his voice, time and again, pulled me back from the abyss into which I could write myself. It still does.

And then I found Phil Lister. He came to ASG before the then-inevitable death of his younger daughter, Liza, claimed by leukemia, which also took Gordon’s youngest son, Lucas. Phil had come to the newsgroup asking for advice on what books to read. He’d been met by a chorus of the best books on grieving, but it seemed to me that was not what he was after. I thought he meant something else, and I recommended Eudora Welty, and that is, in fact, what he wanted. We didn’t unlink. Phil’s voice was—and is—what the word dulcet was invented to describe. Dulcet and mournful. He would send his extraordinary poems, and I would read them aloud to John, and neither of us tried to stop the tears that formed silently as I read of the tree they planted at Liza’s school or the sofa on which she had lain and died. One of my favorite things of Wade’s was a box in which he kept his most treasured belongings. When Phil and his wife had a son, I sent a box for a boy.

It wasn’t just bereaved parents who gathered at ASG. It was sisters and sons and girlfriends. We would be supportive, but we would also be firm. I wrote to Robin. Her boyfriend’s son had died, and her boyfriend was spending time grieving with the boy’s mother. Robin was sad, and she was angry. After I expressed my condolences, I added, I do not mean to be harsh, but now you need to focus on him, on his needs, on his pain, on his loss. The more you focus on your own, the further you will be from him.

One girl who lost her fiancé wrote about her mother wanting her to move on, and though I knew nothing about a loss such as hers, I wrote. Because that’s what we did. We tried to help. Grief is a long process of untangling ourselves from the physical reality of the person and from our expectations of our future with them. You will not, I imagine, decide one day that it is time, that you are ready, and then go out and find someone. You certainly won’t do so because someone else, even someone with the best intentions like your mother, has decided it is time. It happens the other way, I suspect: you will instead discover—some day in the future—that you have made a new emotional connection. Then you will know that you have been ready for someone else in your life. I am the mother of a dead son and a living daughter. As the mother of a dead boy, I want to tell you to keep Bill’s memory a part of your life, but recognize, as much as it hurts, that it is but memory, that he is dead. As the mother of a living daughter, I want to tell you that you do not have to serve the memory to honor it; you honor him more by valuing