Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [62]
There are five stages of grief, according to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the pioneer in the field. Denial and isolation come first; I suppose I went through denial. I drove past people mowing their lawns or planting a tree and I wanted to yell, Stop, don’t do that, don’t change anything, God is just about to grant our wish to turn back time and you are only making it harder. I would open a drawer, and as I closed it I would see something unfamiliar that caught my eye. I would open the drawer again, and I knew I was looking for Wade. I did it from the first: I had only to find him and bring him back. I looked in his towel closet and under the clothes in his bureau. Certainly this was denial. I thought so often of the book Wade and I had read together for his freshman English class, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. In it, there is a carousel of death run by a satanic figure. Goodness, in the form of two boys, finds a way to move it backward, to move back in time. So round and round we continued, hoping against reason to move fast enough forward or fast enough backward to feel his face and hear his voice above the screams inside my head.
The second stage, anger, I never felt. With whom should I be angry? There wasn’t anyone. It was the wind. Physics and engineering and meteorology took him. Science took him. There is somewhere some blasted equation that can be written to explain why he was dead. It was something that could be explained fully, and something that could never be explained satisfactorily. So there was no one with whom to be angry, not even ourselves, except that we failed in some larger sense to keep him safe. Many parents blame themselves, play a tortured game of “What If?” I wrote to one such parent once: His is not a life you might have saved by some different action. We who have lost children to accidents all think “if only” we had done one thing, a phone call, a chore, even an argument, we could have changed the course of time. But which “if only” is it? My husband called my son before he left the house, I did not. If we each think we are responsible, I would have called and he would not, and Wade would have been where he was nonetheless. It is not us. It is not you. It just is.
Now, the bargaining stage—maybe I am still there, since part of my daily prayer is that God takes me and lets my son live. My head knows they are just words, but I feel it so desperately, when could I ever stop offering?
And there must have been depression, the fourth stage, but honestly, we so quickly threw ourselves into our post-death parenting—the WELL, the Short Fiction Contest, a bench at his high school—that we had to plow through whatever roadblocks depression might have put up. John was and is a great life force, a bright piece of energy. It was why I fell in love with him. I had seen that energy dimmed by Wade’s death, but he had relit himself, redirected himself, a sadder self for sure, and now he was pressing that life force against all we needed to do to parent Wade’s memory, pushing it forward. Depression was a poor match indeed for John and for me.
The last stage is acceptance. It is not an adequate word, and neither is resignation. Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poetry I have loved since I was thirteen, wrote, “I am not resigned to shutting away of loving hearts in cold ground…. Down, down, down to the darkness of the grave, gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.