Free Beyond Tears: Living After Losing a Child by Ellen Mitchell Page A

down from college to sit with us in the hospital. She was terrific; I felt I owed her that wedding. And at the wedding, my husband Don and I got up and danced. It was kind of a signal to all the guests that it was alright to dance.”
    Barbara G.: “I watched with pride and thought of Howard as Philip got married four years after Howie’s death. Just before Eric walked down the aisle as best man, I ran over to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Walk slowly, Howie is walking in front of you.’ Later, when Eric got married, I repeated the same words to Philip, who turned and assured me that Howie was walking beside him.”
    Several of our children were already married at the time of their deaths. None left children behind, but they did leave a husband, a wife or girlfriends. For the most part our relationships with these people has been amazingly positive, much more so than we would have imagined
possible. None of us has gone out of our way to encourage closeness with these people, each of us feeling that they are young and must get on with their lives. So, any ties that have continued have been not of our making, but of theirs. They have helped to lighten our burden. We know that their lives, too, were deeply affected by the loss.
    Ariella: “Michael had a girlfriend who keeps in touch with us. She was with him for three years. Since his death she’s been engaged twice. Life has been hard for her. She tells us, ‘It should have been Michael. You should have been my in-laws. ’ She always sends Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards and signs them from Lauren and Michael. It means a lot to us.”
    Carol: “It was very painful at the beginning for us to see Lisa’s husband Craig. He would come to family functions. I wanted him there but it was difficult. Where was she?”
    Lorenza: “Kate, Marc’s wife, remarried and has several children. She never forgets an occasion … Father’s Day, Mother’s Day. She sends flowers on Memorial Day to be placed on Marc’s grave. On the anniversary of his death, she and her family come to New York from Massachusetts. They go to the cemetery with Marc’s friends and then everybody comes to our house for lunch. Her husband comes along. I think he is a very special man.”
    In one case, a relationship was severed not by the girlfriend but by her parents. Brian Eisenberg’s girlfriend left college to be at his bedside throughout his illness. She stayed with Barbara and Michael for six weeks following Brian’s death. When it was time for Brian’s gravestone to be unveiled, the young woman’s father phoned to say she would not be coming, that it was time to break the connection. His concern for his daughter’s welfare is quite understandable.
    And then, of course, there are our parents. Their suffering is double-fold. They grieve not only for the grandchild they lost, but they grieve for us, their own children whom they see in torment.
    Rita: “Our parents cried for their children and their grandchildren.”
    As in all families, our relationships with our own parents differ from case to case. Some of us, frankly, found our parents to be a burden. More than one of us had to contend with a mother who seemed to feel that
the loss of her grandchild was “all about her,” that it weighed more heavily upon her than on anyone else.
    Others of us enjoy an enormous closeness with our parents and have found them to be a great solace during our ordeal.
    Barbara E.: “My parents were there for Mike and me and Brian, both physically and emotionally. They flew up from Florida and were with Brian almost every day.”
    Barbara G.: “In a book I prepared about Howie for an unveiling we never had, I thanked my parents for giving me life not once but twice. They suffered along with me, and with the wisdom of their years looked ahead to the future and tried to keep me alive to enjoy whatever lay ahead. I did not always agree with them as they spoke of grandchildren and graduations to look