Free Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards Page A

alt.support.grief. The Internet itself gave parents a place to parent, and in the years that I spent as part of the grief community, hundreds of Web sites and thousands of individual Web pages came online, each a lifeline for a lonely parent. I visit them still, and in each one, I see the mother choosing the pictures, writing just the words she hopes will capture her child and will introduce her to those people she never got a chance to meet. I did it, too. I posted where I could; when the computer lab opened, I worked on a Web page for the Wade Edwards Learning Lab, and no page was more important to me than the one that awkwardly, sweetly I hope, told the visitor who Wade Edwards was.
    But I also found that for me and for other parents, doing these things was not complete insulation. Sometimes I felt the same emptiness even while I was doing the things that kept his memory alive. It was as if some aching part of me was screaming at the part of me doing the remembering: What are you doing, treating this child as dead? It is a cruel result that the few things we can do for our children are also the things that sometimes intensify the sense of loss. When we got the building we had wanted for the computer lab across from his high school, it should have been a great day. It meant that the “Wade Edwards Learning Laboratory” would be in place in the fall. Matt Leonard, who had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Wade and his father a year before, was already planning how to turn the space into a computer lab. Everything was falling into place. And yet somehow the news that the lab would soon be real also had its hard edge. “Memorial.” “Dead.”
    It is always there. Sometimes the most present thing of all is his absence. I close my eyes and see his lips and his breath across them. I shut out all the noise and hear his laughter in the next room. What was therapy yesterday is simply painful today. And I have to let that happen. I cannot pretend that I can't hear that laughter somewhere distant from me. But it is precisely because I let myself hear it today, because I let myself cry today, that tomorrow I can paint the walls in the lab. And each day, sadly, it is a little less likely that I hear that laughter. (I think, honestly, that one of the reasons I cannot watch the videotapes is that they would relight that voice I love and fear.)
    Grief is a long process of untangling ourselves from the physical reality of the person and from our expectations of our future with them. I knew a girl in college named Laura Del Maestro. Some years before she came to college, her house in New Jersey had burned down; everything in it was destroyed. She told me that her family had grieved for what they had lost and moved to a new home, the grieving, they thought, behind them. But it wasn't. Some holiday or some old friend or some seemingly benign comment would trigger a memory, and they would grieve a loss they hadn't realized they had suffered. Something else had burned that they hadn't remembered at first. It is like that when you lose someone with whom you have expectations of a long future. When the late fall came after Wade died, we received in the mail our season tickets to the University of North Carolina basketball games. What had been an exciting moment every year before that was like a dagger: How can I possibly go? How can I enjoy the games he so loved without him?
    The process continues for me today as his friends marry. These are boys—now young men—whom I dearly love, and they are experiencing one of the great joys of life, but I cannot go and tell them how happy I am for them. This is yet something else that burned in the fire, a loss I had not wrapped myself around in 1996. So now, with each wedding, it wraps itself around me. Even though it gives me pain, my feelings about it are unambiguous. I am the mother of a dead son and a living daughter. As the mother of a dead boy, I want Wade's memory to be a part of their lives, but I