Grief

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I MISS MY LITTLE BOY


Silver Lake, Arizona
November 1984
I miss my little boy. I miss the sound of his small feet tapping fast on the hardwood floors. I hear his laughter, and I see the deep smile in his eyes. He runs towards me, his face beaming. His little arms tightly envelope my shoulders. I feel the pounding of his heart. I melt when through his fast breathing he declares the sweetest of all: “Mom, I love you, mom”. I hold him there for a long eternity, our precious moments of affection. I miss my little boy.

The last I remember him, he was in his fuzzy, yellow, zip up pajamas. I could see him through the mirror standing right behind me. He tries to open his eyes and adjust them to the dark. He squeezes them even more when the lights of the upcoming vehicles blind him. He lifts his head, giving sweetly into a long yawning. Strands of unruly hair freely fall down his face. He tries to pull them back, but they stubbornly resist making him to pull them back again. His frustration grows with each attempt he makes. He is eight and a half now, but I deliberately have kept his childish look. He is my little boy who is turning into a fine young man and I am the first one to slow this process down. Can a hairstyle do it? I just want him to stay this way for a little bit longer.

He keeps my attention away from the road. I continue driving and talking to him, casting fast looks at his image in the mirror.
“I am hungry, mom”. I know well the size of his appetite. I try to reason with him why he should be patient. It is 4:30 in the morning and his aunt and little sister are deeply asleep in the back of the van. We still have a way to go until we reach the next big city. After all, there is nothing open yet at this early hour, only his appetite.

I was glad to have his company. The little chat kept me alert. The long hours behind the wheel had taken their toll on me. Even though, I repeatedly switched turns with my sister, driving, my body still needed a good stretch and my stomach a hot coffee.

We had done this trip before – an overnight drive from California to Texas. Visiting my family in Texas for Thanksgiving was our tradition. This year, though, my husband could not make the car trip, he had to fly to Texas and join us there on the Thanksgiving eve.

A big sign indicated that we were approaching Silver Lake, Arizona.

We never reached it. Abruptly, the road reality seized. I entered an existence beyond comprehension. I flew through the tunnel. I saw the light. I was floating weightlessly bathed in a transparently bright light. An intense contentment had suddenly enveloped me. The peace of the place drew me further and further. It was glorious. I wanted to stay there.

Pasadena, California
Nine days later
The light was too bright for my eyes to handle. For long minutes, I kept them cracked open trying to adapt them to the bright exposure. My mind was even slower to adjust. Deprived of vital sensory information, it failed to function. Sounds and voices, far and near, were unrecognizable. The smell, the smell… how can it be? I pulled myself up in an effort to see and dismiss the thought. Sudden pain rose sharply causing uncontrollable spasms. Bandages, wires, and tubes all were tightly woven around my body, restricting even the smallest move. A voice directed me to stay calm, but I was fast falling into weightlessness again.

That day I kept coming in and out of consciousness. In one of these short moments of enlightenment, I recognized the faces of my family: my sister, my husband, my little daughter. Then images flooded me: the road, the van, my boy…. Where is my son?

The struggle went for nine days. I rose high in weightlessness; I crashed down in pain. I made it on this side.

They said that one of the front tires of the van had a sudden blowout. The van rolled down the ditch in the middle of the road. The back doors opened throwing out my sister and my daughter far away from the vehicle. They were not seriously hurt. At the moment of the collision my head banged against the steering wheel. The huge blow left me unconscious. My little boy flew out through the windshield, breaking it, and landing a distance in front of the van. He died instantly.

The pain of my broken body I could bare. The pain that was sweeping over my soul I could not. Like a mighty river it flooded my consciousness. Like a giant avalanche it crushed the breath of life out of me. Like uncontrollable wild fire it destroyed the world around me. I lost the desire to fight for my life. I wanted to go back to the weightless existence where there was no pain. I wanted to run away form this reality that was overwhelming with painful images and memories. My son was lying on that dark and lonely ditch, his little body crushed and bleeding. I was not there to hold him, to carry him on my arms, to tell him that all will be good. “Why Oh, Lord, why?”

The following two and a half months the doctors kept me under strong sedatives. Along with the physical pain the drugs were supposed to dull the emotional pain as well. Yet, nothing could ease my heartache. Each time I woke up, the reality of my son’s death hit me again: “My boy, my little boy”. There was no relief for my bleeding soul. I mourned for my child’s death day and night.

The grief consumed my ability to reason. I was slipping into madness. One thought was pulling me back, though. I lost my son but still had my daughter. My beautiful princess needed me. Overtaken by my own pain, I had left alone my little daughter in her own grief over the lost of her brother. They were like twins, only eighteen months apart, always together.
My daughter never left my side. I would drift in and out of comma, but she was always there at my feet looking at me. She was so tiny, so beautiful, and so frightened. There, sitting down at my feet, she had the look of a grown girl. Her face seemed to have lost its childish appearance. Her serious eyes studied me in deep concern. The painful loss of her brother had forced her to mature fast.

That day, I woke up under the sedative influence of the drugs, and I saw her again standing next to my feet. This time, she did not offer a gentle comfort when she saw my tears pouring. Instead, with her little arms on her hips, and her eyes half closed, with her chin lifted towards me, she said: “Mom, God gave you a child for eight and a half years and now you are not willing to give that child back to Him”.

The Lord had spoken through the mouth of my six-year-old girl. The words entered my consciousness, cleared my mind, and empowered my ability for reasoning. There, in the truthfulness of that moment, I found strength to let my son go.

I did not consider myself being a very religious person. Catholicism was a way of life, a tradition that my family honored and passed its values onto me. However, I had never had a personal relationship with the Lord. I was baptized according to the Catholic tradition as an infant, but I had no salvation experience. Now, with the loss of my so much loved son I sought God’s love as an ultimate shelter for my broken soul. And He took me in.

I know the Lord has taken my boy in also. At the scene of the accident, my daughter saw him transformed. All eyewitnesses reported that my son died instantly. My girl, though, saw him very much alive. In her desperation to make sense out of the tragedy, she repeatedly told me: “ I saw him, mom. I am not crazy. I saw him standing with his feet next to your head. His arms were stretched over you, and he was looking down at you. He was crying, mom, and nobody paid attention to him. Why, mom, why my aunt did not help him?”
For years my daughter resented her aunt; she believed that my sister deliberately did not help her brother. Years had to pass so she could understand that what she had seen on the side of the road was her brother’s spiritual body.


One year later, University of Southern California County Hospital, Los Angeles
The elevator’s door silently opened. Why did this always happen when I am in such a hurry? The elevator would always come from the opposite side where I expected it. I rushed to catch it only to find myself bumping against a wall of bodies tightly pressed in the overcrowded elevator. For few moments, until the door closed again, I met many disapproving looks. And rightfully, so… I was still trying to slip my arms through the sleeves of my white hospital clothing while a large folder hung clutched between my teeth.

I did not have time to apologize about my appearance or wait for another cramped elevator. I had to get to the fourth floor fast; I had to get to Juanito before it was too late.

“Knock-knock-knock, knock, knock-knock.” I paroled my coming on the half-open door.
“Where is my little angel? I am bringing him a present. Where are you, angel? My angel…, an enormous gulp of air jetted out of my chest, slamming against my vocal cords, leaving them mute. How can I ever get over this sight, Oh Lord? How can I ever get used to the pain? The pain of a dying child.

Juanito did not move. Tucked neatly under fresh linens, his tiny body appeared even tinier against the heavy frame of the hospital bed. His head was slightly tilted towards the window, towards the morning sun. Exposed to the vibrant light, his skin appeared transparent and fragile. The chemotherapy had stripped off his facial features from their natural framing of eyebrows and lashes. They all had blended unrecognizably in a painful sight.

Slowly his lips puckered in an effort to whistle. That was how he played back the beat of my door knocking. That morning, though, there was no response; his lungs were too weak to blow a stream of air through his lips. Despite my own growing weakness, which always floods me at the sight of death, I expanded my lungs to give it a good blow. My try produced a parody of a whistling sound that brought a smile on Juanito’s face. His parched skin folded away from his mouth and draped his high cheekbones with wrinkles. I fought back the aching inside.
“I can never learn how to do it, son,” I laughed, “I better stick to only what I know how to do - to the knocking. But, look, what I got for you. I found a picture of Santa Clarita, the one that your mom told you about.”

Death was coming into that room. Death was creeping into the small body. Juanito remained motionless.
“Reyna,” he whispered my name still smiling; his eyes still closed.

Juanito suffered leukemia, but he also was an eight-year-old boy. His little heart desired all the simple things that every eight-year-old boy desires. As his therapist, I made sure I saw those little things even if it was just a saint’s picture. Since we first met, I kept my spirits high when I was with him. With jokes and teasing, I stayed on his level, the level of an eight-year-old child. I always made him laugh.

“Here is your Santa Clarita, son,” I took out of my folder a colorful postcard depicting the famous saint and placed it in front of the child. Juanito, with his eyes half-open, held his gaze on the picture. He was too weak, though, to reach for it. I moved behind the stationary medical equipment, and came closer to him. His small hand, bedecked with many tubes and wires, lay lifeless, pale against the white color of the sheets. I gently placed the image between his fingers and held it there. Unexpectedly, the warmth of my hands quickly dissolved in the coldness of his. An icy encounter with the coming death chilled me with a shiver.

The death, I could feel it, see it, but I refused to subdue to its destructive pain. Juanito’s family, though, broke into an early grievance. The deterioration of the child’s condition inevitably triggered deterioration in his family’s emotional response. Their initial high hopes turned into desperation. Each time they visited Juanito, they brought with themselves their own brokenness. Their pain and tears added more sorrow to already emotionally overwhelmed child.

As a grief therapist for terminally ill children, I have been dealing with this painful dynamic on a daily basis.
How can one witness daily a loss of a child’s life and remain sane, unless one develops a self-protecting mechanism of complete emotional detachment. But, how, then, one can successfully counsel the grieving without grieving with him? Unless you are like me, already suffered through the loss of your own child.

It was too soon after the loss of my boy. I, the wounded, was given strength to comfort the parents of many dying children. I, the broken, was given even a greater strength to prepare these children to face death: many boys and girls, some too weak to talk. Still freshly grieving over my own loss, the Lord sent me to comfort others. The Lord put me in a position to help them, empowered by my own grief, by my own loss. He placed me in a facility and provided a job with perfect setting and timing. That year was the last of my studies at the University of Southern California, and I was assigned as an interim grief therapist at the Children Hospital, USC in Los Angeles.

“Reyna…, tell me…, about Heavens…,” Juanito whispered. I knew his request. I sat next to the dying boy and began describing the world of Eternity. I did this for many mornings and for many dying children like Juanito.
I told my little patients of the beautiful place where they were about to go. I told them of our wonderful Father and His great love for them. I gave them a place to go. I gave them permission to go. And the Lord blessed us with peace.

Amazingly, the daily walk amidst many dying little children turned my brokenness into a power, my depression into joy. With a great love and deep compassion, I was able to transmit that power and joy to my young patients. I watched them transformed under the promises of hope. I witnessed daily how they transcended into peace.

Along with them, I transcended into peace also. The love of the Lord stretched over me. Out of the ruins of my heart, He built a much stronger one. A heart that is victorious when looking in the eyes of death.

Tears still roll down when I think of my son, but there is no pain. I just miss my little boy.

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