The last place you want to be is in a room full of people, where they divide you into the following groups: Only Child, Long-Term Illness, Siblings, Overdose—and my personal favorite—Sudden Death.
We had already gone around the wide circle of chairs, each set of parents struggling to say their child’s name out loud, as well as the date and cause of death. These included: two brothers who drowned on a Caribbean vacation, an eight-year-old girl thrown from a car crashed by a drunk driver, a teenager found hanging in a motel room, a fall from a hotel balcony, an asthma attack, cancer, murder, assisted suicide . . . who can listen to this stuff? The first time I heard this wrenching roll call, I cried; not for our son, Kasriel, who died at the age of 25 from an apparent drug overdose, but for the stifling pain that seemed to fill the air like a thick, suffocating fog. We were newcomers, here just weeks after the horror of that guided-missile phone call; others had been coming to this support group for years, some for decades. I have heard this recitation of names many more times since, but each meeting brings several new ones to remind us that the hostilities continue.
They say there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think there is one more. I call it What?! This is like denial, but many levels higher, like the difference between first- and fourth-degree burns. It’s where you begin to question the faulty cosmic framework that suddenly screwed up and got it so wrong. After all, a child’s death is something you read about in the paper while eating your Cheerios. You say, “how sad to yourself,” and move on to see how the Knicks are doing.
That’s why, for me, the What?! seems to overshadow everything else. It’s obvious the family they meant to target is living somewhere in Queens or the Bronx, eating Chinese takeout and watching American Idol, totally oblivious to the fact that they narrowly missed the ax. Of course, once there’s a mistake like this, just like with City Hall, you can’t get anyone to straighten it out. One thing you learn over time is that while you may wish differently, death is not even a teeny bit temporary. Another thing you learn is a lot of stuff about your kid that you never knew. We had no idea Kasriel had so many close friends or affected so many people’s lives—or that so many people, besides us, loved him. During the seven days of Shiva, our house was so full of lively youngsters that if you didn’t know there had been a death, you would have assumed it was a cool party. Of course, Kasriel was smart, loving, generous, and a wonderful human being just like every child, of any age, who dies prematurely. One family we heard of was so tired of idolizing their lost son to the point of sainthood, that they agreed to have one evening where they talked about all the things he did that drove them crazy.
A friend, shocked to hear about Kasriel’s death, suggested that there should be a special word for the grief parents feel when they lose a child. He was right. Only when you have gone through such a personal tsunami can you understand how new and unexpected the feeling is. For those in the group who had lost their only child, the future seemed to grind to a sudden halt, their genes crashing into an inconvenient roadblock. I felt guilty that we had nine (yes, nine) more, as if somehow, like a long-ago Costco purchase, having children in bulk had finally paid off.
But anyone who has gone through this will tell you that a child’s death—any child’s death—takes up a vast space in both your mind and your heart, a space that stretches across the whole, bleak horizon. The coordinates of this area may become blurry over time, but the geography will always be sharp, with seemingly impassable mountains and precipitous valleys that at times seem impossible to clamber out of.
Yet while the pain for us is still raw, with good days and bad, entry to this club does come with unexpected—I hate to say it—benefits: a loss of naïveté, a deeper range of emotions, a focus on things that might actually matter, zero tolerance for petty squabbles, less fear of death, and a feeling that if the worst thing that can happen to you has already happened, well, it should be clear sailing from here on.
One thing I do know: our lives will never be the same. Maybe with wear and tear, and the unpredictable erosion of the years ahead, the What?! will be honed down to reveal some magical, spiritual, inner truth. MeanwhiIe, what I miss most is Kasriel’s huge bear hugs and the matching smile we got each time he came to visit and, this may sound cheesy, but the fact that though he was a grown man, with a job, an apartment, and a well-developed, fatal drive to fill some vast emotional hole, he still called me Daddy.
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