The Long Arms of Grief

This past weekend we spent some time with my mom, her sisters and her mom. It was a lovely weekend filled with laughter and sprinkled with tears.

My grandmother gave birth to twelve children. Until this weekend, I never knew she’d also had several miscarriages.

In addition to those losses, she endured the death of her third born when he was six months old. Her seventh child, a daughter, died when she (the daughter) was twenty one years old. And about seven years ago, my grandma lost another child, a son who died of a heart attack at only fifty years old.

She’s suffered losses that most of us don’t think we could bear.

On Sunday morning, my mom and I were looking at some pictures and we came across one of Debra, my mom’s sister who died at twenty-one. Most of my mom’s sisters are blond but this sister was brunette. My mom said Debra was taller too, more like my mom than her other sisters, none of whom are taller than 5’3”. My mom is 5’7”.

My grandma joined us and my mom filled her in on the conversation.

My grandma looked at Debra’s picture and said wistfully, “I can’t wait to see and talk to her again.”

This brought tears to my mom’s eyes.

My grandmother is almost 90 years old. She lived with my aunt Lorry and goes to work with Lorry at a beauty salon every single day. She loves this. She folds towels, talks with Lorry’s clients, gets her hair styled, and basically feels useful and fulfilled. She reads a lot, prays a lot and is quite happy and healthy considering she had several mini-strokes over the past few years.

But she’s suffered and she still grieves her lost children. I don’t think I realized how much until this past Sunday when she gazed with love upon a picture of a daughter she hasn’t seen in almost forty years.

The pain of losing a child never, ever goes away. You learn to live with that pain and you find things that bring you joy, like your other children if you’re lucky enough to have them, reading, visiting with other old ladies at a beauty salon. But you never forget, you never stop missing the child(ren) you lost.

My brave, beautiful grandmother showed me that, something I think I knew intellectually all along but seeing it in the flesh, seeing the tears of a mother and a sister, feeling the tears as a niece who never got to know her aunt, it brought it home. Children die and we all grieve.

It seems the world should stop when this happens and yet it keeps turning, things keep happening, time keeps passing even as the grief goes on, passing from generation to generation.

My daughters were there as my mom and grandma and I talked about my aunt. They will remember that conversation, those tears, that girl who died so young, her mother who missed her so, so much.