Emily Dickinson said, “Hold dear to your parents, for it is a scary and confusing world without them.”1

Emily, to you, I pose this question: what do you do when it is not a matter of holding? What do you do when no matter how tight you squeeze, the iron fist of death still manages to rip their hands away? When regardless of your hold on them or their hold on you, the world is still scary and confusing, and you are left with a smudge on your family tree where a mother’s name should be? What do you do then?

I don’t know if there is an answer to that question. And if there is, I definitely will not find it here. What I do know is that no great figure, whether it be Emily Dickinson or Steven Hawking, or even Thanatos himself, has the right to put death into words.

Dying is soundless, but humans are loud. There is no way for us to understand death’s silence, and if we can’t understand it, then we can’t experience it, and if we can’t experience it, we definitely can’t express it. We are bystanders, watching death but never really learning it, and by trying to find beauty in the end, we overlook its nature.

A human end is definite; philosophy will never change that. Of course, you have the afterlife and spiritual oasis in the Kingdom of Heaven, but for us fallen angels on earth, death is all there is.

Numbers

Let me begin here: the child is not a statistic. She cannot even spell statistic. She knows not of hypotheses and independent factors, nor of charts and line graphs. Her fingers can barely count to ten, and in no circumstance should she be studied as a cog in a twelve-person sample.2 Scholarly journals don’t stress the hardships faced by the bereaved child. To them, she is a subject; an opportunity to predict what might go wrong. They undermine her resiliency and forget to keep in mind that she is a survivor.3 Most importantly, scientific articles forget the true nature of the child. They fail to grasp her youth and her naivete.

On May 11th, 2010, the child worries about everything except death. She pouts over the knee she scraped on the school blacktop and bites her lip as she reads Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, leaving her textbook unopened. Her thermos keels over on the bus ride home, but the granola in her mouth keeps her smiling. It’s an easy day with simple obstacles and equally simple solutions; a Wednesday or maybe a Thursday, depending on how the light hits it. The child skips through her front door, awaiting a snack and, if she’s lucky, a long sip of Coke, but is met with Daddy, head bent over the kitchen table and requesting his daughter’s attention.

“Mom’s gone,” he tells her, analyzing the child as if she were a chessboard. “She passed away at the hospital.” Ten years go by before he adds, “in her sleep.”

The child does not understand death. She contemplates it simply: yes or no, wrong or right, true or false. She glances up at her father’s face, the fabric of her Wednesday or Thursday collapsing slowly around her, and asks, “Who will take care of me now?”

The answer: no one. Just the shadows in her room and the warmth of her own hugs. Because, to almost everyone else, the bereaved child is a number—one of some-odd million—and numbers only have worth on paper.

Funerals

For the love of God, keep children away from funerals, or at least any funerals attended by adults.4 Funerals are mirages with good intentions; wonderful in the abstract but brutal in the concrete. It’s not the death of a loved one that’s celebrated. It’s the death of grief itself.

The child is cold at her mother’s funeral. It’s probably the dress her cousins put her in, the one that shows her armpits and tickles her thighs. They dolled her up as if she were going to a wedding, like she was the bride and her mom’s casket the altar. The child squeezes her eyes shut and regrets the comparison—Mommy won’t be at her wedding.

She won’t remember much of the service. Her memories will be frayed like threads peeled from the sleeves of old sweaters. One strand is Daddy squeezing her fingers. The next is her uncle holding tightly to her shoulder. The child has a quilts-worth of these sensations, flashes of men and women pulling at her, an eight-year-old, for strength. She will remember feeling exalted for all the wrong reasons as her family pities her for something she can’t control. “A brave girl,” they murmur. “Look at that, she’s not even crying.”

The child can’t cry. She can never cry. Never, ever, ever. If she breaks, what happens to the others? The ones leaning on her frail little body like a crutch? Another thread: the child blinking back tears as bagpipes scream in the distance.

Later on at brunch, the child paints her uncle a rainbow with the words, It’ll be okay, sprawled sloppily beneath it. There’s his comfort; now where is hers? The child, still sporting a black dress and fancy hair, throws herself into the deep end of a pool and holds her breath until her feet go numb.

Legacy

What hurts more, knowing death or knowing the opposite? And what is the opposite? Life is too easy of an answer. The opposite is being left behind when a loved one is gone.5 It’s the comparisons and the old anecdotes and the landslide of unturned stones.

When the child’s mother dies, the world forms high expectations of her. She is cast in a one-woman show, forced to fill an infinite number of ghosted roles. Grandpa misses his daughter? Change costumes. The neighbor misses her friend? Flip the script. Daddy misses his wife? Set the stage on fire.

The child doesn’t stand in death’s wake; she is death’s wake, constantly sparking stories of what once was. You have such pretty hair, just like your mom. The flattery doesn’t belong to her. If it did, there would be no like. Someone would tell the child she has pretty hair and the child would say thank you. Instead, she stands there voicelessly, buried in her own silence, and waits for her mom to reply.6 That’s who the compliment was for, after all.

The worst, though, is when the child doesn’t live up to par. She forgets to wash the dishes or wipe the crumbs from the table. Daddy comes home in a funk on those days, raving about overtime, overtime, overtime, and not a minute to rest. He’ll cry, break a hairbrush, and scurry off to bed because dreams are more merciful than reality. And the child kneels in front of her mirror, sleepy but unable to sleep, wondering where she went wrong. She tousles her hair—the hair she’s always been praised for—and presses the spots where stress made her locks fall out.7

Panic Attack

Prepare for the bereaved child to go apeshit, because she will, and when that happens, no choice of action (or lack thereof) will seem good enough in hindsight. Panic, for someone so young, builds over time. Think grains of sand on a seesaw; the problems are minor but heavy when multiplied. Eventually, the child tries to speak. The pain, the anxiety, the loneliness. She trembles in front of her father and frees the truth from its cage:

“I hate myself and it’s your fault,” the child whispers. It’s the most she’s said in years. “I don’t feel like a human being and it’s your fault.”

Daddy blinks, although he isn’t really Daddy anymore. Not even Dad. More like a monster with her father’s face.

The child’s voice is less than a whisper now. It holds all the strength of a gnat in the breeze. “Please say something.”

There’s a pause. Father rubs a hand down his face. His fingers pinch the bridge of his nose. “What is this?” he asks. “Huh? What’re you trying to do to me?”

A Tear Falls

The creak of Father’s feet on the floor. His hand twisting the doorknob. He’s leaving. Off to bed for better things and kinder dreams. “You’ve always been so dramatic, you know? I’m not a monster, and plenty have kids have it worse than you do. Goodnight.”

All at once, the child can’t breathe. The word goodnight echoes in her ears, plagues her like a pestilence. Pant, pant, pant. Her lungs are in her throat and her throat is in her lungs. The room ebbs and flows, waves of red washing over the walls. Or maybe the red is washing over her, over her palms where her nails are digging in and the blood is seeping out. “Help me,” she cries. “Daddy, help me.”

Her father tells her to get up. Stop acting like this.

The child is screaming now, and her body is on the floor. She is chaos in its primitive form, the universe before it was pulled together. I want my mom. I want to die. She peers up at the ceiling, tears spilling into her mouth. “I want to die.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do about that,” her father replies. “I’m taking you to a therapist tomorrow.”

Hindsight

Mulling over what I would say to the bereaved child, to my younger self, if given the opportunity, I’m not sure anything would really suffice.

As a child, I didn’t want to be comforted by myself. I’d done enough of that. What I wanted, whether I was aware of it or not, was an outside audience, a chance to not just tell my story, but be bolstered by it. I wanted to be told I was human, not a number or a legacy or a burden, but an individual with my own rights and feelings. More than anything, I wanted to know I was loved. I’d gone without human connection for so long that I’d forgotten what love meant.

In hindsight, I survived. I lived without the comfort and affection, but that doesn’t mean it was a life lived well. The ignorance of others shamed me, drove me to be a person I never should have been: broken, unhinged, desperate, suicidal. I was a child who wanted to die, and at the same time, I was a child who wanted others to want to die. It was the only way to be understood. I bullied my friends into submission, I persuaded them to hate their own parents as I hated my father, and I taught them to put me in their parents’ place. Lean on me, talk to me, depend on me. Loneliness did bring me a few gifts. I’m an empath, a lover strong enough to make up for all the loves I never had, and I experience human emotion in a way that’s almost holy. But in my ability to feel, I’ve developed a bottomless need to be relied on when I can’t even rely on myself.

The motherless need to be nurtured. The fatherless need to be hugged. 
Orphans can make it alone—they’ll always make it alone—but their adult selves will have bruises in places skin will never see. As children, they must learn their worth. They must know that they cherished. We need to tell them this so that, as they grow older, they never have to worry about holding dear or holding on or holding back.

Bibliography

Notes

1. Flavia Medrut, “19 Remarkable Emily Dickinson Quotes to Inspire you Every Day,” Goalcast, last modified March 8, 2018, https://www.goalcast.com/2018/03/08/remarkable-emily-dickinson-quotes/.

2. Ava Gail Cas, Elizabeth Frankenberg, Wayan Suriastini, and Duncan Thomas, “The Impact of Parental Death on Child Well-being: Evidence From the Indian Ocean Tsunami,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, November 13, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4229656/.

3. Christie Eppler, “Exploring Themes of Resiliency in Children After the Death of a Parent,” Professional School Counseling 11, no. 3 (2008): 190, JSTOR.

4. Emma Plank, “Young Children and Death,” Young Children 23, no. 6 (1968): 334, JSTOR.

5. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), 78.

6. Jandy Nelson, I’ll Give You the Sun (Penguin Random House LLC, 2014), 181.

7. “Alopecia Areata,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 6057 (1977): 335, JSTOR.