We can't turn back time, but we can remember, move on

The Boston Herald

What you want is to turn back the clock, to make it Tuesday morning again, early, and make the accident not have happened, to change the confluence of things - the rain, the timing, a car being where is was? A few seconds sooner, a few seconds later and what is would not be. What you want is to give three dead children and one broken one back to their parents, whole.

But what you want is not doable, and there is no second choice. And so friends stumble over words, over condolences. They send flowers and casseroles and say, "Please let me know if there is anything I can do," because they don't know what else to say, because they can't fix what is broken. And so many acquaintances and strangers who would like to reach out and help don't even try, because they simply don't know how.

We have swallowed, in this country, the big 20th century myth that it's unnatural, an aberration, when parents have to bury a child. That's the standard line, that a child's death is something so out of the ordinary that it happens only rarely and only in the strangest of circumstances and isn't anything we really need to worry about.

But it happens over and over. Children get sick. They fall off bikes. They run into streets. They die in cars. They take their own lives. They're vulnerable, breakable human beings. But no parent is ever prepared to lose one child, never mind more than one, because we have convinced ourselves that death has to do with age and sickness and that our children are young and well and therefore, somehow, protected.

But they're not. That's what no one tells you. That's what's not in the baby books or in any of the dictums on how to raise a child. That you can do everything right, that you can love them and protect them and inoculate them and teach them all the ways they should be careful; that you can pray and barter and trust in God and it can still end up so wrong.

This time it was three young girls on their way to school. This time it was a wet road. This time it was September. But next week and next month it will be other children and other families burying their futures and other family and friends not knowing what to say or how to help. How is it possible that we can talk about anything in this country, anytime, anywhere, with hardly any discomfort, but when it comes to death and grief and what to say to someone who is suffering, we're mute and embarrassed and want to run away?

"People turn away because they don't know what to do," says my friend Anne, who is a grief counselor and who came to her job with unwanted experience. Her daughter Amy was 11 when she died. "Time helps the most," Anne says. "And other people who've been through what you're going through who tell you that someday you'll be able to remember the joyful times, that eventually you get to the other side." As for people who don't know what to say past "I'm sorry," they don't have to say anything, she says. "All they have to do is listen."

Listen and maybe tell some stories. That's a gift anyone can give. The "I remember whens" aren't painful to hear. They're balm. They're confirmation that a person's life mattered, and to grieving parents they're often part of a child's life a parent didn't know. "After Amy died, her friends called and sent notes and kept in touch. Fourteen years later, they still do. I'm continually touched by this."

There is no shortcut through grief, no "getting over" or "getting past" the death of anyone. Nearly 50 years after she buried her young son, a mother still cries for him. How can she not? You don't burn the bridge when you're on the other side. It's simply that you don't walk back over it as often.

My friend Beth tells me about her great-grandmother who lost, in a single year, her husband and daughter and son to tuberculosis. She raised her daughter's daughter, Beth's mother, and lived to be 99. "She was a wonderful, kind, loving woman," Beth says. How amazing are human beings who lose the people they love but continue to get up and go on? How is it possible that human bodies can continue to function long after their hearts have been crushed?

"When I was born, everyone rejoiced and I cried. When I died, everyone cried and I rejoiced." In times of grief, we cling to these words, which are on a gravestone at Mt. Benedict Cemetery in Brookline. And in times of grief, we cling to each other and our memories and the promise that life changes, but it never ends.