child loss

A shadow and a friend.

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One little girl arrived with bare feet on the site. May be six years old. Tiny. The odd one, out of place. Unflinchingly prancing about on the dry prickly ground, then sitting quietly, watching her dad clear the tall brown grass with his strimmer. Not a word from her. No toys. No books. No company. No food. Simply watching men working with their tractors and JCBs and one woman watching the men do their thing. Six egrets curiously dancing about the Hitachi and whatever else.

I wondered what her bright little eyes picked up on. I wondered what went on in her little head. What did she think about? School? Mum and Dad? Brothers? Friends? TV last night? Did her family have a TV? Who decided what to watch? What did she have for dinner last night? Where were her slippers? Her father said she forget to wear them as they left home in a hurry. Was that the real reason?

I wanted to talk to her and listen to her but wasn’t sure if that would be okay. As I walked past her I smiled lightly and waved my right hand at her. She gauged me as she turned her head to look in my direction. I continued waving my hand as she considered her response. After eight waves from me, she finally waved back once and I think I detected a hint of a smile.

For today, that was enough.

An excerpt from the poem ‘Kindness’ by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

PS: The building of a home for CORe has begun. http://www.core-community.com

(Ref: https://poets.org/poem/kindness)

The C – Word

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It might explode like a grenade thrown into a small room. I worried that everyone might be put right off by it. They might log out, log off, shut their laptops and go for a walk.

What do you mean ‘Celebrate’? What is there to celebrate? Nothing. NA – Not Applicable.

After a severance such as this. The death of my child? How can I? To me, it does not apply. I belong to another club now. Here, the air is laden with a sense of exclusion and non-deserving. Here, the rejection of invitations to celebrate is automatic.  

Memories of our kids. The foods they loved, toys, TV shows, films, books, nursery rhymes, practical jokes, school and Christmases. Our hugs. Sweet stories revealed through their friends after they died. Their hidden kindnesses. Laughter. Tears. A whole life worth remembering. Worth honouring. Celebrating.

What of us? Parents. Alive. Old labels stripped off and new strange ones slathered on. The ground beneath our feet taken away and replaced with quicksand. Our identity shattered. Life in the After becoming something resembling life. An unthinkable exile. Aloneness, inside the non-understanding of the world. Every day, a fight. A reconciliation. Every day, showing up and facing whatever shows up. Keeping the broken bits of our hearts held together with the glue of love inside our silently sighing chests. Still alive.

The invitation at the Circle of Remembrance was to celebrate ourselves for being here. Now. It did not go off like a granade in a small room. No one left in a huff. It was accepted graciously. At the end of an hour and a half, the virtual space was filled with acknowledgement of things to celebrate – our love, patience, resilience and compassion reflected in this poem by Lucille Clifton written in the 1960s. We can replace ‘nonwhite and woman’ with any other phrase:

won’t you celebrate with me

what I have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in Babylon

both non-white and woman

what did I see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

star-shine and clay

my one hand holding tight

my other hand;

                        come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

PS: Circle of Remembrance is an international online peer-support group for bereaved parents that has been effectively working for the past three years and four months. Please visit the website http://www.core-community.com to learn more. Please recommend it to any parents you know who might be struggling alone after a tragic loss.

The wrath of the years.

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Do I really care?

What do people think of me? Of us?

Which landmass do I live on?

What is the weather like?

What colour is the bloody sky?

Whose child left for University?

How much money I have left?

Who is coming from where? Who is going somewhere on a holiday?

What’s for dinner tonight? Or any night.

Will I ever have a job to go to?

When will the Amazon-man deliver the stuff I ordered?

Is there any milk in the fridge?

What happens next?

The sun came up from the North-west this morning?

Do I care?

One whole decade in the world ‘after’ Saagar will be completed in the tenth month of this sort-of-new-year. Since the 1st of Jan, every time I read or write 2024, that is the singular thought that comes to mind like an unwelcome guest. How can the world tolerate this? Who authorised for all those days and months to pass? How can this even be allowed to happen? How can I still be here? Who granted permission for this kind of treachery? Is this gorge of yearning bound by any boundaries? Or is it bottomless, without any limits?

Does anybody care?

Long shadows

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A few months after Day 0, at a SOBS (Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide) meeting at the All Saints near Euston, I met a father who said, “Eight years” when I asked him how long it had been since his son died. I looked at his face as if he was the most spectacular and wondrous impossibility of the world. Is it possible to live as long as that after the death of a child? He was proof. It was. I had never seen anyone who had been bereaved that long, standing and smiling and speaking sense.

Last Monday I joined the 3 dads on the last leg of their long walk to Westminster alongside many people who want the government to add suicide awareness and helpful resources to the school curriculum. We walked and talked in the rain. I said ‘Nearly eight years’ in response to how long has it been since my son passed. I got the same look from a young mum recently bereaved. She stopped and looked into my eyes through the thick rain drops. Past and future, face to face. “Gosh! Does it get any easier?” she asked. It does, I replied, holding her hands.

All these years I have tried to keep Saagar alive in every way I could – writing, public speaking, teaching Youth Mental Health First Aid courses, advocating for young people, working with various people, charities, NHS, Churchill Trust and other organisations, making films and so on.

I have read other people’s accounts of loss, hoping to lessen my pain and deepen my understanding. The latest book I read was ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion. She says:

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the Trust accounts.

Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it easier to let go of him in the water.”

Eight years! No time at all.

“Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.”

  • Delmore Schwartz.

Come home, my darling.

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I still hear the key turning in the door from the outside and you stepping in. Can you believe it? I still see your face, darkened by the sun. Dressed in your cricket whites, you drag your massive cricket-bag-on-wheels behind you by your left arm.

“Did you take the sun-screen with you?” I ask.

“Yes, it’s in the bag.”

“Did you actually put it on?’

 “Mamma, I’m hungry.”

I still wait for you to join us for dinner. I cook the foods you like, especially on your birthday: spinach-paneer for mains, chocolate mousse for dessert. I wonder what you’d be doing in this realm if you were here. Job? Girl-friend? How silly! Isn’t it? I can’t help it. It’s involuntary. It’s got something to do with the heart. With longing. With missing. With love. It’s not supposed to make sense. You would have had a good old chuckle at my expense if you were here. But you are not and I am. How random is that?

I still remember the first time I felt you elbow-ing or knee-ing me from inside my tummy, as if we had an inside joke between us. I remember holding all three kilos of you in my arms for the first time. I couldn’t believe you were for real. You were all mine. Now my arms ache with emptiness. Is this real?

Do you miss me sometimes?

Happy birthday my darling.

Heaven

It will be the past

And we’ll live there together.

Not as it was to live

But as it is remembered.

It will be the past.

We’ll all go back together.

Everyone we ever loved,

And lost, and must remember.

It will be the past.

And it will last forever.

                      – A poem by Patrick Phillips, on the New York subway.

(“Ghar aa” is a Hindi phrase that means “Come home”)