children and grief

Under the Bus


Gabe-birthday-part

Image via Wikipedia

Late in the day yesterday I flipped through my calendar of events for the upcoming week and realized that today was Will’s birthday.

Not “is”.

The dead don’t have birthdays and I have struggled to incorporate his deadness into the scheme of holidays and birthdays for the last five years.

Last night I decided to throw it all under the bus.

For some reason I will never know probably, Dee decided that her late father needed a cake last year. Her older sisters’ deceased mother gets cake and picnics, and she was feeling decidedly left out of the frivolity. Which is how she views it. Fun times. Cake and picnics are jolly events to a child. Buying balloons and pin-wheels to put on graves is the whole point of having dead family in the first place. Because she’s a child.

When I was a child, I thought cemeteries were part of the family history experience. I totally looked forward to Memorial Weekend, bouncing in the back seat of the station wagon as we tooled through the countryside from one graveyard to the next. It was fascinating and filled with interesting stories about people my parents and grandmother actually knew. The whole “dead” thing barely penetrated my consciousness.

“I just remembered that tomorrow is Will’s birthday,” I told Rob as we sat in the office last night.

“I know, ” he said with a tone and look that implied that he had been waiting to see whether I’d bring it up or not. Not is usually my go-to because I forget. The anniversary of my dad’s death was just before Halloween and if my mom hadn’t mentioned her plans for the day to me a few days before – I wouldn’t have remembered at all.

“Dee hasn’t brought it up, ” I said, “and I am kinda thinking of letting the whole thing pass, but what if she asks in a week or so? Should I pretend I forgot? I mean, I almost did, but she isn’t all that interested in him again.  Shouldn’t I just follow her lead?

“She had said that the whole thing makes her too sad, ” he said. “She doesn’t want to talk about him.  She changes the subject when his name comes up.”

“Or just gives you that look that says ‘what does he have to do with anything?’,” I replied.

And really, what does he have to do with anything?

She didn’t know him. That he was her father, doesn’t make him any more known or immediate to her. It doesn’t give him standing or influence. She’s decided that Rob is her father and it’s her right to do so.

And I remember Will telling me about his childhood. His dad died when he was seven and his mother never let him forget the guy.

“She was always telling me how I reminded her of him,” he told me. “I hated it.”

With good reason. His dad was a rat, fucking bastard.  Alcoholic.  Child and wife beater. Adulterer.

Seriously, why rub your little boy’s face in any resemblances?

He would be okay with Dee putting him into proper perspective in the scheme of her life. Because it is her life.

Someday, she will want to know Will – or at least have more spontaneous interest, but for now, birthdays for the (un)dead are over.

That is all.

Terry Fox, My Old Nemesis, We Meet Again


Photo of Terry Fox, Canadian cancer fund-raise...

Image via Wikipedia

Terry Fox Day is a Canadian thing. During the month of September, communities all across the country organize run/walk events to raise money for cancer research in Terry’s name. This year marks the 30th anniversary and celebrates the $500 million that has been raised in his name since his attempt to run the length of Canada thirty years ago.

What made Terry’s run special and inspiring to Canadians was the fact that he’d lost part of his leg to a cancer that would go on to claim his life at the age of 21. His cancer returned after a three-year remission during his trek and he never saw the finish line, but his family was determined that the run become an annual event and it has.

I first heard of Terry as a high school student. We read about him in our Catholic high school back in Iowa. It was one of those grisly teachable moments that the nuns and priests were so fond of when I was a child. “See how lucky you are that you aren’t one-legged and being eaten away by cancer?” was the gist of the lesson.

As an American though, I didn’t know the run went on to become a yearly event.

Until I emigrated to Canada three years ago.

Terry Fox came back into my life via Dee, who discovered Terry in kindergarten and developed a morbid fixation that plagued us for months.

At the school assembly, where footage of Terry’s original run was shown and the children received morbid Terry tattoos, Dee met up with death too young – again.

She created a tiny little shrine for the tattoo in our dining room and all manner of death, cancer and why questions haunted Rob and I more than our own dead spouses do when they are feeling feisty.

Last year, Dee asked if she could skip school on Terry Fox Day. She didn’t want to see any more pictures of him. They made her feel sick.

“So you don’t want to take a toonie or go on the walk?” I asked.

The kids bring “toonies for Terry” and go on a 3km walk in the afternoon. She loves donating coin. We can’t walk past a street musician without tossing change, and she adores group walks, which is ironic because “walking” her father is the eye-rolling height of boring in her opinion.

“No, I want to bring a toonie and walk, ” she said. “I just don’t want to hear about him or see him anymore. He makes me sick.”

A quick flurry of emails between her teacher and I resulted in Dee being excused from the assembly after which she happily strolled hand in hand with her teacher.

This year? Same thing. Pictures of Terry give her “a sick feeling in my tummy” and she would rather stay home from school (she adores school so much that she can make weekends unbearable for Rob and I) than endure the sight of Terry.

More emails. A new, and fortunately equally sympathetic, teacher will handle distraction duty.

My own feelings about the cancer run/walks is predicated on the fact that my late husband died of something rare and unglamorous and, therefore, not worthy of fund-raising. The boobie bracelets for breast cancer and the fun-runs for cancer research in general distract from the fact that most people die of something other than cancer.

Rob’s heart attack is a stark reminder that cardio-vascular ends await more of us than cancer does and, between it and accidents, that’s how most of us who don’t die old and asleep in our beds will shuffle off this mortal coil.

Despite losing my father to lung cancer and Rob losing Shelley to melanoma, I feel removed from the whole cancer thing most of the time.  I have read too much to believe that there is a cure anywhere or ever, and I am a bit hesitant to cheer for treatments that mostly seem aimed at allowing death to whittle away at you at the expense of life’s quality and at the greater expense of the physical, spiritual and mental well-being of your loved ones.

Dee took a toonie. The school’s gym isn’t finished and so there will be no assembly, but her teacher will shield her from any reading material the class goes through. And she will walk. She does love to go on those walks, which I am grateful she is healthy and able to do.

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My Child


I knew before she was even born that my daughter was going to be difficult. Some might say that the fact that she is challenging is a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don’t. She was stubborn and defiant and determined, and I could feel that in her long before I even knew what she looked like. Her personality was so strong it just radiated through me. And she has done nothing to dissuade me from this stance even once in the last five years.

Sometimes I wish, as much as I love her, that she was like other people’s children. You know, the children who are sweet and easy-going. The one’s that sleep through the night from month one and were never bothered by tags in their clothing or socks that weren’t put on just right. These children were perfect angels in public regardless of the circumstances, went to bed on time without struggles every night by 7 even though they took three hour naps every afternoon. They weren’t messy at the table and didn’t mark every inch of the living room with toys. Never grumpy or sassy, they were just joyful sources of pride that validated the great parenting they were receiving.

Katy never slept more than a few hours at a time when she was a baby and the situation hasn’t improved much in the ensuing years. Tags, creases, long sleeves, fabric, just being dressed in general can still send her into a tizzy. At one time she did go to bed early, but she has never willing napped – ever. She is the messiest eater and like a tomcat she claims space with her markings – toys. Toys are everywhere. She is grumpy in the morning (just like her dad which is ironic since she never knew him as a well man) and she is as sassy as I am, which I don’t find the humor in as often as I should. All in all, I feel like a pretty crappy parent about half the time.

This morning’s attack of grumpiness and the tantrum/tears that ensued when she was sent to her room is a direct result of Christmas hyper-stimulation and sleep-deprivation, but it doesn’t make it easier to deal with or make me feel better. When I finally went up to check on her (Rob went initially until it was time for him to go to work) she tried to play the grief card on me and blame her tantrum on being “sad about Daddy Will being dead”.

I really hate when she does that because she knows what she is doing, and I will not allow her to grow up to be one of those people who blames ever misfortune, or just a bad day, on past grief. She is too little to know that it hurts me when she does this, but she does know it generates sympathy, and in the past as allowed her to have her way. It’s hard to know however when she is truly grieving or just playing the card.

I told Rob that I understood why my own mom hated Christmas vacation more than she hated summer vacation.