reinventing a family
I recently read and participated in book club for the memoir Grief is a Dancer, written by Alisa Bair. I’ll probably be making references to it quite often on my blog, as it is an insanely powerful and eloquent glimpse into the life of a mother who lost her 8 year-old daughter to cancer. Coincidentally, I also grew up and graduated with the author’s daughter Lauren.
Alisa wrote the book 25 years after her daughter Kelly’s death, but her recollection of the first years of grief are so spot-on, and her reflections integrating hard-earned wisdom and experience are so helpful that parts of the book feel like a survival manual.
One of the areas on which Alisa reflects— and, in hindsight, laments — is her relationship with her surviving daughters after Kelly’s death. Both of her daughters, Lauren and Leslie, were in their pre-teen and teen years during the most devastating years of their family’s grief. Like many teens, they went on about their days, doing teenage things — going to school, playing sports, participating in musical events, dating — and seemed to be doing ok.
However, when the author wrote the book and asked for her daughters’ honest input 25 years later, their responses were pretty brutal. In a nutshell, they told their mother that because she had been so lost in grief, and then subsequently trying to deal with Kelly’s loss in her own way, they had felt neglected and unseen. Everyone went on with their own lives, but their family was disconnected. Alisa assumed her daughters were doing ok because they seemed successful on the surface, but there were serious issues broiling underneath.
Reading these parts of Grief is a Dancer scared the crap out of me, to be honest. It was a wake-up call — a cautionary tale telling me to make sure that no matter what I’m feeling or going through, that I need to take time to focus on my LIVING children and finding ways to strengthen our new, weird little family.
But it’s hard, y’all. They are teenage boys. I ask them questions and they respond with grunts and rush to go back to their video games, or YouTube videos, or FaceTiming with their girlfriends. They dutifully come to check on me when they hear me sobbing and offer pats on the back and “It’s ok, Mom.” But then they retreat into their lairs.
I’ve gotten glimpses of what Alisa talked about — hints that even though they smile and laugh and are doing their normal activities, my teens are still grieving and processing. In the midst of one conversation Max told me that he didn’t want Vitamin E oil to help heal the big scar over his eye from the accident. “I want it to stay there to remind me,” he said, and if it were possible for my heart to break any more, it did.
Grayson, who admittedly is a handful to live with, once muttered to me as we sat on his bed, “I wish I had been nicer to her.”
They are each doing what teenagers do — compartmentalizing their grief, trying to move on, worrying about their mother who seems to cry all the time, and fighting to make sense of the QUIETNESS in our house. Our eerie new normal without the sounds of Libby’s constant talking, or her laughter as she chats on her iPad, or the pounding of her feet upstairs as she dances in her room, or the strains of the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat filling the house.
I am trying to keep our family a family despite the loss of the most beautiful piece of our puzzle who, we now know, held us together.
And after reading this book— I’m committed to trying even harder. I’m making sure we sit down and have dinner together a few nights a week. I’m instituting movie night. I text them random texts to let them know I’m thinking of them throughout the day. I give them each a hug and tell them I love them before I go to bed (they always stay up later than me), and I say goodbye and “I love you — have a great day” before I leave for work in the morning. Actually, I hug them and tell them I love them A LOT.
I’m probably pretty annoying.
But I only have them for a short time, and I want to make sure they are ok. That they get any help they need. That they want to come back and visit me. And that they never, ever doubt that my children are STILL the most important thing in my world, even though I’ve lost one.
